#i think it would be some version of fucked up organ donation in combination with 'mysterious science' stuff

[whatudottu]

You know, sitting here thinking about TFP humanformers I have rather found it difficult to come up with an idea for a human Predaking, seeing as how his entire schtick as a predacon lead him to being depersonified and marked as a beast before folks realised he could transform.

I mean, these are just humanformer ideas based on Predaking KEEPING his canonical treatment rather than making Predaking and changing the dynamics that way. It does involve some uh... dehumanisation under the cut to keep with the theme, so keep in mind if you DO read, but those parts are mainly in the 'struggling to come up with a concept that isn't racist' section.

The first ideas that I had for him would probably to make him into a super soldier, and sure it works but- if you attempt to 'discipline' a super soldier the way Starscream tried to do so with a predacon's beast mode, I think you'll be walking away with broken shins (aka not walking at all). Another idea was to bring a fucked up 'shockwave inspired' element that would lead to the amp 'beast' comparisons to be made, but the more 'beastman' version of this idea is VERY DELICATE to work with (read: comparing a human to an animal is VERY HISTORICALLY and still PRESENTLY a not great thing to do) but also doesn't quite FEEL that predacon to me; predacons are emphasised to be ANCIENT not that they are extant animals, so if Shockwave has done anything to beastify a human I think insecticons may be that unit of humans.

No, I think that for a human to be considered a beast without being racist about it would be to turn predacons from 'animals' to 'monsters', to Frankenstein's monsters. Though I thought of I think a vague Frankenstein comparison before, I will bring up that many others have also seen some modern Prometheus allegories between Shockwave and Predaking. I was mainly inspired by my [insert number here] rewatch of OSP's Frankenstein episode and especially the particular eye colour Adam was depicted with, but the basic idea of being a dead person brought back to life with the best pieces carefully selected by someone wholly dedicated to the craft of science (irrespective of Frankenstein's dropout status) plus how the monster is almost universally feared? Come on, this is the 'in' I needed if I wanted to keep the general fear of the unknown with Predaking and the Decepticon High Command.

And what better show to introduce a character that is this compilation of ancient human DNA and real corpse than a show that has previously introduced ZOMBIES and will later introduce VAMPIRES!?

If Shockwave shows up, after 3 seasons worth of knowing what a zombie is and that it's a real possible thing to happen - in addition to the fact your own fucking leader stuck a shard of 'zombie making' juice into his chest/bloodstream/whatever the humanformers version of Megan would do - with a creature visibly made up of the dead with eyes of something very non-human, would you welcome them with open arms? Adam Frankenstein certainly wasn't, not even from his own dad which Predaking can at least attest to actually having SOME sort of decent relationship with Shockwave.

In a way, it modifies the predacon fossil scavenger hunt to be 'global graverobbers' which in a humanformers setting might actually be 'go to this great battle and recover the bones of not only our but our enemies bones to provide a human base' which could EMPHASISE the monstrosity of Predaking's nature as a melting pot of old friends and foe mashed together into one fucked up super soldier. In a canon parallel this mixture of gene sequences and cadavers would still influence Knock Out and Starscream to think turning the corpse of C.Y.L.A.S. into their own super soldier would still be a good idea, having something else besides the dark 'energon' (if it is not still energon) fuck up the experiment and make a tech-modified human into some kinda fucked up vampire. Heck, with this old post of mine comparing the looks of the new predacons to the two big blue (dead) bots, this humanformers concept for Predaking can persist and continue to be used by Shockwave to create Skylynx and Darksteel, not made of battles long passed but of the freshest bodies the scientist would have access to.

But I guess canonically there has only ever been 2 zombie hordes throughout the entirety of TFP, if you consider the horde in Thirst to be very hungry vampire thralls instead (considering they were killed rather than revived, I'd place them under 'vampire'), so perhaps not a lot of bots can go 'this is terrifying' and not a lot of evidence that Shockwave can gather about why they are at this level of hesitancy; it's not a simple fear of the unknown, it's the type of fear from experience. But I have a trick up my sleeve!

BOOM, Altered Loyalties baby; human edition, of course.

This might deserve it's own post but essentially, a humanformers 'Shockwave's Monster' Predaking would have a lot more precedence for being a Unicron made monstrosity if the threat of Unicron damned creatures exist as a background constant. A threat to base verse to their position on Earth, a threat in humanformers because the dead outnumber them. All the while, Shockwave stands beside a being created from those very same dead that may or may not have risen from the corruption of WHATEVER it is within the Earth's core, only to announce this is a very new SUPER SOLDIER!? Zombies are one thing with their durability and their hordes, but this creature - this DEMON - stands there with advance agility, enhanced endurance, and superior strength!?

To later find that it - that HE - is not merely a walking corpse, but an intellectual, sends shivers even down Megatron's spine. Megatron, the head of one of the last remaining shreds of humanity, staring at the undead being not only made to be harder, better, faster, stronger than him, but capable of intelligence in much the same way as the poetic ex-gladiator.

He WILL NOT go extinct.

[xenon-demon]

I fucking love pretty much every version of the “celebrity x Just Some Guy™” trope that there is for Steddie, but in honor of having a totally reasonable amount of wine I’m going to tell you about the version I’m currently thinking about all the time, one of my dumbest yet also funniest AU concepts: modern!AU with streamers Steve & Robin and Hardcore Fan™ Eddie who writes reader-insert fic about Steve.

Steve and Robin, aka EvenStevens and BirdBox_ on Twitch (“My name is spelled with a P-H, Robin, that’s such a stupid name.” “No, it’s actually even better this way! You don’t want to just use your real government name for something like this, and you would just make your username ‘SteveHarrington01′ or something equally uninspired-”) frequently stream together and have a shared YouTube channel. They got popular doing reaction videos that quickly devolve into the pair of them bickering on camera, and since the internet just loves the ‘snarky woman and her emotional support himbo’ dynamic, they got very big, very quick. Plus, it certainly doesn’t hurt that they had the combined might of Dustin and Erica to help them bend the algorithm to their whims.

While most people recognize their platonic-with-a-capital-P soulmatism, there are still some that are convinced they’re secretly dating - they can’t decide if it’s hilarious or absolutely maddening that every time they try to disprove the rumors, they somehow get stronger. Robin doesn’t feel comfortable coming out to the internet yet, and without that trump card some people just can’t understand why they’re not dating.

...there are other sections of their fandom, however, that absolutely do believe they’re not dating. Mainly because they’d rather be dating Steve or Robin (or both!) themselves, and write all the reader-insert fanfiction you could ever possibly need about it. Robin is largely ambivalent to the concept of fanfiction being written about herself as long as they’re not writing smut, since at least that way they’re not insisting she’s dating Steve.

Steve on the other hand finds it absolutely hilarious how despite how much he’s changed, he’s back to being the heartthrob he used to be in high school - and, he’ll be honest, he thrives on the attention. He’s given everyone the green light to write whatever they want - dared them to make it raunchier, even - to the point where it’s a running joke that Steve will read your reader-insert fanfiction about him unless you tag it with some form of ‘Steve don’t look’. He even used the prevalence of fic about himself to come out on stream.

(Steve’s in the middle of re-organizing his flower field in Animal Crossing when he’s interrupted by a donation. “Hey Steve, really sorry to tell you this but people are writing porn about you... and they’re making it gay. Like writing about you getting fucked by a dude. Just wanted you to know so you can say something about it.”

Steve stops dead, his screen freezing on his open inventory. “Hey, uh, why the fuck would I have a problem about a fictional version of me bottoming? Or- wait, do I seriously give off homophobic vibes? I’m literally bisexual. Hey Dustin, can you ban that guy please? Christ, the nerve of some people. If that’s how you feel about people being gay, or about people writing things that I’ve already said I have no problem with, you can leave this stream right now because I don’t want you here.“)

Many people lost their minds after that stream, one of them being popular tumblr blog whorefireclub.

Eddie didn’t plan on starting a tumblr blog for self-insert fanfiction about a twitch streamer. Really he didn’t, and every time he thinks about it in terms that plain he kind of dies a little on the inside. It’s really all Gareth’s fault, for getting fed up with Eddie’s dumb parasocial crush on a streamer and daring him to just “get it out of his system already”. So, using a bare-bones anonymous tumblr and many, many beers as his cover story, Eddie posted some of the most quickly written and unedited pieces of writing he’s ever produced in his life.

Except he wrote it with an AMAB reader character - and for those of you unfamiliar with the reader-insert sphere, that’s like fucking hen’s teeth. People are pretty good at making things gender neutral at least in their descriptions, and sometimes the anatomy is vague enough that it’s ambiguous, but the majority is written with AFAB genitalia for the reader character.

Eddie’s little drunken post blows up, and at first, he’s never regretted a life choice more.

After thinking about it, and seeing just how many people left comments with their reblogs or came into his askbox directly to thank him for giving them the representation they wanted, he starts to feel a bit better about the whole thing. In fact, it kind of tickles his “protector of the outcasts” instincts; there are people who can’t enjoy the content they want to because it doesn’t gel with their anatomy or gender identity. Eddie could, hypothetically, if he wanted to be absolutely insane about this one hot streamer guy, help fix that problem somewhat.

A couple of months later and he’s become “the guy who writes inclusive reader-insert fic”. While a fair amount of his work is gender-ambiguous, both in anatomy and in avoiding gendered language, more than half is written for anyone who finds themselves underrepresented in the usual reader-insert scene; anyone AMAB, AFAB people who can’t do female language, he’s even written a few oneshots with intersex reader characters. He did research for it and everything. It’s certainly not how he planned for this to work out, but it’s actually kind of... nice. He’d written a lot of fanfiction in his youth, mainly about Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, and while this isn’t how he’d imagined returning to the hobby it’s actually really fun. (It’s making his celebrity crush on Steve a million times worse, of course, but he’s in denial about that so it’s totally fine.)

He’s a little shit, so his blog header has - underneath his personal details - a PSA that reads “Steve, don’t look at this unless you have the balls to shout me out on stream ;)”. Eddie thinks he’s absolutely hilarious.

Right up until he wakes up to find his following has exploded overnight, and upon checking his DMs from his mutuals realizes that - oh shit - that bastard actually did it and talked about his blog on stream.

And Steve said he liked it. Steve likes the porn that Eddie wrote about him. Jesus H. Christ, Eddie is so unfathomably fucked.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

if this were to exist as a fic it would be told through social media posts/DMs. one of those fics that uses unconventional (i.e. non-prose) formatting, you know the ones. the concept actually came from the fact I fucking LOVE fics like that, I’m a slut for any of that House of Leaves-type shit. one time I read a fic that consisted of 8 short stories and each one had a HTML puzzle you had to solve to be able to read it, e.g. one you had to highlight because the text was in white, another you needed to hover your mouse over to make it scroll through the text - I can’t remember the rest but it was SO COOL.

(or, to put this another way, I read homestuck at a formative age and it forever changed how I feel about formatting stories.)

[marveltrumpshate]

MTH 2020 Pod Bid List

So what are pod bids? A pod bid is a group of people who want to combine efforts and bid as a collective for a specific auction! If you aren’t sure you can compete with other bidders on your own for an auction you’re interested in, they’re a great way to get involved without breaking the bank. Even chipping in $1 or $5 can make a difference; you never know if your $1 is the one to win the auction for the group! The more money, the better your chances—and the more money you raise for charity.

The only requirements for making a pod bid are the following:

Contact the creator first to see if they’re okay with your prompt idea before seeing if anyone is open to joining your pod bid.

One representative per group must be responsible for coordinating the bid and submitting all the donation receipts by our donation deadline: October 31 at 11:59 PM ET (what time is that for me?).

Here are the existing pod bids so far, in alphabetical order by creator. If you want to add your pod bid to the list, send us a DM or an ask on Tumblr, add it in the #pod-bids-chat channel on our Discord server (a great way to find more bidders to join your group), or email us at marveltrumpshate@gmail.com.

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Creator: artgroves

Auction: Art

Pod bid: Alby is willing to do Steve/Tony (they love 616 and Noir the most, but they're down for MCU too) and I have been yearning after their auction since 2018. I'm thinking of sending them a list of prompts to choose from, so if you have an idea that you'd love to have Alby potentially make, join my pod bid!

Organizer: nostalgicatsea

Organizer contact info: nostalgicatsea#5251 on Discord or nostalgicatsea on Tumblr/Twitter

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Creator: AuroraWest (and Nonexistenz)

Auction: Art & fic

Pod bid: FrostStrange something or other fun

Organizer: Nova

Organizer contact info: DM SpaceCrazyArtist#8523on Discord or NovaOfAvalonia on Twitter/Tumblr

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Creator: betheflame

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Celestial Navigation - The Vampire Remix! (Feat. Stevie as Vampire & TBD-Tony - But, Flame. Will be amazing!)

Organizer: JehBeeEh

Organizer contact info: Preferably on Discord (JehBeeEh#6047)

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Creator: betheflame

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Stuckony Check, Please AU

Organizer: RoseRose

Organizer contact info: Discord is best (TehRoseRose#0409)

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Creator: BladeoftheNebula

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Atlantis AU based on the pretty drawing from b. with Smol Steve with big round glasses

Organizer: Mairi

Organizer contact info: Mairi✨#9804 on Discord or KappaMairi on Twitter

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Creator: deathsweetqueen

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Defending Jacob AU (with racebent Tony)

Organizer: betheflame

Organizer contact info: betheflame#2044 on Discord

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Creator: dracusfyre

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: A Cyrano de Bergerac AU. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, it’s a story where character A asks character B to write love letters to character C, posing as A, which causes some angst as B also loves/is interested in C

Organizer: nostalgicatsea

Organizer contact info: nostalgicatsea#5251 on Discord or nostalgicatsea on Tumblr/Twitter

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Creator: Emerson

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Pride and Prejudice WinterIron Edition anyone?

Organizer: betheflame

Organizer contact info: letsallsleepoverwork#1930 on Discord

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Creator: Eriot

Auction: Rotoscope (moving art)

Pod bid: Steve/Tony fluff

Organizer: ishipallthings

Organizer contact info: Discord DM (ishipallthings#9888) or Twitter (@ ishipallthings)

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Creator: Eriot

Auction: Rotoscope (moving art)

Pod bid: WinterIron (ships war time!)

Organizer: Kimmycup

Organizer contact info: DM on Discord (kimmycup#8137) or Tumblr (kimmycup)

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Creator: FestiveFerret

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Ferret goes WI for MTH? I guess we'll see

Organizer: letsallsleepoverwork

Organizer contact info: Discord - DM letsallsleepoverwork#1930 or @ me in the MTH server

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Creator: FestiveFerret

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Stony Band AU based on this tumblr post: https://festiveferret.tumblr.com/post/185482555125/band-au-idea

Organizer: sabrecmc

Organizer contact info: Message on Discord (sabrecmc#2925) or Tumblr (sabrecmc)

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Creator: Firelightmystic, magicasen, or Mizzy

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: one of these prompts, all stevetony:

616: Tony finally confesses his love to steve. Too bad steve is a skrull.

616: steve finally confesses his love to iron man. Too bad he told the sentient armour.

multiverse 616/1872: commander steve rogers ends up in the small town of Timely, where a certain Tony Stark is mourning sheriff Rogers

multiverse: during the incursions, tony decides to visit different universes and talk to different versions of himself to try to find a solution. featuring brain in a jar Tony and commander rogers. (ults? noir? more universes?)

616: tony and steve die together on the courthouse steps. they also become unstuck in time together.

Organizer: oluka (lomku)

Organizer contact info: oluka#1392 on Discord

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Creator: Firelightmystic

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Dragon!Tony and Virgin Sacrifice Steve. Basically 70K of monster-fucking porn, but she swears there's like a plot or something, too.

Organizer: sabrecmc

Organizer contact info: Discord (sabrecmc#2925) or Tumblr (sabrecmc)

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Creator: GotTheSilver

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Steve/Tony AU where Steve is defrosted earlier + arranged marriage

Organizer: ishipallthings

Organizer contact info: Discord DM (ishipallthings#9888) or Twitter (@ ishipallthings)

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Creator: jellybeanforest

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Overcome, a Stony A/B/O Identity Porn fic (if anyone would like the summary, please feel free to DM me)

Organizer: Simi

Organizer contact info: Discord DMs are the best way to get a hold of me (Simi#6049)

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Creator: JenTheSweetie

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: In Jen's words: "cute bonding fluff with Tony alive post-Endgame, background Steve/Tony and probably early days of their relationship so Steve is just getting to know Morgan so he's awkward stepdad Steve but trying really hard."

Organizer: magicasen

Organizer contact info: Discord DM (magicasen#6819) or Twitter DM (magicasen)

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Creator: KandiSheek

Auction: Art

Pod bid: full-color comic strip of the stony doing kissy kissy - to quote ferret

Organizer: betheflame

Organizer contact info: betheflame#2044 on Discord

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Creator: Lauren/Ragingstillness

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: FrostIronStrange. Tony and Loki are already established, Stephen is aspec, they are in a poly relationship but Stephen lives at the sanctum and feels left out and insecure in their relationship. Happy ending.

Organizer: kimmycup

Organizer contact info: DM on Discord (kimmycup#8137) or Tumblr (kimmycup)

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Creator: magicasen

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: post Endgame steve/tony in the afterlife AU, getting together, addressing their issues and relationship in canon

Organizer: ishipallthings

Organizer contact info: DM me on Discord (ishipallthings#9888) or Twitter (@ ishipallthings)

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Creator: Mizzy

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: There's a serial killer on the loose, and Detectives/FBI agents (?) Steve Rogers and Tony Stark find themselves on the same case, chasing the same elusive individual. They're like oil and water, their methods and temperaments making for horrible first impressions and a tense work relationship. That is, until the killer sets his eyes on Tony. When the killer's terrifying letters transform from taunts to a deep, intimate obsession, Steve knows that time is running out to stop the psychopath from hurting the man he's fallen in love with and other innocent people. Brownie points if Tony is isolated and in serious danger at some point. More points if Mizzy goes into depth with the investigative part of the plot (think Zodiac). Long nights, coffee as sustenance, the works. Most likely will be set in the 1970s!

Organizer: nostalgicatsea

Organizer contact info: nostalgicatsea#5251 on Discord or nostalgicatsea on Tumblr/Twitter

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Creator: newtypeshadow

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Omega!Warlord!Tony - either as WI or Stuckony

Organizer: SaganaRojanaOlt

Organizer contact info: Sagana Rojana Olt#0856 on Discord

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Creator: queenerdloser

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Creator is willing to do Tony Stark/Phil Coulson. Right now we are open to any prompts. We could also collect prompts and send them a list.

Organizer: Ruquas

Organizer contact info: Ruquas#8838 on Discord

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Creator: RiotFalling

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Regency Au, WinterIron, Knight!James and young King!Tony

Organizer: SaganaRojanaOlt

Organizer contact info: Contact me on Discord (Sagana Rojana Olt#0856 ), by email (aishiteru999@gmail.com), or on Tumblr (saganarojanaolt)

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Creator: Ruquas

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Sugar daddy Tony surprised by how doting his sugar babies Steve and Bucky are

Organizer: RoseRose

Organizer contact info: TehRoseRose#0409 on Discord

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Creator: scaramouche

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Sequel to "A Furious Vexation" and "Splenditudinous Figment of Wonder"

Organizer: jellybeanforest

Organizer contact info: Discord DMs (jellybeanforest#5427)

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Creator: Serinah

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: Hunger Games AU, Stony

Organizer: Buckyaboveeverything

Organizer contact info: buckyaboveeverything#4387 on Discord

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Creator: Serinah

Auction: Fic

Pod bid:Clint/Tony/Natasha fic where Clintasha gets married and invites rich people they dont know in hopes of getting gifts and them not coming. Tony comes and things soon turn complicated.

Organizer: kimmycup

Organizer contact info: DM on Discord (kimmycup#8137) or Tumblr (kimmycup)

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Creator: The Casual Cheesecake

Auction: Art

Pod bid: Comic of one of Sineala's 616 fics

Organizer: sabrecmc

Organizer contact info: Message on Discord (sabrecmc#2925) or Tumblr (sabrecmc)

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Creator: weethreequarter

Auction: Fic

Pod bid: WinterIron modern Royalty AU

Organizer: betheflame

Organizer contact info: betheflame#2044 on Discord - we have a group chat going with more details

[somnilogical]

modular "ethics":

a wrong and two rights make a right

<<I've been known to cause outrage by suggesting that people who really care about something shouldn't have romantic relationships. Think what would happen if I dared to suggest that those people should also seriously consider getting castrated. That would be crazy! And who am I to suggest that basically everyone claiming to be doing good is faking it? Then people would feel bad about themselves. We can't have that!>>

https://squirrelinhell.blogspot.com/2018/02/men-have-women-are.html

previously i talked about an infohazard about altruism that seemed to fuck with grognor. it feels useful to pass by the dead and look at their lives and choices.

i dont think that castrating yourself is a good intervention for doing stuff you care about, like this is patchwork constraints for an unaligned optimizer. if you arent altruistically aligned from core values, castrating yourself wont make you more aligned.

the "altruists" having babies thing is actual insane and pasek is right about that. pretty much all of society will try and gaslight you about this the way sometimes people are gaslit about "i need to have sex with lots of attractive fems to keep up my moral so i can do super good stuff afterwards.". like if people want to do good for the world it will flow out as a continuous expression of value not some brent dill kind of deal that institutions like CFAR accepted until there was too much social pressure for them to maintain this facade.

the entire premise that morality is this modular thing and you can help set the utility function of an FAI while being a terrible person, is wrong. yet organizations like CFAR keep thinking it will work out for them:

<<We believe that Brent is fundamentally oriented towards helping people grow to be the best versions of themselves. In this way he is aligned with CFAR’s goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally.

  In particular, Brent is quite good at breaking out of standard social frames and making use of unconventional techniques and strategies. This includes things that have Chesterton’s fences attached, such as drug use, weird storytelling, etc. A lot of his aesthetic is dark, and this sometimes makes him come across as evil or machiavellian.

  Brent also embodies a rare kind of agency and sense of heroic responsibility. This has caused him to take the lead in certain events and be an important community hub and driver. The flip side of this is that because Brent is deeply insecure, he has to constantly fight urges to seize power and protect himself. It often takes costly signalling for him to trust that someone is an ally, and even then it’s shaky.

  Brent is a controversial figure, and disliked by many. This has led to him being attacked by many and held to a higher standard than most. In these ways his feelings of insecurity are justified. He also has had a hard life, including a traumatic childhood. Much of the reason people don’t like him comes from a kind of intuition or aesthetic feeling, rather than his actions per se.

  Brent’s attraction to women (in the opinion of the council) sometimes interferes with his good judgement. Brent knows that his judgement is sometimes flawed, and has often sought the help of others to check his actions. Whether or not this kind of social binding is successful is not obvious.>>

https://pastebin.com/fzwYfDNq

<<AnnaSalamon 2/6/09, 5:54 AM

Aleksei, I don’t know what you think about the current existential risks situation, but that situation changed me in the direction of your comment. I used to think that to have a good impact on the world, you had to be an intrinsically good person. I used to think that the day to day manner in which I treated the people around me, the details of my motives and self-knowledge, etc. just naturally served as an indicator for the positive impact I did or didn’t have on global goodness.

(It was a dumb thing to think, maintained by an elaborate network of rationalizations that I thought of as virtuous, much the way many people think of their political “beliefs”/clothes as virtuous. My beliefs were also maintained by not bothering to take an actually careful look either at global catastrophic risks or even at the details of e.g. global poverty. But my impression is that it’s fairly common to just suppose that our intuitive moral self-evaluations (or others’ evaluations of how good of people we are) map tolerably well onto actual good consequences.)

Anyhow: now, it looks to me as though most of those “good people”, living intrinsically worthwhile lives, aren’t contributing squat to global goodness compared to what they could contribute if they spent even a small fraction of their time/money on a serious attempt to shut up and multiply. The network of moral intuitions I grew up in is… not exactly worthless; it does help with intrinsically worthwhile lives, and, more to the point, with the details of how to actually build the kinds of reasonable human relationships that you need for parts of the “shut up and multiply”-motivated efforts to work… but, for most people, it’s basically not very connected to how much good they do or don’t do in the world. If you like, this is good news: for a ridiculously small sum of effort (e.g., a $500 donation to SIAI; the earning power of seven ten-thousandths of your life if you earn the US minimum wage), you can do more expected-good than perhaps 99.9% of Earth’s population. (You may be able to do still more expected-good by taking that time and thinking carefully about what most impacts global goodness and whether anyone’s doing it.)>>

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8

like opposing this isnt self-denying moral aestheticism or a signalling game of how good you can look (credibly signalling virtue is actually a good thing, i wish more people did it by for instance demonstrating how they win in a way that wouldnt work if they werent aligned. whose power seeded from their alignment.). its like... the alternative where people do things that it makes no sense for an altruist to do and then say that when they go to their day jobs they are super duper altruistic they swear; compartmentalizing in this way ...doesnt actually work.

people who want to obscure what altruism looks like will claim that this is moving around a social schelling point for who is to be ostracized. and that altruism as a characteristic of a brain isnt a cluster-in-reality that you can talk about. because it will be coopted by malicious actors as a laser to unjustly zap people with. these people are wrong.

both EA and CFAR are premised on some sort of CDT modular morality working. it is actually pretending to do CDT optimization because like with brent at each timestep they are pretending to think "how can we optimize utility moving forward?" (really i suspect they are just straight up mindcontrolled by brent, finding ways to serve their master because they used force and the people at CFAR were bad at decision theory) instead of seeking to be agents such that brent when brents plans to predate on people ran through them, he would model it as more trouble than it was worth and wouldnt do this in the first place.

CFAR and EA will do things like allowing someone to predate on women because they are "insightful" or creating a social reality where people with genetic biases who personally devote massive amounts of time and money to babies who happen to be genetically related to them and then in their day job act "altruistically". as long as it all adds up to net positive, its okay right?

but thats not how it works and structures built off of this are utterly insufficient to bring eutopia to sentient life. in just the same way that "scientists" who when they arent at their day jobs are theists are an utterly insufficient to bring eutopia to sentient life.

<<Maybe we can beat the proverb—be rational in our personal lives, not just our professional lives. We shouldn’t let a mere proverb stop us: “A witty saying proves nothing,” as Voltaire said. Maybe we can do better, if we study enough probability theory to know why the rules work, and enough experimental psychology to see how they apply in real-world cases—if we can learn to look at the water. An ambition like that lacks the comfortable modesty of being able to confess that, outside your specialty, you’re no better than anyone else. But if our theories of rationality don’t generalize to everyday life, we’re doing something wrong. It’s not a different universe inside and outside the laboratory.>>

--

to save the world it doesnt help to castrate yourself and make extra super sure not to have babies. people's values are already what they are, their choices have already been made. these sort of ad-hoc patches are what wrangling an unaligned agent looks like. and the output of an unaligned agent with a bunch of patches, isnt worth much. would you delegate important tasks to an unaligned AI that was patched up after each time it gave a bad output?

it does mean that if after they know about the world and what they can do, people still say that they specifically should have babies, i mark them as having a kind of damage and route around them.

someone not having babies doesnt automatically mark them as someone id pour optimization energy into expecting it to combine towards good ends. the metrics i use are cryptographically secure from being goodharted. so i can talk openly about traits i use to discern between people without worrying about people reading about this and using it to gum up my epistemics.

[biologyweeps]

Four Thieves Collective’s FAQ: No Really We Got No Idea What We’re Doing

Last, and perhaps most importantly: This is still in the beta stage. But we have begun the process.Time for part two! Today we’re looking at the words right out of the FTC’s mouth, in the form of their FAQ, found here. It neatly clears up any suspicion one might have about the article misrepresenting them. No, they really are that bad at medicine. 

Let’s go

Do you have doctors on any of the teams?

We do have medical professionals, with various degrees yes. But most of them are consulted for which medicines we most need to create synthesis programs for, so that we can direct our efforts where they are most needed. Again, we are not in the business of prescribing, or diagnosing, we merely offer a tool by which people can help themselves.

Now I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘are consulted for medicines are needed’ means ‘ask your local GP if the EpiPen shortage is as bad as reported’ because after everything described in my other post, I doubt that any actual licensed professional would participate in this.

Won’t people use the wrong things, and hurt themselves?

That is indeed a risk. However it already happens every day with both prescription, and OTC medications. We are convinced that access to medications will do more good than harm. Additionally, people are less likely to go to the trouble of making their own medications, just to take them recklessly.

Now here’s the issue. If you don’t homebrew your stuff, you know the exact dosage and contents of your pill. If you DO homebrew, you know neither, you’re just living on a prayer. The lack of verification for purity and yield is A PROBLEM.

Also if you think people won’t use their hone made stuff recklessly you’ve never met someone with their own stil.

Won’t people use this technology to produce narcotics?

It’s unlikely. This tool is capable of small-scale production only, and does not scale up. It’s not something a “drug lab” would get much use out of. Additionally, the requisite ingredients for production of narcotics are tightly controlled, so even if they were to use our technology, it wouldn’t really help.

My dude in the other article you’re cited saying that the direct precursor to your Naloxone is oxymorphone. That’s a narcotic. Pray tell what does stop someone from just not proceeding to make Naloxone and just. Selling the powerful narcotic they got. You even said that you make it from oxycontin soured from the street. Like. Dude.

What about poisons? Again, unlikely. Most poisons are not synthesized, instead they are extracted from plant sources, so this technology is not helpful in that regard either.

That is fundamentally WRONG. There are plenty poisons that you can brew up easily in a lab. Chloroform? Chloramin? You can make those by accident when you mix the rong cleaning products. The idea that you can’t make poisons in a lab is so far from the truth that it left the milky way. The only thing this shows is that FTC has NO idea about the actual risks they’re playing with.

Doesn’t giving people free reign on medication endanger the public health, like the overprescription of antibiotics creating antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria?

This also is unlikely. If someone is sufficiently ill that they take the pains to build an Apothecary MicroLab, and synthesize a drug which would give them relief, it’s unlikely that they would then fail to be vigilant about completing their course of medication.

HAVE YOU MET PEOPLE. They absolutely would. Also considering the planned ‘BioTorrent’ project yes, yes they absolutely would brew antibiotic resistant strains like nobody’s business because shipping bacteria in the mail on fucking CD-petridishes, for home use, is how you grow new and terrible strains of things.

What about quality control?

It’s important to know that making small quantities of a chemical is vastly different than making it on an industrial scale. The chemistry isn’t even the same. This is a big reason why chemical engineering is an entire field of study. With smaller reactions, while you do have to be more precise in your measurements sometimes, there are fewer things to go wrong.

THIS IS ALSO WRONG. Why yes there’s a difference between small batch and arge batch production, that doesn’t mean that small batches have less sources of failures. In fact if you’re making small batches, precision can be even more crucial and somehow i doubt that must people have a miligram scale at home.

Actually that does remind me, are they using imperial or metric for this fuckery?? 

But small reactions can go wrong, and easily so. Owlet anecdote time. When I had my orgchem lab practical, one of the steps in a reaction involved add tiny specs of ice to a bottle of AlCl3, Aluminiumchloride. If you do it too fast, you get HCl. The moment you inhale that, it turns to hydrochlorid acid in your lungs.

So guess who added a slightly too large chip of ice, and despite running fume hood took a good deep lungful of HCl? Yeah it’s this very owlet. And this reaction had TWO fucking components, at room temp. You can’t get much simpler than that and it still went to a point where the absence of a fume hood could have fucking hurt me. Which actually reminds me, yeah you can EASILY made hydrochloric acid in a lab, too. 

Simple does not mean harmless. At all.

But how do you know if what you made is actually what you were trying to make? What about purity?

The protocols we are developing front-load the points of attention. Instead of making a mess in the lab and then using sophisticated filtration and analysis techniques at the end, we set things up so that being very careful measuring and performing the reaction will give us a product within narrow band of purity and yield.

My dude, you’re talking about complete laymen doing this. ‘carefully measuring and performing the reaction’ my entire ass. Laymen won’t know if one degree Celsius or half a gram of substrate variation will actually impact the reaction or not. Or running it 5 minutes longer. They just don’t and it’s not their fault that they don’t but you cannot pretend that this is in any way safe.

Are you all just a bunch of these self-aggrandizing egomaniacs who claim to have a panacea from combining a few established ideas?

No. This will not save the world; in fact it won’t even wipe out the problems it is targeting. It may make them a little better, however.

If you want to help people, ACTUALLY help people, support the organisations who already fight tooth and nail to keep healthcare accessible. That means donating to places like Planned Parenthood, or doing the political lobbying (also on a local scale) to keep things accessible. 

Organic Chemistry synthesis is not trivial. Oftentimes it requires many many steps each of which are hard to make happen, and you have to deal with yield and purity at every step. Merely having an automated reaction chamber does not by any means guarantee that you will be able to manufacture a molecule merely by downloading a file and pressing a button. However it may bridge a gap, and make it possible for people with less experience able to perform some of these reactions.

Please do me a favour and compare this to all the bullshit said before. We’re not talking about people with ‘less’ experience. The intended user base is people with NO experience.

Last, and perhaps most importantly: This is still in the beta stage. But we have begun the process.

Here’s my hot take of the day: DON’T FUCKING USE REAL LIFE PEOPLE AS TEST SUBJECT FOR YOUR MEDICATION PRODUCTION PROCESS.

This is a slightly more covert version of the ‘cut people’s heroin with an untested med without telling them’. You’re gambling with actual real lives here.

And don’t fucking call it a beta stage, this isn’t a video game ffs. 

[lightsandlostbells]

Skam France 2.5 reaction

I got really heated about that auction, apologies

Episode 5

Clip 1 - Giving away Manon’s clothes

Ohhh my God. Even though this is one of the crappier things Eskild/Mickael does in the series, he is hilarious here. This actor is killing it. 

“What did you say?” “That you look great sweetie.” A+ timing and delivery.

He’s even more dickish and terrible than Eskild was in this situation, but not gonna lie, I’m enjoying every second of his screen time

So Manon is organizing the collection herself? I feel like that provides a somewhat different context. Noora was very much motivated by Eskild’s words to her to start caring about refugees, not that she didn’t care about them at all but she felt guilty about not doing enough. Noora also had some ignorant spots, she thought Lito must be a Syrian refugee when he’s the son of a Turkish ambassador. Of course Eskild was in the wrong in the way he went about taking her clothes, especially since it was motivated by getting laid, but Noora had her own hypocrisy. Manon seems quite genuine about helping the migrants.

Clip 2 - Fuckweasel auction imminent

 It would be nice if we had heard about Manon’s involvement with the clothes drive earlier, but that’s good of her and that’s a very different take because I think Noora wasn’t as proactive.

The amount of sympathy I have for a bunch of spoiled dudes trashing a hotel room and having to pay for it … zero.

Wait, so not only are they having a fundraiser to cover for their destruction, they’ve put it on the same night as an already scheduled event for migrants? Man, fuck them. How did they manage to be worse than the original?

I mean depending on the school, it’s common for multiple events to happen at that same time, that’s not unusual. But lol, some dudes holding a fundraiser to cover for their terrible behavior at the same time other people have arranged a fundraiser for people in genuine need … not a good look.

The Norwegian version of this scene was way more personal, which makes sense since it was a bedroom scene and it was less hurried.

Clip 3 - Manon is mad

I don’t have much to say about this scene except Manon is completely justified in being pissed. The guy who professes to have feelings for her and wants a relationship with her scheduled a fundraiser to cover his and his friends’ property damage on the same night she is working an event for people in need. Like I guess he could just not know about the other fundraiser, but he’s doing something that’s going to actively take away from her charity event. 

The saving grace is that Charles doesn’t try to justify this and he looks somewhat humbled/upset by her telling him off.

Clip 4 - Daphne please get a grip

“We were talking about what happened with Charles and his crew and it’s really horrible what happened” yeah it’s really horrible that some teenage assholes destroyed a hotel room. Daphne is talking about it like a rival team paid to have their kneecaps broken and now they can’t play basketball anymore.

Call me humorless but Manon is completely right and even more justified in being angry than Noora was, like Vilde was suggesting they give up some of their bus money - unfair and it was their own earned funds, but at least it was going to something that’s fun/frivolous, not a necessity. Why the fuck would you give time you meant for a charity event to some shitheads who wrecked property?!?!?!

I mean it’s not even like “their bus broke down and they can’t get to games and they’re having a fundraiser to buy a new one” or “there was a fire in the gym and now they can’t practice so they’re raising money to rent a new space.” Buying new uniforms or equipment for their team or something. They CAUSED their own problem.

“Since it’s so important to you I’ll give 10% of the night’s benefits to migrants.”

Hey, you know what would be a really impressive thing for Charles to do? Call off the fundraiser to cover the asses of his crew and direct everyone’s attention to the clothing distribution event for migrants. That would be a humble, selfless action where he actually makes a sacrifice.

Does that sound too extreme? Am I being too hard on him? Maybe, but why is Charles/William consistently doing the minimum decent thing, often for self-serving reasons, and yet we’re supposed to buy into his character development and think he’s a great guy?  

What if Charles got his guys to give everything to the migrants regardless of whether Manon attended? What if Charles went to help Manon out instead of going to his own fundraiser? Doesn’t that seem like an obvious storytelling decision in terms of showing us he’s a good guy? Wouldn’t that be something Manon could respect and we could see why she starts to like him as a person and had to reconsider her opinion of him?

This is just such a deeply strange storyline to me! Charles and his friends act like assholes. They try to raise money to recoup the losses from when they were assholes inconveniencing other people. There is another event for a much better cause, for people genuinely in need. Charles offers a smallish percentage of the profits from his fundraiser to the people in need, but only if the girl he likes comes to the event. How … in the world … why am I supposed to like this character?

This is annoying me even more than the original, maybe because the Penetrators were not directly competing against a charity event. 

Imane has a nice line about showing solidarity to human beings, not a religion (because not all the migrants are Muslim).

Clip 5 - Help the spoiled brats and some other people, IDK

Wow they really underplayed this Emma/Yann storyline. I’m not sure they built up to Emma’s drunken meltdown enough.

Daphne is so embarrassing about Charles, please put this one-sided relationship out of its misery.

Soooo is Lucas already flirting with guys, kind of?  At least they got in a nice shocked moment for Lucas when Emma says he likes boys.

Drunk Emma interrupts Alex talking to a guy … poor form, Emma, poor form.

I did laugh at how Daphne being like “I’ve known you for a while and we have this special relationship” meant boy Alex started to close in. Yeah, that’s more or less what I expect of him.

Emma telling boy Alex “I like you, you’re my friend, but Daphne, I love you so much” - when will one of these goddamn adaptations take this further than some drunken makeouts?? When?? I don’t even ship them as much as the Noora/Eva combination but this is ridiculous.

This is a not as bad as a situation than the date, because she had less pressure to come to this party than to go on the date for Daphne’s sake, but like … he did tell her he’d only donate the money if she came. Why does he act like it was a given that he would donate the money.

Daphne looks less into kissing Emma than Vilde did kissing Eva. Vilde was having the time of her life, Daphne’s like ... tolerating it. Or maybe I can’t tell because the lighting isn’t as bright.

They did the same tune-out music effect when Manon tells Charles she doesn’t like him as in the original.

Kinda think we should have seen Manon reconsider more before running after him since it’s a big turning point for her character.

I wasn’t totally impressed with her last season, but Manon’s actress has been doing much better. She did a good job in the last scene.

“The only thing that interests you is getting what you want.” I mean, yeah, that’s true.

I saw some people didn’t like this scene compared to the original, but I think their first kiss was pretty good, I liked it just as much. Lots of passion, very cinematic. Since I’m not a big Noorhelm fan their first kiss isn’t sacred to me or anything, but I also think it’s because of Coldplay being the song selection. (I don’t hate Coldplay, tbh, but my dad has very very limited taste in music and for a long time literally the only thing he would listen to was Coldplay. For months, he would listen to Viva la Vida in the car. Just that song. On repeat. Like the middle-aged man version of John Mulaney’s Salt and Pepper Diner bit. So I have, ehhh, complicated feelings about Coldplay, and “Paradise” is one of my least favorite songs from them.)

I was super afraid Emma would fall in the water as she puked but at least Daphne kept a hand on her even after she saw Manon and Charles kissing.

General Comments:

Sorry that 90% of this reaction was me being grumpy about the Raptors’ auction. That was the main focus of this episode, not a lot else to talk about. The next few episodes have more subplots and varied scenes to discuss.

I’m a Daphne fan but damn did I hit my limit with her Charles obsession in this episode, even more than with Vilde. 

I don’t speak French so if I misunderstood something or missed context, feel free to correct me.

If you got through all this cranky ranting, thank you for reading! ❤️ Here’s a video of a golden conure dancing to the Beach Boys.