#do read the article linked

[autisticthings]

Autism: The Grieving Experience

TW//talks about death

I've been very lucky with the limited amount of people that have died in my life so far. Extremely lucky. During my life time, three of my great-grandparents have died and one grandparent. Plus a relative that stayed with us for a bit.

Plus 3 dogs and a guinea pig.

All of these deaths had one thing in common. I didn't really.. feel anything.

In the show "The Good Doctor" one of the last episodes briefly mentioned that autistic people experience grief a different way. and that it hits us a bit later than it hits allistics. I started thinking about it, and eventually forgot about it.

In late May this year, my great-grandma died. I had done very low quality research about autistic people and grief. Finding this article by Karla Fisher.

Fisher talks about how she was mostly uncomfortable during a very emotional time for her family. After things had settled down, she took a couple weeks to process the death of her dad and decided she was good to go back to work. Only to find out that her feelings felt manageable but she couldn't function.

In the article, she explains that her sensory input was failing, because her brain was too absorbed in processing her feelings. She has a video on a meltdown model, explaining it even further.

I recommend actually reading the article, but that's the gist of what I got on how we process grief.

---

My Personal Experience In Grief

I have never cried about the death of a loved one, including pets. Ever. Honestly, the thing that hurts me most is the fact that I can't really feel anything about death. I always have family members crying, asking if I'm okay, always someone who is a mess. It makes me very uncomfortable.

I don't really feel anything, or at least I don't notice, but I have noticed that after a month, I start to slow down. It doesn't last long, ever, probably because it's never been someone actually close to me (other than pets). But. I still don't know if it's cause I'm sad about the death itself or the fact that I feel like a monster for not feeling anything.

I really do feel like I'm broken for not really caring about the deaths of those around me. It's just a part of life, if anything it has me just thinking what it will feel like. curious for when it eventually happens to me. will it be painful? will it be peaceful? is there an afterlife, or is that just man's fear of death talking? I figure, I can't really do anything about the death, it happened, why dwell on the past? why dwell on my last breaths when I have so many in between my current one and my last one.

---

Just some food for thought ig. This was more like a rant, hope it helps you feel less like a monster if you don't experience grief like allistics, too.

[arttsuka]

People need to stop blaming 'parasocial relationships' when it's revealed to the public that a famous person has done something controversial (or even a crime) and the public is upset. 'I can't believe xxx did that!' doesn't always mean that the person who said it has a parasocial relationship with xxx. Usually it's just our faith in humanity, we want to believe that everyone has some basic human decency (especially someone we might admire) and it's only natural to be disappointed when we learn they're a bad person.

[stevenrogered]

im still reeling from that episode but i wanted to talk about this part in oliver stark's tvline interview in particular

if you've been in the fandom for long enough, you would know that oliver used to be on twitter. and he was VERY active on it. he was really engaging with fans, he live tweeted the show sometimes, and it was great. but there was a small but very loud part of the internet (i wont call them buck/buddie fans bc as an actual buck/buddie fan, i do not claim them) who would harass him RELENTLESSLY because buddie wasn't canon/buck was never confirmed to be bi or gay.

and i mean relentlessly. to the point where he left/deleted twitter multiple times before leaving for good a couple of years ago. i remember him being SO EXCITED about buck begins only to get people mad- at HIM- for buck not coming out by the end of the episode.

of course he couldnt say anything, even if thats where the character was intended to go all along. the term queer baited gets thrown around so much and i've always been very vocal about the fact that i never thought 911 was doing that. sometimes you just have to wait and let something play out organically on its own.

but as happy as i am for buck, im equally happy for oliver that he now gets to exhale and let this out into the world and that hes getting so much love from this episode

[sickfreaksirkay]

balin and balan for @caer-gai’s arthuriana august: "blood or no"

The Quest of Balin and the Mark of Cain, David C. Fowler / illustration by H. J. Ford / Tennyson's Balin and Balan / The Tragedy of Balin: Malory's Use of the Balin Story in the "Morte Darthur", Ralph Norris / Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur / illustration by W. H. Margetson / illustration by Walter F. Enright

[whenyoulosesmallmind]

Nicklas Bäckström & the Washington Capitals (+ nickeovi) ― Immortality, Clare Harner | insp.

credits: x. x. x. x. x. x. x. x. x. x.

[monokuromuheaven]

Carlos Diehz, the Mexican actor in “Conclave”, outlines his destiny

The architect, who plays a cardinal in “Conclave”, the Oscar-nominated film, is not interested in people recognizing him; it is enough for him to have played a character faithful to his principles.

Things haven't changed for Carlos Diehz. He continues to work happily as an architect in Vancouver, where he designs community centers, health centers and schools.

(...)

In Mexico, according to distributor Diamond Films, more than 700,000 people have so far seen Diehz playing Cardinal Benitez, a Mexican religious man who follows the ideals of the Church, caring for the needy and entering into tension with polar opposites.

(...)

His life hasn't changed a lot. Only one man recognized him at the airport the day after the Palm Springs show and congratulated him. Plus, there's the “threat” from his boss at the architectural firm.

“I'm still an architect, I started plan B 30 years ago (laughs) and it will be until acting requires me, until I have a full calendar year, that I leave it. Architecture is my first passion, it is a very rewarding career, we mainly design works that benefit society and take care of it. My boss already told me that if I get to have a lot of (acting) work, that we could do an agreement, but they wouldn't let me leave.

“If people don't recognize me, it's because I did well, that people see Cardinal Benitez. Yes, a selfie would be nice, but the satisfaction of having played the character who says the phrase: 'I am who I have always been', is gratifying”.

(...)

He now has an agent in Canada who is approaching him about possible projects. He was just part of an audition for something important that he can't elaborate on.

Source

Twitter Post

[mousemannation]

some highlights from the article i linked in this post

[yudayajin]

Ottilie Kafka Davidová (1892-1943)

I haven't used Tumblr in a very long time but I wanted to share one story of one remarkable woman.

Many of us know Ottla as Franz Kafka's beloved little sister. We are left mostly with only his words as her loving big brother through his letters to her, whereas her letters to him have long been lost. However, this remarkable woman lived almost 20 more years after his death.

Her words may be gone but the stories of her actions live on:

She insisted on pursuing her love of agriculture and followed her brother in his vegetarianism. She was the only woman in her agricultural programme. She persevered throughout and finished her education, ending up the manager of her brother-in-law's farming estate.

Unlike her other two sisters, Ottla chose her own husband, a Cech Catholic and, in 1920, they married against her father's will. They went on to have two daughters together: Helene and Vera.

By 1942, both her sisters (her only remaining siblings) were taken away for being Jewish and murdered. She thus decided to divorce her husband in order to protect her two daughters' legal rights and lives by separating from the family and allowing them to escape being assigned by the law as Jews. It also meant her parents' inheritance could be left to them. This ended up saving Helene and Vera's lives.

After her divorce, she voluntarily turned herself in to the police for being Jewish and was sent to the Terezin Ghetto, a concentration camp where Jews would be imprisoned to wait to be sent to be murdered at an extermination camp. There she chose to be a child counsellor, helping care for the huge number of orphaned children staying there.

In 1943, she again volunteered to accompany a group of these children on their transfer to be murdered in Auschwitz. She chose to offer them some light and comfort for their final journey and ended up accompanying them all the way till the end.

We can never know exactly how much she gave to all the people around her directly with her strength, warmth, kindness, and spirit. However, her sacrifice left two daughters who never forgot her, and left us with the words of her brother who often stayed with her to write, and later also with his letters to her that were published due to her daughters' willingness to sell them.

She was independent, free, and truly, recklessly, unapologetically kind and good. More people should know her, not just as a beloved little sister, but as an amazing Jewish woman and mother who chose to be good and kind till the end.

May her memory be a blessing.

Here is the full biography included as a preface to the English edition of Letters to Ottla and the Family:

Ottla (full name Ottilie), sister of Franz Kafka: a young woman, reticent, shy, kind, obliging, friendly, gracious; living in quiet opposition to the bourgeois society and to the petit bourgeois regimen of the family home; not beautiful or in the ordinary sense even attractive; ready to help where help was needed (after finishing primary school she had to help long hours in her father’s notions store); reading books and journals without becoming especially educated.

Before the start of World War I, twenty-two-year-old Ottla met the jurist Josef David (born 1891), a Czech Christian, to whom she was later married. This step was a mark of her independence: her two older sisters, Elli and Valli, were married to men of the elder Kafkas’ choice. During the war she expressed her wish to study agriculture and to work on a farm. Franz supported her plans.

In 1917 she went to Zürau, in northern Bohemia, to take care of a small farming estate belonging to her brother-in-law. Franz, plagued by the noise of the city—and of the parental home—visited Ottla in Zürau several times.

Franz had a special affection for Ottla. Her simplicity, her purity, her ability to listen, her appreciation of her brother’s art, and the obvious pride she took in her big brother (Franz was nine years older)—all this went to make Ottla Franz’s favorite sister.

In July 1920 Ottla and Josef David (nicknamed Pepa) were married against the objections of relatives and friends. It is not known what attracted Ottla to David and David to Ottla. Ottla was reserved, even humble; Josef was outgoing, even boisterous. Ottla had adopted Franz’s vegetarianism; Josef liked to eat well.

In spring 1921 daughter Věra was born, followed, in 1923, by Helena (Helenka). The post—World War I period in Austria was harsh. Food was in short supply, housing conditions poor, inflation rampant. Ottla needed all her energy and time to take care of the household: to tidy the small, uncomfortable apartment, to feed Josef and the girls, to shop, to walk the dog. Franz was ill, but he and Ottla met periodically until his death in 1924.

Politically there was much tension in the land, and especially in Prague. The majority of the population was Czech in cultural traditions and outlook; the socially more prominent part was German-speaking and better educated. Within this minority was the Jewish group, separated from both the lower and the more privileged classes. With the rise of the Nazi movement rose a feeling of increasing threat in the Jewish community. Only slowly came the realization that the threat was being translated into reality.

Now begins the real story of Ottla. We are aware of it only now, since an old friend of Ottla’s, Anna Maria Jokl, published what she knew (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 27, 1969). When the Nuremburg laws were introduced to the “protectorate Bohemia—Moravia,” Ottla—the quiet, the innocent—decided to take steps that remind one of a story motif by Kafka. In 1942, in order to offer some protection to her husband and daughters, she suggested a divorce from Josef David. Josef at first declined the generous offer. But Ottla advanced the argument that, after the divorce, their daughters would retain rights to the elder Kafkas’ property. This the lawyer David recognized as a “rational approach,” and the divorce was effected. Ottla put her apartment in order, packed her rucksack, and prepared herself for the trip. The daughters suddenly noticed with fear and dread what their mother’s intention was. The husband gave Ottla a good shoeshine and applied a coat of grease: “Now they are waterproof.”

Ottla went to the police, registered as a Jewess, and was sent to Theresienstadt. The girls came and begged to be admitted to this concentration camp but were refused, since “the law” did not apply to them.

After some time the girls received a pre-printed “message”: ES GEHT MIR GUT (“I am fine”), with Ottla’s signature. Later it became known that, in October 1943, Ottla volunteered to accompany a transport of children to the death camp at Auschwitz. We can only surmise how much goodness and love she could offer those little ones. To her, this action must have been a final proof of her freedom—of the bonds of convention, of estrangement.

Anna Maria Jokl continues her report. After the war (1947), this old friend of Ottla’s returned to Prague and, of course, phoned the David apartment. “Ottla is no more,” said David and invited her to come and meet the daughters. She came and was informed of some details. But first the young women begged her: “Tell us about our mother. We have forgotten everything; we even forgot what she looked like. Tell us, perhaps we’ll then recall things.”

David died in 1962, seventy-one years old. Ottla’s sisters had been deported by the Nazis and killed.

The children preserved Kafka’s letters to Ottla. For many years, the ruling authorities in Czechoslovakia did not allow the letters to be taken abroad or published locally. When, finally, this permission was granted, Hartmut Binder and Klaus Wagenbach edited them for S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a.M., under the title Briefe an Ottla und die Familie (copyright © 1974 by Schocken Books Inc., New York).

English translations of some of the letters to Ottla have appeared in the volume Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). The present collection includes all of the letters to Ottla that have been preserved. Letters by Ottla to Kafka must be considered lost, although we have many from her to Josef David.

[milks-thoughts]

If you love our planet, stop using ai.

this is a topic I tiptoe around a LOT considering for a while, I used ai. I’d use c.ai, I used grammarly generative ai, and it’s important to know the environmental repercussions of ai. Especially now that America (one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gasses) has pulled from the Paris Peace Agreement.

Rapid development and deployment of powerful generative AI models comes with environmental consequences, including increased electricity demand and water consumption. By 2026, it’s estimated that 4% of electric energy will be ai (for reference, 4% of energy powers ALL of Japan.)

In 2019, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers trained several large language models and found that training a single AI model can emit over 626,000 pounds of CO2, equivalent to the emissions of five cars over their lifetimes.

A more recent study reported that training GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters consumed 1287 MWh of electricity, and resulted in carbon emissions of 502 metric tons of carbon, equivalent to driving 112 gasoline powered cars for a year.

The more we overshoot what natural processes can remove in a given year, the faster the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rises. In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.8± 0.1 ppm per year. Over the next half century, the annual growth rate tripled, reaching 2.4 ppm per year during the 2010s. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.

If you use c.ai? Go find a discord server to roleplay in, try finding a community on apps like amino.

There’s other ways, we don’t have to kill our earth like this,

[milfygerard]

honestly i think some of the posts abt american teens and 20somethings moving to red note are kind of missing the point bc like the ppl who are going to red note are not like tumblr users raised in progressive communist circles and in fact have never had their preconceptions of china that theyve learned from media and culture questioned outside of maybe watching a chinese romantic drama show or whatever. like seeing posts that are like "we've been telling you guys about the misinformation spread about china the whole time" no you havent bc these ppl have never and will never see yr blogs or even see tumblr posts off of tiktok and instagram, the ppl impacted by this change are the ones who use tiktok to keep up w friends and celebrities and like to be entertained by hauls not faux progressives who sometimes accidentally learn things while bickering back and forth about politics they barely understand on a slowly dying microblogging website thats only real use in any sort of organizing seems to be the ability to spread fundraisers and even that is limited considering this site isnt exactly popular with the rich and powerful.

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

speaking of well-written articles, why is anime journalism absolute TRASH? every time I see a headline about anime news that interests me, I have to brace myself for the worst sample of pop culture journalism I've ever suffered

[cogcltrcorn]

with all due respect to the "innocent until proven guilty" I do not believe in the nypd's ability to find a random guy that had this online presence and also on the hearing upon listening to the claims made by the prosecution (alleged murder, possession of a gun, several fake ids, 10k and a faraday bag) all he had to say "idk I didn't have that much money on me. also my bag is waterproof idk if it blocks phone signal". like I am sorry guys but "innocent until proven guilty" is about the treatment by the justice system not about posts made online. I am pretty sure this guy did it (based)

[humbleapplecrumble]

"In a world of replicants and regrets, would you pick up the call"

I don't mind if you want to use my gifs just leave a like or reblog. Both if you're feeling extra bold. If you're feeling extra risky you could even credit the creator(...me...)

Click more for the important part of this post and the reason why it exists. :)

Also! Feel free to explore the Medium account linked below! It features articles spanning topics from the mysteries of space to the complexities of politics and all the dark and fascinating corners of the world your brilliant mind might wander to. Your support would mean the world—so take a look if you're curious and have a moment to spare.

[twodiamondhoes]

YOU SHOULD KNOW BY NOW THAT THERE IS NOT A SINGLE ACADEMIC PAYWALL I WILL NOT FIND A WAY TO NINJA MY WAY OVER FOR YOU

Shoutout to my partner for barely even waiting for me to go "They won't let me read the article 🥺" before finding a version I can access

Every time 💕

[rollercoasterwords]

like. i still wouldn't want someone to copy and paste my fics into a large language model like chatgpt but it's not so much bc i'm worried abt my work being stolen (seems unlikely that an LLM would spit back out my exact words considering how it works, and even if it did, i doubt any individual would be able to like. publish and profit from those words, based on the nebulous status of copyright law when it comes to LLMs like chatgpt. and having my words fed into the LLM really isn't going to make much of a difference when it comes to corporations profiting off the tool in the first place; plus in instances of corporate exploitation i think there are more effective ways to organize than like...arguing for strengthened ip laws or trying to like make ip laws for fanfiction spaces). it's more because i'm wary of what that says about how a person is like...approaching my fic specifically + fanfiction more broadly. in two main ways:

1. i think it is just. basic respect to check with a writer before u take their work off ao3(or whatever fanfic-specific place it's been shared) and put it somewhere else. and like, this applies to lots of things outside chatgpt--reposting fics to other sites, posting them on goodreads/storygraph, printing + binding fics, etc. if u are treating fanfic writers as people who u are in community with, who are generously sharing a gift with u, then it seems like basic kindness to check in and see if they're alright with u taking that fic outside the space it was posted to do something else with it.

with chatgpt and similar LLMs specifically, a lot of people are wary because there's still so much unsettled in regards to how copyright laws might shake out, and most people (myself included) are unsure of how/whether our writing/data might be stored and used by these corporations that own the LLMs. i don't think ai itself is something that should be mythologized as like ontologically evil technology, but anytime a corporation is introducing us to new tech like this we need to be wary of where it's coming from and how it could be used--people have already pointed out a lot of very serious issues with the way this technology is being developed and how it could/likely will be/already is being used exploitatively--which, again, is more a matter of organizing against corporations than railing against ai tech itself, but is still a valid reason for writers (again, myself included) to be wary of having their work fed to LLMs without permission.

and like. sure, u don't have to care abt writers' feelings + boundaries and can just take their stories and do whatever u want with them. but to me that says u aren't treating fanfic as a community space, but rather a content farm in which fics are products that u are entitled to do whatever u want with. and i just think that's shitty! and if that's how ur treating fanfic then i'd rather not have u reading my fic at all

2. i honestly think it's a strange way to engage w storytelling by treating endings this way. like. story endings are usually v important + intentional, and can completely change the entire tone, themes, messages, etc of a story. i understand going to the writer and asking them abt what they had in mind for the story ending if ur looking for closure, and i understand imagining ur own story ending or even writing ur own ending to an unfinished story. what i don't understand is plugging a story into chatgpt and having it spit an ending out for u.

and like. maybe this is bc we've all been calling these LLMs ai, which evokes an impression of like. a sentient robot creating something. but that's not what these programs do! the first article i linked explains how they actually work really well, but essentially--chatgpt and similar LLMs cannot create new ideas. they can't take a story and synthesize its themes or pick apart its tone to then come up with an original idea for an ending. at the same time, they aren't just plagiarism machines that are ripping text directly from other writers and spitting it back out.

instead (to my understanding), what they're doing is compressing vast amounts of information by running statisical analyses to just save the most common trends, patterns, recurring info, etc, and then plugging that in to fill the gaps. it looks like it's writing something new, but it's essentially just paraphrasing already-existing information pulled from the internet. so i'd imagine that if u fed an ai a fic and said "write an ending," the ai would basically compare the fic to whatever similar stories it has saved and then spit out an ending that is most commonly found on the internet for that type of story. [not an expert here tho--this is just my best guess based on the bit of research i've done].

my point is--you won't be getting a new ending inspired directly by the story u put in. you'll be getting a paraphrased version of the most commonly recurring type of ending for similar stories on the web. and i just....don't see how that would be satisfying in any way. it seems, again, like a way in which someone would be approaching fic like a product, something that needs to be finished + complete bc ur entitled to it, rather than viewing fic as a piece of art with its own unique themes, message, and story that can't just be plugged into a one-size-fits-most ending generator. and like, i'm trying to avoid mysticizing writing as some sort of ethereal art form that would be blasphemously degraded by having someone plug in a shitty ending paraphrased from a conglomeration of various similar stories--i don't think someone creating a shitty ending for a story is like. a horrible evil thing. but i can understand where the satisfaction is coming from if you're writing your own shitty ending, where you get to come up with where u think the story would go + where u get to synthesize the themes u picked up on etc. but ai isn't even doing that--so again, i don't understand where the satisfaction is coming from aside from just going "well every story i read needs to be finished," which. makes me wary bc it just feels like a completely different way to approach stories and storytelling than i would hope to find in fanfic spaces, one that treats fic less as a creative place to explore and more as a transactional space where u are entitled to products.

anyway. feel like my thoughts + feelings abt ai keep changing the more i learn abt it + i'm sure they could change again, but rn my impression of this whole situation is like. i find the fact that some people are plugging fics into LLMs less concerning re: ip + ownership rights, and i don't think it's useful to exaggerate or mythologize abt what ai actually does (i think even calling it ai has kind of misled a lot of people, myself included). what concerns me more is that plugging fics into LLMs to write endings feels symptomatic of a broader culture in which people treat fanfic as an informal profit economy in which fics are product or content that a consumer-audience is entitled to, and i think that sort of approach leads to a whole plethora of other issues + makes fandom a more hostile space.

[lastseance]

i really am gonna need all trans people to learn about gendered socialization as a sociology concept, then make actual effort into unlearning those social roles we were taught SINCE BIRTH because lots of us dont actually do that. we just transition to try and match those gender roles that especially subjugate women. its why we have such issues with transphobia and misogyny in our communities. unlearning gender socialization, realizing there's more ways to be a man or a woman and your gender doesnt mean you naturally prefer to be dominant or submissive or whatever, is what ever trans person should do when we come out. i get that it can cause dysphoria but the socialization we're put through actively harms afab people so we have to work on it instead of ignoring it.