#things I think about on a regular basis: this

[smallnico]

i'm literally so flattered by this. i wish i'd come up with a more thought-out argument so i could properly fight your student. i can do the counterargument now if you'd like.

i'm not scared of generative ai. i'm genuinely concerned for the impact it'll have on the neurological development of young people if they become overexposed to the instant gratification of "bringing their ideas to life" and never practice or develop the skills and labour actually associated with creating something from nothing. it means that if the ai gives you dogshit (and it will), you don't have the ability to fix it, because you're so alienated from the process of creating (writing an essay, drawing a picture, organizing a playlist, composing a song, listening to and analyzing and summarizing the art you're examining) that you don't know what isn't working or how to make it work correctly. if you don't learn how to analyze, if you don't train your brain to do these things, they don't stop needing to be done. you will be dependant on ai, or on others to do these things for you. others, you can sometimes trust, but it really helps to be able to really grok the difference between a grifter, an ignorant person, and a person who knows what they're talking about -- and again, the more you alienate yourself from the construction of their arguments, the less you are able to take them apart and see what isn't adding up. and ai is dogshit, frequently incorrect and incapable of doing the small calculus the human brain can do (if you train it to) to tell the difference between quality of sources and reliability of data, so it should never be trusted, period.

the only part of this "new technology" that i'm scared of is based on a history of ideas that i have actually studied. historically, the more we alienate ourselves from the process of labour, the less we are able to grasp it as a reality, and the more people are able to use that fact to exploit us. if you look at, say, the paper coffee cup on your desk, really look at it. where did that come from? it didn't spring fully formed from someone's imagination. someone had to design the shape of that cup, engineer it so it could contain a hot beverage and keep it hot, come up with the sleeve to make sure the drinker could actually hold it, but there's even more to it than that. someone had to make the cup. someone had to source the paper (or the compound) for the body, the material for the lid, the glue that holds it together. someone had to harvest those materials, in whichever country they were sourced, and someone had to package them and transport them to the company responsible for assembling the cup. someone designed the logo and the pattern on the outside, and someone is monitoring the machine that prints those images on the cup. someone will be responsible for picking up the waste and transporting it to a recycling plant, or to the landfill where it'll end up. let's not even start on the drink inside it. farming, harvesting, shipping, receiving, assembling, serving. it takes time to manifest something, and you are in a position of immense privilege to not have to think about where it all comes from on a regular basis. but what happens when the supply lines get shut down? what happens when there's a failure of irrigation or something in the paper mill and the glue holding the paper together doesn't work? do you know? i don't, personally. but there is someone along the line whose job it is to know, and i appreciate the work they (probably aren't paid enough to) do so that i can grab a coffee on my way into my own work. i have to appreciate it because i know that if the process goes wrong somewhere, i have no fucking idea what to do about the problem.

but i'm not pretending to know. i'm not applying for a job at the papermill to work for pennies instead of someone who does know the perfect chemical makeup of coffee cup cardboard because i can order a ton of coffee cups online from amazon in bulk. that's why generative ai offends me. the work that goes into creating art and writing still has to be done, because all generative ai knows how to do is steal, and it doesn't steal like an artist. artists look at the works of others and think, oh, i see how they did that, i want to try doing that, and then they can, because they learned how to appreciate the process. they've actually worked, and practiced, and spent time engaging with the process step by step to create something they find pleasing. generative ai looks at art and spits out a copy by comparing one image to another and assuming based on Uncredited Data that sometimes, pictures have hands in them, and hands sort of look like this. and the computer doesn't have a goddamn clue how many fingers the hand has, or how to translate that data into a visual. you know what does? the human brain. you know what you can do instead of bemoaning that you, a high school junior, can't produce a rembrandt on your first try? you can actually try drawing something.

you can actually try to turn your ideas into a drawing. you can do research into how to make it look the way you want it to. who knows? you might actually have fun doing it. because the creative process can be fun! it isn't for everyone, but unless you actually sit down and try, you won't find out, and if it's not for you, you'll never grasp on that physical experiential level that the creative process is actually a lot of fucking work, and we should respect artists for being able to sit down and do it so we don't have to, same as we respect the farmers who grow our food or the plant workers who mix the slurry that becomes our coffee cup cardboard.

i'm not scared of spotify for pushing ai bullshit down my throat. more than anything, i'm kind of offended, because i do put a lot of work into my playlists, and i have a lot of fun doing it, because i like listening to music and analyzing lyrics and relating the themes of songs to my little characters. i took it so personally because i Want to be involved in the process. i'm paying spotify a lot of my real adult money to have access to music and the tools i can use to entertain this pastime of mine, and it's kind of fucked up that they're raising their monthly fee to fund a tool that makes me, the user of their product, motivated to use their product less. insulting, even. why should i pay more for a computer to do a worse job than me at Having Fun? making a playlist isn't even that fucking hard.

i'm just tired. stuff takes work to make. it takes care and time and effort to create something from nothing, and a lot of the time, the process is necessary to make the thing good, because it forces you to take the time you need to spot and fix mistakes. i hope by now that it's self-explanatory why i don't want an entire society run by a dipshit program that doesn't know how to do what it's doing and doesn't know how to solve the problems it creates faster than human hands could ever manage, and i hope the dipshit machine and the grifters who push it are inextricable from each other in the minds of anyone who's read this whole post. i don't want them to run society either, because they Know that generative ai sucks and can't do anything right, and they're still trying to tack it on to everything to devalue the labour of artists and make a quick buck for themselves.

the best quote i've ever seen about generative ai is "why should i bother reading something nobody bothered to write".

we are a social species. alienation from labour alienates us from each other, from our communities, and makes us feel alone. when we're alone, we're vulnerable down to our core psychology, and there are a lot of people out there who know better who want to take advantage of vulnerable people to manipulate society at large. they want to make money off of your suffering. they want to reduce you to a number for their own convenience so they can use the One Life You Have On Earth to play their own personal tycoon game and get a slightly higher score. they want you to spend less time having fun, creating art, spending time with your family, thinking about what they're Doing to you, so you don't ruin their good time. i'm not scared because it's new, i'm pissed because it's the same old late capitalist shit i've already been dealing with, and i'm sick of seeing it everywhere because it stands a very real chance of turning everyone's brains to even more detached-from-reality mush than late-stage capitalism already has already.

And, on top of all of that, spotify's algorithm sucks shit already, so why on earth would i want it to make my playlists for me. the other day i saw it put zombie by the cranberries on a halloween playlist. she doesn't know dickety shit about my ideas or vibes or anything. so

no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder

[velvetvexations]

I'm censoring this URL because the OP is eighteen. Do not seek the post out and do not harass anyone. Teens are often wrong about things. It's fine. It's radfem bullshit but it's fine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let me be clear: The idea that t4t was invented by trans women for use betwixt themselves, and that "TME" people "gentrified it," is (a) holy fucking shit racist as fuck and (b)

takes a deep breath

WRONG INCORRECT UNTRUE EASILY VERIFIABLY FALSE

The OP is eighteen. That means that we did not do anything. They were not born when It came about on Craigslist and was being used by all trans people from the very start. I don't think they know what Craigslist is and probably more than half the people reblogging it don't either.

TME people fucking gentrified it? Are you fucking kidding me? Are these people tossing that post back and forth just fully playing pretend in fucking Tarabithia, what world do they live in where this combination of syllables makes sense and doesn't cause them to wither up in shame for even having the thought, much less vocalizing it?

Ohhhh but what really gets me is the assertion this was done because being with "TME" people meant there was a high chance you could be "socially (or even physically) murdered."

No.

No, OP. If you were any kind of trans person in pretty much any time and place before the 2010s, and a relationship with a non-trans person went poorly, there was a very high chance you would be dead. There's no "or even" about it. That is what fucking happened. Your ex didn't go crying to your mutual friends telling them about how you hogged the blankets. Your non-trans ex would proceed to ACTUALLY FOR REAL MURDER you, assuming they even waited for the relationship to go sour and didn't just kill you the second you walked through the door like they were always planning to do.

That's how it was when I was growing up, denied transitioning but longing so achingly to be a girl in spite of the horror and misery that seemed to plague us. So I have a problem with the obsession with sOcIaL mUrDeR that keeps getting tossed around these days, because of how degrading it is not only to how bad things still are with death after death after death, but how it disrespects what we came out of. But to directly act like soooocial murrrrrder was the big scary thing trans women feared back then? That's heinous. That's sickening. The social consequences all trans people were deathly afraid of back then was being outed as trans and then being fucking stabbed within twenty-four hours.

Even in spite of the election and what's coming next, how good we have it would be nigh-incomprehensible to the first trans men and women and non-binary people to be brave enough to advertise themselves as t4t to strangers. Like, I need everyone to understand that. They could not have wrapped their fucking heads around it. It'd be like explaining a circuit board to a Mesopotamian. One could show them a video of the Blue's Clues episode about queer people and it'd just register to them as migraine inducing static.

We're in such a better place than we were. And this is what people do with it.

Make up bullshit reasons to be angry at their siblings and imply they also didn't get murdered for being trans on a regular basis, or that even just trans women cared about an irritating buzzword, even as cishetpatriarchal fascism is empowered and determined to drag us back to the the horrific dark age that scholars refer to as Literally All of Human History Up Until Now.

Amazing.

Why do I even try. Like, with anything. Why do I get out of bed in the morning. I could have stayed in bed all day listening to rain sounds.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on that.

[oodlyenough]

arcane s2 act 1

alright might as well collect my thoughts for posterity

first and foremost: obviously the triumphant cackle i was doing the entire hexcore scene. huge W for me, personally. did it always feel like the most logical and narratively satisfying extension from s1? sure. do i trust television to do the most narratively satisfying thing? no. especially not after fandom spent years of the hiatus trying to convince me otherwise

really all the jayvik scenes were, more or less, exactly what i expected/wanted and very satisfying lmaooo. i knew jayce wouldn't give a fuck about the shimmer or unethical experiments. i win!

other stuff i liked:

in the hiatus i've now seen all of yellowjackets and it has made me fonder of ella purnell and by extension jinx, lol. i love sevika and i think their grudging alliance in the wake of silco's death is a fun direction. jinx finding a random dumpster baby and adopting them immediately, silco would be so proud lmfao

i love caitlyn's dictator arc. i have to be honest i found her disney princess schtick in s1 pretty boring, so this is finally something more flawed and dynamic for me to invest in. yes girl get worse

ambessa rules. i was a little rolling my eyes at the "wow she was pulling the strings all along" reveal, bc it was so obvious and i was sort of hoping they'd do something more interesting with her. but this show has never been subtle. either way it still seems ambessa believes she's protecting mel? so i AM curious about how that plays out

i don't know shit about the league lore around the black rose stuff and don't want to <3 knowing league lore has never improved my arcane experience. but those sequences were very cool and took me by surprise. some good body horror with elora. good luck in the nightmare labyrinth mel!

stuff i liked less:

i think the stylized music video sequences are being a little overused. maybe s1 did them as frequently and I forget? anyhow, the police brutality one really worked for me, because it's the kind of info that def needs to be montaged, and the style was cool and engaging. cassandra's funeral ... i understand why they did it but i didn't like the regular arcane models mixed with the charcoal bgs, i found it distracted me from what was meant to be the emotion of the moment. and the jinx montage i found kind of mid.

i do think the pacing feels as breakneck as ever, to its detriment. i said above the jayvik stuff all played out basically as i wanted, which is more-or-less true, but viktor just be like I Have To Go Now was a bit abrupt. i can excuse a lot of that on the basis that i don't think viktor is really himself anymore because of the hexcore -- very flat emotionally, etc. and i assume we'll see them butt heads again later in the season. but still, the hextech weapons, the nonconsensual hexcoring, etc, would've expected something a little more explosive lol

plus, then we shift from that scene to the Furby Comedy Hour and jayce and heimerdinger having like a nonreaction to each other despite how acrimoniously they parted or how emotionally charged jayce must be sleeping next to viktor's empty cocoon etc... felt whiplash-y to me. but i hate heimerdinger and ekko teaming up to begin with lmao (and ofc ekko directs his frustrations with piltover to jayce, and not the 300 year president furby he has no beef with for some reason)

this extends to vi's decision to pick up the badge, etc. stuff just happens really quick and the fact that the passage of time in the show isn't very clear doesn't really help. i can understand why riot didn't want to spend two decades making five seasons of this show, but 2 seasons will probably feel too short imo.

[wolves-in-the-world]

the thing about eliot spencer as a character, right. the thing about him.

(and as always your mileage may vary on my analyses so if we disagree that's cool actually)

is that he is in fact a somewhat emotionally constipated idiot who is occasionally sensitive about his perceived masculinity and gets defensive about emotional intimacy around other men (largely hardison, who's much more comfortable expressing affection and embracing a softer kind of masculinity), but eliot displays enough emotional awareness and sensitivity and respect for women etc etc that anyone who's been subjected to that era of television will put on rose-tinted glasses without even looking twice.

(and he is, don't get me wrong, incredibly emotionally aware for a professionally punchy guy with enough trauma to sink the titanic. it still startles me to see.)

on top of which we have the layers and the accessories and the excellent hair with the secret braids and the way he barely has an ego and he's good with kids and protective of his team without taking it too far, and some of us never stood a fucking chance.

[spow-ed]

It just dawned on me

So like, the question of how you got into CJ has been asked before, and most of us have answered. So I feel it’d be appropriate if we asked a follow up question:

Why do you like him? What about his music makes you go absolutely FUCKING feral? Is it the vocals/voice? How the instrumental(s) are composed? Anything!

Though more in depth answers are preferred, you are free to be as brief as you’d like. I’m just curious after all.

[mellon1998]

Someday

Someday we'll all forget, and as is her right, nature will reclaim you for herself.

Someday someone will find you, whatever still remains.

Someday they'll wonder what you were, why they find remnants of your name across the world.

Someday no one will be left to tell others who you were, why we cared so much.

But everyday the change you had on us will ripple out into the world.

The lives that you touched, those who felt your message in their bones.

Their impact will ripple out.

So as you will breakdown and feed the Earth, your memory will break down and feed our souls.

Long after that someday comes.

[dailymanners]

@that-bloody-linguist

That is really concise and to the point, and that attitude sounds very hauntingly familiar to what I see here.

I am very grateful that I never saw teens purposefully coughing in the face of old people, but I did see a similar attitude of "How DARE you tell me what to do even if it's for the benefit of everyone around me!"

When I worked retail over the mask mandate days about half my customers would flip me off, cuss me out, scream at me, or even try to reach over the counter and harm me when I asked them to put on a mask. Pretty often I see Icelandic teens and young adults do things like, intentionally throw their trash on the ground when they're only a meter or two away from the nearest trash can and smugly strut away from their empty soda can now just sitting on the ground. It's this idea of "How DARE someone tell me where I can and can't dispose of my trash, how DARE someone tell me where and how I can cough." It's this obsession with being ungovernable and nobody getting a say in their actions or behaviors, even when their actions or behaviors are directly harming someone else.

I've had Icelanders tell me it's unavoidable to see this kind of behavior here because they believe this obsession with being ungovernable (even to the point of harming others) is grafted right onto their DNA, because the Norse people who left Norway to settle Iceland were people who wanted to live independently without being ruled or governed by the king of Norway.

For what it's worth, I don't believe in that. I don't think "self centered jerk" can be found in anyone's DNA. I think it has more to do with the fact that Iceland has been a rural agrarian society, where people lived in small isolated family farms, for most of Iceland's history. So, for most of the country's history people rarely, if ever, were interacting with anyone outside of their small close knit communities. Urban areas where people actually have to see and interact with strangers on a regular basis is a fairly new phenomenon to Iceland, so this idea of "maybe you should be considerate of other people, yes even if you don't know them" is a fairly new concept to Iceland. Some are more resistant to this than others.

An obsession with independence is also a major part of the Icelandic identity. The first and only Icelandic novel to receive a Nobel prize is "Sjálfstætt fólk" (Independent People) by Halldór Laxness. The central theme of the novel is criticizing the Icelandic cultural obsession with independence, and the main protagonist of the novel is portrayed as a very cruel, selfish man for his obsessive pursuit of total independence. But it's also very interesting to note that the Icelandic word for independent, sjálfstætt, would more literally translate to "self standing" in English, and I think it really is more accurate to many Icelander's concept of independence to have "self" right in the word.

For important nuance, of course a major reason independence is so important to the Icelandic cultural identity is the centuries long struggle for independence from Danish rule. It is right, healthy, and just to want to be free from tyranny, from unjust rules, from being controlled and manipulated by others.

However, in many western cultures, you can find this hyper-obsession with independence and being ungovernable to the point of being actively destructive and harmful to the people around you, when the obsession of being ungovernable is self obsession, me me me self self self. However, We Live In A Society.

For anyone interested in the theme of obsession with independence and being ungovernable -> obsession with self -> cruelty and malice I do recommend reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. That book won a Nobel prize for a reason.

I do try to avoid grumbling about rude/inconsiderate people as much as I can on this blog because I want to keep the tone of the blog positive and helpful rather than "grumpy person nagging you to behave better while always griping and being grumpy about people being rude". It's also why I try to balance my posts between "do this kind thing that's nice and considerate" and "avoid this inconsiderate behavior" instead of just having it all the latter so I'm not the nagging and complaining blog.

Nevertheless, I am human, and I make this post for the hopes of discussion and feedback as much as it is me griping about this.

I thought COVID would make people more conscious about covering their mouth when they cough or sneeze in public + respecting other people's person space bubbles more. Somehow, the opposite seems to have happened? I don't know if it's just where I live, but I feel like people have somehow gotten *worse* about open mouth coughing and sneezing in public and invading other people's personal space. How?? Why??

I also feel like I don't see parents / guardians / caretakers teaching their kids to cover their mouth when they cough or sneeze anymore. I understand you can't expect a baby or a young toddler to cover their mouth. But a kid as old as 6, 7, 8+ should be able to. Now it's a daily thing whether I'm in public or visiting friends/family with kids that I see their little ones who are in primary school open mouth coughing and sneezing right at other people while their parent / guardian just stares at them with a blank expression and doesn't react.

Of course, this is 100% the adult's fault for not enforcing this behavior, I'm not trying to hate on kids for not getting proper guidance from the adults in their life. And of course kids mirror the behavior they see in adults, and if the adults around them are open mouth coughing and sneezing of course they'll mimic that. I just think it's disappointing that this has somehow gotten worse instead of better after enduring an airborne pandemic spread by coughing.

Anyway, I don't know if it's just me or just the area that I live in, but does anyone else feel like people have somehow gotten worse about covering their mouth when they cough or sneeze + teaching kids to do the same?

[freeuselandonorris]

.

[invinciblerodent]

i should not be concocting elaborate daydreams about characters i haven't even heard speak in earnest yet, huh

i am vying against the desk, nails bloodied and knuckles white, please let me make up more guys (gn) to kiss those other guys (gn)

[coquelicoq]

just had the thought "after i exhaust the french fiction, poetry, and textbooks i own, i could read the french dictionary cover to cover" and got, like, GENUINELY excited about it.

[evan-buck]

can't believe the film and tv industry has let fifteen years go by without casting david tennant and billie piper in something else together

[phantajam]

my hot take about descendants is that NONE of the core four were ready for a relationship until maybe like, the third movie (rant in tags)

[pyrriax]

hi tumblr im pyrr pyrriax and im in my trimonthly artist arc, lord help me and all the projects that are currently sitting in my drafts while i am lured in by the siren song of drawing

[punkrockisafulltimejob]

Bleh

[campingwiththecharmings]

me whenever someone gives me unsolicited opinions about myself:

[itsbenedict]

Villain meme: .......Step Lively? Does she count as not-a-villain enough? I'm certainly curious where things were going with her

Ha ha ha ha ha ohhhhh man, no, yeah, she's already a villain. After stealing the party's ship, she was going to be, like... enabling a proto-Pacifista situation using her amplified Senchou Senchou no Mi power to provide the World Government with countless battle-puppet replicas of her crew, and wielding political power via the taxidermied-alive not-quite-corpse of Saint Zaroff acting as her mouthpiece. In her mind, she was doing her mutinous crew a favor by ensuring that their visages would command fear and respect wherever they went!

(Notably, she would not be distributing robot Dinas- they were supposed to be the Lively Pirates, after all, and Dina had made it very clear that she was technically not a member of the crew, and wanted to avoid notoriety at all costs. She did have a doppel-Dina among her personal retinue of elite PX-0.X pacifistas, for sentimental reasons, but it wore a mask.)

She... was going to start her reign of terror by abolishing slavery, since she has a personal bone to pick with that, but that was going to involve- as a step one- attempting to overthrow the World Government and install herself at the head. I hadn't landed on exactly how- letting her combat mannequins become ubiquitous and then carrying out an Order 66 on the Marines? Using realistic doppelganger puppets to trigger an intragovernmental civil war? Whatever it was going to be, she was going to go about it with zero regard for collateral damage, and prioritize grabbing at power over actually helping anyone.

So yeah- the intention was to play her as a Big Bad to the hilt, cause problems constantly, and let the party straight-up kill her if that was where they were at.