the courage of stars

She/her. Fantasy Writer. Bunny Mama. Book Dragon. Ask me about my WIP!

[babybirdi]

I’m almost halfway done writing my minsung apothecary diaries inspired fanfic and I’m constantly screaming internally at how endearing they are even though I’m the one writing them like this.

I rarely talk about anything here let alone my writing but I’m really excited about this one so I wanted to share.

My plan is to post on ao3 when I’m done writing the whole thing (I don’t trust myself to finish it if I start posting before it’s done based on past experience), but if people are interested I can also link it here 👀

[should-be-sleeping]

Everyone please behold this baby tree:

It's so much smaller than the support posts, they had to secure it with caution tape.

[should-be-sleeping]

Caution: baby!

[should-be-sleeping]

One day (but not this day)!

[should-be-sleeping]

Update:

Thriving!

[should-be-sleeping]

Now taller than a human person!

In case you were wondering!

[should-be-sleeping]

Update:

Filling out, and up!

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

We threw it a birthday party once spring arrived. 🎂

[should-be-sleeping]

🎉

[lee-alder]

Today was a pretty shit day. This is a nice post to see. Birthday hat tree.

[should-be-sleeping]

I hope tomorrow is kinder. 🌱

[should-be-sleeping]

You can. You will! 🏞

[bethanydelleman]

My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.

What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.

Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.

But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?

[lew-basnight]

People kept trying to do this to my petcare business. “Let us build you a website! Let us buy you some ads! Let us print you flyers and cards!” I have exactly as much business as I can handle, and I’m happy with that. “But if you expand you could hire other people to do the work and pay them less, and raise your prices and eventually you can work from home!! Let us help you!” I’m doing this because I like playing fetch for a living, I like being outside moving around all day every day, I like spending time with each animal separately, I like being trusted by my clients with the keys and codes of their homes, it makes me feel proud. None of what you’re offering me is what I want. I don’t want a dozen miserable contractors who I pay 40% of each visit, I don’t want to try and wrangle and hire and vet people to do the part of my job that I like for me. That sounds bad. That’s a bad idea. And they looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. “But… website!! SEO! Ad buys! Targeted coverage! Constant growth!!” I don’t want any of that in my life it sounds fucking awful

[stjohnstarling]

One of the cruelties of capitalism is that if you want to do work you’re good at and love, a lot of the time your only option is to enter into some kind of business, and as soon as you do that, all the structural incentives of the system start trying to pull you away from the parts that you’re there for (i.e. the things that make life worth living) and towards various kinds of exploitation. Anyway, this also applies to writing and selling novels.

[thehappysatan]

I agree with OP down to my bonessss. The best things are done with pasison by artisans, who deseve to be compensated respectfully, but aren't into their work from a place of greed or whatever misguided capitalist-brained bros think 'efficiency' is.

I'm plenty efficient, at getting things done the way i intend to.

i described to my econ-brain-rotten brother how i run my tattooing business and got the same responses as above.

It's like he absolutely didn't hear me when i explained the nuanced reasons i even started doing this work; I started tattooing because i was tired of the isolation of my (at that point) decade-long career in the animation industry. I was sick of my best work rotting on hard drives in shut down studios, of never getting to see anyone interacting with my art.

Moved to a big queer city, where my community got me started: queer tattooers patiently shared information and resources with me. early on, friends volunteered to let me experiment on their skin. Then they started offering to pay for materials, then more. Then they brought their friends to me...

I have a beautiful community of people who know me from the drag scene, from the poetry and writing scene, from the techno scene - and all these ppl come to me because they know me, met me, trust me, because they felt comfortable in my presence.

I only have like 1200 followers on my tattooing Instagram - which rly isn't a lot for a tattooer. But i stay busier than some ppl who have more followers - and im pretty sure that it's because 90% of the ppl following me have actually met me irl. I don't give out my info to just anyone. I have to have a nice interaction with them - and they with me - and i basically invite them to get to know my work, if i think they'd be interested, if they seemed excited about it.

I built my business out of love and care, and connection. I built it because i wanted more of these things in my life. I am making what i wanna see in the world.

Im deeply proud of what I've accomplished as a tattooer, exactly because i stuck to my own beliefs and built a business that is fully customized to me, what im excited about, my abiliy and disability levels, and my philosophical values. This part of my life is all mine, crafted and chiselled just how i want it.

I don't like getting up in the morning, so my sessions never start earlier than 1300. I have a hard time focusing alone + i wanna empower ppl who aren't artists to play with art + help ppl practice and engage their decision making and request making skills - so i design the tattoos with them sitting right next to me, being part of the art process. I don't like doing math and counting so i give my clients a sliding scale based on project complexity, and they get to choose how much they pay me. This also doubles as a way to give ppl more agency in the process of getting a tattoo. Etc etc it goes on and on - every aspect of the process is considered and phislophically and emotionally calibrated. I love what I've created and i love giving the gift of a well-crafted thing......

And after hearing me explain all that, my brother said my marketing wasn't efficient and my business isn't scalable...

I dunno, i think smtng abt capitalism legit gives ppl brain damage or smtng wtf

[thehappysatan]

@asmadasthehatters you can't leave that in the comments, buddy

[heymerle]

There's this assumption, in marketing and in business for the last 40 or 50 years, that growth should be unlimited.

That exists in the real world, and it's called cancer. It will kill whatever it's growing in.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Not everything that makes you uncomfortable is actually causing you harm

[alphagodith]

and not everything that causes you harm will be unpleasant at the time

[rosalesbeausderholle]

One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!

[notalotgoingonatthisinstant]

As a neurologist, I’ll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.

[depsidase]

[depsidase]

[livedinthecastle]

hello child born between the end of the 1990s and beggining of the 2000s, welcome to my saw trap. in front of you is a computer, you can learn to code and guarantee yourself the only career that will be available in a couple of decades, or you can play around on ms paint and develop a beautiful creative mind that will starve to death forever, you have a few years to choose but by the time you do it'll be too late

[depsidase]

[ralfmaximus]

Excellent! AI is wasteful as fuck and we need to stop this shit.

However.

An average golf course uses about 548,000 gallons of water per day.

Indianapolis has 77 golf courses within a 20 mile radius, utilizing an average of 42 million gallons of water. Per day.

Do something about that too, please.

[depsidase]

yes! thank you! golf also needs to be stopped. it does not need to exist. play minigolf or virtual golf or something i dunno but there is absolutely no reason golf should be allowed to exist in a world where water is becoming increasingly scarce and even land itself increasingly expensive.

one's love of golf does not outweigh civilization's need for water. it does not outweigh all the ecosystems' needs for water. get that selfish boomer attitude out of here. it has no place in the 21st century.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Ideas for background court drama in your fictional monarchy for flavor or humor:

King did not name his son as his heir because his son is an idiot. Said idiot son keeps trying to kill his cousin or uncle that was named as heir but keeps failing because he’s not good at this. Everyone is annoyed at the king for not imprisoning him

New political marriage in the court and the new spouse from outside the kingdom brought a chef with them that cooks weird

Some religious authority and the king keep going to war with each other and making up again like an on again off again toxic couple

Everyone thinks that one of the ladies in waiting got pregnant out of wedlock but she doesn’t even look pregnant and she keeps being like guys it’s been ten months

Someone important in the court keeps throwing really big parties that they can’t afford and people lower down on the ladder keep trying to find ways to stop them without technically disobeying them

Monks come complaining to the king that they’re not being fed enough when in fact they usually eat better than the king does

One of the servants overheard something really embarrassing and they really wanna tell someone so they’ve gotta figure out how to do that without getting in trouble

One of the members of the royal family has gotten obsessed with something (fashion trend, food, etc.) that the rest of the court hates but they have to pretend to like it or they’ll get in trouble

The queen mother (king’s mom) keeps annoyingly trying to interfere with how things are going and the king and the new queen keep running away and hiding whenever they hear her coming and it’s getting ridiculous

The king has not named an heir yet and everyone even slightly eligible for the throne keeps quietly trying to kill each other in the background while the king doesn’t notice and obliviously drinks beer and reads his newspaper

[exwife-of-frankenstein]

Youtube is full of ads, spotify is full of ads, tumblr is full of ads, pinterest is full of ads. Everything uses ai. Every new update makes the website/app worse. Youtube auto translates almost every video I want to watch. Sometimes pinterest only loads ads for me. Check out this new ai feature. Here's a new update that breaks ur laptop. Here's a new update that breaks ur phone. Why are u complaining about ur phone, just get the newest iphone lol. Join my patreon. Join my membership. Pay a monthly membership to get all features. Upgrade your membership to get even more features. Subscribe to netflix. Subscribe to disney. Subscribe to amazon. Subscribe to hulu. This content isn't available in ur country. This content was removed. This website was removed. This feature only exists for apple. This app only exists for apple. U need to a WiFi connection to play this game. U need an account. We need your email to finish creating this account. We need your number to finish creating your account. We need your id to finish creating your account. In order to delete your account please write an email. In order to delete your account you need a laptop. Oops our database was hacked and ur information was stolen. Ur data was sold from this random website u used once 10 years ago. Spam call. Spam call. Spam call.

[byjove]

I truly hate that “women are more emotionally wired than men” bullshit. Men are creatures of hysteria and I say this as a man.

[transmascmikey]

reblog to give the person you reblogged from the strength to complete The Task™

[ruffolive]

Heads up, especially if you have trouble with unreality:

I've already started seeing Sora videos pop up on other platforms, so just know that if you see this watermark logo:

the video is AI generated. Some of them can be very convincing, so I just wanted to let people know if you haven't already heard of it.

[image id: a white watermark of a cloud with eyes next to the word Sora.]

[nonstickwaffleiron]

as an archivist I am begging you

put dates on everything

don’t believe digital stuff is preserved forever - if it’s really important (documents, photos, etc) print it out

name your files accurately I know it sucks but please

don’t destroy the original just bc you scanned it

rubber cement is the devil’s adhesive use photo corners and quit gluing shit

you will NOT remember write it down

if you staple things to the inside of a folder I will find you

your public library probably has equipment to digitize old media for free or can at least get you connected with somewhere that does!

[ampervadasz]

[bumblebeerror]

THE CASUALNESS OF THAT COLLIE SLIPPING RIGHT OUT OF THEIR COLLAR. That dude is a Willing Participant of this walk and by god everyone else is going to follow the RULES.

[roach-works]

im a fan of the moment where the husky is like 'wait you're not authorized to do that' and the collie is like 'THE FUCK IM NOT'

[spacelazarwolf]

unstoppable force (border collie) vs immovable object (husky)

[slugbus]

autumn/winter affirmations:

7 p.m. is not late

your day is not over at 7 p.m.

you are allowed to leave your house after it gets dark

7 p.m. is so early