#what kind of culture allows it

[fandomsandfeminism]

On Saturday, in New York, a group of friends pulled into a strangers driveway to turn their car around. The homeowner came outside, shot at them, and killed one of the 20 year old women in the car.

Last Thursday, in Kansas City, a 16 year old boy ended up at the wrong address by mistake trying to pick up his younger siblings. He rang the doorbell. The homeowner shot him in the head. He is, miraculously, alive and recovering.

Yesterday, in Texas, a group of high school cheerleaders stopped at a grocery store on their way home. One of them opened the door to the wrong car by mistake, realized her mistake, and quickly retreated and found her friends car nearby. The man in the car followed her and shot at the group. 2 were shot. One remains hospitalized.

In less than a week- 3 people, doing normal, nonmalicious, nonthreatening, everyday things. Turning around in a driveway, ringing the wrong doorbell, going up to the wrong car by mistake. And with no escalation, no warning, it turns to gun fire.

It's a terrible intersection of easy access to firearms and an entitlement to use violence against others. All 3 of these recent incidents were so unprovoked and unjustifiable, and the core thread remains the same.

A man who felt entitled to use violence and had the means to do so with a firearm.

I don't even know what to say.

[fvckw4d]

The concept of queerbaiting annoys me. I was told that it refers to a work of fiction pretending to cater to a queer audience but then pulling back from it to avoid alienating homophobes, which is an incredibly specific thing. But a lot of people seem to think that it instead means "any time there's any gay subtex, metaphor, or ambiguity" or "whenever something from 1995-2012 was being a normal amount of homophobic for the era."

[biohazard-inevitable]

It fucks me up so supremely that Astarion’s name means “little star” and its his child name- HE NEVER GOT TO CHOOSE HIS ADULT NAME AND IT FUCKS ME UP SO HARD-

[no-empathy-culture-is]

Low empathy culture is looking at the "no Endo" syscourse bullshit on here and being enough of an adult to point out that you're faking your disorder and don't deal with low empathy, you just want attention. Please give this blog to someone who it's relevant to rather than having it run by a shitty neurotypical who doesn't understand what it's like to have a real diagnosis.

You don't get to just decide you want to be mentally ill and diagnose yourself while faking symptoms. Fuck you, you don't deserve this page.

nonny what on earth makes you think i'm not diagnosed lmao

[tariah23]

Now he’s trying to lie when he literally tagged Princeton like 5 fucking time. White people are so evil, bro. They always know what they’re doing when they do shit like that. With the attempt to bring harm to Black people who they want to “get out of the way,” because they don’t think that we belong in the same spaces as them while at the same time, believing they should be allowed INTO our spaces and afforded hospitality and a whole red carpet rolled out. The sad thing is, she has connections to the industry because of her uncle and name so what if this was just a random Black woman who worked for Princeton without this kind of protection at all…?

[el3ctraaa]

One thing about me is that I genuinely want to get married one day because I love love love the idea of someone committing themselves to ONLY me forever and ever and ever and ever.

[count-asscrackula]

..breh

[merlinenilrem]

alright guys if i were to change my icon which one should it be to. ignore the different sizes & stuff i'm just asking about the style

[tetradic-echinoidea]

I've been contemplating a lot about why I don't enjoy fanfic or fandom much anymore, and the closest thing to an answer I've come up with is that most of the time it just doesn't have anything interesting to say about the source material. The reason I would go search for fic is because I crave more of what I just watched/read(that I thought had something interesting in it), or I crave somebody to tackle something that was hinted at in the subtext, or someone who has an unique point of view to the story. Someone who looked at it and thought: now this I have something to say about.

I don't bother reading fic for media I don't care for intensely, so a lot of the "fuck canon" kinda fic just feels very boring and run-of-the-mill stuff copy pasted from one fandom to another to me. There's no moral judgement in that, it's just that most of the people who write that kind of fic clearly write if for different reasons than why I want to write or read fic, and that happens to be the dominant current in fandom at the moment.

I love character focused stories, I love eroticism, I love stories written from a marginalized perspective or bringing that perspective into an existing story. I think a lot of people in fandom spaces agree with me. But I would argue that as much as fandom claims to be transformative, most of the actual content within it is not. Even if the act of creating something just out of your love for it is transformative, the "product" at the end might not be. It's quite common for fics to regurgitate the same tired tropes, the same bland descriptions of sex and character dynamics and kinks without really delving deeper than the surface of those things. Even within fandom people bringing in new ideas and challenging the set ways of tropes or opening discussion about it are very often shot down, people resisting change and deeper analysis of what they create, wanting to shut down their ears and yell that what they are doing is transformative, and therefore the mere idea of change is bad.

[technofeudalism]

every single comment on this post has been nuked by reddit.

per what reddit mods have said, they are apparently cracking down on anything glorifying Luigi Mangione or "promoting violence".

so we're absolutely clear on reddit's opinion of "promoting violence":

r/CombatFootage, which regularly shares high definition, extremely graphic war footage, including drones dropping grenades on prone soldiers in Ukraine/Russia and people having limbs being blown off by explosions, has 1,761,375 subscribers. It is one of the top 500 subreddits by subscribers and in the Top 60 NSFW subreddits.

The Columbine Shooters have a subreddit for discussing the Columbine Killers and their families with over 33,000 members. It has been active since May 5th, 2020.

The Sandy Hook shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 3,551 members. Here are some of the posts, in addition to pictures of him as a child. It has been active since December 3rd, 2021. he is also described by a mod of the subreddit as "not a pedophile, but an ephebophile."

The Pennsylvania Weis Markets shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 500~ members. It has been active since April 15th, 2022.

The Apalachee High School shooter has a subreddit dedicated to discussing him with 260~ users. It was created the day of the shooting, September 4th, 2024.

if you dig through the frequent contributors to these subreddits, you will find that the vast amount of crossover from the users occurs in communities such as r/teenagers, r/highschool, r/roblox and a wide variety of subreddits dedicated to self harm, severe mental health struggles and other mass killers or topics related to them. totally normal stuff that reddit allows.

this is without seeking out all of the alt-right rat nests that have buried themselves underneath somewhat innocuous-looking community names pushing dog whistles and avoiding overt calls for violence.

every last one of these social media platforms, including the one that we are on, overtly allows glorification and deification of the most notorious, mentally unwell, violent, extremist mass killers in modern history. but if you show any kind of approval of what Luigi Mangione is accused of doing, you are censored not in days, but hours.

i sincerely hope this opens the eyes of people who previously didn't see the forest for the trees. this is what is meant by “they got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war.” not that our cultures aren't significant or that we don't have differences, but that ultimately, the divide among us lies in wealth, not in skin color.

as long as the "poors" are killing each other, there's no reason for alarm or concern. it's only when the roles are reversed that we see action taken or examples made of people like Luigi Mangione.

[marypsue]

I desperately wish people would start actually reading the AO3's TOS before confidently making 'user guides' to the AO3 that are just blatantly, flatly wrong.

Yes the AO3 has banned content. They do not allow anything that's illegal under US law - though US law, importantly, does not ban fictional depictions of things - and they do not allow any commercial content. That includes your ko-fi link, or mentions that you do fic commissions. If you do post fic commissions to AO3 and want to mention the commissioner, the fic is a 'request' from the commissioner. This protects the AO3 and you from copyright law.

No the AO3 is not 'a creative fanfiction archive'. It is a fandom archive. Your meta, insights, and theories are absolutely welcome and encouraged there. AO3 also encourages you to post other types of fanworks, like fan videos, podfics, and art, but unfortunately isn't able to natively host those like it does text, so fic has kind of become what it's known for. That absolutely does not mean that other types of fanwork aren't allowed, or are discouraged by the site culture! Anybody who tells you otherwise is just plain wrong!

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

David Tennant interview at the British LGBT Awards, June 2024 (x)

Int: You being an ally to the community isn't something new. You've been doing it, but recently you've obviously really stepped up for trans and non-binary people in a time that's so, so needed. What made you do that?

David: I don't know that I feel like I've done anything that I wouldn't just sort of be normally doing. I mean, it's for me it's just common sense that there's there should be any suggestion that people aren't allowed to live the life they want to live and and to be who they want to be with and to express themselves wholeheartedly. I mean, as long as you aren't hurting anybody else, everybody else just needs to fucking butt out. I don't really understand why...

Int: ...it's controversial.

David: Yeah, there is and the thing... the thing, if there's something that's particularly sobering and depressing, it's that certain debates are being weaponized by certain elements of the political class, often for no... it seems it's not ideological so much as opportunistic. And I just think that's pretty disgusting, really.

Int: I couldn't agree more. What message would you like to send out to trans youth?

David: Please don't feel like you're not loved and that you're not accepted and that you're not... you know, most people in the world are good and kind and just want you to be able to be who you are. Most people in the world don't really care. I mean... you know what I mean?

Int: We're all narcissistic.

David: Exactly. Everyone's so self obsessed that really, the sort of noise that comes from a certain area of the press and of the political class is... it's a minority. It really is. And please don't let that make you feel diminished or dissuaded or discouraged, because, you know, you just... you have to be allowed to be yourself, and you are, and you are yourself and you must thrive and flourish, and we're all here for it.

Int: Amazing. I think, yeah, it's so important .I think sometimes it feels like there's so many people, but it is a minority. It's such a minority.

David: It's a tiny bunch of little whinging fuckers that are on the wrong side of history and they'll all go away soon.

Int: Like what happened with gay people 20 years ago.

David: When I was a kid, when I was a kid, exactly. You know, I was at school when Clause 28 came in and it all felt like being gay was something to be terrified of. And gay men in particular were demonised as paedophiles and now that just feels historic and ludicrous and, I mean, I don't see all those... all those battles aren't won, but we're in a very, very different place. And I feel like.I feel like history is on a progressive trajectory and it might get knocked sideways now and again by people for all sorts of reasons, which are often quite selfish and quite, as I say, not coming from a place of any sort of genuine belief system, but other than a place of opportunism. And that's something that we... I hope that in 20 years time, we're talking about, you know, these culture wars as something of the past.

Int: I believe we will. I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, so.

David: Oh, good, me too!

Int: You are my Doctor.

David: Oh, thank you very much.

Int: But recently, obviously, you came back for the 60th anniversary and you got to work with Yasmin Finney.

David: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Int: What was it like working with her?

David: Oh, she's brilliant. She's fantastic. Yeah. And she's in the show again now, she's back in it, so that's fantastic to see. She's lovely, talented, cool as a cucumber, articulate, brilliant. I learned a lot from her as an actor and also as someone who, you know, who's become a sort of de facto activist just because of who she is and where she is, and she becomes a sort of symbol of hope, and she's wonderful.

[leafkidsblog]

sometimes I tag something because I'm like "oh but what if someone doesn't like this because they see it as childish and they want to be able to filter it I should tag it".

like, have I seen my blog?

[bonediggercharleston]

I am very wary of people going "China does it better than America" because most of it is just reactionary rejection of your overlord in favor of his rival, but this story is 1. absolutely legit and 2. way too funny.

US wants to build an AI advantage over China, uses their part in the chip supply chain to cut off China from the high-end chip market.

China's chip manufacturing is famously a decade behind, so they can't advance, right?

They did see it as a problem, but what they then did is get a bunch of Computer Scientists and Junior Programmers fresh out of college and funded their research in DeepSeek. Instead of trying to improve output by buying thousands of Nvidia graphics cards, they tried to build a different kind of model, that allowed them to do what OpenAI does at a tenth of the cost.

Them being young and at a Hedgefund AI research branch and not at established Chinese techgiants seems to be important because chinese corporate culture is apparently full of internal sabotage, so newbies fresh from college being told they have to solve the hardest problems in computing was way more efficient than what usually is done. The result:

American AIs are shook. Nvidia, the only company who actually is making profit cause they are supplying hardware, took a hit. This is just the market being stupid, Nvidia also sells to China. And the worst part for OpenAI. DeepSeek is Open Source.

Anybody can implement deepseek's model, provided they have the hardware. They are totally independent from DeepSeek, as you can run it from your own network. I think you will soon have many more AI companies sprouting out of the ground using this as its base.

What does this mean? AI still costs too much energy to be worth using. The head of the project says so much himself: "there is no commercial use, this is research."

What this does mean is that OpenAI's position is severely challenged: there will soon be a lot more competitors using the DeepSeek model, more people can improve the code, OpenAI will have to ask for much lower prices if it eventually does want to make a profit because a 10 times more efficient opensource rival of equal capability is there.

And with OpenAI or anybody else having lost the ability to get the monopoly on the "market" (if you didn't know, no AI company has ever made a single cent in profit, they all are begging for investment), they probably won't be so attractive for investors anymore. There is a cheaper and equally good alternative now.

AI is still bad for the environment. Dumb companies will still want to push AI on everything. Lazy hacks trying to push AI art and writing to replace real artists will still be around and AI slop will not go away. But one of the main drivers of the AI boom is going to be severely compromised because there is a competitor who isn't in it for immediate commercialization. Instead you will have a more decentralized open source AI field.

Or in short:

[musical-chick-13]

I bring a real "Doctor x River OTP" vibe that a bunch of the DW fandom doesn't really like.