if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.
starter pack for when your third mutual twice removed will not stop posting about how mid heated rivalry is and how they do not understand why anyone would bother watching it when there are queer characters in shows that are completely different to HR in every way
"It's a pity that soulmate stories have never–" Yes they have.
Every year there's a new fifty thousand note post by someone who thinks they're the first ever person to think of subverting a genre they don't read.
Me when I go to post something on discord and/or tumblr.
flicking back through my procreate library what the fuck was this
authors notes: there is absolutely no one true meaning intended for this piece, but I guess my thoughts while making it were the plain, boring and literal way you talk about the world after seeing something traumatic , or the way things seem to lose all meaning and significance . and also the way you minimise an event to make it sound like it's not so bad , the way you remove detail from the memory.
like .. there is something over the river . there is something unspeakable over the river . when you recount it , you have to make it seem so small . it's just a body. the state the body is in can't be made out like this . you hide the details from yourself to forget how bad it really looked . you hide it in general - so insignificant you could miss it entirely ! it was just a body and The Something that killed it looming , and birds flying away .
and the world could be full of colour , but you can't see it that way any more . the grass is just grass . the trees are just trees . the fish in the river that's just a river are just fish , and that's just a body .
Also SPOILERS for anyone who wants the solution to the eye-spy:
This is a really excellent deep dive into AI water use and how a lot of discourse around it is at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately misleading.
A great example of how it's misleading is the NYT story about an AI datacenter causing local wells to dry up for residents, but the story is actually about the construction causing water issues - the datacenter wasn't active, hadn't been finished, and the construction could easily have been for a shipping hub or housing development. Framing "construction company did not do appropriate groundwater surveys and fucked up the water table" as "data centers guzzling up water" is extremely disingenuous.
The substack article I linked is quite long and quite technical, and if you're not interested in reading it John Green has made a video discussing the fact that there is a lot more nuance in the discourse around AI water use than the most vocal Pro-AI or Anti-AI people are interested in examining.
There are a lot of people who say that all AI use is theft. I think that's uncomplicatedly wrong, that if you're using "theft" the way that the DMCA uses "theft" you're wrong. For more on that, I'd recommend reading the "Expanding Copyright is not the Answer" section of @mostlysignssomeportents's adapted speech on AI criticism or the EFF's comments to the copyright office RE generative AI. (You should actually read both, and you should read Doctorow's article in full because it is a criticism of AI that moves beyond thought terminating cliches to really explore why the AI industry as it stands is bullshit).
I do not, generally speaking, like AI. I think that most AI products create shit results. I think most AI art looks like shit and most AI writing is awful bordering on unreadable. I think that there's a massive bubble built up around AI and I think AI is absolutely fucking the personal computing market.
And, all that said, it is deeply annoying to dislike AI as much as I do and still feel the need to point out that the way that a lot of people criticize AI is shortsighted, reactionary, and just flat-out incorrect. There are real things wrong with how we are approaching AI as a society and how AI is being sold to users and forced into our environments, and "art theft" is not one of those things.
(And this is everyone's reminder that fair use is the best, I love it, and you are allowed to copy, distribute, remix, sell, and do whatever you want with my art and writing whenever you want to. Every time I write something like this people come into my inbox to say "I hope your art gets stolen" and I'm like "Bitch, me too, the fuck?")
richie tozier core
I need everyone to see this picture from the 4th article.
for this MLK day every non-Black person on earth is required to watch elliot sang's hour long video essay on the anti-blackness that persists in leftist spaces despite the massive (foundational) contributions Black ppl have made to the global struggle for liberation
signed, A Very Tired Black Person
No look, because when I say that it takes Conscious Effort every day for me not to throw my hands up at the thought of solidarity? How you quoting MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, Kwame Ture, and you're antiblack? And you think we haven't contributed to this fight?
Like, I don't ever want to give up on the fight for anybody's rights, not only because they affect mine, but because people deserve human rights regardless. I truly and genuinely believe that, and will continue to fight because it's the right thing to do, morally and objectively.
But MY GOD some of these groups will treat their Black members and allies like GARBAGE and then have the audacity to be angry when we're like "well I don't want to be around you then". I've noticed it's a growing sentiment in Black American spaces. And while I have my many qualms with the failures of Black liberalism, I admit I empathize with the sentiment that is "I'm sitting the fuck down then, because don't ask me for my strength and then demean me. I'm not a tool."
It's gotten very old, being in spaces where we shout for freedom and rights and things I believe in, and then watch those same people we're fighting in solidarity with either 1) be antiblack or 2) do fuck all when someone is antiblack towards us. And then treat us like we're causing infighting or destruction of the movement when we address it out loud. You want the strength of my voice and numbers but you don't want me, and that's unacceptable. That's not solidarity!!!
It's like there's a belief that you cannot be oppressed on one axis and still cause harm to others. Just last year, in Lebanon there was a family that STILL found time to lock their Black slave (because that's what she was!!) in the basement and left her to die. In the middle of a Zionist onslaught. In war-embroiled Ukraine, still having the time to kick Africans off of trains for escape. Just goes to show how deep it runs.
saw an absolutely hilarious animal crossing theory that i now 100% accept and it’s that in the animal crossing world, humans are going extinct, and so all the animals have locked you in an elaborate zoo enclosure and are trying to give you enrichment. and that’s why they give you infinite pointless tasks, hide money in trees and rocks, invented debt that doesnt matter etc. it’s why they always act so happy to see you even after you raze the entire island, relocate their houses twice, and always act so pleased about your choices no matter what. it’s all to keep their little endangered human healthy and enriched. and thinking of it this way has genuinely improved my experience of the game
The first time I watched Knives Out, I was in nursing school & wondered what I’d think about it when I was a nurse. Now I’m five years into my nursing career, plus with plenty of time in the home health speciality like Marta, and watched the movie again a few nights ago. My overall feelings about the nursing are actually about the same: I could quibble about details but overall the vibe feels right. She feels emotionally authentic. She feels like a nurse. She should have maybe done a respiratory assessment. But also that old man was absolutely so hyped to concoct a mystery. Absolutely jazzed to slit his own throat. Not a good partner in his own care. Patient who definitely wouldn’t use the call light appropriately.
And god can you imagine dealing with his family
You know that hospitalist note starts with something painfully diplomatic that just screams you will be walking into a war zone. “Harlan is an energetic and pleasant 85 year old gentleman with very engaged family support network actively involved in care”
Cannot consumption of AI be considered an art expression?
Of course it can, and performance art is art, but I feel like it's important to know that the art being eaten was a series of AI generated images reflecting the artist's experience of AI psychosis and commenting on the way that AI use changes the users' interactions with the world. The images were generated by someone who has been using image generation tools in their art since 2017 and who was educated as an artist using traditional techniques.
The piece that the protester ate was made by an MFA student and wasn't an attempt to "pass off" generated images themselves as art, the art was the presentation of the images and their sequence and variety (there's an element of obsessive iteration visible even in the remaining images - an empty room, the same room with different light, the same room with a smiling woman on the bed, the same woman standing in different poses, which speaks to me of someone furiously attempting to construct a comforting reality and finding the tools in your hands inadequate, but that's just my interpretation of what remains).
Some pictures of Flame w/ her chicks❤️
first name PLACE last name HOLDER / parents didn't NAME ME till I got OLDER
you cannot make a post about how men put women in certain boxes without someone going "but what if i love the box? what if i've decided that it's comfortable in the box? are you gonna tell me i'm not ALLOWED to like the box? not very feminist of you to police a woman's decisions... maybe you'd be less ugly and miserable if you stopped talking about the box LMFAO #Girlboss #MyBox<3"
inevitably this has hit the terf circle of tumblr so let me be very clear that if trans women aren't included in your feminism you are actively participating in the same boxing in of women that this post is speaking out against and ridiculing. you're just following the exact same disgusting bioessentialist rhetoric as men to justify why you refuse to accept trans women as women. the entire point of this post is that the limitations of gender are something that should be broken down, not reworked for you to girlbossify so you feel comfortable continuing to live within the confines of a society that hates you. you look stupid