for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

The problem with saying "Frankenstein is about [X]" is the same as saying "Dracula is about [X]"- these books are not fables, they are novels. They do certainly draw from their author's lives and the cultural zeitgeist around them, so you could say Frankenstein is about:

All of those things were surely on Mary Shelley's mind when she wrote Frankenstein, consciously or unconsciously. The book is about all of these things, and also it's about an entirely fictional scenario.

One thing that comes up again and again in critical theory regarding Gothic literature is its “excessive meaning.”

In other words, there is no singular reading of a Gothic text.

does anyone else think that its crazy (remembers i’m in discourse time-out this week) how the wind blowing thru the grass is so common yet so beautiful. one of many marvelous experiences in this wonderful life

A friend of mine is in a similar situation. She had trouble conceiving after three years of trying and all she heard from gynecologists was "lose weight". Then when she went back complaining about month long periods and debilitating cramps, and they insisted she had to lose weight and take medication for hypothyroidism.

Things got so bad she had to be admitted and it turns out she has stage 3 uterine cancer. Advanced enough she can't go through surgery without chemo and radiation. I am so angry on her behalf I want to rip the throats of all her doctors with my bare teeth.

When we say fat phobia kills this is what we mean. Medical neglect kills people and leaves people on the brink of death. It's not us being too sensitive. Real human people suffer and die from this.

I'm so disgusted how often I hear about this exact. scenario. of a fat person going to a trusted medical "professional" about a problem, the doctor blaming their weight for months or even years, and then finally somebody does the most basic test and realizes the fat person has cancer. So many horrific deaths have been caused this way. I also have to hear fatphobes try to pretend fatness causes cancer. Gee, I wonder why fat people have a high cancer rate? /s

If you're fat and need help from somebody in the medical field, you'll probably have the same result or better by just not going to the doctor, and that's fucked up. I still remember somebody telling me about their doctor accidentally giving them chemotherapy and then dismissing the harm they enacted on the fat person because "at least the chemotherapy helped you lose weight! 😊"

And yet despite all of this, I still have "progressive" people with pride flag icons call me "land whale" in their replies and send me asks saying "You want to be oppressed so bad, don't you?" The gall to deny the oppression of a group of people who get killed on the daily by bigots.

-Mod Worthy

"i would kill a pedophile to protect my child" ok but would you teach your child how to say no? even to adults? even to adults you like? would you teach your child the words "penis" and "vulva" and then use them? would you let them ask questions about their body? would you answer them honestly? would you learn how to cope with your feelings when you talk about human bodies, so they don't feel ashamed? would you set a positive example for how you talk about your body? would you tell your child they don't have to hug or kiss anyone? would you tell your family the same? would you stand by them when they refuse to hug someone? even someone you know has never done anything to hurt them? would you let your child avoid food they don't like? would you let you child avoid people they don't like? would you believe them? would you sit in the discomfort of not knowing all the answers and not take it out on them? would you love your child the same if someone did hurt them? would you make them feel valued just as they are? would you let them talk to doctors or nurses in private? would you let them express their feelings? would you show interest in their life? would you let your child say no to you? would you help your child feel safe coming to you when they make a mistake? would you apologize to your child? would you believe them? would you put aside your anger to focus on what would make your child feel safe and loved? would you put your ego aside for your child? would you take your child's concerns seriously? would you listen to your child? would you believe them?

its a cliche but im a slut for when a character is introduced as super chill and goofy and then you later find out theyre chill and goofy because theyre too powerful to be touched. the level 100 wizard whos already figured out everything and is just vibing now. big fan.

as a former escape room host i highly recommend doing an escape room as a first date. its a great way to learn how ppl react under pressure and how well they collaborate with you right off the bat. also more than once ive seen people enter an escape room as a couple and exit broken up LOL its a fantastic litmus test

sorry to broadcast ur tags but this is also a valuable part of the litmus test! it seems like you learned a lot about how this person makes you feel in their social group. they didn't go out of their way to include you, and neither did their friends. therefore you can come to a pretty good conclusion about how you might feel being part of their life outside of an escape room; someone who doesnt include you or your feelings in a game is likely going to do the same in other situations

Fanfiction exists for TWO reasons:

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

I am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

Yes some languages like French or Thai or Japanese have nonsensical or weird spelling but you can already read English so you should be used to that by now

Look at Thai. This script is very old. Many of these sounds don’t exist like that anymore. Do not panic. You know how to read knife. You are battle hardened already.

Japanese kanji have many different sound and meaning. Too many. However, you can already deal with things that don’t make sense. You have conquered deer and dear. You have learned to deal with phishing and fishing. You can do this.

French have many silent letters, but so do we. Grab French by the throat. Choke it to death to assert dominance.

Choking the French language to death to assert dominance is the most British thing I’ve heard (affectionate)

What did you just call me

there is something magical about watching people writing English to complain about spelling in other languages, though, isn't there?

Brotherhood of The Orb

There are ten trillion pictures of flowering trees to the point where they sometimes seem trite and overdone. But then you see a tree in full flower and go holy shit this rules and I've gotta show this to everyone so they can experience the same magic and wonder and there are ten trillion and one pictures of flowering trees

Love not having a ”””fandom””” specific blog. Something new will just consume my mind and everyone has to accept it. My house

"I CANT HANDLE THIS" *handles this*

"I CANT TAKE ANOTHER DAY" *takes another day*

do you ever tell people you’ll be going to sleep but then you don’t and you have to not do anything noticable online for the sake of it seeming as if you didn’t lie to them

the last time i got sloppy with this @tinynaught Columbo’d me

this post is classic tumblr in a lot of ways but the one I appreciate the most is that the second post happened eleven years after the first one. one of these days I’m going to see a reply to a post by someone younger than the post itself and we’re all just going to have to deal with it

oh so we're doing scooby doo crimes now