Don’t mind me

[viejospellejos]

AUDIO POR DIOSSSSSS!!!!

[starlightxraven]

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

[appalachian-werewolf]

"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."

It fucking better.

[mrsjdavis]

Like to charge, reblog to cast?

[aplacetoreblogthingsto]

Lmao, I particularly like the court going "so if users are supposed to always think AI Overviews are unreliable, what actual utility do they even have?" Which is such a good point 😂

[timbitshockey]

i think there’s a disconnect in fandom spaces between the general fan attitude of “i want more fic all the time with the exact concepts i’m interested in executed exactly the way i think is best and i want it to be 100k words and i want 25 chapters and i want a new chapter every day” and then also “i can’t believe the writers i was treating like a machine to create the art i want to consume as if it came off an assembly line used a machine to do it :/ who could ever do this” and like yeah obviously not everyone is in that first group but it’s an extremely pervasive attitude in newer, younger, popular fandoms. i don’t think it’s an “excuse” to use AI but i think the attitudes and environment that create that also create authors who feel they have to use AI to keep up with demand or authors who feel that their work is being consumed as factory-line commodities so why bother putting in effort? everyone wants fast food. everyone wants shein. if you want to be in an environment where art is created by artists the environment needs to be one that values art and creation and the process rather than just end results and numbers.

[timbitshockey]

like, writers and artists and people who create any kind of fan works are IN your fandom with you! they are not some outside entity who you appease with kudos and comments and reblogs to make sure your crops survive the winter. if i join a new fandom and everyone is obsessed with First, Longest, Newest, Most, More then those are also going to be the concepts i value when deciding to create fanwork!

it’s sad to me because the aspect of fanworks that i enjoy the most is the community aspect. i love having long conversations with my friends and other fans about work i’ve created and work they’ve created and work others have created. you don’t get that with AI works, right? you get, like, the dopamine rush of New, More! and then it fades because there was no real creative process involved. but there’s a lot of fandom spaces where that dopamine rush is all you get, because fanworks are treated as content being created for the fandom rather than by the fandom. idk man!!! it all sucks!!! i have a lot of empathy for people who have been raised in this environment when it comes to everything — school, social media, friendships, relationships — and bring the same processes into fandoms. we have to engage with the world to have a world with engaging in

[fuck-customers]

[aplacetoreblogthingsto]

What was that tweet or something that was like "you get to go through the secret special door! But watch out"

[mysterycat-official]

I lowkey hate when programs talk to me in a friendly way. "don't worry, nearly there!" Shut up. It should say "loading 64.3% completed. Do not turn off device" and absolutely nothing else. You arent my friend you are computer. Act like it

[headspace-hotel]

I'm dead convinced that a significant portion of AI companies' revenue is spent paying off every major media outlet NOT to point out all the obvious problems with it + creating legions of bots and bullshit articles online to hype AI up

cause like. apart from the (potential) exception of writing code, there is not really anything useful that a Large Language Model can do.

it imitates patterns in the text that it takes in

that's fundamentally how it works

if a Large Language Model can produce text that looks like something a human created, that doesn't mean it can do a human's job, it means that the paperwork/plan/document it's being used to create no longer fucking means anything

[headspace-hotel]

Yes, haha funny, the AI is bamboozled by spelling, but seriously: I asked Google the same question 5 different times just now, and not only did I get 5 incorrect answers, I got 5 completely different incorrect answers.

The fact that they're different every time demonstrates just how much of an LLM's output is up to random chance. This is how LLMs imitate human language: each stage of constructing the text has built-in randomness, just like how human language has variation and flexibility.

This is my problem with using these things in the workplace. Like, imagine you're using an LLM to fill out a report of an accident that happened, or to write dietary recommendations for a patient, or to give feedback on a paper a student wrote...really anything you can think of.

Even if the LLM-generated text doesn't say anything technically flat-out wrong, the words and details are still randomized instead of being chosen by you for an actual reason.

Using an LLM for these tasks means it doesn't matter to you exactly what you write, what words you use, what details you include, or what meaning it has, just that it looks like you wrote something.

[disheveled-notion]

I’ll also point out that it’s also not good for writing code for the exact same reasons. Part of working on a codebase is working within established coding patterns and architectural decisions so that other people can easily navigate it. If every single module is written completely differently than, inevitably, when some human has to go in there and fix a bug it becomes much harder since every file is written completely different even if they handle the same problem-space. If one module is completely object oriented and uses class instantiation for everything and another that solves a similar problem is functional programming and relies entirely on pure functions then trying to figure out how they are supposed to work together is infinitely harder than just using one model.

[headspace-hotel]

I suspected this might be the case but truth be told I didn't know enough about coding to say either way.

[aplacetoreblogthingsto]

My husband is an engineer, and his company pays for a company AI, and has found it useful in several ways. LLMs are not necessarily always good at writing code purely from a prompt, but they are good at finding problems or patterns in code that a human just doesn't have the capacity to find. His company's AI has been able to parse large amounts of data to suggest useful algorithms for interpreting that data, and also identified the cause of several bugs in various software that were hard for the human engineers to pin down for years.

That's something I've noticed as a professional translator as well, LLMs frequently make dumb errors when it comes to translation, but when it comes to checking important details that a human translator might accidentally miss, LLMs are often pretty good. Like, maybe I accidentally missed a 0 when I'm translating a financial document, and both me and the human editor might miss that when we're going through it because it's such a small detail. But you can stick both documents in an LLM and it will do a pretty good job at identifying easy to miss inconsistencies like that.

(Unfortunately, LLMs are also killing my industry, because people would rather pay peanuts to someone to "edit" or "proofread" an AI translated work rather than pay someone to just professionally translate it, so there's that :/)

LLMs are significantly better at giving feedback about concrete things like "why doesn't this software do this" or "check these two documents to make sure the translation is consistent" or "here is the client's request list, check that my work [paste] fulfills their requests."

Problem is, these real and useful aspects of LLMs aren't nearly sexy enough to raise billions and billions of dollars. So LLM companies have a vested interest in making it seem like LLMs are capable of a lot more than they are.

[aromanticduck]

You have to read all the books in your bedroom before you can leave. How long will you be trapped?

There's no books in there, I can leave immediately

Less than a day

1-3 days

4-6 days

1-3 weeks

4-7 weeks

2-3 months

4-6 months

7-11 months

1-2 years

3 years or more

Results

Voting ended onJun 27

You can't die from hunger or thirst or lack of medication etc.

It doesn't matter which books you've already read. You have to read them all, starting from now.

Physical books only - if you have an e-reader in there you don't have to read your entire digital library.

[lakevida]

free the nipple has to make a resurgence for a number of reasons but bro look at our upcoming eternity of wet bulb temps youre smoking straight up cock if you think im keeping a shirt on when it hits 105° in new england

[lakevida]

everyone tits out with a parasol is such a beautiful world to imagine that the fact it doesnt currently exist fills me with equal parts fire and misery

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.

[deathsmallcaps]

? I realize im proving your point but what

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.) 

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.

[drferox]

Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.

[materassassino]

Australians have a very good attitude to respect

[onionhighonionandrenown]

…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.

[earhartsease]

As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.

[whitmerule]

covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.

[makaeru]

Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.

[love-lays-bleeding]

One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.

[wolverrina]

YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!

[padeko]

Different cultures are fascinating.

[searchingcassiopeia]

Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.

[silvergryphonart]

We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.

It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”

[confusementation]

Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.

I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”

[claskerdoodles]

It can’t be entirely about how Australia has never had an aristocracy. I’m Danish, and we have pretty much exactly the same concept of respect, and our country is a monarchy. But admittedly, it may be a relatively new custom.

The Danish language used to have a formal register, like Japanese and German and lots of other languages. You used a whole different set of grammar rules when you talked to a superior, and they’d get upset if you didn’t. It was still a thing in my parents’ generation, but these days it has almost entirely disappeared. It’s only used when you’re communicating with an unspecific person, like in “please insert your card in the slot”, where the receiver could be anybody at all - and even there, it’s on its way out. It’s also used when addressing the royal family.

Nobody else - ever - warrants this form of address in 2026. If you use it, you sound robotic at best, acerbic at worst.

We do the exact same thing as Australians where the more deferential we are, the less respectful we are. Even addressing someone by their last name is considered depersonalizing, and generally only something you do after getting permission. And you’d NEVER use the Danish equivalent of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ out loud, even when you’re being formal - that is used in the military, and that’s most people’s only frame of reference for those titles. If you use them, you sound like a soldier.

When I started working in Germany, it took a bit of a mental shift to get my brain to acknowledge that management expected me to use deferential language, and that wasn’t just a weird power trip. That’s just how it works everywhere that isn’t Denmark, and apparently Australia.

[sporifluorous]

As an anxious American, I tend to default to Polite when I’m nervous, in order to keep some distance but make sure there’s no ill will or unpleasantness. It’s not warm or super friendly but it is respectful and almost never actively disliked.

Do Australians and Danes not have any option like that? Do you just have to be… Casual and best buds With Everyone At All Times, regardless of how tired or anxious you are?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

In Australia, addressing everyone as your equal isn’t necessarily considered being ‘casual best buds’, it’s assumed to be neutral. Defaulting to 'sir’ because you’re anxious would be like a nervous high schooler calling the teacher 'mum’. It’d be an embarrassing thing to do because in Australian culture it tells everyone else that your automatic reaction to being a bit nervous is to immediately fall back on over-the-top arse kissing, which is cringe behaviour. We use more subtle ways to differentiate between 'we’re best buds now’ and 'I’m being polite and a little distant’ that don’t involve invoking deference. Simply opening a conversation with “excuse me” and using a neutral tone is enough to tell other Australians that you don’t want to get all personal with them. You wouldn’t ask a stranger for directions by greeting them with “oi cunt!” and asking about their family, but nor would you call them 'sir’ or 'ma'am’ unless you wanted them to assume you were a foreigner and make them feel a bit awkward. (“Mate” is acceptable as a substitute for an honorific, or a term of address if you don’t know somebody’s name, but it’s more common to simply omit the term of address entirely where that’s an option.)

[aplacetoreblogthingsto]

It’s an interesting thing in Japanese, that of course there are different ways to address people for different situations depending on who’s “above” or “below” and such, but using very respectful language in the “incorrect” situation is also perceived as disrespectful. Like one of my friends was getting annoyed with the son of an inn she was calling who she felt was being rude, so she started addressing him in the most polite possible way as a way to be like “fuck you fuck you fuck you” to him lmao. So I think the “using respectful language when it’s not appropriate = disrespectful” thing is pretty universal, it’s just that which situations are not appropriate depends on the country/language.

[the-beard-of-edward-teach]

Hawaiʻi is currently in the midst of a natural disaster if you didnt know

Apparently there isn’t much news coverage of this outside of the islands

Towns are flooded, homes destroyed and collapsed, roads collapsed, lives at risk, gas leaks from the flood damage

Haleiwa and Waialua are currently evacuated because the 120 year old dam is at risk of bursting

Mind you that damn is owned by Dole. Theyve known about it needing to be fixed for years and years and years. Despite having more than enough money they refuse

The state has been trying to buy it out from them for years so they can fix it, but the sale hasn’t gone through

Keep in mind that the Dole family were the ones who illegally imprisoned Queen Liliuʻokalani and illegally overthrew the monarchy.

If I see another goddamn person say how sad this is for the tourists whose “trips were ruined” and compare a messed up vacation to people losing their homes, belongings, and livelihoods, I’m going to lose my mind

I am so lucky that my family or friend’s are safe and the few whose houses flooded didnt have it too bad, but so so so many were not as fortunate

If you haven’t heard anything about this until now, I suggest looking into it

The sirens didn’t go off until the flood had been going on for hours. Our state government is spending so much money on a fucking monorail we don’t need rather than fixing the infrastructure.

It’s been the locals and Kanaka doing the most to help get people to safety from the start

I don’t really know how to end this

I just need to know people are aware

I need to know people are seeing whats happening

[elodieunderglass]

Thousands evacuated as Hawaii faces worst flooding in 20 years

"Don't take this storm lightly," Hawaii Governor Josh Green warned on Saturday, as more rain is expected on Oahu and Maui.

[maykitz]

i have no idea what the context is but i can make a pretty good guess

[headspace-hotel]

Pasteurization is literally "heat the milk up to a high enough temperature that it kills the bacteria, then let it cool down" This is the scary sinister technology they fear

[maykitz]

the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad's hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he's in weird ambidexterity situation where he's not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf

[seeingteacupsindragons]

It is fascinating to me that people also think of handedness as an example of bigotry that just...went away. As you note, it...hasn't in some places. I know people who grew up in the mid-late 90s who still had this problem.

But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.

If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.

It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.

All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.

I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.

I could go on.

But the point is, bigotry isn't just a mindset shift. People can't just decide they're not bothered by that particular difference anymore and everything's fine, because society is still structured and designed to cause problems for marginalized people. And they're never even going to notice all the little ways their life is bent to convenience them that inconveniences others.

[kkelenca]

When kiddo was learning to write, their teacher—who was a beautifully kind, caring, compassionate person who even thanked me for making them aware of certain kinds of left/handed supplies, because their new toddler was a lefty and they’d never even thought about it—was teaching the kids a method for word spacing that involved placing their free index finger down at the end of each word and then writing the next one.

Pause for a moment, especially if you’re right-handed—and I’m being serious here, physically do this if you have two functioning arms and hands—and grab a writing tool in your left hand. Now place your right index finger down and try to start writing a word next to it.

Yeah. Great technique, huh? Really convenient and comfortable and easy. 🙃

I sent in a small baggie of small popsicle sticks I’d custom painted for them and labeled with their name for kiddo to use instead, but ultimately they stopped because it wasn’t as convenient when nobody else had to get something out.

Writing in English is difficult enough when you’re left-handed (most of our letters are designed with pull motions, but lefties must push), but even other foundational basics are made more difficult than they have to be, because their needs aren’t considered, even in situations where overt hostility isn’t intended.

Even now, in an older grade, they’re now all sharing a lot of the supplies, but my kiddo has their own pair of labeled lefty scissors they keep in their personal cubby. Teacher was 100% chill with me sending them in, but didn’t even consider to take the step further when I’d asked about whether or not they had them to just… get some for all the lefties. I know there are other kids, know some of them personally. (I made a set of writing spacing sticks for the single one that I knew of back in 1st grade.)

Regarding computer mice? Kiddo had standardized testing last year. They do it on chromebooks now at their school. They did their entire first day with the track pad instead of the mouse, because none of the teachers proctoring or assisting even knew you COULD switch the sides/toggle a setting to switch which button was the dominant select. We happened to have one at home thanks to remote learning during Covid’s early days, so that night we sat down together and found the setting ourselves so they could fix it the following day. But on a student account at school, they couldn’t change that setting. And? None of those teachers knew enough about technology to be able to override it. So even when I went above and beyond and personally sought out the skills and tools to help my child level the playing field on their own, the teaching staff was so unaccustomed to even considering this as a need or problem, that they weren’t able to remove the incredibly basic barriers to a fair schooling experience.

And this is honestly a good school, with staff that care and work hard and take 99% of bigotry concepts very seriously, teach about truth and compassion and how to recognize at this kid level a lot of the basic seeds that can grow into hate and hurt and also healing and helping. But the fact that left-handed needs are different? It is so ingrained to default to right-handed layouts that even left-handed staff don’t conceptualize these problems, because they were taught the exact same way.

[snommelp]

Big story and then small gripe.

Big story: My second master's degree, the school had a clinician come in to do a workshop on unconscious bias and whatnot. To explain privilege in a way that would (theoretically) not immediately get dismissed by the more conservative among us, she got us talking instead about handedness. She asked the right handed people "when is the last time you thought about which hand you use?" And the answer was, of course: never. A small number of people had sort of thought about it, but they struggled to name a time that it had come to mind. Then for the lefties: "when is the last time you thought about which hand you use?" My answer was, two minutes ago when we all sat down. Because of course, all of the lefties were hoping to get the corner seat at their table so that they wouldn't be bumping elbows with their neighbors (though funny enough, all the lefties ended up at the same table anyway). Right handed people rarely-to-never think about where they're sitting at the dinner table; if they do think about it, I 100% guarantee it's because they dine regularly with a lefty.

Small gripe: we got a new coffee maker a while back. It's a great coffee maker, top of the line. But the lid opens to the left. I have to turn the damn thing 90 degrees just to pour water into the reservoir. I can't prove it, but I guaran-fucking-tee that there's not a single coffee pot that opens to the right.

[selectivegeekwithstandards]

For those who don’t know by the way, about 10% of the population is left handed. It’s not a small number.

[headinthegrave]

Feminists should be alarmed too. The anti-hormonal birth control is part of the same regressive anti-science, religious extremism, misogynistic miasma that is trying to take away women’s rights across the country.

[headinthegrave]

This is a gift link. Every other line holds a new horror. This is one of the scariest things I’ve read recently (and in this political climate that’s saying something)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/style/birth-control-skepticism-wellness-tiktok.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pE8.b2tR.Jpicc0Qk7gPw&smid=url-share

[knight-of-skyloft]

Just over a year since Ms. Hamrick decided to stop taking the pills, she has figured out who she is without birth control: She is a mother. Her baby is four months old.

[tuulikki]

The “wellness” movement started with mystic gender essentialist blood and soil bullshit and we must not let ourselves be surprised when it does what it was always designed to do: encourage women to surrender autonomy over their own lives and bodies by discouraging them from learning how to access real information so that they can stay barefoot in the kitchen making organic sandwiches and pushing out Aryan babies while looking as fuckable as posisble.

#CleanGirl #RacialHygiene #KinderKücheKirche

[headspace-hotel]

the moral overall is that "corporations can't be trusted with telling a good story"

however specifically it has happened twice that very large media franchises have essentially obliterated and destroyed a pair of highly compelling and interesting characters out of anxiety over those characters being perceived as gay.

Bucky and Steve in the MCU are the first example; Steve's friendship with Bucky was interpreted as homoerotic by many fans, and the franchise responded by going scorched earth on the friendship itself.

but a more blatant example in my opinion was finn and poe dameron from the (gag) sequel starwars trilogy. it's been forever since i saw the movies but i remember they had a very cool chemistry and energy together and when they were separated from each other and randomly stuck with extremely flat female love interests, it came across to me like Disney was desperately reassuring the audience that they were not gay.

But this is bad storytelling, because if the bond between two men is a powerful driving force of the story, a good storyteller follows that to its conclusion because it is providing the story with aliveness. It is possible that this means you wrote a gay story or one that will be perceived as such. Love is deeply overlapping with other love. If you find the possibility of homoeroticism intolerable, you will uproot love, closeness, and friendship entirely from the story in the process of trying to root it out, and the story will be fucking dead.

This fact is so much about good storytelling and so little about wanting characters to be gay or not. Even if you are homophobic, you cannot deny the truth of it in my opinion.

[hollywoodbabylondean]

I'm still fully convinced that Luigi Mangione didn't do it btw. Not in the "innocent until proven guilty" way that the media should be operating under but the logistics of the case literally never made sense to me. Especially with the inconsistencies about the backpacks (complete with convenient manifesto!) and the fact he physically can't get to that McDonald's without spending almost a full hour on a bus and that Altoona is SO out of the way!

[asaripaladin]

Leaving Comments

[posted in a Discord but decided to open the discussion up here]

Authors, do you reply to comments? 

I have read a couple really great fanfics lately, and when I go to excitedly leave a comment, I notice the author has either replied to NONE of the previous comments or USED to reply to comments and clearly has stopped. 

It always kills my urge to leave my own thoughts then. I can’t help thinking to myself, I guess the author doesn’t really care what I think? Maybe they don’t care if they get comments at all. Leaving a comment isn’t easy; it takes a lot of effort to think about how you’re feeling and put that into words in a way that is encouraging towards the author. So I wonder why I should even bother if the author clearly doesn’t care about what I have to say. 

As an author, I always reply to comments b/c I am so honored that someone would take the time to read my story AND talk to me about it. So I’m shocked that this isn’t universally done. What do you guys think?

[aplacetoreblogthingsto]

I certainly try to reply, but I'm not consistent. I'm not a consistent reader, writer, commenter, or comment-replier. If, as a result, some commenters don't leave a comment, that's up to them. I certainly think it's nice when authors reply to comments, but tbh I rarely encounter it. I'm absolutely not going to make an internal rule for myself that I must do it. Comments aren't mandatory, comment-replies aren't mandatory, we're all out here just doing our best.

[ledzeppelinmixtape]