proposing what I'm going to call Gaylor's Razor, which is: never explain normal shit as being part of a secret message that can only be decoded by over-analysis.

"These Taylor Swift lyrics are actually coded messages saying that she's a lesbian and is forced to stay in the closet! Any lyrics that are clearly about being attracted to a man are just to throw us off the scent!" Sometimes people, like Taylor Swift, are straight and write about being straight, because they are straight.

"The fourth series of Sherlock was deliberately bad because it was actually a coded message to us fans that there is a secret fourth episode that will make Johnlock canon and will actually be good!" Sometimes writers (even experienced writers who are normally good at their jobs) will write something that's not good, because no one is perfect. They're not going to waste everyone's time and money and energy creating something terrible on purpose as part of a grand master plan.

"Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dancers, are secretly married (with kids)! Their public relationships with people who are not each other and them repeatedly saying 'we dated as kids and now we're just friends' are just to hide the truth! Which they need to hide for some reason! Their relationship is obvious just from their physical chemistry when competing! JUST LOOK AT THIS TWO SECOND CLIP OF HIM BLINKING AT HER!" It seems counterproductive to put all that thought into hiding a relationship that doesn't need to be hidden but then also telegraph that same relationship in front of millions of people through planned choreography.

"But BB, what about times that people really are speaking in code or hiding something due to outside influences?"

Trying to apply fandom meta analysis techniques to real life is a really good way of fall into conspiratorial thinking that can be easily exploited. You can totally try to predict what's going to happen in a story or choose to interpret a scene in a specific way; you can't do that in real life with real people. That way lies the kind of nonsense that leads to shit like "this image of pizza on a children's toy is actually subliminal messaging by The Cabal™ that proves that Pizzagate is real."

bringing this back for the stranger things homies

see i just don't think mlm ships work with good luck babe because i think that song operates on both the axes of being gay but ALSO being a woman. "when you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / with your head in your hands you're nothing more than his wife" is such a harrowing line because women are socially only defined in their relations to men instead of as their own people especially after marriage (taking his last name, changing your prefix, the physical cost and emotional labor of having children...); women often become relegated to wives and mothers whereas men are afforded agency and personhood outside of their marriages. the line from the song doesn't work for mlm couples because men are very rarely nothing more than a woman's husband no matter how "suffocating" men make marriage seem

Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me

what gets me is that if everyone woke up tomorrow and went ohhh the weight loss industry is EVIL evil like killing and disabling people for profit including children who don't have medical rights evil, and was always an evil scam, and everyone in the industry woke up tomorrow and publicly apologized for being evil and donated every cent they had to helping people recover and their companies dissolved and blew up and every medical doctor woke up tomorrow and went ohhhh shit of course that was wrong and unhealthy for everyone, i have to go apologize and fix what ive done to all my fat patients, and every weight loss supplement turned into pure clear water and every weight scam business location exploded and was instantly transformed into a green park and playground and library and shelter, and everyone was suddenly awakened to the reality like a dancing plague had suddenly passed. if all that happened the industry could disappear tomorrow and literally nothing of value would be lost. at all. there is literally nothing good or redeeming about any of this. its pure shit. its entirely evil.

You can cut past like 90% of gender essentialism by shifting from "men are like X because they're men, and women are like Y because they're women" to "people are held to different standards, given different amounts of criticism, grace, encouragement etc based on positionality and they change and grow as a result."

Guys if you want queer shit written by queers on our own terms you're going to have to start seeking out weird independent media. I'm sorry that's the only place you can regularly find it idk what to tell you, we can't keep acting like there's nothing if we're not getting blockbusters and triple A titles or whatever it is we're waiting around for. The thing you keep saying you want is already being offered for free by one person making a passion project on the internet and you would both benefit enormously if you interacted with it instead of lamenting that the only options we have for representation are pandering afterthoughts from corporate shit

I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.

And u know a side effect of learning about scam artists is that you start to understand certain things about economics, and just how STUPID these systems are and how easily they are taken advantage of....and I'd much rather people gained a passing familiarity with economics than whatever armchair psychologist shit these true crimers get on. We need fewer people who think they're experts on "sociopaths" and more people who understand how people like Elizabeth Holmes and the WeWork guy were able to do what they did

Here are some of my favorite books about financial scams:

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).

The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.

And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.

Enjoy!

I want to add, if you’ve got access to it, the BBC Radio 4 series (or podcast) “Scam Secrets” is a fascinating look into scams that are currently running.

OP has a point about capitalism, but actually I want to reblog this as someone who recently answered the phone to a scammer and say: we need true crime to make people more vigilant in their personal lives. You're at way more risk from an unknown number calling you than from anyone slicing your Achilles' tendons as you walk through a parking lot. I don't care so much about the people scammed by Elizabeth Holmes but I do care about worried and confused senior citizens buying thousands of dollars in gift cards because they think they need to help their grandson who's in trouble in another state.

Seconding this. There’s also a lot of crossover between scams and cults, which are also useful for people to be aware of. “Oh I’m not religious so I’d never fall for a cult” “oh I’m smart and savvy I’d never join a cult” oh boy do I have some fun stuff to tell you about cults.

Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Lynn Paulson is a great intro to MLMs!

GenAI v. not GenAI round up.

So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.

Pro GenAI websites/Programs:

Neutral ground:

Strong positions against AI:

Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.

LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)

Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.

yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.

Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.

Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.

Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.

Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.

Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.

Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.

Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.

Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)

Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.

Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.

Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)

Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.

But you need a pro website...

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

which will poison the algorithm

Take Away:

The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.

And why not help that along?

I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.

You can add Procreate to the anti AI list. They have vowed time and time again when people ask that they will not use AI in their software.

Will also add that elllipsus has options for sharing work with Betas and getting comments in-line wjth the text, a lot like google docs does.

I know a lot of writers stick to gdocs for thaf specific feature but you dont have to!

Reblog if you will never. Ever. Use AI in your writing.

perfection

by @ toolbburs (no pronouns in bio).

Obsessed with how Will Graham showed up to work twitching, trembling, and visibly distressed, and the entire department is like “This is Will, he just does this sometimes, he’s in perfect shape to go look at some mutilated corpses”

I’ve been thinking a bit about Harry Potter again and specifically why it feels so different to me from other bad things I’ve enjoyed.

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

I don’t think I can be trusted to ever study this particular knife objectively ever again. Because I’ve seen what it can do. I’ve seen where it’s pointed. I can’t really have rational academic thoughts while I’m watching that.

Some other post on here said the appropriate comparison to JKR isn't your garden variety Author Doing/Writing Bad Things but rather Elon Musk.

The content and quality of the work isn't even really the point anymore; the point is we have a rich powerful person publicly and ostentatiously saying and doing bad things and taking encouragement from their own popularity.

Maybe it's fastidiousness, maybe it's virtue signaling, maybe it's 'make the change you want to see'. But, if I were going to buy a car it wouldn't be a Tesla, and I don't engage in Harry Potter fandom anymore, and those choices are for roughly the same reason.

my research of the eastern US coast shows that many of the citizens have a 3rd parent whom they refer to as "Wawa"