bork bork

Hey there, I'm taff and I'm in my early 30s and from australia. I'm interested in birds, reading, and sleeping later than I should. they/he

[zyxalyx-deactivated20250925]

[swiftrunnerfelidae]

"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.

[junk-thunder]

come back my scarab

[junk-thunder]

please come back my scarab

[junk-thunder]

i,m so fuckign sorryy my scarab

[ostdrossel]

I like cameras on the ground because they give me different views and it often feels like you are right there with the birds. These are clips taken with the Ceyomur CY95 this weekend, just mostly Gracks being Gracks but also some other visitors. Come good into the week!

(The music had a weird alarm sound in the middle of the clip, I lowered the volume because of it but still wanted to use it because the music fit so well.)

[unidentifiedspoon]

my turn at this one. ART is the feed? no. ART is the frame

[vanglaggle]

"why are so many leftists disabled" maybe it's because disabled people don't really care for the "kill all disabled people" parties but who can say

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

[littlepagodatree]

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

[seananmcguire]

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

[siarczek]

Commission for cautious-callum on Bluesky!

[normalcei]

Not all dogs have jobs and I think they should get to wear little vests too

[xenosaurus]

it’s a shame more vampire media doesn’t pull from vampire bat behavior because they’re such sweeties. they can only survive their incredibly specialized diet because bats will share blood with colony members that didn’t find a meal! there’s evidence that suggests the donors sometimes initiate this behavior themselves by approaching hungry bats! the colonies are mostly harems of females with a few males but they’ve been observed letting unrelated males in when it gets cold so they can all stay warm! cute little social critters!

[xenosaurus]

@yupekosi your tags have created such a beautiful world

[shopcat]

look at this wonderful gif of scallops getting scared and scattering like a flock pigeons

[elioftheasphodel]

whatever. go my scallops

[officialspec]

so we just moved, and the house we moved into has been abandoned for a few years so weve discovered some fun little secrets scattered around as we explored. for example, theres a little room downstairs with graffiti on the door dubbing it 'the dog box'

of course we were intrigued. aside from some storage and a place to put a washing machine, the dog box seems to exclusively contain this old ass piano, with a little window to see into it from outside

also pictured sitting on the piano is a little novelty dagger we found in the grass outside. its all very funny and novel, right? we thought so

that was when we found The Stain

of course, we immediately jumped to some conclusions. the knife outside, the abandoned house, 'do not enter' written on the door. whatever it was, it had dripped through the floorboards from upstairs, from approximately just outside the bathroom. we decided to wait until we finished moving and then grab some peroxide to test it just in case

still, the dog box bloodstain remained a hot topic, and the curiosity was killing me. after figuring out where upstairs the stain wouldve dripped down from, we noticed it had also seeped up through the newly installed flooring, and i decided i couldnt wait to investigate

looking around the dog box, i noticed that there was a section of the ceiling/underfloor that was noticeably newer than the rest of it, meaning the place the stain had leaked through had been pulled out and replaced just before we moved in. suspicious

im using my phone torch to look around in the dark, and when i shine it on the bloodstain it lights up in a distinctly.... glossy way. when i get closer i can see its not matte, but sticky. so i decide to touch it, and immediately im hit with a STRONG smell of something deeply familiar. all the pieces fall together at once, and using my superior investigative prowess i have deduced the culprit

it was bees. there was a fuckoff massive beehive in the floor that got taken out before we moved in and it leaked honey up through the floorboards and onto the floor of the dog box and the landlord didnt feel like cleaning it up. mystery solved

[godsfavoritespecialangel]

The chances of your fish committing credit card fraud is low, but never 0

[tuxankhamun]

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[ifoundmybeatingheartagain]

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

this has rewired some neural pathways for me

[preserving-tiktok]

[taraljc]

This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.

[liminalbeauty]

Thank you, adorable scientist, for making people's lives better.

[punchspeedchunk]

As an Australian, THIS WOMAN IS A FUCKING GODSEND.

[weaselle]

Californian (sup, fellow desert-havers) i've been using this since i saw it and it works so fucken good dude (i often have to put like 8 dogs in my car, so it's extra important my car isn't attempting to go super-nova when we get in)

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!

[bleaksqueak]

I've been toiling away at top speed to catch up on all the work I missed and all the pages I need to get done, but today's warmup ended up being revisiting this old piece done for @painted-bees ! I've always liked it too much to let it get so visibly old that I see nothing but flaws instead of the piece itself, so! Have a lovely werewolf and a lovely friend.