i also want a sword!

Anna Elizabeth | 31 | (personal blog: plus—est—en—vous)

[somanypetals]

Catradora: The Great War 💘

Polished and remade without the zoom transitions bc I wasn't quite happy with it and it's MUCH better now, I'm so happy with it!!! Happy DYGIILYIAHSPJTOS day!

Watch on YouTube, Twitter or Tiktok.

[mackdaddyofthecravate]

Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol 

[sazandorable]

a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)

[shatterpath]

bring the healthy fun back to fandom!

[gloriousclio]

Luke Skywalker put away his targeting computer to destroy the Death Star so I don't need AI to help me write an email.

[luminouslumity]

I remember watching the original video ages ago, so I'm glad to see there's an animation lol!

[rars]

saying this as a lesbian who loves women's boobs--sexually, even! but i don't think that we as a society should consider breasts inherently female or inherently sexual. a flat chest should not be seen as the "default" for gender neutrality but instead just one way a person can present. boobs should be normal. anyone of any gender can have boobs

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[evilsanlang]

it's okay if you as a lesbian want to fuck the straight blonde popstar but you can't be pretending she's a lesbian too girl at least make it a lesbian corruption kink or some shit

[evilsanlang]

"taylor swift is a lesbian" check your house for mold

"I can fuck the heterosexuality out of sabrina carpenter" questionable taste, but much more respectable

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

[herowyn]

5 0    Y E A R S    A G O

[closetocanada]

Happy Moon Landing Day! ❤️👩‍🚀🌛

[ghostinwinterfell]

personally I think that people need to let sansaery be the toxic yuri that they’re meant to be. sorry but their canon dynamic is literally “margaery is manipulating sansa for her family’s political gain so that sansa immediately latches onto and trusts and tries to protect margaery because she’s the only one in king’s landing who has shown any kindness towards her plus she’s also searching for female companionship as she actively represses her grief for arya and jeyne.” basically margaery falls for sansa in a guilty awful kind of way and sansa falls for margaery in a codependent idealistic kind of way. sansa is margaery’s guilty conscience and margaery is sansa’s childhood dream come to life. neither of them really sees the other. neither of them really wants to. LET THEM BE AWFUL. THAT’S THE BEST PART.

[whimsicalfairytales]

The “nobody” scene in the odyssey is absolutely not just a clever pun—it’s a character defining moment for Odysseus because he refuses to be nobody. He devised an incredible plan that worked and he could have saved his men and returned home much sooner but he just had to yell to the cyclops that he isn’t nobody—he’s Odysseus, king of Ithaca so now Poseidon knows who to curse which severely fucks up the rest of the journey.

The “nobody” scene highlights both Odysseus’s cleverness but also his arrogance and those two traits define Odysseus throughout the entire story. It’s a foundational aspect of Odysseus’s character and cutting the scene displays a shocking level of ignorance and disregard for the themes in the source material.

[kurzler]

a quick psa to anyone recently getting into greek mythology and is a victim of tumblr and/or tiktok misconceptions:

-there is no shame in being introduced to mytholgy from something like percy jackson, epic the musical or anything like that, but keep in mind that actual myths are going to be VERY different from modern retellings

-the myth of medusa you probably know (her being a victim of poseidon and being cursed by athena) isn't 100% accurate to GREEK mythology (look up ovid)

-there is no version of persephone's abduction in which persephone willingly stays with hades, that's a tumblr invention (look up homeric hymn to demeter)

-as much as i would like it, no, cerberus' name does not mean "spot" (probably a misunderstanding from this wikipedia article)

-zeus isn't the only god who does terrible things to women, your fav male god probably has done the same

-on that note, your fav greek hero has probably done some heinous shit as well

-gods are more complicated than simply being "god of [insert thing]", many titles overlap between gods and some may even change depending on where they were worshipped

-also, apollo and artemis being the gods of the sun and the moon isn't 100% accurate, their main aspects as deities originally were music and the hunt

-titans and gods aren't two wholly different concepts, titan is just the word used to decribe the generation of gods before the olympians

-hector isn't the villain some people make him out to be

-hephaestus WAS married to aphrodite. they divorced. yes, divorce was a thing in ancient greece. hephaestus' wife is aglaia

-ancient greek society didn't have the same concepts of sexuality that we have now, it's incorrect to describe virgin goddesses like artemis and athena as lesbians, BUT it's also not wholly accurate to describe them as aromantic/asexual, it's more complex than that

-you can never fully understand certain myths if you don't understand the societal context in which they were told

-myths have lots and lots of retellings, there isn't one singular "canon", but we can try to distinguish between older and newer versions and bewteen greek and roman versions

-most of what you know about sparta is probably incorrect

-reading/waching retellings is not a substitute to reading the original myths, read the iliad! read the odyssey! i know they may seem intimidating, but they're much more entertaining than you may think

greek mythology is so complex and interesting, don't go into it with preconcieved notions! try to be open to learn!

[hylialeia]

listen it's not that I think epic the musical is a perfect adaption of the odyssey but it was an impressive passion project that knew what it wanted to be and knew what people gravitated to in the original work and it put significant effort into conveying this through its unique medium and tone to the point that hundreds of other people felt compelled to put effort into their own artistic interpretations of that version of the story. and that's really cool! and yes I would be more critical if it was a 100 million dollar project made by a professional because what the fuck do you mean you're a world-famous director and you cut the my name is nobody scene are you goddamn serious

[oedipalrivalry]

being a team sports fan really is like oh what if you stanned the ship of theseus

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

ohhh my god I just fact-checked, Nolan actually DID cut the "Nobody" scene from his Odyssey movie. Mfer that is like cutting the Father reveal from Star Wars. Let me speak in a language you understand this is like not dressing Batman up in his suit. "It was not possible to work it in" the TikTok musical with a budget of $4 and a scratched Hamilton CD managed to work it in in SONG form, step up your FUCKING GAME

[maxiemumdamage]

As someone who has written academic papers about the role of disguise and deceit in the Odyssey — Nobody is so damn important.

Prior to this point, when Odysseus tries to exercise Xenia (ancient Greek guest rites/hospitality code), he did what he was supposed to do. (Well, we think so anyway — notably, the most famous books of the Odyssey are told by Odysseus, who isn’t exactly a reliable narrator.)

But when Polyphemus kills and eats some of the men, the game changes. The Cyclops makes it clear he has no intention of abiding by Zeus’s laws, and will cannibalize the lot of the men. So, Odysseus responds in kind — he breaks Xenia and lies. He introduces himself under a false name as part of a trick. Polyphemus then breaks Xenia again — he tells Nobody he’ll be eaten last, and that is the Cyclops’ guest gift to him.

Odysseus’ transgression is clearly the lesser one. The Nobody trick works. It gets Odysseus and most of his crew out of the cave alive.

But, crucially, before leaving Odysseus sheds his disguise. He admits his true identity, in detail, so he can boast of his achievements and add vanquishing a Cyclops to the list. And it bites him in the ass spectacularly.

The only reason why Polyphemus can curse Odysseus, can bid his father Poseidon to curse the man who blinded him, is because he now knows who did it. If Odysseus had kept his mouth shut, he might have safely made it home from there. But while a big part of why the Nobody disguise vs. real name reveal is showing Odysseus’s hubris, it’s not just about that. It’s also about the start of a pattern that hurts him more than it helps him.

From this point in the Odyssey on, Odysseus lies about his identity constantly. And sometimes it protects him, but more often it’s a detriment or at least unnecessary. He’s lying about his identity primarily to people who are on his side — a kindly loyal swineherd, his son, his faithful wife, his ailing father.

The last one is especially damning, because happens when Odysseus has already killed the suitors and returned home and reunited with the rest of his family sans disguises. He knows from everyone else that Laertes never betrayed him or his legacy, but was mourning his son and heartbroken for almost a decade. Odysseus has publicly declared his return to everyone else — his father doesn’t know because he’s living in squalor remotely. But Odysseus doesn’t tell his father who he is. He makes up a fake identity and tells a story implying Laertes’ son is dead. And when Laertes bursts out crying, then Odysseus drops the charade and finally admits who he really was.

There was no utility to that lie. No loyalty to test. No hidden threats to worry about. But Odysseus still instinctively lies to his beloved father about who he is, only dropping the charade when he sees the damage it’s doing to his relationships.

Because at this point, lying is pathological for Odysseus. He can’t seem to stop doing it. Because with Polyphemus, a lie protected him and the truth hurt him. That is the point of the “ Nobody” disguise.

And they fucking cut it???

[h-medicinalis]

Oh to be a medieval apothecary and have dried herbs in little jars all through my dimly-lit shop

[lornaka]

Thank you. 

[owa-tagoo-siam]

[kunosoura]

I know it feels good as fuck to cast spells from up there