#*makes a reference to a single episode* *makes a reference to a single episode* *makes a referen-*

[ultramaga]

Looking at recent Dr Who et al, I think AI's been used for a few years now. It's just that they want a team of human writers to be paid for as well. Clownfish TV monitored one writer's room, who spent all day posting on twitter. They clearly weren't writing. They were sitting about eating expensive treats and drinking designer coffees whilst fiddling with iphones, while an idiot box did all the work for them. At best, they might have polished the scripts up a bit. Maybe selected the best one out of five.

I pointed out back in the writer's strike days that it is routine to have ten writers in a room now. We used to have one, maybe two. That's how we got things like Star Trek. Now it takes a giant team to produce The Acolyte. It's enshittification.

e.g.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV Series)

The Inner Light (1992)

Morgan Gendel ... (teleplay by) and Peter Allan Fields ... (teleplay by)   Morgan Gendel ... (story by)   Brannon Braga ... (staff writer) René Echevarria ... (staff writer)

Not one moment spent on social media.

The City on the Edge of Forever

Writers

Harlan Ellison

Gene Roddenberry

Two writers, Gene basically adapting the Ellison version to make it fit better. Not a single post on social media, not even a selfie. It's amazing how productive writers could be if we could take away their phones.

IMO this was the quintessential Star Trek, to the point that portal would reappear over and over as tributes in assorted media.

"As I'm watching the episodes for reference just before drawing each strip, I take notes on ridiculous stuff that I can make fun of in the comic. Things that pull me out of the story and make me think, 'That makes no sense. I can make a gag about this bit.' For most episodes I have anywhere between 10 lines and half a page of notes. When this episode ended, I had written nothing."

— David Morgan-Mar, creator of Planet of Hats

Even the original story was made into its own comic.

I’m just going to leave this here

[diaryofageekgirl]

Cross-posting my meta/ranting from the Helluva Boss subreddit. Originally posted June 22, 2024 (here):

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I love both Stolas and Blitzø. I'm super invested in this relationship. Both of them made mistakes, but both of them are also coming from places of trauma and previous fucked up interpersonal relationships. That being said, I don't really feel the need to point out how Blitzø fucked up, because so much of the fandom is so biased towards Stolas that everyone is already well aware of that part of the problem. I'm also very aware of the fact that Stolas has grown significantly as a character, but sometimes people in the audience forget the difference between what WE know, and what the CHARACTERS know. Now that that's out of the way...

Oh my god, THANK YOU. There was one particular line in Apology Tour that stuck out to me, especially because Blitzø's reaction wasn't what I hoped it would be.

Stolas: "I don't look down on you! How many times do I ha- when have I ever?!"

Oh, I don't know dude, maybe the entire first season?!

Episode 1: refers to Blitzø as "my little imp" during the phone call (using his bottom-of-the-hierarchy species as a cute pet name is..... bad. It's bad). Also just fully ignores the fact that Blitzø tells him that it's not a good time, that he doesn't understand what he's saying (more than once!) and clearly just agrees to the deal in order to deal with the more pressing issue of being shot at.

Episode 2: CONSTANTLY flirts with Blitzø using incredibly sexual language throughout the episode, even when Blitzø repeatedly tells him that he doesn't want to be flirted with while he's working. (That's not even going into how he completely ignores Octavia's emotions/reactions to what's going on around her and just focuses on himself and what he thinks is a good idea in the moment. That's two for two on episodes where his stunning lack of self-awareness shines through).

Isn't in episode 3 or 4. Though I will take a second to acknowledge one line in episode 3 - when Blitzø charges into the room and challenges Verosika and her crew, one of the succubi says "Is this little imp boy starting a demon duel?" Yet another example of imps being treated as lesser by other demons.

Episode 5: The constant heavy-handed flirting in public, again, even though Blitzø repeatedly tells him not to, again. On top of that, there's the "itty bitty imps like yourself" comment that he makes to Blitzø while in bed, and not even a minute later, tells him in cutesy UWU baby talk that he's "sowwy his cwients wiw have to wait" - not taking Blitzø or his work seriously. And, of course, we get Striker telling Blitzø that Stolas treats him like a plaything.....

Episode 6: ......aaaaaand the very next episode has Stolas literally calling Blitzø his "impish little plaything". Side note, but I feel like most discussions about Stolitz's dynamic and the imbalance present in it focuses on this line in particular, but not the rest of his behaviour throughout the whole first season. He is constantly making aggressively sexual comments, oftentimes right after being asked or told not to by Blitzø, sometimes after being told more than once.

Episode 7, he's actually fine. Hiding his face when Ozzie singles him out isn't great, but he had just been publicly embarrassed, and if you watch in the background, he does get up from the table (likely about to try to help Blitzø) right at the end of Verosika's bit, before he's interrupted by Asmodeus. And while I'm certain he really did just want to "talk, or watch a movie, or cuddle", I can also see how easy it would be for Blitzø to interpret that as him asking to Netflix and Chill, as it were.

(Also, not a major thing, but having a little plush imp doll as a kid (as seen in S2E1) feels.....really weird, to me? Like I know most posts on SocMed and reactions on YT just see it as cute, and I'm probably reading too much into it, and I know that IRL toy dolls and stuffed dolls of people are a common thing, but just the idea of a prince having a plush doll of a low-class citizen feels really bad. A literal plaything, if you will.)

Season 2, Episode 2: Not much, but even though they had a tiny bit of a fight (if you can even call it that) after Ozzie's, and even though they haven't been communicating super well, and even though he's concerned about finding Octavia, Stolas still finds an opportunity to make a sexual comment towards Blitzø.

Season 2, Episode 4: Ohhhhhhhhhh my god, I never even used to be mad about this, but the way that it got brought up in Apology Tour made me pissed. Stolas now getting upset about Blitzø not coming to rescue him when Striker kidnapped him? Telling him that he "couldn't even be bothered to come help me"? Fuck. Off. With. That. As a father of a daughter himself, you'd think that Stolas would be sympathetic to the fact that Blitzø was trying to help out his own daughter in that scene, especially considering that he had to wait 5 fucking years for a mandatory medical procedure. Of fucking course he's not going to skip out on that! And just the way he responds to that:

Stolas: Oh, ha, ha. Well, I do agree that is very important...But, I-

(and then he's cut off by Striker). I urge anyone and everyone to go rewatch that bit of the episode, because his tone of voice is just so dismissive. Like, "yes, yes, that's nice, now drop everything and come rescue me, which is more important". And that's before he even realizes that he's in serious danger!!!

Like, I'm sorry, but where the fuck does he get off getting mad at Blitzø for "always making it about sex"? Blitzø has only ever reacted to the sexual advances that Stolas was putting out - even from the very first hook-up, Stolas just assumed that Blitzø was there to seduce him, and Blitzø just went along with it as a way to distract him while he stole the book. He agreed to the transactional fucking in episode 1 while he was being shot at and was trying to get Stolas off his back. He's expressed annoyance towards Stolas' sexual advances in episodes 2 and 5 of season 1. And now suddenly it's Blitzø that makes it all about sex?!

And what do you mean, "How many times do I ha-" Have to what, buddy? Tell him that you see him as an equal? You haven't done that yet. Tell him that you love him? You did that whole conversation in pretty much the exact wrong order and shut down when he didn't react like you imagined in your head. Tell him that you think highly of him? You haven't done that. Not directly to him, not where he could hear, not before the end of that argument, right before forcibly teleporting him away from you, which, y'know, just reinforces Blitzø's earlier comment about treating him like one of his butlers, and how he "can't just dismiss [him]."

He may not have ever actively viewed Blitzø as inferior to him, but there's a LOT of internalized classism going on that I'm not sure he's even aware of.

(continued in a later comment):

One thing I'd like to add to all of 👆 that: I mentioned a bit about other people in Hell talking down to imps, but one thing I forgot to talk about is how Stolas himself views imps that aren't Blitzø. Quick list (entirely from memory):

Refers to Millie and Moxxie as "you littler ones" in Loo-Loo Land

Refers to I.M.P. collectively as "you little creatures" in Truth Seekers

The generally condescending and dismissive way he talks to the imps of the Wrath Ring in Harvest Moon Festival - if I'm remembering correctly, he also refers to them as little! Like I get it, he's crazy tall, but we all know that's not the only way to interpret that comment.

3.5 Since Stolas (and a big chunk of the fandom) went ahead and compared Blitzø's comments to Striker's, I'm gonna do the same to him! Those comments are so reminiscent of Striker saying "you little things ain't worth the clean-up" to Moxxie and Millie, also from Harvest Moon Festival.

4. Picking up, forcefully squeezing, and swinging around his imp butler while he was mad during his phone call with Stella in Seeing Stars. I'm not saying that he's abusive towards his staff, or anything like that - just that the very fact that he did it at all seemed to be totally subconscious, which in turn suggests that he doesn't realize how demeaning that is.

5. Actually, now that I think about it - the fact that he's so upset that specifically Blitzø didn't rescue him in Western Energy. The main reason he's alive and not bleeding out in the bottom of a mine shaft is because Millie and Moxxie showed up, and they only knew to go there and help him because Blitzø told them/they were there during the phone call. Like, does he even know their names? Is he even grateful that they helped? We don't know!

I saw someone in another thread say that he was essentially at the equivalent of the "I'm not racist, I don't even see colour!" stage of racism, and I completely agree. He doesn't realize all of these internalized prejudices he has, but they are ABSOLUTELY there.

(comment on another thread, building off of the comments I made about s2e4, originally posted July 7, 2024):

Also, a few other points to build off of this & respond to other comments on this thread:

"But he didn't tell Stolas about the first time, and the Carmine-crafted gun that Striker had that can kill royal demons" - You mean the one that Moxxie took from him and still has in his possession at the end of Harvest Moon Festival? The one that Moxxie was shocked that Striker even managed to get his hands on? Remember, I.M.P. didn't know that Striker was working for anyone; logically, that means they would have assumed that he got the weapon entirely on his own, and something like that is both rare and expensive - imps don't typically "make it big" in Hell, and I can't imagine a powerful Overlord would be thrilled to give a weapon that could kill them to someone so far below them in status. With them taking it from him and keeping it at the end of the episode, it means that they would assume that he's no longer a serious threat. They had no way of knowing he was being bankrolled by a royal, with access to three more angelic weapons (two pistols and a knife) (four if you count the rope as well).

"Stolas: You knew someone was trying to assassinate me?" Uhhhhh, yeah? You were there for Loo-Loo Land, dude, you know that people are trying to assassinate you, like all the time. This isn't news in any way - and yes, Striker is generally more dangerous than any of the assassins that we saw in that episode, it still doesn't change the fact that you're already well aware that being rich and royal puts a target on your back. This is really unfair to get upset with Blitzø for. (I'm aware that this is an argument and sometimes you bring up unfair accusations in arguments and both of them were very heated and I shouldn't have to plaster every comment about this episode and this relationship with disclaimers that I'm not hating anyone, just expressing frustration.)

[knaveumineko]

Umineko Episode 1 Blog: None Shall Be Left Alive

We're on the home stretch. It's time to present my final (for now) theory on what happened in Episode 1.

The last few murders are probably the simplest of the lot to pull off. The deaths of the last few servants are pretty simple if you're assuming that the servants were in on the conspiracy the whole time. Maria claiming to have seen the witch again doesn't matter if you assume that the witch is "possessing" people and that the servants simply mislead her. Natsuhi's death was either a suicide after reading the contents of the final letter, or a more straightforward murder by the culprit, who was lying in wait for her. The latter seems a bit more likely, given the disappearance of the final letter.

I'm skimming over all of that because we need to talk about that final scene. I'm going to level with you: I completely misread this scene the first time. It's a good thing I'm writing this blog or else I would have been moving forward with a pretty huge misunderstanding.

On the first read, I somehow thought that this just meant Maria was running up to the portrait for some reason, and there was some colourful narration being used to cover up what was going on in the cousins' final moments. In my defense, it was very late at night and a lot of crazy stuff happened at once.

OK, so with our dual assumptions that magic isn't real and there's no 19th person, this scene explicitly confirms that at least one of the people we saw dead somehow survived, and that this dead person is the culprit after all. Rereading Maria's narration also reminded me that Maria recognises the culprit as the Beatrice.

This leads me to an angle I haven't tried yet. I think I've been a little too married to one specific theory and not considering other possibilities, and now's the time to correct that.

What happens if we assume every single person who Maria recognises as the witch is the same person? That is:

The person who gave Maria an umbrella and letter

The person who Shannon met in the halls the night before her death

The person Maria is referring to in the scene with Battler and the servants in the kitchen, when she says that the witch is in the room with them at that moment

The person who Kanon met before he died

The person the cousins see at the very end of the story

I argued way back when that Kanon gave Maria the umbrella, but Shannon and Kumasawa's alibis are also extremely weak. Maria's claim that the witch was in the room with her during the scene in the kitchen implies that the witch is Genji, Kumasawa or Kanon. The one the cousins met at the end of the story has to be someone we thought was dead, but not Genji, Nanjo, Kumasawa or Natsuhi.

The only person who plausibly meets all of these criteria is Kanon. I mentioned earlier that I think him meeting the witch in the boiler room could be metaphorical, so I don't see that as a huge roadblock.

This reading would imply that Kanon faked his death somehow. I guess we'd need Shannon's death to be fake, too, since Kanon definitely wouldn't kill her? Also, there's this:

I previously had no idea what to make of this end text, but under this new interpretation the game is basically telling us that Shannon and Kanon are alive at the end of the story. Notably, Maria's line does not say that Rosa is alive. It only says that Maria somehow received the her lost parental love. In some way, the wound within her was healed.

It's troubling to me that this theory requires us to assume that even the most convincing of corpses can be faked, but in all fairness this was never a mystery that relied heavily on material evidence. It's all about using storytelling to figure out what's going on, and this seems like a pretty good story. I suppose if we "spin the chessboard around" then the reason the faces were mutilated was to help sell the idea that Shannon was truly dead, and then the other bodies had the same done to them because it would look weird if only one of the bodies was marked this way. In any case, with this final scene we absolutely need to assume that at least some corpses are fake. There's unfortunately no getting around that.

We should also discuss the epitaph. When I first read it, it occured to me that the directions match the island pretty well. Battler makes a point of describing the initial path as pointlessly long and circuitous, like a river. There are a handful of buildings dotted about the island, with a small population living there, like a village. The story goes out of its way to have the grandchildren and Shannon visit a beach, which matches the shore that the "key" is supposed to be located at. Narratively speaking, it would make sense for the epitaph's directions to refer to places on the island, since these are the only places that the characters can access. We could also speculate that, much like the story itself, the epitaph is being tricky and switching perspectives, so that "my beloved hometown" actually refers to Beatrice's hometown. Beatrice is said to live in the woods of Rokkenjima and be the head of house by night.

With these revelations, my guess for how it all went down is something like this:

Kinzo died ages ago, but Natsuhi kept up the illusion that he was alive to help her husband stall for time, and to finally claim some real power for herself. Kinzo's inner circle help to maintain this lie.

Shannon goes to the beach with the grandchildren and finds the "key," whatever that means.

Kanon visits Maria in the gardens, claims to be the witch Beatrice, and gives her the letter and umbrella. It was hoped that this letter would provoke the killing to begin. The seal was done using Kinzo's ring, which was stolen from wherever it was being kept after he died however long ago.

The siblings turn on eachother during their argument over the inheritance and begin murdering eachother. The servants agree that this is the Demons' Roulette choosing appropriate sacrifices, and so they start carrying out the ritual described in the epitaph, in accordance with Kinzo's will.

In order to ensure there are enough sacrifices, Gohda is killed and Shannon's death is faked. The servants also clean up whichever of the siblings survived the initial altercation. I'm thinking the servants would probably only have to kill maybe 2 or 3 people tops at a time, which seems more reasonable than someone Rambo-ing 6 people solo.

That morning, Natsuhi enters the study after being bullied into it by Eva, and lies about Kinzo being up there, maintaining her deception.

After the bodies are discovered, Natsuhi decides that her facade can't survive a police investigation and takes the convenient out of claiming that Kinzo has mysteriously disappeared.

The servants enter Eva and Hideyoshi's room with the excuse of serving dinner, and instead murder both of them. They then create a fake locked room mystery by cutting the chain to the door and telling everyone else that the door was locked when they discovered the scene. The letter was simply written by one of the servants the same way the last one was.

Kanon may have also gone back to the storehouse and let Shannon out around this time, since the story mentions him going there anyway.

Kanon's death in the boiler room was faked somehow. Maybe he had Shannon's help, and the one fleeing from the boiler room is her. Shannon may also have been the one who deposited Kinzo's body in the incinerator at this point, since she was free to act while everyone thought she was dead.

The servants have another letter, which was intended to help fulfil the "praise my noble name" part of the epitaph. They place this letter on the table whilst Natsuhi and the grandchildren aren't looking. It is notable that Maria does not claim that Beatrice was the one who put the letter on the table.

When the servants and Maria are forced to leave by Natsuhi, they meet Kanon, who was already hiding in the parlour. Genji locks the door, and then Kanon comes out of hiding while Maria isn't looking. He tells her that he entered by turning into butterflies, and then instructs her to look the other way and start singing.

The servants allow Kanon to set up their bodies in accordance with the epitaph, and then Kanon unlocks the door, leaves the letter, makes a phone call to the study, and flees the scene.

After discovering the bodies, Natsuhi reads whatever is written in the letter (a confession, perhaps?) and leaves to challenge the culprit, making sure to seal the door to the parlour so the kids can't follow.

Despite her efforts, Natsuhi is defeated due to being outnumbered and the culprits lying in wait for her. The culprits take the letter Natsuhi was holding with them.

Kanon and Shannon reveal themselves to the surviving grandchildren, thus fulfilling Jessica and George's wishes for them to return to life. They then all travel to the Golden Land, whatever that means. Perhaps understanding this Golden Land would be the key to understanding the grandchildrens' disappearance? Unfortunately, I don't see a way to progress much further on the epitaph, so I can't speculate much on this.

This will be my working theory going forward. With this, I will finally move on to the rest of the story and find out exactly how and why I'm completely wrong about everything.

[phineasandferbtheories]

the fact that candace had the number of the chef that taught her mom’s cooking class is fantastic. are they friends? does she know his kid? is it for emergencies? did her mom know that he’d smash her phone and so she made sure her daughter still had a way to contact her? did he put it on an ad for the class and candace found it, on purpose or not? do phineas and ferb know it? does lawrence? many many questions and very few answers

[just-spacetrash]

😚

[good-to-drive]

I just found out from the sopranos of all places that taxman was used in an ad for H&R block in about 2002 lmaoooooo

[char-lie-spirals]

You made a Graham powerpoint? ...... any way to see it?

Yeah I did!! I presented it in a Discord Server I'm in last weekend, but it's like a Proper PowerPoint, where I add a LOT while showing it, so I don't think uploading the slides would convey the Energy :[

I really want to put it Somewhere Out There so I think I might just like?? Record it with a voice over and put it up on YouTube maybe?? Probably unlisted, at least for now, but I'd put the link here? And if I'm ever showing it off somewhere else (Different Discord etc) I think I'll try to put out a link beforehand too?

[plotholes-and-spellingerrors]

I think the thing is that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as running an "AI" locally. (I'm assuming that when you say "AI" you're referring to the "generative" models where a user makes a natural-language request, e.g. "re-organize my business", and the model outputs an org chart or something.) The problem is that these models require so much compute that you basically cannot run them on a personal computer. If you saw that post going around talking about Windows quietly turning on constant system snapshots to run it's AI assistant, the article pointed out that some features were only available on machines with specially beefed-up processors and memory, and even then, internet connectivity was vital because it was sending data back to Microsoft to be processed - that was part of the privacy/security risk, that images potentially displaying passwords, etc., were being stored on Microsoft servers. The point being, you need massive server farms to ingest, store, and analyze the data that these models are being built on - and it never ends, or the model becomes stale. And even once you have the model, calculating a response is also incredibly resource intensive. That's why every single Google AI result takes so much more water and electricity than the entirety of the actual search results combined.

I have shared the link before, but I am begging people to listen to the "Data Vampires" miniseries from Tech Won't Save Us. They make clear very early on that the reason Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are pushing AI so much is because they are data center companies: they make money every time a service uses their data centers. And you know where ChatGPT and MidJourney results are being processed? On Microsoft and Google and Amazon's data centers. In fact, a lot of the "money" that these companies are investing into GenAI orgs is actually just donating server usage to them, to get them locked in on those servers, which will then need to be paid for. So the GenAI companies have to find a way to get people to pay for AI services, because they're paying for AI compute power.

The other thing, and I cannot stress this enough, is that these are not knowledge models. They are very sophisticated duplication models. If you say to the "AI", "Make my workflow simpler", it doesn't have a semantic understanding of what "simpler" means (and it certainly can't ask for clarification). All it can do is look at its massive data set and try to predict a version of whatever it is outputting that is associated with the string of letters "simpler", based on a bunch of stuff that has previously been labeled as "simple" (or similar words). So you might get a work flow that has fewer steps, for example, but what the "AI" might not realize (because it doesn't have a concept of what any of the steps are) is that maybe it's actually added that are meaningless, maybe it's just shuffled some steps to it looks like there's fewer but actually it's just hidden a couple... or maybe it's eliminated some vital error-checking steps that 98% of the time result in nothing (it looks like a waste of time, so simplify it out) but 1.7% of the time catches something minor (oh good, that would have wasted resources to fix) and 0.3% of the time catches something mission-critical (this error could have brought us to bankruptcy/court/prison). And keep in mind, the person asking an automated system to simplify their business workflow is NOT the person who designed the workflow and knows what needs to be in there (if they were, they wouldn't need a computer to tell them how to fix it) - they're the person trying to not need to pay someone to design the workflow.

And for that matter, a lot of what happens when some "AI" system is inserted into a process is that it's still doing the same task (just at a much higher computational requirement, and potentially wrong), but it looks simpler because the human user is only clicking one button rather than five.

And look, I'm all for automating tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming for a human - that's the whole point of computers in the first place. But a truly effective and efficient replacement for human work is one that was designed by people who are intimately familiar with the required tasks and thinking deeply about how to make their jobs easier.

You know, these techbros love to make it sound like humans are just bad at making systems, computers will be so much better at it, but I think that's a lie they tell because they want to make one generic product and get everyone to buy it. That's the promise of "general artificial intelligence" - it's one system that can do everything. But what else in life works like that? Do you put your clothes and your dishes in the same washing device? Something that does a lot of things well is typically very simple. You can fry an egg and boil water in the same pan because it's a bent piece of metal sitting over heat. An espresso machine, however, will have a harder time with the egg. Good software generally focuses on doing one thing - the difference is whether that one thing is simple and can be applied to a lot of different things (Firefox renders web content, it just happens that you can have all kinds of stuff on the web) or if that one thing is extremely specific (Audacity edits music and GIMP edits images - audio and images are both data types that Firefox can show you, but can you imagine what a mess GIMPdacity would be?); the problem is that this specialization requires human effort, and these techbros do not want to PAY for human effort; the problem is that this specialization means that you have target audiences, and these techbros want to sell to a general (read: bigger) audience. And conversely, those byzantine systems that are so terrible? Often it's not because people are just dumb, it's because either the job is a very complicated one, and the system is tailored to success in that task, or because someone wanted a general system that accomplishes all kinds of things, and often what they want accomplished is METRICS so that the efficiency of the business can be micromanaged. But that's another story for another time. In short, don't ever let someone who is trying to sell you bullshit tell you the lie that you couldn't do better on your own.

Anyway, IDK if this is really even what OP meant, it's just where my mind went. If you put up with me to the end, thanks for reading.

MAN, can you imagine the clusterfuck of working at a company that’s become reliant on an AI layer between itself/its employees, and knowing how to do their jobs and use their systems and stuff? Like when that AI layer goes down, poof, you’re all hosed. And they don’t strike me as super robust…

I guess there are ways of training and running them locally, but they’re so seductive they’re definitely going to be deployed in places that aren’t up to the task of maintaining them in a sane state. Like… damn… cutting headcount in favor of relying on AI is like. A raccoon stuffing its head into a yogurt container. This is gonna be killing off organizations in a few years.

Unless AI gets good at destroying preexisting fucked up byzantine workflows and replacing them with simpler, human-friendly ones. That would be okay. But it is gonna irrevocably destroy a lot of records and botch a lot of database migrations on its way there.

[capriszn]

oh succession s4 the masterpiece that you are……….

[mariocki]

Horror icon Ingrid Pitt guest stars as enemy agent Elayna in The Adventurer: Double Exposure (1.20, ITC, 1973)

[bittersweetresilience]

i've been thinking about beyond ascension again, since i've been rereading. like most of the other things i posted more than a year ago, thinking about it is incredibly embarrassing. but objectively i know i'm happy with it. posting things just has a way of making them seem cringe. anyway i still find it funny that i watched this terrible show, became irremediably gripped by these terrible villains, wrote this entire thing, and completely totally forgot temutai existed. sorry. that guy can just stay unredeemed.

[exeggcute]

none of this is new info, but you know I have the "loves to write lists and compile links" disposition, so I thought it might be helpful to share some of the tips I've seen about how to make sure you're sharing legitimate palestinian evacuation fundraisers and bundle all those tips into a single handy reference post.

this is a spreadsheet of legitimate ("vetted") fundraisers on tumblr.

this post explains how the people who maintain this spreadsheet confirm the legitimacy of each fundraiser they add.

this podcast episode ("yousef and the fourth move") explains why evacuation fundraisers are often organized by people who don't live in gaza and/or who may not be immediate relatives of the people trying to evacuate. it's part three of a series about a man named yousef and his family; parts one and two aren't required listening for part three to make sense, but if you have a few hours to spare then I wholeheartedly recommend listening to all of them.

this is the process that I personally have been using to check whether a particular fundraiser has been vetted:

spreadsheet method

open the vetted fundraisers spreadsheet.

inside this spreadsheet, open the "find..." menu. on a windows computer, this shortcut is ctrl+F. on a mac, this shortcut is cmd+F. on a mobile device, click the three dots menu in the upper right corner of your screen, then select Find and replace.

search for the last name of the person or family in the fundraiser. you may get several results because last names obviously aren't unique; keep hitting "next" until you've looked at all the results.

if you find an entry in the spreadsheet that has the exact same name and whose gofundme link leads to the same fundraiser associated with the blog, it's legitimate. if you don't find an entry in the spreadsheet that matches the blog's fundraiser, that does not mean it's a scam. try the next method below!

tumblr search method

copy the username of the tumblr who originally posted the fundraiser and/or sent you a message asking you to boost the fundraiser. (for example, username123)

paste this username into tumblr's search bar.

for best results, click the All types drop-down menu, then select Text. since the search page is often dominated by asks sent by username123 (which people then answer and tag with their username), this helps narrow things down a bit.

look to see if any people who are not username123 have made posts confirming that username123 is legitimate. this includes people who've reblogged fundraisers and added notes, people who've compiled masterlists, and people sharing hyperlinks to other posts confirming a fundraiser's legitimacy. if the message seems to be "yep, looks legit," then it's safe to assume it's legit.

this is not a comprehensive list, but here are some of the usernames I've seen associated with "yep, looks legit"-type posts and who I've come to trust by association. (disclaimers: I am not mutuals with any of the users, and not all of them do the vetting firsthand, but the ones who don't vet posts themselves still seem to be careful about what they share and therefore are a good lead to follow. also, don't bug these people to vet fundraisers for you unless they've specifically indicated that they're open to that.)

90-ghost

el-shab-hussein

nabulsi

appsa

northgazaupdates

retvolution

communistchilchuck

neptunerings

a-shade-of-blue

shimamitsu

neither of these methods yielded anything definitive; what now?

it may just be too early to tell. unless a trusted source has shared overwhelming evidence that a particular fundraiser is a scam (which seems to be a very very rare occurrence), the best thing you can do is ignore it. don't report their blog as spam, because there's a good chance it's a legitimate fundraiser who just hasn't been vetted yet.

[craneboys]

you know you're normal about a show when you take so many screenshots for a single episode that you could have filled up the entirety of your childhood ipod touch with just frasier pics and still had a bunch left over

and most of them are just this

[valeriehalla]

actual writing advice

1. Use the passive voice.

What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.

2. Use adverbs.

Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.

3. There’s no such thing as “filler”.

Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!

4. okay, now that I’ve snared you in my trap—and I know you don’t want to hear this—but orthography actually does kind of matter

First of all, a lot of what you think of as “grammar” is actually orthography. Should I put a comma here? How do I spell this word in this context? These are questions of orthography (which is a fancy Greek word meaning “correct-writing”). In fact, most of the “grammar questions” you’ll see posted online pertain to orthography; this number probably doubles in spaces for writers specifically.

If you’re a native speaker of English, your grammar is probably flawless and unremarkable for the purposes of writing prose. Instead, orthography refers to the set rules governing spelling, punctuation, and whitespace. There are a few things you should know about orthography:

English has no single orthography. You already know spelling and punctuation differ from country to country, but did you know it can even differ from publisher to publisher? Some newspapers will set parenthetical statements apart with em dashes—like this, with no spaces—while others will use slightly shorter dashes – like this, with spaces – to name just one example.

Orthography is boring, and nobody cares about it or knows what it is. For most readers, orthography is “invisible”. Readers pay attention to the words on a page, not the paper itself; in much the same way, readers pay attention to the meaning of a text and not the orthography, which exists only to convey that meaning.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Actually, that means it’s of the utmost importance. Because orthography can only be invisible if it meets the reader’s expectations.

You need to learn how to format dialogue into paragraphs. You need to learn when to end a quote with a comma versus a period. You need to learn how to use apostrophes, colons and semicolons. You need to learn these things not so you can win meaningless brownie points from your English teacher for having “Good Grammar”, but so that your prose looks like other prose the reader has consumed.

If you printed a novel on purple paper, you’d have the reader wondering: why purple? Then they’d be focusing on the paper and not the words on it. And you probably don’t want that! So it goes with orthography: whenever you deviate from standard practices, you force the reader to work out in their head whether that deviation was intentional or a mistake. Too much of that can destroy the flow of reading and prevent the reader from getting immersed.

You may chafe at this idea. You may think these “rules” are confusing and arbitrary. You’re correct to think that. They’re made the fuck up! What matters is that they were made the fuck up collaboratively, by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. Whether you like it or not, you are part of that collaboration: you’re not the first person to write prose, and you can’t expect yours to be the first prose your readers have ever read.

That doesn’t mean “never break the rules”, mind you. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with English orthography, then you are free to break it as you please. Knowing what’s expected gives you the power to do unexpected things on purpose. And that’s the really cool shit.

5. You’re allowed to say the boobs were big if the story is about how big the boobs were

Nobody is saying this. Only I am brave enough to say it.

Well, bye!

[izukuer]

how do i adapt this to work with my brain. send help

[cerastes]

We’ve heard about the seeming contrast of creators that make these super happy saccharine pieces of art being bitter people whose lives seem to be filled with agony whereas horror creators that thrive in the grotesque all seem to be super happy and positive people, the usual “Miyazaki Hayao vs Itou Junji” kinda beat.

There’s a similar, slightly overlapping dynamic between cuisine and blacksmithing. Chefs are the single angriest existences in the world and would piss on your grave seconds after stuffing your freshly gutted corpse in it. Blacksmiths are jovial, usually quiet dudes that work machinery and think your dagger is still very cool even if it’s got some balance issues.

Now, of course this is making reference to the Ramsay style of food shows, which is not the universal experience when it comes to the genre -- I’m more of a Cutthroat Kitchen kind of guy, because I like Mario Party -- but it’s always fun to me to go through an episode of Hell’s Kitchen where Ramsay annihilates his own vocal chords screaming “FUCKING DONKEY” and “IT’S RAW”, then right after, watch some old Forged In Fire and see the Filipino weapon master, Marcaida, test a short sword one of the contestants made and it fucking explodes into shards without nary a scratch on the pig’s carcass, obviously the shittiest weapon you could possibly make, damascus steel shards flying embedded in his arm, and he’ll calmly, with his signature friendly smile, lovable demeanor, and charismatic gait, face the contestant and be like

“Well, you see, Bob, your blade unfortunately suffered a catastrophic malfunction, and it can’t be tested any further. However, the handle on your weapon allowed for some very good balance and ease of swing, it fits my palm perfectly and it swings very easy. Despite the blade fracturing in 7 uneven fragments, we can see that the blade didn’t chip or roll at all. Good work, Bob” then they’ll shake on it and Bob is eliminated, and all he’ll say is “I’m sorry to have punctured 4 blood vessels on Marcaida, but end of the day, the other smiths were simply better, and I’m proud of them. I just gotta go and work on my fundamentals back at home now :)” meanwhile Hell’s Kitchen’s contestants are having a shootout with Glocks in their dorm because someone made fun of someone else’s raw scallops.