#this article is somewhat misleading

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

okay. so. the symptoms you should be looking out for more are:

fatigue. this is the number one symptom.

weight gain

always feeling cold

hair loss (generalised, not just in one spot)

depression

constipation

goiter, or enlarged/swollen thyroid

joint and muscle pain

heavy or irregular periods

dry skin

libido drop can also happen, as mentioned, but the weight thing is specifically weight gain. Trouble maintaining stable weight in general may have other causes and so should be examined separately.

pay extra attention if you:

are afab (including if you are on T) and/or have an estrogen-based hormone system (eg are a trans woman on gender affirming hrt)

are under chronic stress or experienced chronic stress in childhood

have other autoimmune conditions/allergies/other immune dysfunction

have chronically low vitamin d levels [and start taking supplements]

are on lithium or seroquel

have family history of hypothyroidism, hashimoto's, or other autoimmune issues

you also need to get your thyroid antibodies checked.

it is very common for generic levothyroxine to not be as effective as brand name levothyroxine. If you find this to be the case for you, either have your doctor specify synthroid and give prior auth for it OR have your doctor prescribe a higher dose of generic. (for example, im on 100mcg synthroid but 112.5mcg generic levo)

if you have adrenal insufficiency or are on corticosteroids*, you need to keep in mind that thyroid hormone impacts the speed at which your body metabolises cortisol. If you are on levothyroxine, you will metabolise cortisol faster, so you need to pay extra close attention to how youre feeling, and your endo should be extra careful with monitoring and dosing both your levothyroxine and your hydrocortisone/prednisone/corticosteroids, especially if you have upcoming surgery/other thing requiring stress dosing. Failure to do so can cause life threatening complications. I went into adrenal crisis after wisdom tooth surgery because I missed a stress dose and my body was already metabolising the cortisol more quickly due to the levothyroxine.

IF YOU ARE A TRANS FEMME GET YOUR THYROID CHECKED, ESPECIALLY IF YOUVE NOTICED A DROP IN LIBIDO OR AN INABILITY TO MAINTAIN A STABLE WEIGHT

It isn’t a big deal if you have hypothyroidism, you just need to take an artificial thyroid hormone called Levothyroxine…but don’t let it go untreated!!! It’s super fucked up doctors don’t regularly check our thyroid when we start HRT

[mongeese]

Maybe this is like toxic or whatever but the RQ drama is kind of entertaining to me. Obviously if there is genuine worker's exploitation going on that's serious, but the way I see it there's no proof either way. And the fact that this is playing out exactly like a Twitter callout but it is about a whole-ass company is so funny. "This company is potentially being chronically mismanaged" okay? I don't work for them babe it's not my business. It's even funnier that some people are super defensive and invested. Were you ppl parasocializing with a company?? A business institution?? Get it together, man

[adrianthevampire]

A Somewhat Comprehensive List of Horse Video Games

I will be editing this original post with new games, new information, and so on. If you see a reblogged version of this post, it is worth going to the original post to see if updates have been made.

Ahead will be a list of games that either were released recently and/or are being actively maintained. I have not personally played all of these games. Do not take this list as my personal recommendations.

If you have games you would like to suggest for this list, please let me know!

Some games are listed in both the Single Player and Multiplayer sections. This is due to them having the capability for either.

Single Player

The Ranch of Rivershine [Steam]

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch [Website, available for PC and consoles]

Rival Stars Horse Racing [Website]

Astride [Steam, Website]

Horse Club Adventures [Steam, also available on consoles]

Horse Club Adventures 2 [Steam, also available on consoles]

Wildshade Unicorn Champions [only available on consoles]

Tales of Rein Ravine [Steam]

Multiplayer

Rival Stars Horse Racing [Website]

Astride [Steam, Website]

Horse Isle 3 [Website]

Alicia Online [Website]

Star Stable Online [Website]

Star Equestrian [Website]

Browser

Horse Reality [Website]

Ropin' Ranch [Website]

Wild Horses Valley [Website]

Hunt and Jump [Website]

Mobile

Wildshade

Equestrian The Game

Star Equestrian

Rival Stars Horse Racing

Star Stable Online

Equestriad World Tour

Honorable Mentions

These are games that are not horse games technically but may have good horse gameplay, either in the base game or via user created content.

Red Dead Redemption 2/Red Dead Online/RedM

Minecraft

Roblox

The Sims 3 Pets

The Sims 4 Horse Ranch

Black Desert Online

Upcoming

Some but not all of these games have demos or paid beta testing, though none are officially available yet.

Fernhoof Grove [Trailer]

Unbridled: That Horse Game [Website]

Horse Life Simulator [Patreon]

Canter Crossing [Steam]

Pro Show Jumping [Steam]

Horse Project [Website]

Horse Trainer [Video]

Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori [Steam]

Details about some of the games:

Rival Stars Horse Racing

Rival Stars has two versions. Desktop via Steam and Mobile. While the gameplay itself (e.i racing, breeding, etc) are identical there are massive differences in how it functions. Mobile has micro transactions and limits on how much you can do a day without paying money. The desktop version has no micro transactions and no limits on how much you can do at any given time. Desktop, however, does not get updated as often as Mobile. I could go on and on listing various pros and cons between the two versions, but ultimately I personally prefer Desktop due to the lack of micro transactions or wait times and in addition Desktop has the ability to make custom horses, which is quite fun. It's worth checking out the mobile version first, however, so you can see if the game appeals to you as the Mobile version is free to play.

Astride

Astride is in "early access" on Steam, though that can be misleading. What is currently available is little more than a tech demo. You can create a horse and ride around an area on it, utilizing Astride's unique jumping system, and you can given play with friends. However, it is extremely glitchy, the lighting looks awful right now, and overall it just... isn't good. That said, it is still in progress and I personally have hopes that it will become a full fledged game as promised someday. That day is not today and so I personally recommend not purchasing it until it has gotten a few good updates, unless you just really want to financially support the developers.

Horse Isle 3

Oh boy. I'll just point you towards this article about some of the issues with the community management of HI3. Be warned if you intend to play, moderators are inconsistent about the rules they enforce and you can very easily get banned for saying harmless things. Personally, I stay out of the chat and I'm careful with what I name my horses. Horse Isle 3 is a one of a kind game, sadly, that allows for extremely detailed breeding. Realistic genetics combined with the ability to breed for all sorts of shapes makes it a very compelling game, which is why so many people continue to play it despite... the issues. It is free to play, though there are paid aspects to it. However, you can earn the premium currency within the game and utilize paid features without ever paying your own money.

Minecraft

Minecraft can be a fun horse game using mods or server plugins! The mod SWEM adds a lot of content that makes for good realistic horse roleplay, though doesn't fit well in survival style gameplay. The mod Realistic Horse Genetics actually doesn't change much of the horse functionality, making it a really good fit for survival gameplay, but adds lots of realistic genetics and a better system for inheriting stats than vanilla minecraft. The mod Genetic Animals will be adding horses soon.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online, and RedM

While it is not intended to be a horse game, RDR2 has horses that feel so very real. They are well animated so they feel alive and they respond to their environment in realistic ways. Many people purchase the game purely because of the horses. There are mods you can use to improve the horses in Single Player, though I've never used any so I can't offer suggestions. Personally, I really like Red Dead Online for the horses because the horses can't die and there are a few more breed options. You also can look into joining a RedM server. There is one called Rift that is specifically meant for horse enthusiasts.

Roblox

I know nothing about Roblox personally, but I know there are several worlds (games? I don't know what they're called) in Roblox that revolve around horses.

I will add to this as I think of more. If you are viewing this as a reblogged post, it's worth checking the original to see if it has been updated.

Please feel free to request more information or suggest games or add your thoughts.

[transit-fag]

so apparently the news article about Tesla buying a train line in Germany is somewhat misleading. What *actually* happened is they paid an existing train company to set up a shuttle service to their factory for their employees

Yeah, I just saw that and had to make that reference, still annoying how it's being marketed. Also it's funny that the train isn't electrified

[m1ssunderstanding]

On the John/Paul opposite roles thing, Paul said himself a couple of years back: "[John] could be quite caustic and witty, but once you got to know him he had this lovely warm character. I was more the opposite: pretty easygoing and friendly, but I could be tough when needed." That kind of thing can be easily oversimplified but I do think in broad strokes it's true. I guess that's another way they worked well together: they both had their soft and hard sides but proportioned in such a way that they balanced out well and made up for where the other lacked when working towards the same goal.

I do think their "armours" for the world served their purposes well too. The image the press takes is always going to be crude caricature of whatever you show regardless, I just wish more of the people doing the deeper dives would recognise how misleading extrapolating purely from their public faces can be. But I guess many of them just don't want to let go of their tough-John soft-Paul images for various reasons. The general reaction to Get Back was somewhat encouraging along those lines though, quite a few journos made note of how Paul drove forward and John supported the band in ways that go against those preconceived images.

Thanks for finding that quote anon. Every once in a while Paul is able to articulate a coherent introspective thought and this is one of them. And you sum it up so well. They could both be both but in exactly the ways and amounts and times that the other lacked.

And yes. They did too good a job with their suits of armor. Not only are they extremely difficult to penetrate, but they are so attractive that no one wants to open them for fear of damaging the pleasing exterior. You're right. Even supposed experts "don't want to let go of their tough-John, soft-Paul images". It's a very marketable story they created. The trouble is, it's not the truth. Luckily the trend seems to be with younger, non-casual fans, and with a select few creators of docs, pods, books, and articles, that we actually are interested in the more complex humans who created and wore the armor, why and how they created it, etc.

[variousqueerthings]

What can I say? I meet good people in good struggles every day, almost every day. Our numbers are increasing in the number of young people on the streets struggling for justice, whether it’s climate, or Palestine, or trans rights, or anti-violence. It’s really moving to me.

(I think the title is somewhat misleading, this article is far more about their latest book and general thoughts about the current movement)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media:

A shakeup at two major news outlets in the US would bodes poorly for Americans interested in factual, responsible coverage of issues relating to the trans community in the mainstream press. Two British men associated with anti-trans culture war publications will take top jobs in US media, according to news reports. In a hurried announcement memo that went out to Washington Post staff on June 2, publisher William Lewis announced that Robert Winnett of the conservative Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph newspaper would take over leadership of the Washington Post’s core newsroom after the election, following the abrupt resignation of Suzy Buzbee, the previous editor-in-chief. Then, on June 4, Daily Beast CEO Ben Sherwood announced the replacement of editor-in-chief Tracy Connor with Hugh Dougherty, formerly of the New York Post.

Anti-trans bias is ubiquitous throughout print journalism in the UK, so the installation of two British editors would be of note regardless of which publications they’d previously helmed. However, in a news environment flooded with false, malicious, and misleading stories demonizing transgender people in the UK, the Telegraph may be second only to the Daily Mail in its obsessive focus on pushing an anti-trans culture war. Already, on Wednesday morning, the Telegraph has published 10 articles and opinion columns, all negative, relating to the trans community this week.

The New York Post, a right-leaning tabloid, is little better, though its obsession with trans issues has cooled somewhat from a peak last year). [...] These sorts of extremely misleading stories have largely been confined to the right-wing press in the United States, except in the case of the New York Times, the one mainstream US newspaper that has repeatedly found creative ways to distort news stories and mislead readers in news reporting relating to gender-affirming care. However, with the installation of Winnett and Dougherty, two outlets whose reporting has remained consistent and objective (though not universally friendly) on trans issues are being helmed by editors connected to two of the worst purveyors of transphobic moral panic in the UK and the US. There’s no sugarcoating it, this does not look good for trans people, or for anyone who believes that journalism should first and foremost be about informing the audience and presenting the truth.

Analogizing to the situation at the New York Times, it has long been surmised that the anti-trans bent the paper took starting roughly in 2022 has been driven by the desire of publisher A. G. Sulzberger, who pressed the NYT to court more readers with right-wing views.

Having right-wing editors-in-chief take charge of the Washington Post and The Daily Beast is a bad omen for trans rights coverage, as both those outlets tend to mostly cover the issue in a respectful way.

[saltminerising]

Tbh… I think the mods’ solution of adding a thread’s topic in brackets next to whatever non-descriptive title op chose is both more annoying than any clickbait could possibly be and extreme no-fun-allowed-here behavior. I think it’s because clickbait is definitionally scammy and intentionally misleading and the assumption that someone’s excitement or otherwise emotional expression is a scam is very gross to me. 

Clickbait: OMG! I just got 1,000,000,000g in 1 second!

Not clickbait: OMG! I’m so excited!

Also not clickbait but patronizing and unnecessary: OMG! I’m so excited! [recent ah profits] 

Maybe it’s just me but I’ve seen the second example turned into the third so many times and I would never consider someone’s emotional expression (or meme for that matter) to be clickbait. And I don’t know how anyone could on a site where one of the main and encouraged interactions is LITERALLY bragging. Knowing what op is excited about from the title alone doesn’t make me any more or less likely to click. Both titles give me the exact same expectation: someone bragging /neutral about something. The extra information doesn’t change that and is therefore unnecessary and feels like I’m being nannied to a small extent. Like I can’t be trusted to gage what threads I want to engage with unless their titles are as descriptive and precise as the title of a scientific research article.

On a somewhat unrelated note I also find it patronizing that the official reasoning for banning all-caps titles is “because it looks angry.” As if the internet hasn’t developed a billion ways of designating tone beyond using caps. The real reason all-caps titles aren’t great for forums is because they can be hard on people with vision disabilities. This is extremely pedantic I know but in the context of other issues (like the coli captcha), not only is trying to police tone gross on its own but choosing to tone police over highlighting a place where accessibility should be considered is extra gross. And again, it just feels like misplaced nannying. It’s small in the grand scheme of things but it adds up to my extreme dislike of fr’s (permanent, the volunteer mods are great) mod team.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"While prison administrators boasted that prisoners were able to earn money while in prison, their assertions were somewhat misleading. In a 1924 article in the Baltimore Sun, Henry C. Raynor, a former prisoner who served a three-year sentence in the Maryland Penitentiary in the early 1920s, complained that prisoners often were forced to spend portions of their wages to purchase necessary items such as bedding, underwear, and clothing—items that many would consider the responsibility of the state to provide. These expenses prevented prisoners from saving more of their wages while engaged in the prison workshops.

The low-wage labor system generated enough revenue to the state to allow the Maryland prison system to operate mostly on a self-sufficient basis and return a profit to the state. The balance for the combined earnings of the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Corrections for 1927 resulted in a surplus of over $33,000 paid to the state treasury. A considerable portion of the surplus came from the profits of prisoners laboring in contract shops and state-use industries. Taxpayers in Maryland during the 1920s contributed little to the general upkeep of the prisons. A 1928 Baltimore news article lauded the convict labor system in the Maryland Penitentiary for being largely “self-sustaining” and noted that the prison “costs the taxpayers of the State less than $60,000 annually.”

While the prison labor system was celebrated by state officials for its rehabilitative benefits, it is clear that the revenue it generated substantially motivated the continued reliance on prison labor. Labor union members were concerned with the competition of prison-made products on the open market. Labor leaders agitated for the ending of private prison contracts and advocated for state-use industries. Labor leaders believed that the state-use system was favorable because it meant that prison-made products would be sold directly to states outside of the free market and thus pose less of a threat to workers in labor unions. Evidence of efforts made by prison administrators to bolster state-use industries can be seen in some of the Board of Welfare minutes. For example, in April 1923, the warden of the Maryland Penitentiary and members of the Board of Welfare discussed a plan to employ female inmates in the House of Correction in laundering the clothing of the inmates in both the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Correction. This motion reflected both the desire to find employment for prisoners and to provide traditional gendered work assignments. During this time, women sentenced in the Maryland prison system were kept apart from male inmates. This separation influenced the type of labor that was considered appropriate for female prisoners, thus reflecting the gender norms of labor that were imposed by the prison administration. The Board of Welfare approved the laundry plans, and in the fall of 1923, laundry equipment was moved to the House of Corrections for the use of female inmates.

Male inmates, on the other hand, were seen as fit workers for labor-intensive manufacturing and road construction. Members of the Board of Welfare sought ways to expand the state-use automobile production, and in the spring 1923, held a meeting in the Maryland Penitentiary “in which all parties interested in the making of automobile tags…were present.” Prison administrators sought to secure auto tag making contracts in states outside of Maryland, and signed a contract with the State of Florida to manufacture automobile tags in the Maryland Penitentiary state-use shops. However, this expansion did not supply enough work to keep all inmates employed, and additional work for inmates was secured by hiring out inmates on state road construction projects. Throughout the summer and fall months, prisoners were taken outside of the prison and transported to road construction sites in various Maryland counties.

True to Progressive Era bureaucratic principles, prison administrators focused attention on the prison conditions and rehabilitation of inmates. One prisoner, Henry C. Raynor, who served a prison sentence in the early 1920s, pointed out the need for better ventilation and temperature control in the cells. Overall, however, he seemed satisfied that conditions in the prison system were improving. Raynor described conversations he had with “old-time” inmates in the prison who spoke of improved food and work conditions compared with those of years earlier. The prison warden enacted clear policies about appropriate disciplinary methods to rein in power abuses of prison guards. Officers who oversaw work in the prison shops were restricted by new prison policies from using undue force to control the prisoners. One officer complained that he had once been able to beat a prisoner in order to instill discipline, but was now prevented from “knock[ing] his block off as he pleased.” This illustrates a shift in prison discipline from a reliance on physical force to more humanitarian policies. In addition, it reveals the expansion of bureaucratic rules and procedures used to govern the actions of guards and civil servants employed at the prison. … In regards to the full implementation of these progressive policies, much depended on the attitudes and behaviors of the prison guards. Raynor remarked that the warden was limited by his inability to automatically dismiss guards from service without major cause. Guards who were resentful of the restrictions placed on them found ways to unfairly punish prisoners anyway through nonviolent means. For example, one domineering officer forced inmates on his watch “to stand in driving rain or snow for ten minutes at a time, for no reason except that to show his power.” While prison policies and punishments were more humanitarian in principle, the attitudes and actions of prison guards responsible for enforcement varied the actual treatment of the prisoners. In similar manner, the ethics of some private contractors at the prison were also suspect. Raynor described how one contractor of a pants workshop would strategically require prisoners to load products during lunch or dinner time as a way to eke out extra work without pay. Another contractor, angered by new terms which required the payment of a higher wage to experienced inmates, attempted to shirk the requirement by rotating inmates through tasks to avoid paying them the higher wage, and a shirt-making firm attempted to “evade the payment of any wage at all to their men, and constantly tried to raise the daily task.” Prisoners brought grievances to the warden in regards to the shirt contractor, and one day the inmates found the “the contract cancelled, the contractor gone, and another in his place who was more fair.” Such accounts reveal that prisoners actively negotiated for fair treatment and that their grievances held some weight with the warden. While the reforms of the 1920s largely improved prison conditions, like other aspects of progressive reform, new prison policies also sheltered racially prejudiced social science recommendations, medical opinions, and merit-based grading systems. Raynor, himself a white male, described his alarm at being seated in the dining hall between rows of black inmates. He learned from fellow prisoners who had been sentenced to the Penitentiary years before, that the “mixing of races” in the prison used to be more standard, but in more recent years “ha[d] been partially corrected.” This “correction” resulted in increased segregation. Revealing racial prejudice as the normative social view of the time, Raynor published evidence of increased segregation in the prison to further his argument that prison conditions were better in the 1920s than they were years before.

Moreover, racial prejudice also affected services that were rendered by private reform groups that operated outside general state jurisdiction. The Prisoners’ Aid Association provided many services for recently released inmates at the John Howard Center boarding house. This center provided temporary housing and shelter and assisted inmates in finding stable employment. However, the housing, meals, and resources at the John Howard Center were only available to white male ex-convicts. The Association reports that similar resources were made available to women and “colored men” through “private houses or other agencies,” thus signaling the separation of resources on a gendered and racially segregated basis. Progressive Era science also led to troubling medical policies and procedures, including sterilization of prisoners deemed as “feeble-minded.” During the 1920s, members of the Board of Welfare and the Board of Mental Hygiene arranged for semiannual joint meetings. The two boards, responsible for the security of those deemed criminal and mentally ill, often communicated regarding the transfer of inmates from the prison system to hospitals and mental care units if they were found psychically unstable. At a joint meeting of the boards on February 17, 1927, the administrators discussed the “sterilization of certain insane and feeble-minded under proper safeguards and with the consent of the patient or his guardian or next friend” and motioned that such “should be authorized by Act of the General Assembly.” Discussions such as these highlight the troubling ethics of progressive reforms. State oversight of normative categories severely restricted the freedom and rights afforded to marginalized inmates and mental health patients. While progressive penologists and civic reformers may have insured better living and working conditions in the Maryland state prison system, such reforms came at the cost of greater state control over those deemed unproductive, both in terms of their labor and their reproductive capabilities.

- Erin Durham, “In Pursuit of Reform, Whether Convict or Free: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland in the Early Twentieth Century,” Master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 2018. p. 60-67.

[bookqueenrules]

And So It Begins.... Season 2..........

This article at screenrant with showrunner Zabel was published a couple of days ago..

The title is somewhat misleading....

In an interview with TVLine, Zabel addressed the possibility of a romance developing between Daryl and Isabelle in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 2. Zabel acknowledges that the pair have formed a connection over the course of season 1, but that a relationship would take a lot of work. Check out his statement below:

That’s a good question. A deep connection has clearly formed between them over the course of the five episodes we’ve seen so far, and it continues to deepen in episode six. They have to deal with conflict about what [their relationship] means in the future for both of them, because they have different goals and ideas about what comes next. So it’s an interesting, kind of profound place they find themselves in at the end of the season. The idea was, from the beginning, to really form a mature bond between two people who are really different… and to follow that in a truthful way. And that includes following not only the story that we were telling but following the performances of Norman and Cleménce. We tried to be really nuanced in terms of how we developed that and what romance may be read into it or not by the audience. The actors feel what they feel, and the characters feel what they feel. We’re not trying to force anything. There’s this whole idea of a surrogate family forming. That may include romance, but a surrogate family was really the idea behind the premise. The big question for Daryl was, ‘What happens if in your effort to go home, you wind up forming a sort of home in the place where you are?’ That goes beyond just romance. That’s more about ‘How do you fit into the world, especially an apocalyptic world? In that scenario, what is your place? What is the place that you’re most needed, and what is the place you most want to be?’

However, it's unclear if a relationship between Daryl and Isabelle could work. Despite the pair growing close and becoming parental figures to Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi), their relationship has been strictly platonic. Isabelle is a nun and has shown no indication of wanting to break her vows. Additionally, she has shot down the idea of a romance with Daryl anytime it arises. There's a chance that he could still get a love story in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, even if it's not Isabelle. Perhaps Isabelle teaching him about family could inspire him to let someone else in finally.

That is the end of the article.

My thoughts:

My take on this is that the Isabelle/Laurent "family" tease is serving a few purposes:

It is supposed to create angst and interest in the France storyline.

It is yet another example that Daryl is now ready for a wife and child.

In Season 5, Daryl was, in many ways, less emotionally mature than Beth. I think of what happened in Still. Beth handled the loss of their "family" more maturely than Daryl. It's well known that childhood trauma often arrests emotional development.

As Daryl has slowly made some peace with his past, he has had a variety of relationships that have helped him understand husband/father dynamics. Leah and Connie have helped him understand attraction and developing, or not, that into a romance. Lydia, Judith, and RJ have all been surrogate children.

Isabelle and Laurent combine the mother figure and the child into a type of surrogate family. They are NOT the happy ending. They are another "therapy" step.

Additionally, I don't see either actor actually wanting to develop this into a full romance. It would negate Isabelle's claim that God and becoming a nun lead her to change from her former self.

Norman sorta of let it drop that Season 2 is the end of their time in France.{He jokingly said maybe Costa Rica should be next) Zabel said that there are 6 episodes planned for season 2 as well.

SO, that means either:

Isabelle and Laurent leave with Daryl and Carol. Can you see Isabelle giving up the idea that "Laurent is the Savior of France" in the next 6 episodes? Especially when much of those episodes have already been spoiled to be Genet's backstory, Carol's story, and more insight into walker experiments?

I don't think so.

OR

Isabelle dies and Laurent leaves with Daryl, Carol, and possibly others. This would complete Isabelle's redemption arc. I will post something later on the "Land Rover of Love" scene in episode 6, but something no one is commenting on is how when Laurent is talking about "having to do terrible things" he looks at Isabelle and says, "Like what you did to my mother." Isabelle is shocked. We saw her do NOTHING terrible to her sister. I think we will find out about that next season. So, this could be a definite possibility.

OR

Isabelle and Laurent stay in France and work with Fallou's group to rebuild after Genet is defeated. I think this the most likely senario.

Thoughts?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

As of this week, I have a new article in the July-August 2023 Special Issue of American Scientist Magazine. It’s called “Bias Optimizers,” and it’s all about the problems and potential remedies of and for GPT-type tools and other “A.I.”

This article picks up and expands on thoughts started in “The ‘P’ Stands for Pre-Trained” and in a few threads on the socials, as well as touching on some of my comments quoted here, about the use of chatbots and “A.I.” in medicine.

I’m particularly proud of the two intro grafs:

Recently, I learned that men can sometimes be nurses and secretaries, but women can never be doctors or presidents. I also learned that Black people are more likely to owe money than to have it owed to them. And I learned that if you need disability assistance, you’ll get more of it if you live in a facility than if you receive care at home. At least, that is what I would believe if I accepted the sexist, racist, and misleading ableist pronouncements from today’s new artificial intelligence systems. It has been less than a year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and mere months since its GPT-4 update and Google’s release of a competing AI chatbot, Bard. The creators of these systems promise they will make our lives easier, removing drudge work such as writing emails, filling out forms, and even writing code. But the bias programmed into these systems threatens to spread more prejudice into the world. AI-facilitated biases can affect who gets hired for what jobs, who gets believed as an expert in their field, and who is more likely to be targeted and prosecuted by police.

As you probably well know, I’ve been thinking about the ethical, epistemological, and social implications of GPT-type tools and “A.I.” in general for quite a while now, and I’m so grateful to the team at American Scientist for the opportunity to discuss all of those things with such a broad and frankly crucial audience.

I hope you enjoy it.

+

The “P” Stands for Pre-trained

I know I’ve said this before, but since we’re going to be hearing increasingly more about Elon Musk and his “Anti-Woke” “A.I.” “Truth GPT” in the coming days and weeks, let’s go ahead and get some things out on the table:

All technology is political. All created artifacts are rife with values. There is no neutral tech. And there never, ever has been.

I keep trying to tell you that the political right understands this when it suits them— when they can weaponize it; and they’re very, very  good at weaponizing it— but people seem to keep not getting it. So let me say it again, in a somewhat different way:

There is no ground of pure objectivity. There is no god’s-eye view.

There is no purely objective thing. Pretending there is only serves to create the conditions in which the worst people can play “gotcha” anytime they can clearly point to their enemies doing what we are literally all doing ALL THE TIME: Creating meaning and knowledge out of what we value, together.

There is no God-Trick. There is enmeshed, entangled, messy, relational, intersubjective perspective, and what we can pool and make together from what we can perceive from where we are.

And there are the tools and systems that we can make from within those understandings.

[more]

[thelonesomequeen]

The men's health headline is killing me 😂😂 I'm sorry but what the... 😂

I’m assuming this is the one you mean?

What’s interesting to me is how they were clearly going for click bait. When you see the preview, it seems like it’s going to be a neutral to negative tone, but when you open the article itself it’s all positive. It’s somewhat weird and misleading? But that’s click bait for you. Either way, they speak positively of his ideas in the article itself.

[byneddiedingo]

Jeff Bridges and Gary Busey in The Last American Hero (Lamont Johnson, 1973)

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gary Busey, Ned Beatty, Art Lund, Ed Lauter, William Smith, Gregory Walcott, Tom Ligon, Ernie F. Orsatti, Erica Hagen, Jimmy Murphy, Lane Smith. Screenplay: William Roberts, based on articles by Tom Wolfe. Cinematography: George Silano. Art direction: Laurence G. Paull. Film editing: Robbie Roberts, Tom Rolf. Music: Charles Fox. 

All good actors act with their eyes, but I don't know anyone who is better at acting with the lower half of their face than Jeff Bridges. Which is to the good in The Last American Hero, because a lot of the film consists of Bridges as Junior Jackson behind the wheel of a race car, his eyes covered with goggles and only the thin slit of his mouth and the determined jut of his jaw visible. But Bridges is also called on to suggest desire (mouth softened, jaw less firmly set), defiance (mouth tense, jaw forward), and defeat (mouth downturned, jaw in retreat). This is not to say that the eyes as well as the voice don't come into play. Bridges has a tour de force scene in the middle of the picture when Junior steps into a record-your-voice booth (a fixture made obsolete by, among other things, the cell phone) to compose an oral letter home to his family, each person -- his disapproving mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald), his supportive brother (Gary Busey), and his incarcerated father (Art Lund) -- receiving an appropriate message as the play of emotions is reflected on his face. There's also a lovely aw-shucks moment when Junior, the hillbilly in the flatlands, deals with the desk clerk in a hotel; Bridges never lapses into caricature in the scene. This also seems to say that Bridges dominates the film, which isn't quite true, since the ensemble consists of not only such skilled character players as Fitzgerald, Busey, and Lund, but also Valerie Perrine as Marge, the racing groupie who adds Junior to her list of racing stars she has bedded, Ned Beatty as Junior's first promoter, and Ed Lauter as the promoter who tries to milk Junior of all the cash he can earn. The film's title comes from the profile of racer Junior Johnson that Tom Wolfe wrote for Esquire in 1965, but it feels a bit misleading. There's nothing particularly heroic about Junior Jackson. (The name and many of the biographical details in Wolfe's article were changed, though Johnson himself served as a consultant and technical advisor on the film.) It's less a biopic than an entertaining dip into an American subculture, somewhat glossy in presentation and memorable mostly for its performances. 

[childabusesurvivor]

Sharing - Peer-on-Peer Abuse: What can be done when kids hurt kids?

New Post has been published on https://www.childabusesurvivor.net/reviews/2023/08/01/sharing-peer-on-peer-abuse-what-can-be-done-when-kids-hurt-kids/

Sharing - Peer-on-Peer Abuse: What can be done when kids hurt kids?

I write somewhat often about the truth, and my displeasure at groups who try and use child abuse stories to focus on either misleading, or completely fabricated, information they are sharing. There are those who disagree with me, who think that any story that raises awareness of child abuse is a positive. They point to conspiracy theories about mole people, elitists drinking the blood of children, or even celebrities who aren’t really dead and say, “well so long as people are paying attention to child abuse”. Or, maybe they don’t share made up stories but overly focus, or even make movies, about one particular type of abuse that at the expense of other, much more common, forms of abuse. Sometimes, yes, they even make movies about them.

As I’ve said elsewhere, we’ve raised entire generations to be afraid of creepy looking men in mall parking lots, but forget to warn them about the people they already know, when we know that somewhere around 90% of sexual child abuse is at the hands of someone the child, and family, already knows.

This article from Childhelp also reminds us of something else we too often forget to warn them about. Each other. We’ve been so busy telling them what to look for in strangers that maybe we’ve forgotten about kids being bullied and physically attacked by their peers, sexually assaulted by older children, subject to teen dating violence. Perhaps it would help to understand the effects:

“The immediate and long-term impact of peer abuse overlaps with many of the impacts of abuse perpetrated by adults. Adults have an important role to prevent abuse among children and help children know they can reach out for help to stop abuse and find support.”

There’s no real difference. I should know. I was sexually abused by an older minor. There was no creepy old man, only an older and bigger kid who threatened me. Someone in my own family. Mall parking lots, school, and our neighborhood park weren’t the places where I was not safe, my family was.

And I had no way to tell anyone, because I wasn’t taught about that being child abuse. Only strange men in white vans giving out candy abused children. Whatever was happening in my family wasn’t to be discussed with anyone. It wasn’t, and it went on for years.

Maybe we should do better with understanding the ways kids abuse other kids, and talking openly about it. The link below can help.

https://www.childhelp.org/peer-on-peer-abuse-what-can-be-done-when-kids-hurt-kids/

#Abuse, #Family, #School, #Support

[sarcastic-salem]

I really, really, really want to be at the library right now cause I really, REALLY, REALLY want to be reading. But I have to finish doing the laundry first. Which I put off because I REALLY do not want to see Library Guy. Who I am no longer annoyed with.

I just have absolutely no desire to see him again because I feel somewhat humiliated and somewhat mislead. After scouring the internet, I have determined that while he may have had — this has not been confirmed — an attraction to me he had no interest in pursuing a romantic relationship with me. I’m basing this off of my with past relationships, about a million articles and videos on how to tell if someone likes you, and my friends’ thoughts on the matter. I’ve been careful to take their thoughts with a grain of salt, however, because my friends are also ND.

And I’m not 100% sure if they have better social skills, regarding NTs than I do. I mean, a lot of them probably do but there are some who I’ve noticed do not. I don’t hold this against them. I’ve been using to google to learn how to apologize “properly” and now I’m confused about whether or not its appropriate for me to preface potentially triggering posts with an apology.

Cause I’m not about to censor myself on MY social account. Which is a public forum. Especially on FB where you can silence people for like a month or stop seeing their posts completely or blah blah blah. Idk.

At this point, I have decided to have no to social interactions with Library Dude outside of the public library. But we remain friends on FB. Which I might delete cause I’m getting tired of Zuck’s shit.

[anthropologistfromentropy]

Adding my friend's article related to this. The title is somewhat misleading, it's really about Georgian queer history going back hundreds of years.

(He also wrote an article about Chinese queer history. I can add it or DM it to you if you want, just didn't want to distract from the topic)

hi if ur unaware georgia 🇬🇪 (where i live) has officially banned gay marriage, gay ‘propaganda’, gender reassignment surgery and anything ’promoting’ it. a trans model, kesaria abramidze, has been murdered as a direct consequence of this legislation. if you have a queer georgian in your life pls let them know they are loved and let this solidify why we Need pride and hope cause jesus fuck man