#open precedents

[slavhew]

look at this idiot not aware that his body is warm and his touch comforting everyone point and laugh

[wolfythewitch]

What is religions place in moral and ethics arguments in your opinion? I saw one of your posts and i was curious :))

It was smth about how you can't really be reliant on religion as a defense on its own because you'll never really be able to properly hold a discussion. Any argument wherein one party's only defense is "god says it's wrong" or "the bible says it's wrong" is a copout and already kind of doomed to fail from the start. And how it's also frustrating to go up against someone who uses that as their only counterargument (i.e. my dad) because there's really no way to argue against it without offending them. It can't be the end all be all argument because God is only real to the people who believe in him, and this stance will ultimately be worthless on people with any differing belief. I spent an Hour talking with my dad about capital punishment and it was because his only reason for why the death penalty is morally okay is because the government authorized it and God says that we should respect the authority.

You can't really use God in a moral argument until you can definitively prove to the opposing party that God exists and is fully omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. You will not be able to tell an atheist woman that abortion is bad because God says so, that would not work and would only antagonize her further. Something something what is god to a nonbeliever. Religion isn't like fully exempt from arguments or whatever, it has its own place in them, especially with how influential it is in every culture, but if man is born with free will then let him think without the constraints of a theoretical god's law

[maxedry-art]

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The whole discourse about the privacy/secrecy/support thing has been sitting with me for a few days (I mean other than it always does to a certain degree) thanks to all the excellent discussion happening and I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but I think what we're seeing and what we're going to learn (e.g. from TTPD) is that it wasn't just the support issue, but how it was shown/handled.

We've all gone out of our way to show that introversion =/= lack of support. Someone can be shy, reserved, etc. and still show up for their partner, whether in public or at home. To chalk any of the differences up to the clash between introversion and extroversion is unfair to folks who count themselves among either tbh.

@thisisctrying said something the other day that hit the nail on the head about how if that support had been offered in private, there very well may not have been a Joever to begin with, or at least not at this point in time. (Sorry for loosely paraphrasing, and for namedropping you! Long time listener, first time poster.)

If this were a case where the "shy" partner said, "I am really uncomfortable with the spotlight personally and do not want to court it, but I will support you in your ambitions and offer you whatever you need to make them happen and make the glare bearable," I suspect that would have gone a long way to making Taylor feel seen and comfortable in pursuing her goals in the way that she now has. Again, that might have been more akin to the balance that seemed to have been struck around 2019 from what we can see, but even speaking in a general sense, there are lots of couples out there, celebrity or not, that have similar approaches where there are highly driven people and busy careers involved.

(A famous example being Dolly Parton's marriage. Tbh I know next to nothing about her and Carl, but she's always heralded as an example in this regard, because her husband is famously uncomfortable with the spotlight and hasn't accompanied her to public events in decades, but she's said that she never minded that because that was always work to her, and what was important was that he supported her in pursuing all her career goals and basically ensured she had a place to call home to return to at the end of the day.)

We're kind of in a brave new world with her current relationship because it felt like, at least at the start, we were maybe watching her figure out her boundaries in real time as to what she was comfortable with or not and adjust accordingly. Like so many have said, I fully believe the extreme privacy thing was initially driven by herself and her experiences in 2016, and she needed that quiet time to recover from all of the things and figure out how to exist in the world again.

Stating the obvious, it seemed like eventually privacy was equated with secrecy, turning the relationship and the celebrity into the elephant in the room and something to never be spoken of to the outside world. People are free to choose whatever works best for themselves and their relationships, and for some the separate public lives might work, but the “kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath” theme is all over her work and it’s clear that it’s a sore spot for her, because she’s been made to feel shame just for the life she leads so many times in the past.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s pretty obvious something Not Great was happening behind the scenes, which didn’t just amount to “she wanted to be a public celebrity and he wanted to be a private hermit.” (Also, in case anyone forgot, this is a person who also chose a public-facing career who also has to engage in press for it, but I digress.) As her career reached new heights post-folklore, if she had the support at home to do all the things without judgment and with encouragement, and in turn offer the same support to her partner, she may have very well lived just fine with that, not unlike Dolly Parton’s case.

By reading between the lines in all the press since, as well as comments on tour and general ~vibes~ with TTPD teasers, it seems like one of the issues was that that was likely not the case. There was all the stuff that we saw — the reticence to acknowledge each other in the media (particularly on one side), the lack of public support even at events at which they were both in attendance for their respective jobs, the great lengths they went to not to be photographed together at events they attended yet no problem taking pictures with other friends and coworkers, the jobs that separated them, the withdrawing from the public even for work accomplishments, etc. Which could all be manageable if a couple chooses to do so together and are not inherently a sign of trouble in themselves.

But what we’re seeing now I think is a reflection of the things we weren’t seeing then, and it seems to indicate some very deep hurt. (I know, call me Captain Obvious.) And like so many have been saying, it feels likely that that part of that hurt is rooted in that very lack of private support where a person would expect it from their partner. Obviously as a Taylor fan blog I’m going to be more inclined to understand her side of a story, but tbh, it’s also because… this is sooooooo common, and something I’ve experienced in my friend group. (@taylortruther is right when she says most breakups are the same one way or another lol.)

One partner is resentful of the other’s success, or resentful that the other’s priorities begin to evolve as new experiences unlock new goals, or feels the other’s ambitions are not worthy of pursuit, and coupled with perhaps their own struggles in the same domain, it’s easy to see where that can chip away at the other partner’s morale and faith in the relationship. I know I’m just speculating here, but I also don’t think it’s totally unfounded. (Again, because a) I’m picking up what she’s putting down and b) it happens to sooooooo many women even among us dull normals.)

With all the pointed mentions about how much Taylor feels supported in her current relationship and how she in turn loves to offer the same show of support to not only her partner but other loved ones, how she’s stepped out more in the last year to a whole host of events, how she’s mentioned feeling like she locked herself away for years and she’s just proud of her partner and happy she can show up for him even if the chaos around it is unsettling, it paints a picture of what perhaps was happening before last year.

To feel like you’re all alone in carrying the weight of the relationship (or burden of it), of twisting yourself into knots to accommodate the other person’s boundaries (or insecurities) but not feeling reciprocity for your own has to be so painful. (The idea that it may have been even darker and to have a partner not only be unreceptive to your own needs but even perhaps resentful/dismissive/belittling of them is even more painful to think of. I guess we’ll find out when TTPD comes out if that was the case, too.)

At a certain point, that lack of acknowledgement will force your hand to be able to reclaim yourself. And it feels like the further removed Taylor in particular is from it, the more she moves from being sad about the life she felt she gave up by leaving, to angry at the life she felt she was giving up by staying. Especially being in a relationship now where it seems like everything comes much easier, where she can be open about the person she’s with and show up for them, all the stuff that seemed as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in her past is nothing more than a molehill at best in her current life.

TL;DR: I don’t think it’s privacy that inherently spells doom for a celebrity relationship like this; it’s the mutual support and respect that does. If Taylor had felt that in the later years of her previous relationship, I think we could be seeing a different, though not necessarily unfulfilled, person right now in 2024, who’d be happy on tour but whose personal life would look a little different. But it seems like by losing that support she lost parts of herself, and we’ve seen her reclaim that in spades in the last year, and perhaps to degrees she didn’t even realize she could from before all the Bad Stuff started happening in her young adulthood.

I know this was extremely long-winded and unnecessary, especially about total strangers we only know through scraps fed through the media, but I just always bristle at this idea that issues like these boil down to “personality differences,” as though one person wants to live in a city and the other on a remote island, or some shit like that. The whole support (and gender tbh) issue is one that’s just very close to my heart because again, I have seen it play out with so many of my friends in long term relationships and marriages and I just think people in relationships (and women in particular in some circles) deserve better than to feel like they’re being, well, tolerated.

[shadystranger]

spn was like I know a spot and it's samdean metaphorical rape with dean being onlooker/facilitator/savior

[revivisection]

strategically cropped wet vampire sex thumbsupemoji @barbwritesstuff

perhaps it's bold to tag you but if other people have drawn the shower scene then i can too

[bi-writes]

ok i've done some light research. if you want a software engineer/fic writer's inital take on lore.fm, i'll keep it short and sweet.

my general understanding of lore.fm functionality:

they use OpenAI's public API. they take in the text from the URL provided and use it to spit out your AI-read fic. their API uses HTTP requests, meaning a connection is made to an OpenAI server over HTTP to do as lore.fm asks and then give back the audio. my concern is that i wasn't able to find out what exactly that means. does OpenAI just parse the data and spit out a response? is that data then stored somewhere to better their model (probably yes)? does OpenAI do anything to ensure that the data is being used the way it was intended (we know this probably isn't true because lore.fm exists)?

lore.fm stores the generated audio (i am almost certain of this because of the features described in this reddit post). meaning that someone's fic is sitting in a lore.fm database. what are they doing with that data? what can they do with it? how is it being stored? what is being stored, the text and the audio, or just the audio?

i find transparency a very difficult thing to ask for in tech. people are concerned with technological trade secrets and stifling innovation (hilarious when i think about lore.fm, because it doesn't take a genius to feed text into AI and display the response somewhere, sorry to say). and while i find the idea of AI being used to help further accessibility on apps that don't yet provide it promising, i find the method that lore.fm (and OpenAI) chooses to do this to be dangerous and pave a path for a harmful integration of AI (and also fanfiction in general -- we write to interact, and lore.fm removes that aspect of it entirely).

we already know that AI companies have been paying to scrape data from different sources for the purposes of bettering their models, and we already know that they've only started asking for permission to do this because users found out (and not from the goodness of their hearts, because more data means better models, and asking for permission adds overhead). but this way of using it allows AI to backdoor-scrape data that the original sources of the data didn't give consent to. maybe the author declined to have their fic scraped by AI on the site they posted it onto (if the site asked at all), but they didn't know a third-party app like lore.fm would feed it into an AI model anyways.

what's the point of writing fics if i have no control over my own content?

[cuddlytogas]

found an acoustic version of white knuckles by ok go a few nights ago and i think it's slowly driving me insane <3

[lokh]

LISTEN listen shuro wants to be more genuine and open and needs to learn to not be a pushover. literally Who better to practice with than laios like Literally

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

hotd never fails to disappoint

[paverics]

i can’t believe it’s 2023 and the “only gay actors should play gay roles” argument is not only alive and kicking on twitter, but thriving. need you guys to shut the fuck up and log off so bad 😭

[lenievi]

re: this post and Kirk and Pike and their drinking habits

Kirk doesn’t seem to drink alone. At least we never see him drink alone as a captain. Aboard the ship, it’s always McCoy who brings him or pours him a drink in order to make Kirk relax. He often brings the alcohol as a comfort, as a way to make him talk. It’s almost a ritual that is always initiated by McCoy for Kirk’s own sake. McCoy does it as a friend, but he also does it from his position as Kirk’s doctor.

“Sometimes a man’ll tell his bartender things he’ll never tell his doctor.”

Pike doesn’t have anyone like that. Pike presents himself as everyone’s friend, and he makes sure it’s him who’s there for everyone, and that reflects even on the times when he’s in his own quarters talking to Una or Spock and it’s him who’s being “comforted”. At those times, it’s still Pike who plays a host and offers them a drink. For his own sake because they won’t do it for him. He pretends they’re his bartenders since that role doesn’t belong to anyone, and he needs to pour himself that drink.

Una is almost like Pike’s McCoy but not really. At times, Spock is almost like Pike’s McCoy but not really. He’s like twenty years younger than Pike and inexperienced, among other things. Neither of them have the option to question him and press him in the way that McCoy can with Kirk because neither of them can relieve him of his command. And M’Benga doesn’t seem to want that role.

Mister Spock, the man on top walks a lonely street. The chain of command is often a noose. is as real for Pike as it’s real for Kirk. Pike just has a more open personality and a way to captain the ship that make him seem less lonely on the outside.

[carcharadroid]

This is the last thing I'm probably gonna say on Palworld for a while but look

listen.

I'm just begging people to give this thread a look and stop being in denial.

Drawing inspiration from the same concept is one thing, but more-or-less tracing a model and barely tweaking it is a whole other kettle. I'm not going to bat for Nintendo here, because at the end of the day no matter what happens I doubt Palworld will put a dent in Pokemon's profits.

I just want people to stop harping on the fucking sheep and sending death threats to the devs. Make your case but for fuck's sake make it well and don't threaten to kill someone over it. The fuck is wrong with y'all??

[mewkwota]

The Tale of the “Poltergeist King”

There’s this very strange character that is mentioned in CV3′s ENG manual called the Poltergeist King, and he has no relevance to the plot of the game, only acting as the “keeper” of sorts to the Belmont’s sub-weapons (it’s just a made-up explanation for why they appear in random places).

In fact, he’s depicted in Captain N (which is how I even knew about this character in the first place). And altogether with the depiction given to him in the show along with the manual, I decided to make my own connections, oh-ho-ha.

“But Mew, how did you even get to this conclusion??”

Well... in Captain N, the Poltergeist King could take the form of a whirlwind.

Also, here’s another thing. Trevor isn’t entirely sure of the details in this tale (maybe Leon was a crummy storyteller). I have it so the “Poltergeist King” is not actually one person, but the name given to the Getsu Clan member taking on the role, and so it is possible Leon had met a different Getsu on his journey.

[widowshill]

“He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;—I am sure he is—I feel akin to him—I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.” Jane Eyre, XVII.

18 / 139 / 91 / 78 / 2 / 12 / 75 / 80 / 75

[p5x-theories]

Huh, that's interesting- it sounds like the Hong Kong/Taiwan/Macau version of the game will be running another Summer Tomoko banner with Version 2.3.4 (coming in a week for those regions). As far as I can tell the mainland China version (the one that just got 2.3.4) doesn't have this banner, but the Hong Kong/Taiwan/Macau account ran a poll asking what character people would want to have a repeat banner for, and Summer Tomoko was the winner.