I just got described as an “ad hating commie” by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff
I completely understand the impulse to structure one’s headcanons such that every significant role is filled by a named character from the media in question, but when any sort of medical treatment is involved you’ve gotta bear in mind that 80% of the time the only qualified physician in the core cast is going to be a morally bankrupt mad scientist whose canon exploits make Victor Frankenstein look like the amateur he is. You want Ethics-Violation von Warcrime over there prescribing your blorbo’s HRT? Really? Really?
Hey has tumblr heard about the Chase “Infinite Money glitch” debacle from tiktok yet because
I cannot believe
I cannot believe that people actually tried this
And even less can I believe that they’re going full Karen to Chase customer service workers. Like you did check fraud. You did a crime. You don’t get to complain about the consequences.
Wait like some people don’t know
So there was a glitch in Chase’s check deposit system. Usually when you cash a check, only a fraction of the full amount is available to you immediately until the check clears. The glitch made it so you could cash a checks full amount right away no matter how big.
So. People were writing themselves massive checks and immediately withdrawing cash they technically didn’t have and then closing their bank account. They were calling it an “infinite money glitch” like it’s the Sims or something.
But it’s not like a cheat code that was suddenly discovered. It’s just check fraud. It’s just straight up a felony. And a good chunk of them filmed themselves doing it.
So people are waking up finding they’re in the negative however many thousands of dollars they pulled.
What BAFFLES me is that people are calling Chase demanding their accounts be reopened, demanding their money back. Work from home Chase agents have shared the calls they’ve been getting from people angry they’re in the red. Like it’s not your money anymore, love, you STOLE it and they took whatever you had originally to try to pay the balance back!! That’s not yours anymore!
People are being SNIPPY on tiktok when people tell them that they did a CRIME. This one lady was like “you don’t know the law, my lawyer knows the law” and it’s like honey! Your lawyer is going to do his fuckin best but you did a crime and then you FILMED YOURSELF. You’re going to jail! Now is the time to start practicing what my therapist calls radical acceptance!
So that’s the tea on the money glitch. Most banks are giving them 30 days to pay the amount back but some people I’ve heard are already being arrested.
Last November, we did an informal game jam for folks who wanted to write something for Writing Month, but would prefer to write fewer than fifty thousand words of it. You can find the complete list of participants for that event in this post here. There’s also an off-Tumblr archive of entries whose authors gave permission for them to be preserved here, if any of those links turn out to be broken.
Last year’s collaboration went over well enough that I thought we might dust it off again this year. To be clear, this is just for fun – it’s not a curated jam, and nobody’s judging winners or handing out prizes..
If you’d like to throw your hat in, just follow these steps:
Step 1: If you’re unfamiliar with 200-word RPGs, read a bunch of last year’s entries (linked above) or browse the 200 Word RPG Challege archives at https://200wordrpg.github.io/ to get your brain-meats properly configured.
Step 2: Write your own 200-word RPG. If you’re not sure whether you have 200 words or not (and with RPGs it can genuinely be difficult to tell!), you can use the word counter at https://200wordrpg.github.io/wordcount to check.
Step 3: Reblog this post and append your 200-word RPG.
Step 4 (optional): Please indicate in your post whether you’re okay with having your 200-word RPG archived off-site for posterity – if you don’t say anything one way or the other, I’ll assume the answer is “no”.
(As before, as a courtesy to anyone who’s creeping the notes, please restrict non-200-word-RPG commentary to replies and tags until November 2023 is over – let’s make the actual games easy to find!)
A Game of Titans: A Play-by-post GMed Godgame
Foreword: Order of Play
GM posts game, solicits signups.
Players submit actions.
GM resolves all actions in a batch. If a player has not submitted an action, their turn is skipped.
Repeat from 2.
Signups A player signs up by submitting a name and description for their Titan.
Actions At the start of play, the universe is an infinite void. Each Titan can act exactly once per turn (a few decades). There is no limitation on how large-scale an action may be, although Titans are invulnerable and an action must be reasonably construed as a single action. However, the chaotic power of Titans is unreliable and difficult to focus. To resolve an action, roll 1d4, add 2 if the area affected by the action is larger than a moon, subtract 2 if it’s smaller than a metropolis, and look up the result below.
3+: Straightforward success. 2: Success with cataclysmic side effects. 1-: Failure accompanied by a cataclysmic display of overkill.
Other Beings Titans may create lesser beings for one reason or another. If they exist, they do one thing sufficiently prominent to draw the Titans’ attention each turn, which is determined by the GM.
Continuing the theme of abuse blogging today, earlier I saw a post talking about the phenomenon of wanting to outlaw things (types of media or depiction of certain topics mostly) because “they can be used to groom” or “were used to groom (me/someone I know)”
And I don’t want to air my personal trauma on op’s post, but like they said, anything can be used to groom, because the problem isn’t The Thing Itself but the motivations of the groomer
It’s like that posts about wooden sailing ships where people keep saying “hope you like scurvy” or “weren’t these used in the slave trade” as if somehow the ships themselves caused those things to happen
Literally anything can be used to groom. Any topic. Any interest. Any object. Abstract concepts like ‘relationships.’
My dad groomed me by:
1) being my parent and having constant and unlimited access to + control over me from birth, the ability to define reality and normalcy for me, and enjoying a bunch of social conventions that meant anything he did to me was basically seen as his business and no one else’s and the default assumption was that any intimate contact he had with me was harmless or necessary
(I can remember, as a child being taught about bad touching in school, thinking that “only your doctor or parents should touch you in these places” sounded an awful lot like an abusable loophole)
and that it would be worse to baselessly suspect or accuse him of abuse and be wrong than to let me be abused because there wasn’t proof
(It was in fact pretty fucking obvious and every so often I think about every single teacher, family member, and other adult in my life who saw how I was and did/said nothing, and how many of those adults actually seemed genuinely contemptuous of me for my Obviously Traumatized Child Symptoms And Behaviors, and am briefly overcome with rage)
And 2) being nicer to me than he was to my brother, treating me like I was special, and doing fun things like taking me on trips.
A lot of the things he said and did to me as a child were self-evidently abusive and dysfunctional, like outright telling me it was normal for parents to have favorites, not only playing me and my brother against each other for his affection but me and my mom, telling me he knew me better than I knew myself and could tell what I was thinking and feeling just by looking at me, making me into his personal therapist and constantly telling me in graphic detail about the abuse he suffered as a child + his history with drug use and abuse + his marital problems with my mom + his mental health issues + his sex life and sexual interests (this also functioned as a way of training me to keep secrets, because he’d tell me things he Wasn’t Supposed To so then I’d feel like we were co-conspirators and I was special and mature, etc etc)
but the fundamental thing underlying all of these specifics was making me feel special and uniquely loved by him, and then manipulating those feelings and that attachment in order to use me for his sexual as well as emotional gratification without having to worry about me fighting back, arguing, or telling anyone.
A lot of the stuff he did would have been otherwise normal if it wasn’t him doing it!
There’s nothing wrong with taking your kid on a business trip with you because you travel for work and it means they get to go all around the country and see places they might not have otherwise, if you’re not molesting that kid.
When I was very little, he had a ritual where every weekend he’d ask me to name three things I wanted to do that I’d never done before, and then we’d go do those things. That’s a great way of introducing your child to new experiences and bonding with them and making them feel like you love and value them and their thoughts, if you’re not molesting that kid.
So are we going to ban parents staying in hotels with their kids? Roadtrips? Daytrips?
I do think there are a lot of problems with the current nuclear family structure as well as the social and legal concepts of 'the family’ that make it much easier to abuse children and much harder for those children to get help, but the solution isn’t “no one should ever have a child because parents can abuse their kids”, it’s to create structures that make it harder to abuse kids with impunity and easier for abused kids to get help.
This is just one specific instance of abuse, but I think it’s illustrative of the flaw in the “ban all things that could plausibly be used to groom” reasoning. There isn’t a single thing or topic you could have banned that would have kept me from being groomed and abused.
The reason it happened is because my dad was a deeply dysfunctional person who ended up with access to two children who couldn’t leave and didn’t know any better, and the only thing that might have kept it from happening in the first place was if social support systems existed so that my mom hadn’t been so afraid of being a single mother when she got pregnant with me that she married him despite knowing it was a bad idea and being warned away by his own mother.
“If gross stuff that makes me uncomfortable stops existing, abuse will stop” is a child’s logic. You weren’t groomed because of porn or Twilight or incest fiction or shotacon hentai. You were groomed because a person decided to manipulate and abuse you using whatever tools they thought were most effective, and if those specific ones hadn’t been available they would have used something else. Blaming the material is like running into a door and blaming it for being there.
Your Reminder that “AI” Will Just Flat-Out Make Things Up
I asked Bard, Google’s AI, the name my upcoming novel, and also (as a test, because I haven’t publicly announced the title), the title of the novel after that. Bard correctly noted the name of the next novel (Starter Villain) and correctly noted I hadn’t publicly named the novel after that. But then, unprompted, it confabulated the following:
Fun fact! Decibel is a logarithmic scale. This means an increase of 10 dB is a doubling in strength.
It’s impossible to get a sound louder than about 200 dB on Earth: this is because a soundwave is a series of peaks and troughs of air compression, and around 200 dB you hit COMPLETE VACUUM in the troughs.
So, decibels are a measure of energy.. 400 dB is around 10^28. By the Atomic Rockets Boom Table, the dinosaur-killer impact was merely 10^23.
400 dB is “all the oceans flash boil off the planet and then the crust melts”. This rabbit just destroyed all life on earth with a noise equivalent to an exaton of TNT. Aliens on pluto are getting woken up going “what the fuck was that light?”
Edit: 10 dB difference is a factor of 10 increase, not 2. Whoops.
so, instead of 2^40, it’s 10^40, which is to say, it’s 5^40 larger than you thought… so the good news is, you dont’ have to worry about the oceans boiling, because there’s no planet, or indeed solar system, for them to boil in.
ALT
