holy quaternity

let's reintroduce "rude" to the lexicon no that person is not evil or morally bankrupt or even your enemy they're just being rude

no one:

someone who got a C+ in their sophomore history class: They never taught us any of this in school.

Ok, so I am now watching the full 18 minute video on YouTube and it's amazing.

Especially the line "I realised I have absolutely no idea how to teach an octopus piano."

I need everyone to see the update on Mattias' yt community tab

@crowscriven ocean creature for you

It's hard to say this without sounding like a right wing dickhead, but the thing about progressive spaces is that they may naturally attract people who are always on the lookout for excuses to start a fight. Like you can find yourself faced with someone whose political outrage is totally justified, and whose humanitarian ideals are right on the money, but simultaneously they are carrying a ton of psychological baggage about being wronged and getting revenge, and they will exploit literally any opportunity to live out this psychodrama with anyone in their line of vision. I have thought of several related anecdotes since I started typing this post, but I'll limit myself to the thing that inspired it, which is that I just visited this ultra-lefty cafe/bike shop/community gathering space where I've heard that the proprietor is constantly in a fight with everyone around her. When I paid for my stuff I noticed that there was no tip option, but I thought I had heard something about this, so I snuck away to look at the website and it made me really glad I didn't ask! I think there should have been a really enticing and exciting way for her to say "I've decided to be the change I want to see in the world, so I'm paying my baristas a full living wage, I'm making sure EVERYONE feels welcome and comfortable here, and I'm selling products I believe in!" -- but instead all the web copy sounded more like "You're either with me or against me, you're a fucking piece of shit asshole if you can't handle the inclusive atmosphere here, and by the way tipping is for fascist cavemen and if you ever try to tip someone you are refusing to relate to them authentically and you are enforcing a dangerous and evil power dynamic that should be purged from human society (so therefore I pay my staff well)." Like everything she stood for was totally agreeable, but why did she have to put it like it was directed at her worst enemy, rather than at the kinds of people she wants to attract? If the word on the street is to be believed, the reason for this posturing is that she spends quite a lot of energy making as many enemies as possible, and she probably likes it that way. I guess I'm just reminding myself, and perhaps others, that while one might think of "politics" as being broadly social and theoretical, no individual can fully separate the political from the intimately personal. Even somebody who seems to want to uplift and protect their fellow humans may be getting some perverse inner satisfaction out of that valiant crusade, and you may never realize it until you find yourself in a confusing fight with them.

I ran a LARP for a few years explicitly aimed at being queer friendly and accessible, and eventually cut it short mainly for this exact reason. You wouldn’t believe the amount of abuse my staff and I took for reasons that felt genuinely insane. I got called ableist for telling someone they couldn’t be invincible in my game of make believe, more than once. Defended myself, multiple Jewish players, and a conversion student from accusations of antisemitism based on alleged lore we’d never written / suggested / that simply and plainly did not exist in game. Had a staffer try to talk to someone about how a joke she made was uncomfortable only for this person to retaliate in epic proportions full white woman crocodile tears style, trying to get this staffer removed and eventually escalating into a full public hate campaign when she didn’t get her way. All that’s still just the tip of the iceberg.

Progressive spaces are naturally populated by traumatized people, and unfortunately trauma makes people more difficult. (I’m not excluded in that. No one is.) Running a progressive space is doubly difficult because a lot of left-facing trauma was inflicted by authority, so you’re setting yourself up to be the windmill that someone tilts their displaced rage at. I don’t really know what the solution is, but I do know that this is one of the huge reasons it’s so hard to find community: the people with a bone to pick can’t reach the ones who actually hurt them, but they’ll sure find you along the way, and the safer they feel around you the safer they’ll feel coming after you.

i've made a point that i will never join a serious hobby space that primarily defines itself by its politics, because invariably they explode in short order as everyone inside starts treating whoever runs the place as a ruling class to overthrow, and all discussion collapses into figuring out an exacting definition of their ideology so they can work out who to exclude

i write fiction on a web forum, and for a few years i'd get a DM every few months from somebody leaving to make That Web Forum But Leftistly, and then a few months later I'd learn how that effort exploded.

political spaces are important! but when your social club defines itself by its politics, it rapidly becomes about the politics of who is allowed in the social club. this isn't to say you have to tolerate hate, but a community which can't function in the presence of relatively small and civil disagreement is a bomb waiting for the fuse to be lit

The prompt was ‘detention.’

reblogging with cute tags that make me happy <3

NEVER GIVE UP even though most people see their ships on this piece because the characters faces arent visible, this artwork sent SO MANY people looking for who the characters were, reading my comics, sending me asks, and falling in love with Sully and Caro just like me. It's been an amazing ride. DO IT! Post your ocs!

xoxo raptorjules

Always embarrassing realizing you don't know basic facts about your friends. Like yeah hey, here's this person I love dearly, I've known them for 23 years, we've been through so much together. They're currently working in a lab.... developing... medicine? and also getting a PhD. I think. Don't ask me what subject.

I get real "I'm at soup" vibes from some media crit

"All YA books are about vampires" you are looking at the supernatural romance shelf in a WHSmith. "All hip hop is misogynistic" have you considered listening to a female rapper. "All classic books are boring stories about straight white men" you are reading classic books by straight white men. "OFMD was the first time I saw a gay person on television" I don't even know how this happened but it's on you

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Actual answer: the sheep know the dogs are not sheep, and they also know the dog is protecting them and take their cues from the dog about whether they need to run for the barn or can just ignore anything scary that approaches.

However, a friend once had an extremely premature orphan lamb born in December who had to live in the house for a couple of months with leg braces and all that, who due to spending her lambhood with dogs instead of sheep came out of the whole experience convinced she was a livestock guardian dog! She would patrol the perimeter of the fields every evening with the actual dog, stand watch in the barn door at night like the dog, and was more than willing to throw down if she saw something scary coming towards the flock the way the guard dog did. Tragically orphaned lamb did a convincing job at being a guard dog without actually having any of the biological advantages a dog has over a sheep.

Which I suppose made her Sheep Batman.

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.

As someone who has been on the Internet longer than many of you have been alive, I cannot emphasise enough what a good idea it is to block fools, bores, and drama-starters ON SIGHT. That means, on the FIRST sight. See the take, do not wait.

You are not a court of law. You are not required to hear them out, argue, nor give them a second chance. Block them. Nothing bad will happen to them without you! It's fine! Goodbye forever! Prevention is better than cure.

My fellow aunties will be with me on this.

Block without remorse and skip away knowing freedom and peace

Internet literacy, if it looks like a scam or a troll, It´s usually a scam or a troll, block on sight. If they´re sending you weird AI-ish images, or they want to "talk in private" just block them.

i will never forgive the internet for making the phrase “fiction affects reality” inherently suspicious because like fiction absolutely does affect reality in the sense that the themes and messages of media can challenge or affirm people’s biases, it can impact one’s ideology, so much of fiction is commentary on real social issues

and yet! everyone who uses the phrase fiction affects reality is using it as a pro-censorship argument and i simply do not fuck with that

I think the absolute worst term to come out of this age of pseudo-scientific puritanical bullshit has got to be “dopamine addiction”. “You’re addicted to feeling good and having fun” bitch yeah???? What else are we on this earth to do??

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)

This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.

My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.

The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.

as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.

thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.

Boosting signal.

Echoes from the ancient human past, wonderful.

Their oral history also contains stories about hunting prehistoric megafauna too. Native Australians are the oldest existing culture on earth, which is even more amazing considering how hard the british tried to wipe it out.

Budji Bim volcano.

I actually looked up the story of The Seven Sisters / Pleiades on Wikipedia, the other day, 'cause I woke up from a dream that mentioned how ancient that story was. And I wanted to check how much of that was invented in-dream, and how much I was remembering something I learned while I was awake.

According to that article, some astronomers think that story is not ten thousand years old; they believe it to be a Hundred Thousand years old.

hey it’s ok if you lost your ai virginity back when you were uneducated. a lot of posts go like “reblog if you have never ever used generative ai and never ever will!!!” but it’s ok if you have used gen ai before and it’s even ok if you used to think it was cool, back before you understood what it really was and how it worked, either because no one had taught you about it and you discovered it on your own or because the only education you had received about it was from the tech bros. you’re not a burger with a bite out of it for having used ai. ok

It is 100 percent okay to stop using it today and join the "boo AI" club.

This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.

Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.

You can stop using character.ai today. You can say "I listened to the facts and stopped." And another thing: don't you think it's a bit more impactful to have used it, stopped, and then you're in a position to say how little it helped? How doing things for yourself improved your life?

also posts in the spirit of "if you've used AI even ONCE your soul is tainted!!!!" can't be great to those with OCD

y'all I used to mess with generative AI all the time back in like 2020-2021 before chatgpt was a thing and it generated entertaining nonsense

i had a paid subscription to inferkit for my amusement. it was a whole thing

Thing is. Since I played with LLM's back when they were in their early stages. I know how they work. specifically i am intimately aware of why they aren't, and can't be, "intelligent," and why there's no way they could possibly work well for the tasks they are being used for

you see, the earlier models offered sliders to manipulate the amount of "randomness" in the result and how the "randomness" was applied. Set the sliders low, you get endless loops of repeating words and sentences; set the sliders high, and you get nonsense gobbledeygook

furthermore, chatGPT has a sort of framing device where all the outputs are formatted in "person talking to another person" form; earlier models didn't use this and they just generated "more" of whatever you input

it made it very hard to miss that it is a statistically likely sentence assembling machine

i tried chatgpt when it first came out and i was like wow. i can't do anything to manipulate the result? this is stupid.

of course that was on purpose because if you give users any insight into how the responses are being assembled, the illusion of it being like, intelligent and able to talk to you falls apart.

No, seriously, do NOT.

Feeling dirty and grimy for extended periods of time is extremely draining on the mental well-being of humans. Psychological studies prove it is detrimental to our self-esteem and contentment. And no wonder; we are animals--homo sapiens, a kind of ape--that instinctively places high importance on personal grooming. Like monkeys and cats and birds in a zoo, one of the best ways to make us feel sad ... is to make us feel gross to ourselves.

So here's an easy saying from my therapist/zookeeper:

"If you feel like you hate the world, eat something.

If you feel like the world hates you, get some sleep.

If you feel like you hate yourself, take a shower.

You will probably feel much better."

Do all three at once to become the perfect life form

Whoa! Is this where @redgoldsparks ‘ comic comes from?

Yes this is the source of the text!

sometimes i wonder if we have forgotten that sharing creative work is, fundamentally, a bid for human connection. like I'm not posting art or fic for 'engagement' i'm posting it looking for other sickos to play with! i'd be making it anyway for my own gratification because there's something wrong with me, i'm sharing it hoping we can have something wrong with us together <3