#rebalrog

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

the guy who made 17776, John Bois, also makes... “normal” sports videos. Except they’re not that normal. He found a scoring error in a ridiculous basketball game that holds the record for the highest scoring basketball game ever and makes a whole video with a spookily well-composed soundtrack and thoughtful comparisons to greek and biblical myth all in the format of a parody of a DeVry university online lecture

[chantillyxlacey]

someday ppl will be able to mention the concept of queerplatonic relationships without some smug jackass crawling out of the woodwork to chortle condescendingly about how they’re too dumb to know what friendship is

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

this is what the singularity looks like

I found this camera on the subway and look what was inside...

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

finally we know: that one's Pink

look at this cool borzoi hanging out with some white dudes

[chantillyxlacey]

.

[chantillyxlacey]

ppl keep complaining about st3v3n un1verse being morally imperfect as if he isn’t a 14 year old child with a complicated relationship w a parent who died before he ever knew her

when we didn’t know anything about rose everyone was cool w her and w steven idolizing her, then when we learned she was a just person with flaws everyone was convinced she was actually the show’s Big Bad, then now that the pedestal stevo had her on is broken and he doesn’t know how he feels about her actually she’s basically pink jesus after all and he’s stupid and selfish for feeling like he has something to make amends for bc of her?

not to mention playing “who was the abuser” wrt lapis and jasper which 99% of the time ignores that the metaphor for an abusive relationship was just that-- a *metaphor*-- and that the literal situation there was about two people’s consciousnesses melting together while trapped in a giant green handtaur body at the bottom of the ocean

and don’t even get me started on the pearl discourse (tm)

idk what it is about this fandom but it seems to try and inject excessive nuance where it isn’t needed and where nuance IS needed suddenly everyone forgets what that even is

and i mean i’m an ugly discourse gremlin who is *all about* acknowledging and grappling with toxicity in our media but its too much even for me

my reflex is to keep coming to the defense of the fandom at large because i have been doing so and i hate being wrong but dammit, i was wrong. maybe it’s not quite a cesspool but i still don’t want to swim in it

[chantillyxlacey]

time to feel like i’m not a person just a bunch of symptoms haphazardly glued together

if you stripped away all the pathology there wouldn’t be enough left to make an actual personality out of lmao

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

a really concise, toy example of this phenomenon is google maps - contrast how hard the developers work to make the computer do people things, while abandoning people to do computer things.

google maps is continually updated with more and more features meant to influence/augment/replace creative and/or social thinking about your environment - the software will tell you where to get lunch, who’s a good hairstylist, what local events are interesting. these are people tasks, and the computer is butting in where it is not welcome. i should think about what i’m hungry for, i should ask my friends about their hairstylists, i should integrate into communities to learn when their events are. (some level of computer help is useful for these tasks, but not to the level that google maps pushes them.)

on the other hand, “i am driving to my hair appointment, then to a concert. i need to get gas at some point along the way. add the most convenient gas station to that route” is an incredibly boring, computer-oriented task. google maps is incapable of it. it would take a fair bit of processing power, but that’s the point, that’s why it’s a computer task. google maps developers do not prioritize tasks like this, because google doesn’t care about using computers to make users’ lives better. it cares about using computers to make money, and once they have a baseline usable piece of software that does one computer task competently enough to accrue users, they can make lots of money pitching terrible attempts to replace people tasks.

now magnify this toy example to global systems with more impact, and you do arrive at “electrical engineers are working on ML systems to churn out bad art instead of working on some sort of scalable mechatronic apparatus to scrap ships.” this is actually a particularly glaring issue with electrical engineering - it’s a miracle how many colleges are continuing to churn out EEs who still know practical engineering, given how many of them just end up taking these jobs making useless toys with piles of linear algebra. it’s an incredible waste of talent, but at least the talent still exists for when we decide as a society to reprioritize, we haven’t shut off the pipeline.

[Image description: A series of posts from Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social dated Dec 08, 2022, 04:33, reading:

It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day breaking down ships, a task that nobody is in a particular hurry to automate because those lives are considered cheap https://www.dw.com/en/shipbreaking-recycling-a-ship-is-always-dangerous/a-18155491 (Headline: 'Recycling a ship is always dangerous.' on Deutsche Welle) A world where computers write and make art while human beings break their backs cleaning up toxic messes is the exact opposite of the world I thought I was signing up for when I got into programming

/end image description]

[chantillyxlacey]

love me a nice originless depressive episode

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

my favorite fact about mourning doves is i'm still not 100% sure what they look like but i can always identify them because they make that ridiculous sound when taking off. with their wings! not their lungs!

also this is just birds i’m familiar with in my area, please tell me about your regional birds!

[chantillyxlacey]

why do so many posts about c4llout/4nti-sh1pping culture devolve into jabs about f1ctionk1n like

you’ve got a post that makes some valid or at least semi valid points and then it veers into making fun of a completely harmless coping mechanism?? if you wanna make fun of mentally ill teenagers that bad just do it on a separate post

[chantillyxlacey]

i dont want to kms right now but i’m still more or less sure that’s where i’m going to end up eventually

jury’s out right now on whether it’s motivated by despair or sheer exhaustion

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

had literally never considered it being anything but seventeen seventy seventy six

sorry for constantly doing so many polls. but i need to know

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

kastortheunlockable replied to your post: ...

it is the monster that will arise if you dig deep, deep into the archives. A beast, of text and photos.

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

the fact that english curriculums just have students read the first few chapters of inferno sucks, the divine comedy gets better as you go. this illustration depicts the fact that lucifer was cast down onto the earth feet-first, and so they encounter his head at the center of earth at the bottom of hell frozen in ice, then they take a tunnel through clear to the other side of the planet and his feet are poking out. it’s called a comedy for a reason

leaving Hell (Inferno XXXIV)

Dante, Divina Commedia, Urbino and Ferrara 1477-1478

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.lat.365, fol. 95v

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

i like how his boyfriend looks short but that's just because russell is fucking 6'5"

They’re so fricken cute together.