#i...don't know how to tag this.

[fox-bright]

I am never going to be able to leave Reddit.

[luckyladylily]

So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

[sabertoothwalrus]

does science experiments on you (homoerotically)

[marshmellowtea]

i desperately need people to realize there's a difference between "women need to coddle (cis) men's feelings even when they're being misogynistic uwu" and "we shouldn't tolerate misogyny but actively keeping men separate from women and treating them like they're inherently dangerous to women is only going to worsen the problem (and also this mindset causes IMMEASURABLE harm to nonbinary, trans, and intersex people, who are already incredibly at risk right now)" and i need people to realize that NOW

[agendercryptidlev]

"Women only" and "Man free" spaces tend to have a lot of normalized abuse because they view abuse as based on identity and not as a pattern of behaviors that any person can exhibit

[xulips]

なにその目やっぱその目

[foone]

Your posts are in an AI model

and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.

Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.

but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.

Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?

They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.

It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.

I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.

They only ever pay for this shit because either:

they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying

They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.

ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...

but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"

Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. * I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant

[brainrotcharacters]

the easy grip on the knife. the leg over the seat. the hand over the other seat. the sassy "come get it" move. you know the bitch is smiling behind that mask even as he said the line.

[kaahmbem]

legend has it that the young witch circe and the once beautiful nymph scylla shared a complicated past...

[diminuel]

First meeting?

I didn't really know where to go with this, so you're getting this as a little "food for thought" comic.

Dragon is with 100% certainty finding some sort of loop hole to let his prisoner go (or he'll just be "careless" for a moment and oops! Prisoner's gone, probably with a number to call in the future if help is needed.)

Dragon does have brows but he shaves them, at this point mostly to piss off Garp.

(Bonus addition & next part)

[raticalshoez]

Was thinking of my post about dream teams and got really invested in whatever Unrequited Hate has going on

[thornedarrow]

proof of concept // i think i'm gonna love you for a long long time

[woozi]

WOOZI on SEVENTEEN winning Artist Of The Year in MAMA 2024

[twilightcitysky]

If S3 gets cancelled you know Michael and David will get dressed up, hair dyed, contacts and bow tie in place, and tell Georgia to grab the phone. Remember, they both know how it ends.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Am I the asshole for getting my best friend killed?

I swear to God, it was an accident.

My (27) BF (34) has a reputation for getting himself out of any jam you can imagine; and at first it was just a fun little thing the friend group noticed: there goes Oily J wiggling his way out of trouble again. but as the meme evolved in the group, it got to the point where we'd loykey started getting him into situations just to see how he'd get out of 'em, and he akept getting out of em. He was having fun with it too same as us. "Oh you guys," he'd say, "getting me into situations again," before laughing it off and getting out of it, so it was enrichment for our shared enclosures, and as time went on, the situations got more intense.

The trouble is, it turns out that putting a man in too many situations eventually gets the police interested. And not local hobsknockers cops either; they was like, proper three-letter FEDs. They put out a bounty on any information pertaining to his capture and everything. It was good money too so I thought, hey why don't I put J in another situation he can wiggle out of like always (and he'd wiggled outta worse before, so I thought this one'd be relatively mild), and at the next boardgame night (cause it was too late to do anything special for this one) we can buy some extra strong booze and get absolutely blitzed while having a giggle about the situation.

Boardgame night, and we were playing some social deduction nonsense or another and he says: "One of you is gonna betray me tonight." and I can't help but think, looking back on it, that he knew. It's stupid, I know he was talking about the game, but the way he said it, it was like he knew. We all felt it, and we had a big round robin round the table taking turns promising that we'd never betray him. And I said it so easily cause I thought it was true. Sure, I was gonna talk to the feds about a bounty; but, I fully expected my big beautiful oily boy to wiggle his way out of the trouble I was 'bout to cause, and that's not a betrayal. I wasn't lying. I didn't think I was lying.

My big beautiful oily boy didn't manage to wiggle his way out of it. They killed him and I got my blood money. He's gone.

He's gone and I'm devastated, crying, mourning. I loved him so much. We all did. And I can't stop thinking that it's my fault: that I'm the reason he's gone. and it is. and the guilt is eating me up inside. and I just need to talk to someone about it. So, I tell the rest of the group what happened in the group chat, hoping they'd understand that I didn't want this. I didn't want the government's blood money. It was supposed the be a prank. some joint enclosure enrichment. He was supposed to wiggle out of it like he always does... did, i mean.

They call me, among worse things, the asshole and kick me from the group chat. And, I know it's my fault he's dead: I know that. If I didn't do what I did, he wouldn't be dead right now. But, I didn't mean it for it to end up this way. He was supposed to be okay, damn it. I loved him. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[bacchuschucklefuck]

class swap design masterpost for convenience (from top to bottom: bard!riz, cleric!gorgug, sorcerer!kristen, barbarian!fig, artificer!adaine, and rogue!fabian)