pixel skylines
oozey mess
cherry valley forever
gracie abrams
Origami Around
Xuebing Du
will byers stan first human second
Discoholic 🪩
taylor price
Mike Driver
Fai_Ryy
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
The Bowery Presents
Noah Kahan
macklin celebrini has autism
hello vonnie
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Love Begins
Andulka
No title available
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@adeptarcanist
reproductive rights is not a euphemism for abortion rights or the right of people to become pregnant, it also includes the rights of trans women to not be forcibly sterilized to get gender marker changes or the ability to freeze sperm. but those two things rarely make it on the radar even when trans women's reproductive rights are under attack.
My wife pointed out to me the other day that apparently most people were literally only taught how to say Sorry and not how to Apologize or even that they are different things so here.
If all you ever do is step 1, not only did you not apologize, but people will rightfully stop believing you and start getting pissed or hurt.
If you learn about apologies in psychology, this is something they emphasize.
An apology that is meant is not just spoken; it is shown in actions.
So when you apologize but don't change, you prove you aren't sorry for your actions; you were sorry they had consequences. And then people don't trust you because of it.
https://twitter.com/vagina_museum/status/1628046312275935232
[Image descriptions in order: a twitter thread by @vagina_museum “Vagina Museum” (verified) which says “In 2014, a 70 year old cis man who had fathered four children went to hospital in Kashmir with an inguinal hernia. Everything about him and his life had so far been ordinary - except that the hernia turned out to be his uterus with an ovarian tube and broad ligament.
“The man had the expected genotype of a cis man: 46XY. He had a cryptorchidism (an undescended testis) on one side, which affects about 1% of people. Everything external about him was as expected - except that he had a uterus, ovarian tube, and broad ligament.
“The man had Persistent Müllerian Duct Syndrome (PMDS). This is a natural variation. Usually, if an embryo is developing as male, a hormone called anti Müllerian hormone is released.]
["The hormone prevents development of Müllerian ducts, the tubes which eventually develop into the gynaecological internal anatomy. In PMDS, not enough of this hormone is released.
"PMDS is considered quite rare, although in order to diagnose it, doctors need to use medical imaging, which isn’t usually done to people without symptoms, and can be entirely unaffordable to do at all in global majority countries.
"The 70 year old father of four isn’t the only man who has discovered a uterus late in life! Last year, a 67 year old father of three from Kosovo went into hospital with a hernia and discovered the swelling was in fact a uterus, ovarian tube and an ovary.
"In 2011, a 35 year old father of two from India went to hospital with severe stomach pain. Imaging revealed that he had a uterus, two ovarian tubes, two ovaries and the upper part of a vagina.
"In 2021, a father of one from the USA went to hospital with abdominal pain. The source of the pain was a tumour on his testis - but he also had a uterus, ovarian tubes, cervix and upper vagina.]
["In all of these cases - and many other case studies of cis men who have discovered they have uteruses, the anatomy was found by accident, because everything else seemed "normal enough”.
“You can read the case study of the 70 year old father of four here. Warning: it includes photos of his uterus.” Attached is a link for an article on sciencedirect.com, titled “Hysterectomy in a male? A rare case report” the preview says “Persistent Mullerian duct syndrome is a rare form of male pseudo-hermaphroditism characterized …”]
[Image in first reblog: a tag by orpheuscas which says #re: there is no definition of ‘woman’ that includes all cisgender women and excludes all others]
Two points. Yes these are intersex men, it doesn’t mean they’re not cis, as Ive seen some reblogs say they’re not cis men.
Second, everyone talking about ‘boypussy’ in the reblogs is pissing me off, can we talk about intersex people existing without immediately jumping on sexual jokes?
like whack a mole
official they can't win against us all post
notice how they pause instead of all-out running? rat want grab-toss. they are playing a game! and pausing to make sure human has time to grab them and gently toss like the football!
If I was a rat I would enjoy this too
AI solipsists and AI cynics
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
https://www.normaltech.ai/
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.
This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."
Aw, thank you!
everyone who is not currently in the process of moving please pause and take a moment to be grateful that you're not currently in the process of moving
*sighs dejectedly* okayyy you got me, I care *smashes head into nearest wall with such force my skull is crushed like a beer can*
I don't know how to address this properly because I feel like every time I write about it I get the same misunderstandings from every direction.
the thing happening right now (at the very least in the US and UK) is that trans youth are actively and systemically losing access to healthcare. this has been gradually escalating since the start of the pandemic, and more young people lose healthcare every single year.
when I talk about this I tend to get two responses
"why do trans adults want to expand these experimental treatments to children who can't consent"
"providers offering care to trans adults is a step in the right direction, even if they aren't offering it to trans youth. the perfect is the enemy of the good. we can't fight our allies."
do you see how both the overtly transphobic version and the nominally "pro-trans" version replicate the same misinformation?
this is not a question of "should we expand access to trans youth?" trans youth have had access to medical transition care for a long time. what is happening is the care they already had access to is being made inaccessible and then criminalized systematically.
am I making sense? places refusing to offer care to trans youth are not "a step in the right direction" because that implies that the trend is expanding access that "begins" with trans adults and innately will gradually encompass young people. that is not the case. this is not a hypothetical thing that we can all have different theoretical opinions on. what is happening is the systematic revoking of healthcare.
the further this progresses, the more healthcare is restricted for more demographics. that's how this works. healthcare is being restricted across the board as part of the broader eugenics project. abortion is being restricted. vaccines are becoming more expensive. insurance companies are denying more treatments to disabled people. anti-fatness is surging. ableism is surging. there are active campaigns to get people to mistrust the very idea of healthcare in favor of "wellness" grifts. no one wears N-95 masks. this is the trend. it's been the trend.
I don't know how to communicate that we are not at an early step in a progressive trajectory, we are mid-stage in a eugenic order. please understand what I'm saying.
I can honestly say i’ve never seen a more entertaining ladle.
i am not a psychiatrist but i do find it really weird how autism checklists are so often focused on "outward" signs of autism rather than what is going on internally. i don't know how to explain it but "do you make eye contact with other people" feels like a much less relevant question than "how does it feel when you have to make eye contact with other people?"
while i'm here, the other one that always pisses me off is "do you interpret idioms literally, for example 'bull in a china shop'?"
well, no, obviously. i know what "bull in a china shop" means because that is a popular phrase with a clearly defined meaning. and if i hadn't heard it before, then i would still not interpret it literally, because it has the cadence of an idiom and i would probably be able to work out from context what it meant. what is the point of this question
third and final complaint: "are you good at noticing subtext?"
i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."
and he laid a hand on my shoulder and was like, look dude i'm gonna be straight up here. i am subtle with you constantly and you simply do not notice <3
@luckyybones hope you don't mind me screenshotting but you are actually so correct
okay let's actually do this properly
Where do you write your fics/stories
Word
Google Docs
Scrivener
LibreOffice
Obsidian/Notion
ProtonDocs
Notes App
Directly into AO3
Ellipsus
Handwriting
Other (explain in tags?)
Uh WOWOWOW we're at #2?! (guys we can't let Google win 😬)
4 The Words
Give me less "being kind requires zero effort" and more "being kind is worth the effort it takes."
being kind often does take effort. but not being a dick doesn’t take any effort at all.
Actually for some people it does and part of my point was that those people deserve to have their efforts acknowledged and respected when they put in the work needed to treat others right even though it doesn't come easily or naturally to them
it looks like you might've misread what they said? they said that being kind often does take effort, not that it doesn't
But they also said that "not being a dick doesn't take any effort at all" which is what I'm arguing with
i think if you showed minecraft or fortnite to a little medieval peasant boy he would probably start writing parodies of church hymns. it’s human nature
this has rendered me speechless
there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between microwave oven manufacturers and the producers of microwave meals over whether the customer should know the wattage of their microwave or if such details should be abstracted away from them
the microwave rice demands 800 watts of power for 2 minutes, but all the microwave can offer me three settings: one low, one high, and one somewhere in the middle. I turn it to the one in the middle as I happen to know 800W is the average power of most microwaves. the light comes on and the bag of rice starts slowly turning, but rather than hearing the usual rumble of the microwave, I instead start hearing short snippets of conversation - words snatched from the ether. the lights flicker and a chill runs up my spine. the voices remind me of those "spirit boxes" ghost hunters use. I double check the setting on the microwave. "ah," I say, remembering that I had set it to medium,
"Mario Mario" is an anachronism. He and his brother were only ever referred to by mononyms in their lifetime, like most residents of the Mushroom Kingdom at the time - multi-part names were typically reserved for members of the Toadstool dynasty, and even these were more like titles or Roman cognomina than what we would call a surname today. His putative ennoblement as founder of the "House of Mario" came centuries later as the collapsing feudal order sought additional sources of legitimacy
#mushroom kingdom folklore says that he sleeps beneath a warp pipe to arise in the time of the kingdom's greatest need #he's definitely shown up a few times but it's hard to tell if he has risen from the dead or is just in the middle of some time travel shit #historians hate him.
While the historical evidence for Mario having a younger brother is quite concrete, the name of said brother is less certain. "Luigi" is generally held to originate with a separate figure from a series of chthonic myths, who originally served as a sort of psychopomp charged with capturing spirits that escaped the underworld. The strongest case for a contemporary figure named Luigi comes from the Waffle Kingdom sagas; however, this Luigi's brother is a gladiator named Gonzales.
now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.
The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".
(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)
The later emergence of "Waluigi" is an ironic recombination of two figures from the same historical source, and may have originated as a farce parodying the Mario stories. (The name "Waluigi" is also conflated with the early Norman figure Varr Yngwi, who is generally credited with the invention of tennis.)
Character has a PhD: they’re really smart and knowledgable about their field!
Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.
Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both
Character has 4+ PhDs: if they aren’t an undercover vampire or something then no they don’t lol
Alternatively: this character is some kind of rock star celebrity in their field and has a bunch of honorary degrees from several different institutions, and also this story takes place before most universities adopted a separate postnominal for honorary doctorates specifically to avoid this sort of confusion.
