#save us media literacy

[buried-l0cket]

KNIVES IS NOT AN ECOTERRORIST YALL PLEASE THE PLANTS ARE NAMED THAT IN A REFERENCE TO POWER PLANTS THEYRE NOT VEGETATION

Please talking about the plants and the moral issues surrounding them as eco terrorism is missing the entire point of Trigun they are living sentient beings on the same level with humans why are you saying Knives is trying to save the environment have you seen gunsmoke WHAT environment

[educatinggenocide]

In Sudan, It Is a War on Women

by Reem Abbas on WILPF

"Formally, estimates from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project put civilian deaths at over 10,400 people and this is a modest figure due to inaccessibility. Moreover, over 5 million have been displaced with the majority of them being women and children and over one million fled to neighbouring countries. UNICEF estimated that at least 435 children including girls have been killed in the war with scarce information on rising infant mortality as well as maternal mortality. "

Essay excerpts from, “War on Women in Sudan: Sharing Experiences of Displacement, Violence and Personal Struggles” from The African Middle Eastern Leadership Project

[zeb-z]

the average q!bbh viewer experience is watching him talk to something that can’t talk back in a monologue that is both poetic and poignant, nodding along as he talks himself in circles, until he finally arrives to a conclusion - and it’s something so off point of where you think he was going or what is correct that you want to break through your computer screen and strangle him

[anastacialy]

y'know, i keep making a habit of swinging my bat at hornets nests, but i have to say i'm getting so, so tired of people complaining about shows not making perfect sense when they aren't even close to done. we're four episodes into this season of doctor who. we're four episodes into this season of bridgerton. and yet in both fandoms i keep seeing people whine that such and such didn't make sense or it wasn't explained all the way and by god you guys i think maybe explanations might come later in the season. this is something most viewers will recognize as being called a 'plot.'

[akascow]

pls learn the difference between than and then 😭😭

[visceralhit]

I can’t believe tweetdeck would get shredded right before Elon wants people to pay for it. tweetdeck is the only good feature twitter has. If you can’t post and retweet between multiple accounts there’s no reason to use it? What else does twitter offer people who have to segment their presence across multiple accounts? 

Since I work on 18+ material but also like to, you know, have a personal life and friends who may not also like what I’m working on, it’s nigh impossible to use the damn thing now. There’s like, no point? AND THIS GUY WANTS PEOPLE TO PAY MONEY TO USE THE THING HE BROKE? 

Also, wow! happy disability pride month! right on the heels of the supreme court dismantling rights for lgbtq people in pride month, the website disabled people us to gather/share resources due to it’s wide accessibility is now extremely inaccessible. 

[asmodeusamaryllis]

G3nshin players never beating the not playing the game allegations

[poughkeepsies]

everyone saying buck wasn't actually trying to save gerrard...brother HE doesn't know what he was trying to do cause he was overstimulated YOU the VIEWER saw his eyes shift to the blade incoming the millisecond before he tackled gerrard let's use those media literacy skills

[olderthannetfic]

This is going to be an obvious question to anyone who's familiar with the language, but how does one type in Chinese? All the languages I've studied have had alphabetic writing systems, so to me foreign language typing is just assigning different letters on the keyboard and hitting them in order the same as English.

I imagine there's some way of entering the elements of each glyph with a command that tells it where to place it? I tried googling and just got a bunch of articles about how autocorrect can suggest Chinese characters when a user types the words in pinyin, but this sounds like a laborious and clunky system for someone who reads and writes Chinese fluently, and it wouldn't nessecarily exist on all devices.

--

(same anon wondering about typing Chinese characters) I also figure that if converting from pinyin was the primary or only way to get digital Chinese characters, then a lot more online spaces would just use pinyin in the first place and save everyone the trouble. The people writing multichapter fanfics or chatting away on social media in Chinese definitely have a fluent way to type their language that probably doesn't involve converting the entire text from an unrelated writing system, but these articles just aren't telling me what it is.

Ahahaha. Anon... phonetic entry is so much easier than other methods.

No, nobody enters characters while typing by picking radicals and where to place them. There are ways to look up an unfamiliar character that use radicals. There are also apps that let you try to draw something by hand, then attempt to figure out what you drew. But, again, that's for unfamiliar things, not typing up a story.

Computers were developed by English speakers and others with alphabets. Phonetic entry would probably be easiest anyway, but with the early infrastructure geared towards it, it's definitely easier.

There was an interesting phenomenon in Japanese (I'm not sure about Chinese) where The Youth™ were using fewer and fewer complex or less common kanji in... I want to say the 80s or 90s. The usual suspects moaned about the death of literacy...

Then cell phone/computer typing came along. If you knew the word, you didn't have to remember every single detail of how to write it. And people responded by using hella kanji all over the place, including lots of much rarer characters that a person would often recognize on sight but not remember perfectly enough to write by hand with confidence.

English spelling is tricky, but just learning 26 letters and then using them in a way that makes sense to a native speaker of [whatever] isn't. People are going to know pinyin. It's not a hardship to use it.

[neo--queen--serenity]

The Black Butler revival will, of course, in this day and age, be the complete embodiment of pro-ship vs. anti-ship discourse, given the subject matter.

But for those of you who are watching this for the first time in 2024 (which includes myself!), there are certain things about the show you simply must understand, for the sake of media literacy.

The first is that Black Butler is supernatural gothic romanticism at its core. This genre alone should tell you that the relationships integral to the plot will be complex, messy, and toxic, by default. That is not only a huge part of this genre’s appeal, but very much the point of the story.

The themes are dark, the terrible things that happen to the main characters are dark, and therefore the relationships at the forefront (and in the background) will reflect that.

The gothic genre has been alluringly popular for over a century (longer, if you know your history) because audiences are entranced by the macabre, the tainted antiheroes, the monsters who live inside us all. It’s popular for a reason.

That being said, understand that whether you, the viewer, ship Sebastian and Ciel or not is irrelevant. Their bond doesn’t need to be understood as romantic or sexual, but it sure as hell isn’t normal. It isn’t healthy. And the audience knows that. That’s the draw. It’s what makes them compelling to watch.

Ciel and Sebastian’s relationship mirrors many gothic novels, poems, and penny dreadfuls written in the Victorian Era (the very same time period in which Kuroshitsuji takes place). The Victorian folks who read these tales for the first time ate that shit up, because it was tantalizing. It was shocking. It was inappropriate, and monstrous, and violent, and erotic, and went against societal norms. But that was the point.

A huge part of gothic romanticism is the blatant sexualization of the relationship between the “monstrous” characters and their human counterparts in the story. Sex itself doesn’t need to take place for their bond to be sexually charged. The forbidden nature of their relationship—which typically involves layers of social taboos, moral ambiguity, or simple infatuation—is what makes their interactions erotic. Sexual contact rarely ever actually happens in these stories. It’s the taboo nature of their bond that creates the tension.

One of the many reasons audiences love this genre is the constant question of morality in its themes. Who, between them, is the real monster? Could the human character have ever been saved? This genre is often associated with tragedy, because the bond forged between the characters in these stories are destined to end in death and destruction. The reader knows it can’t end any other way. How can it?

But an integral element of these gothic tales is the catharsis that comes with this tragedy. The corrupted human often gets what they want in the end, even if it’s at the cost of their own life. Whether they regret their choice to foster this monstrous relationship varies on the story, but it doesn’t change the trajectory of their descent.

Sebastian and Ciel’s relationship is the whole plot of Black Butler. Their closeness bears a grotesque ick factor, but it is deliberate. It is a constant reminder of how unnatrual their bond truly is. Rationalizing or watering down how abnormal they are about each other misses the point entirely. They will never have a normal, healthy relationship, and that’s what moves the plot forward.

That’s why you’re watching it.

[littlegalerion]

I saw this in the ESO fandom before, back like 4 years ago. Some people wanted Molag Bal's description and purpose changed because "its outdated and sexist." They also, funny enough, had OCs shipped with him and demiprince OC offspring with him.

I, for one, am happy to see him on the cake! Makes me think back to the good ol' days of terrorizing his ass, along with a handful of other princes.

ESOfam being fakely upset because there's Molag Bal on the 10th anniversary cake is killing me. Just say the cake looks ugly and move on lmao

[moonstrider9904]

Hunter and Crosshair's whole reunion, from start to finish, was perfectly in character.

Not everyone shows emotion the same. Not everyone talks the same or has the same habits. Everyone's way of expression is different. So it's very strange to me that when Tech told Omega/the audience he processes emotions differently everyone was praising, but when we see nuanced handling of emotions in other characters media literacy is suddenly dead.

No, Hunter is not the type to hug and cry it out, and neither is Crosshair. They are both very stoic, very stubborn, very scarred men. They are brothers. So the cheap shots, the anger, the ignoring each other for a bit, the way Hunter shoved Crosshair when he finally couldn't bottle it in anymore, it made sense. Heck, when Hunter's fist tightened I swore he was about to throw a punch. Actually I'm convinced he would have had it not been for the giant worm.

It took a life threatening situation and mutually saving one another for the brothers to get on the path to making ammends and rebuild their trust and their bond. I prefer this a whole lot over a simple "Oh I'm sorry" "Oh I'm sorry too now hugsies"

Because you know what? I grew up with an older brother too. We would argue and bicker, sometimes it wasn't a big fight but there were other times when it was. You know what the simple "I'm sorry" reminds me of? When mom noticed us fighting and made us apologize. The words were said but when we really made up as siblings was when we'd had some time to cool off, then started playing again, bonding again and the trust was restored.

This is not to say that all siblings are the same, of course they're not, but this is still a very classic sibling dynamic that was transferred to the screen with Hunter and Crosshair, albeit with a much more serious situation and higher stakes.

They are brothers. They act like brothers, and they will make up like brothers.

[biggesthomuradefender]

me losing my mind after everything abt rebellion gets misinterpreted a million thousandth times 💀

so, here are a few misconceptions that i want to rant abt bc they aggravate me !! lol.

“the madoka that talked to homura in the flower field isn’t the real madoka/is only saying what homura wants to here !!”

it was literally confirmed MULTIPLE times that that was the real madoka, by multiple characters 😭 homura, bebe, sayaka, kyuubey, even madoka herself after she regains her memories… that isn’t even media literacy, the movie fucking TELLS you directly.

even one of the fucking creators, shinbo, confirmed that the words madoka spoke in the flower field was literally her true feelings.

also… no, that’s the last thing homura wanted to hear. why would she want to hear that she failed at her one reason to live, that her beloved wasn’t happy and was actually suffering all alone, and it was all her fault? that she lied to herself in an attempt to convince herself that madoka was rly okay? hello???

“madoka was happy/fine as a god”

no, no she wasn’t. she didn’t even WANT to be a god, she was just willing to be one bc she felt that her wish was more important than her life, her very existence and humanity (devil homura parallel…)

homura realized that she wasn’t happy, that’s a large reason as to why she did what she did at the very end of the movie.

“homura could have just gone w madoka to ‘heaven’ at the end”

no, no she couldn’t have. did you forget that the incubators were literally planning to use madoka and her powers in order to bring back the witch system again in order to turn ALL magical girls into witches?? when the girls freed homura from the incubator’s seal and madokami came to take homura’s soul gem away, madoka and all of the magical girls were still in DANGER bc kyuubey was still going to do it, and homura knew that.

“homura never accepted madoka being a god”

this has got to be one of the dumbest ones i’ve ever heard… homura quite literally DID except it, her resolve only started to deter when she learned that madoka wasn’t happy as a god, and then completely broke apart when she didn’t succeed in killing herself (over and over again, might i add) in her own soul gem before all the girls saved her.

[autisticandroids]

i've been seeing ai takes that i actually agree with and have been saying for months get notes so i want to throw my hat into the ring.

so i think there are two main distinct problems with "ai," which exist kind of in opposition to each other. the first happens when ai is good at what it's supposed to do, and the second happens when it's bad at it.

the first is well-exemplified by ai visual art. now, there are a lot of arguments about the quality of ai visual art, about how it's soulless, or cliche, or whatever, and to those i say: do you think ai art is going to be replacing monet and picasso? do you think those pieces are going in museums? no. they are going to be replacing soulless dreck like corporate logos, the sprites for low-rent edugames, and book covers with that stupid cartoon art style made in canva. the kind of art that everyone thinks of as soulless and worthless anyway. the kind of art that keeps people with art degrees actually employed.

this is a problem of automation. while ai art certainly has its flaws and failings, the main issue with it is that it's good enough to replace crap art that no one does by choice. which is a problem of capitalism. in a society where people don't have to sell their labor to survive, machines performing labor more efficiently so humans don't have to is a boon! this is i think more obviously true for, like, manufacturing than for art - nobody wants to be the guy putting eyelets in shoes all day, and everybody needs shoes, whereas a lot of people want to draw their whole lives, and nobody needs visual art (not the way they need shoes) - but i think that it's still true that in a perfect world, ai art would be a net boon, because giving people without the skill to actually draw the ability to visualize the things they see inside their head is... good? wider access to beauty and the ability to create it is good? it's not necessary, it's not vital, but it is cool. the issue is that we live in a society where that also takes food out of people's mouths.

but the second problem is the much scarier one, imo, and it's what happens when ai is bad. in the current discourse, that's exemplified by chatgpt and other large language models. as much hand-wringing as there has been about chatgpt replacing writers, it's much worse at imitating human-written text than, say, midjourney is at imitating human-made art. it can imitate style well, which means that it can successfully replace text that has no meaningful semantic content - cover letters, online ads, clickbait articles, the kind of stuff that says nothing and exists to exist. but because it can't evaluate what's true, or even keep straight what it said thirty seconds ago, it can't meaningfully replace a human writer. it will honestly probably never be able to unless they change how they train it, because the way LLMs work is so antithetical to how language and writing actually works.

the issue is that people think it can. which means they use it to do stuff it's not equipped for. at best, what you end up with is a lot of very poorly written children's books selling on amazon for $3. this is a shitty scam, but is mostly harmless. the behind the bastards episode on this has a pretty solid description of what that looks like right now, although they also do a lot of pretty pointless fearmongering about the death of art and the death of media literacy and saving the children. (incidentally, the "comics" described demonstrate the ways in which ai art has the same weaknesses as ai text - both are incapable of consistency or narrative. it's just that visual art doesn't necessarily need those things to be useful as art, and text (often) does). like, overall, the existence of these kids book scams are bad? but they're a gnat bite.

to find the worst case scenario of LLM misuse, you don't even have to leave the amazon kindle section. you don't even have to stop looking at scam books. all you have to do is change from looking at kids books to foraging guides. i'm not exaggerating when i say that in terms of texts whose factuality has direct consequences, foraging guides are up there with building safety regulations. if a foraging guide has incorrect information in it, people who use that foraging guide will die. that's all there is to it. there is no antidote to amanita phalloides poisoning, only supportive care, and even if you survive, you will need a liver transplant.

the problem here is that sometimes it's important for text to be factually accurate. openart isn't marketed as photographic software, and even though people do use it to lie, they have also been using photoshop to do that for decades, and before that it was scissors and paintbrushes. chatgpt and its ilk are sometimes marketed as fact-finding software, search engine assistants and writing assistants. and this is dangerous. because while people have been lying intentionally for decades, the level of misinformation potentially provided by chatgpt is unprecedented. and then there are people like the foraging book scammers who aren't lying on purpose, but rather not caring about the truth content of their output. obviously this happens in real life - the kids book scam i mentioned earlier is just an update of a non-ai scam involving ghostwriters - but it's much easier to pull off, and unlike lying for personal gain, which will always happen no matter how difficult it is, lying out of laziness is motivated by, well, the ease of the lie.* if it takes fifteen minutes and a chatgpt account to pump out fake foraging books for a quick buck, people will do it.

*also part of this is how easy it is to make things look like high effort professional content - people who are lying out of laziness often do it in ways that are obviously identifiable, and LLMs might make it easier to pass basic professionalism scans.

and honestly i don't think LLMs are the biggest problem that machine learning/ai creates here. while the ai foraging books are, well, really, really bad, most of the problem content generated by chatgpt is more on the level of scam children's books. the entire time that the internet has been shitting itself about ai art and LLM's i've been pulling my hair out about the kinds of priorities people have, because corporations have been using ai to sort the resumes of job applicants for years, and it turns out the ai is racist. there are all sorts of ways machine learning algorithms have been integrated into daily life over the past decade: predictive policing, self-driving cars, and even the youtube algorithm. and all of these are much more dangerous (in most cases) than chatgpt. it makes me insane that just because ai art and LLMs happen to touch on things that most internet users are familiar with the working of, people are freaking out about it because it's the death of art or whatever, when they should have been freaking out about the robot telling the cops to kick people's faces in.

(not to mention the environmental impact of all this crap.)

[lazyturtlehottub]

A breakdown of the Fangirlish interview: an exercise in media literacy

Given that the reaction to Buck and Tommy breaking up has been exacerbated by those interviews, I thought I would look into the one from Fangirlish in order to look at it with my media literacy hat on and see what was actually said. So, here’s a link to a version that doesn’t give the writer clicks because you should make up your own mind before providing revenue to the platform https://archive.ph/fqhlE

We start off with the headline: Lou Ferrigno Jr. on Saying Goodbye to 9-1-1, That Breakup and What’s Next

Right away, as the reader, we’re immediately told that LFJ is saying goodbye to 9-1-1, the implication being that this is the end of the road, no going back. This is, I will say, a choice that the writer made when they created the article: they decide on the headline, no one else. Going in, our mind has already been positioned to believe that this is an exit interview and to understand everything that comes next through that lens.

Supporting this path is this: “Lou Ferrigno Jr.’s time on 9-1-1 has come to an end[...]” but it’s important to note that no one has said this but the author of the article. At no point does she provide a statement from ABC, Tim Minnear, or LFJ to back this statement up.

Another unsubstantiated statement she makes is: “For Ferrigno Jr. it wasn’t exactly the way he envisioned the end of his time on the show [...]” Yet again, at no point in what she quotes from Lou does he say this at all. This is her take on the conversation and she has provided not a scintilla of evidence to support this statement. What she does provide is the following quote from LFJ:

“With the way things were going, and the connection that they had, I was under the impression that it was working, and they were connected,” he shared.

Putting this in the context of the interview, it does make it sound like Lou was blindsided by the break up, which is a very normal thing considering that we all know the actors barely know what’s happening even when they have the script. It’s not surprising that Lou didn’t know about the break-up since even Oliver Stark mentions that he didn’t know about it until they began filming, even though the possibility had been floated some episodes earlier.

So while this quote in the context the writer’s given does seem pretty final, if we remove the exit interview lens from it, it just reads as an actor expressing his surprise at the path his character is going.

Continuing on, the writer then writes the following: Ferrigno Jr. admits he had issues with this ending [...]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, she doesn’t provide a quote to back this up. What she does right is frame the next quote as [...] but trying to get into the mindset of Tommy [...], which changes the context of the quote that Lou gives.

“If preserving his emotional health and saving himself is the only means to survive, then you can’t shame him for it.” He went on to add, “I honestly don’t believe that the relationship matured well enough that they should have made any type of long-term decision.”

So she makes a statement that says LFJ has issues with the ending and then immediately moves on to talk about the acting choices Lou had to go through in order to understand where Tommy was during the scene.

Perhaps the most direct quote from Lou about the relationship that sounds troubling with regards for the future of Buck and Tommy is this: “I just would have hoped that it would have lasted a little bit more,” he also told us, adding that in the hour we also have Buck “looking at those girls, and that sucks for Tommy, and it sucks for any person that’s looking at their partner looking at someone else.”

Taking this with the fact that this has been positioned as an exit interview, I agree that it does sound damning, but if you remove that filter from it then I believe it reads as an actor expressing mild regret that he didn’t get to play this stage of the character and this relationship more. However, I will admit, that this is open for interpretation given that we don’t know where this came in the interview since we don’t know what prompted this answer.

And for Ferrigno Jr., he admits he knew the two were done for good when he realized his character would call Buck “Buck.” I feel I’m a looping record but where in the interview does he say that? He doesn’t say that at all in the quote that she provides below.

She writes: Instead, Ferrigno Jr. told us that Tommy “only knows the man in front of him, Evan. And I knew it was going to come [the moment he called him Buck] because he’s always saying Evan all the time. I’m looking at a character that I’m playing, and he’s just like Evan, Evan, Evan, and in that line, I was just like… I knew this was going to happen.”

“And he doesn’t have to say that. He still can say Evan. But that is essentially signalling that this is all I know how to do, and it’s too much.”

Linked with what LFJ said earlier about Tommy protecting himself, this quote from him makes sense in the fact that Tommy called him Buck to protect himself from the hurt, to try and create some walls between them. But the writer has made this sweeping statement that he knew it was the end, implying that the relationship is at a permanent end when nothing LFJ has said supports that.

And then we move onto the bit that really highlights the bias that this article has been written around. The writer asks Lou: Could the show have been using Tommy as a roadblock to a possible Buck and Eddie relationship?

Getting into the professionalism of this question is for another time but I’ve added it here so you can see the fact that this is someone who is focused on the Buddie of it all. Evidence that supports this is in the author’s various tweets and the coverage of 9-1-1 on their website.

And I know we’re all worried about LFJ’s scheduling conflicts but I will posit that it was a standard answer from an actor who is just doing his job. In his words: “I would absolutely love to come back, but I do need to continue on my journey here. I have a number of things now that are going on that may or may not happen, and I hope that there’s no conflict if it were to be the case.”

Basically, this article is written from the point of view of it being an exit interview but at no point is evidence provided from official sources to support that statement. Throughout it all, Lou’s answers are framed within the narrative that the break-up is permanent and that he’s gone from the show for good.

I hope that this has been interesting and informative for those of you who have read it, and I hope it serves as a reminder that media literacy is for everyone, not just for an attack from those on social media against fans being publicly disappointed that a queer relationship has broken up, temporarily or otherwise.

[pancakeke]

it's kind of funny how much money is wasted on anti-piracy software and litigation when the general public's tech and computer literacy get worse every year. I assume cause people rely more and more on smartphones instead (despite that when it comes to smartphones, users have significantly less control over their experience). everyone is basically required to own a smartphone to do anything these days, so why bother with computers? but you need a computer and some experience to be a highly effective pirate.

also this may be a mostly US american thing but a lot of people act proud of spending money for some reason. they act like being thrifty is tacky. plus many people's first instinct when they have any desire is to open their wallets. even for things that are legally free (like everything available at a library).

this makes me think that anti-piracy efforts actually have zero effect on the profitability of media. but I bet shareholders like the idea of anti-piracy measures. despite not knowing how much money they cost waste vs save. and losing shareholders can break a company overnight.