#Inherently Indicate Anything

[harrylights]

omg fjjfkdkdjd i forgot to update y’all that my very normie bestie went down the larrie rabbithole on tiktok and has been lowkey converted thank u jesus

[uncanny-tranny]

I've been thinking about modesty from a specifically trans lense lately. I was taught that modesty indicates shame, that modesty means you're simultaneously ashamed of being human and having a human body, but also that you are "purer" because you adhere to a hegemonic idea of modesty. Frankly, I just don't agree with this, and it was very much steeped in the idea of specifically christian ideas of modesty.

Before I transitioned, I felt very unprotective of my body because it never felt like mine to begin with. I didn't really care what happened to it, and while I was modest by other people's standards, I certainly didn't feel it. Once I actually started transitioning (and especially on testosterone), I've found that I'm so much more "modest" because I've become protective of my body. There's this stereotype that trans people start "showing themselves off" after transitioning, but I honestly feel the opposite. I'm possessive over my body and exactly how it acts and appears because I actually like my body, and it finally feels like mine. I'm honestly kind of selfish about it, and I think I've earned the right to be.

I made this post because I think this is an interesting topic, and I think it's interesting the ways in which we internalize the influences that be. It's also a reminder that no matter how you feel about things like modesty, you should adhere to what makes the most sense to you and what you are most comfortable with. There are pressures to be modest in this way or that way, but what truly matters is what you decide with your body and yourself.

[happyk44]

It's kinda funny because w/ my Zeus kid OC (who I've been thinking about renaming as Araceli, 'cause it means altar of the sky, apparently, which I like 'cause sky-themed-ish but also like. A little bit I wanted something that meant cloud the way Coral's name means... Coral) the implication is that she takes after her father to an almost mirroring degree because I developed her and my other PJO OCs (who also all got retconned into an OG work) at the same time I was playing around with my ideas on the Big Six, and the gist at the time was supposed to show how the Big Six could've turned out if they weren't so weird.

So the dynamics of the friendship was supposed to be very similar to the dynamics of Big Six's relationship to each other (e.g. Mary having a major crush on Hera's "representative" but also being attracted to literally every other person that walked by, Nico being the soberminded big brother figure, etc). It's also one of the reasons Mary would get angry whenever someone would compare to her dad, because similarly I think Zeus would get angry if someone compared him to his dad.

And then eventually as I got older and the daydream moved around with whatever obsession I had at the time, the characters and general storyline began to change away from that in some ways but core features sort of stayed and so I ended up with a version of Zeus that ignores his daughter's pleas for help because he loves her but her pain hurts him because he can't do anything about it and it's his fault she's suffering.

She got this intensity from him, it's ingrained into the way it's ingrained in him. But he was able to rebuild the world according to his own needs and wants and beliefs. And she can't really do that. So he doesn't have any advice he can give her when she's on her knees begging for help with all the noise and pain in her head. He doesn't know what to do! It's like he can just go and rip it out of her.

But she's suffering because she's different and she's weird and she knows it and she knows it's his fault which is why she's asking but he just doesn't know and he can't handle watching her suffering and listening to her cry when there is no helpful answer to give her because "I don't know" isn't going to fix it.

He's supposed to fix things, he's supposed to have the answers. He's king of the world, by damn! He's a problem solver. He supposed to have a solution, and a million backup solutions. But he doesn't! There's nothing he can do to make the noise stop because truth be told, the noise never really stopped for him! It just got easier and quieter. So he turns away from her because he loves her and he's failing her and he can't handle that.

But also in the same breath, I think he recognizes similar aspects of himself in Jason, who isn't even asking for help, and fucking despises him for it, lol.

✨ Girl Dad ✨

[age-of-moonknight]

“An Unquiet Grave,” Moon Knight: City of the Dead (Vol. 1/2023), #4.

Writer: David Pepose; Penciler: Marcelo Ferreira; Inker: Jay Leisten; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[harbingerofwhump]

Tone indicators are pointless, shut the fuck up

Damn I didn't know you understood my personal existence and experiences better than I --- the person living that experience --- do. My bad 😔 (/sarcasm)

[pochapal]

shannon. bestie. isn't it so funny and quirky how you're the first person to explicitly state that people will die as a result of the epitaph?? what a crazy goofy coincidence!

[yourstormthlaylirahh]

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[unproduciblesmackdown]

imagine that time will was like "oh do people here care about billions. maybe i'll see if i can find some pics" years ago if he qrt'd that Now lol

[ailithnight]

Thing is, with a Protection Obsession, sending him to protect should have been, according to the research on Infinite Denizens from other Infinite Denizens, good for him. Like a constant, consistent access to food.

And unlike human hunger, ghost obsessions don't get "full". They can't "overeat." The excess -ie, what is not strictly necessary to sustain the core- just goes into making the projection form stronger, stabler, more powerful.

Were Danny any other full ghost, this would have been good for him. The problem, what the rest of the League don't know, because Danny is still new and not quite at the 'trusting you with my civilian ID' stage yet and no one even expects the dead kid to have a civilian ID; the problem is that Danny isn't a full ghost. He's human too. And all this time and energy spent helping with these emergencies means he hasn't been able to care for that half of himself.

His ghost half has been soaring to new and dizzying power levels, but his human half has been withering away, neglected.

And despite the two forms, Danny is never truly one or the other. He is both, always both. One side being injured, sick, or weak is going to affect the other, no matter how strong the other side is.

Submitted Prompts: The Justice League learns that Danny doesn’t get harmed by most human weapons or natural disasters, and that he has a protection obsession, so they assign him to a whole lot of emergencies when he joins. They didn’t realize they were taking advantage and burning him out until one of his rouges infiltrates the watchtower with an unconscious Phantom in his arms.

Skulker: Victory came far to easy. What did you all do to him?

[yelloworangesoda]

"why does this make you feel bad if it doesn't apply to you" because emotions are fake and dont always correlate with whats happening

[minakoaiinos]

Animating this season like you can't have the slightest bit of jest and god forbid jesting about yaoi

[theood]

Sorry for bringing up being unemployed like it's a personality trait but I'm really sick of it and multiple journal entries have been made about it. I could use a break from the world and that break would be another interview at any of the places I've applied too

[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[spyroz]

if anyone needs help identifying things that can become moral scrupulosity OCD obsessions/compulsions, heres a list of some i've experienced:

rereading your posts/texts over and over

checking your notes and/or followers list frequently to "make sure" bad actors aren't interacting with you

checking OP's blog before interacting with posts

compulsively opening a social media tab to look at your notifs and then closing it, over and over

fearing ways that things you say/do (or don't do) could be taken in bad faith. being anxious that your words/actions will be misconstrued as morally wrong, bigoted, rude, or aggressive

feeling guilty or obsessing over whether you should or shouldn't have reblogged a post

feeling like you aren't "allowed" to disengage from online discourse or unfollow people who post it

fearing you're being stalked, talked about, or called out behind your back. fearing you'll never be forgiven and that people might even celebrate your disappearance or death, even though you havent done anything wrong

searching your own name/username to see if anyone is actually talking about you

imagining defenses you would make against nonexistent heinous accusations or arguments against you, to prove that you didnt do it

feeling like you have to roll over and become a doormat when others are cruel to you, because it could cause strife if you do anything other than grovel or apologize

having trouble enforcing your own boundaries out of fear that they are somehow "wrong" or unethical

ending up surrounded by people who have all the "right opinions" but are super mean and unpleasant, and make you feel like you have to walk on eggshells

fearing that just HAVING moral ocd makes you a bad person somehow (for example, i often fear that having moral ocd is somehow pushing a 'stranger danger' or misanthropist agenda, even though i actually have a lot of faith in my fellow humans)

some of these bullet points are not inherently bad on their own, but if you find yourself having this kind of anxiety very often, that's not normal, and it's time to get offline or even seek professional help if it's impacting your life

this list is catered to how online culture influences moral scrupulosity, it is not indicative of how everybody's moral scrupulosity functions, and it is not exhaustive

[the-one-and-only-elita]

One thing that I absolutely love about TFOne's writing is that it manages to avoid a lot of the heavier criticism I've seen regarding MegOp's hero/villain dynamic over the years (trust me, the mid-2010s TF discourse was crazy)

*Spoilers Below*

First of all, the narrative benefits so much from the main 4 cast members all being a part of the same exploited mining class. So many takes on MegOp have Orion being of a higher status (an archivist, a cop, etc) while Megatron is much lower down on the social latter (a miner, a gladiator, often in the context of being a slave).

I've seen many people be put off by this, because it feels as if Megs is being villianized for being rightfully angry at the system that deeply harmed and exploited him, while Orion/Optimus is praised for taking a more pacifistic stance despite him not suffering as much from or in some ways even benefiting from the system he claims to oppose. I don't find their dynamic to be as simple as that, and I do find these takes to be a bit reductive, but I do very much see where they are coming from.

I am definitely one of those people who's very frustrated with the way pacifism is hailed as the one true path of morality, and the inherent implication that taking any sort of revenge on the people who abused/exploited you makes you just as bad as them. Also, Marvel's particular brand of demonizing any form of radical political action, despite the system clearly being broken and corrupt, but being completely unwilling to offer any other alternatives to meaningfully change things for the better.

When looking at what I described above its pretty easy to see how a lot of versions of MegOp's hero/villain dynamic unfortunately fits into that trope. Bringing it back to TFOne, you can see how Op and Meg coming from the same political/social status subverts this. The existence of Elita and Bee only further illustrates that out of the 4 people of the mining class who were all deceived, exploited, and literally mutilated in the same way it is only D-16 that completely loses himself to his rage, even to the point where he loses compassion for his own companions and disregarding the safety of the other miners (when he decides to "tears everything down" and Elita exclaims he's going to "kill everyone").

What I think I love most about the characterization in TFOne is that Orion is the radical one. Not only that, but he is praised by Elita and by extension the narrative for it. He is constantly challenging authority, and is the first to have the suspicion that their society is structured in an unjust way.

Meanwhile D-16, to be frank, is kind of a bootlicker. He fully believed in the system and that Sentinal Prime, as someone with power, had the right to decided "what was best" for those who are weaker/lesser (I wish I had the specific quote from D-16 to support this, but the movie's still in theaters). It illustrate that D-16 already held certain fascistic ideals, and that he and Orion already have fundamentally opposing moral/political values, it simply hasn't been of any consequence yet. It shows that their eventual falling out was inevitable, even if they had decided to rebuild Cybertron together.

It should also be noted that D-16's feelings of anger and betrayal do not necessarily have anything to do with the unjust system itself, but that said unjust system was predicated on a lie. Hence his fixation on deception in the post-credits scene and him naming his faction the Decepticons. Meanwhile, when Orion learns the truth he's just sort of like "yeah, I always kinda knew something was up" because again, he understood on some level that their system was predicated on injustice.

Even D-16's obsession with Megatronus Prime, while initially an endearing aspect of his character, is also an indicator of the questionably large amount of value he puts on one's strength. It foreshadows the "might makes right" ideology that the decepticons follow, and is a key part of their ideological characterization across continuities.

Instead of the narrative we often see in Transformers media were Optimus is idolized by the narrative for being more moderate and Megatron is villiainized for being radical (or so people often claim), it is instead Optimus who is rewarded and praised by the narrative for being radical, and Megatron who is villainized and punished by the narrative for holding potentially fascistic values.

I do agree with some criticism I've seen that the whole thing with killing Sentinel and D-16's final turn into villainy felt a bit rushed and more than a little cliche, but I also understand it both had a limited runtime and that it is ultimately a family film meant to be accessible to children. More importantly though, I think the movie set the groundwork early on that, no matter how this final act played out, D-16 was always going to turn to darkness, and Orion would not have been able to stop him.

Its perfectly tragic, the way all MegOp should be, while also feeling really well thought out from a thematic standpoint. I love it.

[idolshineitai]

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