#so i guess it's anti

[kvtnisseverdeen]

Where is the International protection the Palestinian people is entitled to when the occupying power violates international law and harms those it is obliged to protect. Aren't Palestinians lives worth saving?

-Riyad Mansour (Palestinian representative to the UN)

[squidelyfish]

Anti form Vanitas

Edit: made a comic about this form.

[ankles-be-bitten]

idk, i just feel like if your primary argument against transandrophobia/antitransmasculinity theory is that you think it's transmisogynistic you're not being intellectually honest. who does it hurt when trans men and mascs coin a term to describe the intersection of transphobia and sexism as it most frequently affects them? because it does hurt trans men when they're told that they're not entitled to speak on the discrimination they themselves face.

what I'm hearing from people who oppose the antitransmasculinity movement is that transmisogyny is when trans men talk about their problems 👍, but obviously that's not true. i know that's not true. you know that's not true. so then what is the issue? genuinely, enlighten me. you want trans men to shut up and listen? I'm listening.

[ecoterrorist-katara]

Zutara, romance novels, and the female gaze

Okay so I’ve been thinking about the female gaze a LOT so I checked out a subreddit about romance novels, despite never having read one. I came across this meme (which was initially a Tumblr post and then got posted to Instagram and then to Reddit and I’m now bringing back to Tumblr — Internet telephone, pls never change):

And…what is The Southern Raiders, if not a platonic grovel? Katara’s pain is central to the episode. It’s central to Zuko. Zuko asks Katara what he can do to make up for his betrayal; she demands the impossible. He reads between the lines, cockblocks her brother to get the necessary information, and then waits outside her door overnight (which he also did for Iroh, the one person we know for sure he loves). He basically makes himself a receptacle for her rage, and he holds space for her by coming with her on her revenge quest and carrying their bags and not saying a damn thing about what she should and should not do beyond like…asking her to rest. And obviously the grovel works! She forgives him and then they’re thick as thieves, bantering and fighting and saving each other’s lives, etc.

On a different note, I’ve been told that enemies to lovers is one of the biggest tropes in romance novels, similar to YA lit and fanfic. Here’s something else I found in the romance novel discourse:

And…yeah. In TSR, Katara really does show Zuko her worst self, because she doesn’t feel the need to perform for him. She doesn’t feel the need to perform moral perfection OR cold blooded vengeance. She bloodbends in front of him and he just goes with it. She doesn’t kill Yon Rha and he just goes with it. He doesn’t treat her any differently afterwards. Maybe they talk about it off screen, but I kind of like the idea that they don’t, because Katara doesn’t need to explain anything. And it’s so interesting, because some people in the ATLA fandom have a totally different read on TSR. They think Zuko was encouraging Katara to get revenge (by what, keeping his mouth shut?), and that Aang is the one who acts as her moral compass. I believe that either Bryan or Mike said in the DVD commentary that Aang is the angel on her shoulder the entire time. And this interpretation does make sense if you see it from the male gaze, where Katara as an object of affection is acting in an angry, irrational, threatening way. But if you see it from the female gaze, you recognize that actually it’s probably the most emotionally taxing experience Katara has to go through, and she doesn’t owe it to be nice or perfect to anybody. Katara’s formative trauma literally comes to a head, and she has to make a decision — no, a discovery — about who she is in relation to the tragedy that defines her life and even her identity (as a waterbender, as a parentified child who becomes the mom friend, as a genocide victim), and she’s accompanied by someone who trusts her judgement and validates her feelings.

I’m not saying TSR is explicitly romantically coded, but when it conforms so well to romance novel tropes…is it any wonder that so many people thought “yes this is her man?” And then he takes lightning in the heart for her and reaches for her when he’s literally dying, I will never be normal about that either

[remxedmoon]

mmy isat fruit gummies…

for the record no these aren’t part of the redraw project. yet. i just wanted to test the waters with pixel art!! so i made these mockups for the hell of it. which somehow lead to redrawing every single icon but shhh don’t worry about it. the actual sprites prolly aren’t going to look exactly like this because Good Lord That Is A Lot Of Detail To Animate. i’m glad to get the practice in at least 👍

anyways. here’re the individual sprites. enjoy :3

[hellmandraws]

I, for one, am looking forward to Viking Piece.

[jay-wasreblogging]

For more information.

[notherpuppet]

What is your opinion of AI? Personally, I think that like any technology, it depends on the user and their intentions, but that is just me.

What about you?

1. Theft

The most central issues with AI as it is now is that the programs were trained/are trained with STOLEN art. Stolen visual art, music, writing, etc.

The vast majority of what it has been fed is stolen. As in, the artists behind the work were not ever given the chance to consent nor be compensated for their works being used to feed the machine.

This reason alone is straight up copyright infringement and the optimist in me does believe the long arm of the law is gonna shut these programs down for that. But the long arm of the law is looooooong, and the technology is disrupting people’s livelihoods now. Unlike robots or machinery that was invented and built to expedite assembly line/factory work, this technology is only functional by using other people’s labor. If we didn’t live in a society where you have to “earn” your right to live in it, then this would still be wrong, but it probably wouldn’t be such an existential problem.

There are active class action lawsuits for infringement of copyright. And the private sector has begun filing suits and I’m quite certain they’ll win because again—it’s simply theft. These companies did not make licensing contracts, they’re not paying royalties to the artists they stole from.

So if you consider using ai that generates “art” (whether it is visual, music, writing, etc.) please consider stopping immediately, as you would actively be benefiting from theft (which is wrong imo!!!!)

2. AI in its present form dishonors the human spirit

In my personal relationship with AI technology, I do not use it to generate ideas or ‘art’. I detest the notion to use technology in that way tbh. AI is a form of technology, so it’s difficult to break it down into every specific use it actually has. But here’s an attempt; no to generative AI, okay to certain AI.

There are kinds of AI programming in the programs I use (such as features that help you color in a shape quickly or make a perfect circle). This is useful tech (that requires zero IP theft) and I like it because it helps me by taking care of tedious tasks so that I have more time to spend in the creative and drawing processes. But I still choose the colors, I still draw the images, I still write the stories.

I think the way AI is used right now with a focus on “creative thinking” (where it’s not actually creating anything it’s just churning out other people’s *stolen* ideas and practice) is a total waste. AI being used as an assistant to help humans find information easily can be/has been swell. And requires no theft :D

But for whatever reason (greed, capitalism are my guesses), tech companies are leaning into a direction to replace creativity with AI?? I imagine the people behind this view the practice of art as tedious work because it is challenging??

But the beauty of art and the practice of it is that it allows humans to experience and overcome challenges with little to no stakes.

When society determines that is not a valuable use of human time, then I think we’ll all be significantly more miserable. If we allow a machine to be “creative” and leave us to only experience challenges with stakes—like survival (rent, putting food on the table).

So here are some examples of how I feel about AI uses;

AI to translate languages, find resources, discern malicious malware/spam from harmless messages > 👍🏽

AI to generate ideas/art for you > 🤢 Why??????? Why would you want that…that’s the most exceptional part of the human experience and you relinquish it to a bot trained on stolen ideas? 😭

[alexotls]

corporate doppio

[eliza-the-hunted]

I'm an aspiring psychologist, I don't like discussing certain things online because I know how knee jerk and defensive everyone is...but this is annoying me, so I gotta say it:

A lot of you have a paraphilia and you don't even realize it.

Paraphiles come in all shapes and sizes. It's literally just anything considered sexually abnormal, which is anything that's not basic, vanilla sex.

Paraphile isn't a big, scary, icky word. It doesn't always just mean "pedophile", or "zoophile". It can be a huge range of things. If you have a fetish that a normie would consider abnormal or weird, you could most likely consider yourself a paraphile!

Paraphila literally just translates to "atypical attraction".

If you want an example: I am a fictiphile, I am attracted to fictional characters more-so than I am IRL people. This is a paraphilia.

I'll probably delete this later, because I know how much people hate this topic, but it's just been annoying the heck out of me.

Here is a list of what's considered a paraphilia:

Common paraphilias: Vore, cannibalism, inflation, diapers, most BDSM, petplay, and more.

Be more educated, stop treating paraphile/paraphilia as some big scary no-no word.

[little-pondhead]

Your Ancient History, Written In Wax

-

Danny knew he should have put better security around the Sarcophagus of Eternal Sleep. It wasn’t even Vlad who opened it this time! The fruitloop was too busy doing his actual mayor duties because for some godforsaken reason, the man got re-elected.

No, it wasn’t Vlad. And it wasn’t Fright Knight, either. Nor the Observants. Who opened the Sarcophagus, then? Danny didn’t have time to find out as Pariah Dark promptly tore open a hole in reality and started hunting Danny down.

The battle was longer this time. He didn’t have the Ecto-Skeleton, as that was the first thing Pariah had destroyed. The halfa had grown a lot over the past few years, and learned some new tricks, but apparently sleeping in a magic ghost box meant that Pariah had absorbed a lot of power. The bigger ghost acted like a one-man army!

Amity Park was caught in the middle of the battle, but the residents made sure it went no further than that. Vlad and the Fentons made a barrier around the town to keep the destruction from leaking. Sam, Tucker, and Dani did crowd control while Danny faced the king head-on.

Their battle shook the Zone and pulled them wildly between the mortal plane and the afterlife. Sometimes, residents noticed a blow from Pariah transported them to the age of the dinosaurs, and Phantom’s Wail brought them to an unknown future. Then they were in a desert. Then a blazing forest. Then underwater. It went on like that, but no one dared step foot outside of Amity. They couldn’t risk being left behind.

It took ages to beat him, but eventually, Danny stood above the old ghost king, encasing his symbols of power in ice so they couldn’t be used again. He refused to claim the title for himself. Tired as he was, Danny handed the objects off to Clockwork for safe keeping and started repairing the damage Pariah had done to the town. The tear he’d made was too big to fix, for now, so no one bothered. They just welcomed their new ghostly neighbors with open arms and worked together to restore Amity Park.

Finally, the day came to bring down the barrier. People were gathered around the giant device the Fentons had built to sustain it. Danny had brought Clockwork to Amity, to double check that they had returned to the right time and dimension.

Clockwork assured everyone that they were in the right spot, and only a small amount of time had passed, so the Fentons gave the signal to drop the shield.

Very quickly did they discover that something was wrong. The air smelled different. The noise of the nearby city, Elmerton, was louder and more chaotic. Something was there that wasn’t before, and it put everyone on edge.

Clockwork smiled, made a remark about the town fitting in better than before, and disappearing before Danny could catch him.

Frantic, Danny had a few of his ghost buds stay behind to protect the town while he investigated.

He flew far and wide, steadily growing horrified at the changes the world had undergone. Heroes, villains, rampant crime and alien invasions. The Earth was unrecognizable. There were people moving around the stars like it was second nature and others raising dead gods like the apocalypse was coming. Magic and ectoplasm was everywhere, rather than following the ley lines like they were supposed to.

Danny returned to Amity.

The fight with Pariah had taken them through space and time. Somewhere along the way, they had changed the course of history so badly that this now felt like an alien world.

How was he supposed to fix this?

-

In the Watchtower, The Flash was wrapping up monitor duty while Impulse buzzed around him, a little more jittery than usual. The boy was talking a mile a minute, when alarms started blaring an alarming green. Flash had never seen this alarm before, and its crackling whine was grating on his ears.

Flash returned to the monitor, frantically clicking around to find the issue, but nothing was popping up. No major disasters, no invasions, no declarations of war. Nothing! What was causing the alarm?

Impulse swore and zipped to a window, pressing his face against it and staring down at Earth. “Fuck! It’s today isn’t it? I forgot!”

“What’s today?” Flash asked. He shot off a text to Batman, asking if it was an error. The big Bat said it wasn’t, and that he would be there soon.

“The arrival of Amity Park. I learned about this in school; the alarm always gives me headaches.”

Flash turned to his grandson, getting his attention. “Bart,” he stressed. “What are you talking about?”

Impulse barely glanced over his shoulder. Now that Flash was facing him, he could see a strong glow coming from Earth. “The first villain, first anti-villain, and the first hero,” he said anxiously. “They all protect the town of the original metas. They’re all here.”

“Here? Now??”

“Yeah? They weren’t before, but they are now. The first hero said there was time stuff involved, which was what inspired me to start practicing time travel in the first place.”

“I’m not following.”

“It’s okay. We should probably go welcome them before they tear apart Illinois, though. The history I remember says that some of them freaked and destroyed a chunk of the Midwest during a fight with each other.”

“WHAT?”

[archaeren]

I'm reasonably sure that there has never once been a point in human history where we engaged in a period of puritanical censorship that we now look back on like, "yeah that was a good idea and definitely not something we regret happened at all"

[little-meowyao]

Hi,

JIN LING IS NOT HOW AN ABUSED CHILD BEHAVES. He sasses at JC and he KNOWS he's all bark no bite. The instances of JC hitting JL in canon are EXCEPTIONAL. If JC hit JL regularly, he would NOT have said "Not even my uncle hits me!" at WWX. That shit STICKS. You are all stupid

[lainalit]

Tamlin antis: Ew Tamlin getting on his knees and begging Rhysand to spare feyre in book one is such an ICK! Good thing Rhysand never needs to beg or ask tAmPoN for help with anything since he is so pOwErFuL & knows everything

Fast forward Acosf where pregnant feyre was told not to shapeshift by a non-shapeshifter medic and Rhysand being too proud to ask for help by the only other known shapeshifter within the series who feyre got her powers from about it

[ecoterrorist-katara]

”Aang is the one who reminds Katara to be a kid” PUT SOME RESPECT ON TOPH’S NAME!!! Toph brings out Katara’s inner child, not the sunshine rainbow flower crown inner child, but her internal gremlin. Her pettiness and violence and self-centered mischief. Aang is a ride-or-die friend sometimes, but when they’re together, Katara’s priorities are always 1) the state of the world and 2) Aang himself. Like she can be playful but she’s never really distracted from her sense of responsibility.

With Toph, Katara prioritizes much more childlike things, like having the last word in an argument, and whether her friends think she’s cool, and laughing in a day spa, and petty revenge. Only Toph can drag Katara down to her level of immaturity and I think that’s beautiful

[cranberrymoons]

state of the union is like. buck is bisexual. yay! we love that. however he is currently dating someone who is hm. well. i shan't say. a man who was at minimum complicitly (if not outwardly) racist/sexist not so long ago, and not just in an amorphous hypothetical way but in a way that directly impacted buck's brother in law and a woman who he considers family so. okay. that's Bad, generally speaking, and it is sort of implied that there was some reconciliation there but it is also a little concerning that the boyfriend kind of talks about that time as like something that was done to him by an outside force (gerrard) rather than as something that he personally did as an active participant in his own life, like that genuinely does not bode well for him and the way he looks at the world.

and of course then there's eddie, who is buck's family and his partner and the father of the child who buck definitely does consider his own, and eddie is trapped in a hurricane of emotion (and possibly bees), and he is growing a mustache which is either part of an alternate universe, or part of a gay awakening, or honestly possibly just an earnest and realistic depiction of a quintessentially millennial mid-30s identity crisis. and i don't really know where we go from here but what i DO know is that if eddie himself is not also queer on some level, well first of all. his character and actions and storylines are genuinely inexplicable to me. but second of all, the show does sort of have to address the elephant in the room which is the fact (like, not just implication but actual fact) that buck has feelings for him. like even if eddie is straight as an arrow (lmao) buck is not, and their friendship is so far beyond normal that like. get real.