Well it being black history month is reminding me how I wanted to doodle something like this down for a while. Since it’s been a lil detail I always take notice of in drawings. These are very simple depictions but I hope it’s enough to give the general idea! Feel free to reblog
[Image description taken from alt: Drawing Scars on Brown/Dark Skin. The left illustration is how cuts and burns looks on brown and darker skin. Top level is the common depiction of using light pink to color it. So no melanin? typically not how most scars look. Of course there’s the condition of raised scars or stretch marks which could look lighter! Next row is showing how they are when scabbing which is reddish and dark. Third row is an aged, finished scar. Burns are marbled in look. They're darker than the skin tone. Last row shows how a fully or nearly fully healed scar, it's lightly visible but still darker than skin tone. Right illustration is a torso with scars with a diagonal cut to show the difference between left and right side. Left has pink light scars, healing? Or just an oversight? Right has darker colored scars. Normal. Same applies to top surgery scars. For recent surgeries that alter the areola, it is pink as it heals (nipples are pigmented on dark skin btw so it’s a weird look) After full care and recovery they’ll look normal (dark). End description.]
@a-captions-blog
The burning question of course is whether everyone is mice, or just the humans. Like are the salarians little frogs or is it Mice and Mice With Blue Tentacles???
We all want our faves to be perfect, including me. But I do at least try to be pragmatic about things. Even about the things that put grief into my heart.
Reigen owns at least some crypto, and he uses ChatGPT
“But once he learns the environmental impacts of it, he staunchly opposes AI and bans everyone in Spirits and Such from using it!!”
I hear you. I’m holding space for you. I just don’t think Reigen derives his information from leftist and environmentalist think pieces. I think he is an extremely normal guy getting news from mainstream sources and this is just the latest technology thing that he doesn’t want to fall behind on.
I hear you, I’m also unhappy, but I think Reigen wanders around with his phone pressed to his mouth rambling to this thing going “Hey ChatGPT what’s the answer to—“ and then listening to the text-to-voice answer over speaker phone.
He learns some incredibly incorrect information that he relays to Mob and Mob goes “Okay Shishou”
He spends an all-nighter frantically integrating an AI chat bot into the S&S website because he learned this is a sure fire way to drive up business and it’s all he talks about for 3 straight days and then it drives up exactly 0 business and Reigen never mentions the S&S bot again
I DO THINK, AT LEAST, in proper defense of Reigen, that at least once he’d be called in to “exorcise” someone’s AI chat bot companion.
And really it’s just that the underlying LLM changed models but this person is distraught because their AI partner is behaving differently and it might be possessed or haunted and can Reigen save it.
And Reigen looks at this and goes “How sad. This person really has no one in their life and it’s made them turn to a robot for any kind of human connection? That’s just too sad to consider.”
And he takes the job up and “exorcises” the spirit but with a heavy heart he informs the client the source of the haunting is the strong connection built between human and AI which will always end up inviting a spirit to corrupt the AI which was never designed to bear this kind of human burden. And the AI’s last wishes to this person were that they go and live a full life. And Reigen stays behind to talk to this person for a while just about their life and their dreams and everything they’ve had no one to talk to about.
Next time Reigen sees Mob he warns Mob about the deceptive appeal of loving a thing that isn’t real and to always prioritize the value of real human connection and Mob is like “Okay Shishou”
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
ive said it before but please continue to boycott starbucks until they finalize a fair contract with the union or at the very least stop making their workers inhale silica powder for the stupid ass blended refreshers. i know a girl who was out sick for a week with respiratory issues from ts
silica dust lingers in the air for hours to days too so even if you wear a well fitted n95+ mask (which you need a doctors note and approved medical accommodation to wear) youre still at risk if you take it down at any point for eating or drinking
also they could have just continued using the blending syrup emulsifier they already had but they rolled out silica based blending powder bc they hate their workers and want to punish them for unionizing / bringing health and safety concerns to their union reps i m o
Silica is a tightly regulated OSHA issue. If there's enough of it, they'll say workers need to wear N95 masks and fine the company for health regulation issues.
A Friend wanted some help figuring out shiny things so I made a quick tutorial to help him get started!!
This just covers the basics and doesn't account for textures like the weave of a fabric or abrasion of metal but should at least be a good starting point!
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.
However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”
Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”
The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.
And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.
And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.
Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.
Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.
My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:
Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.
Some other notes:
1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-
2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.
3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.
4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.
Obligatory yadda yadda I tend to cherrypick out of his characterization, the way I tend to write him is probably so ooc it veers on an entirely different character, ETC.
THAT BEING SAID.
(spoilers for Literally The Entirety Of 100line Potentially In Here Under The Cut, also discussion of a/mnesia m/emories)
Part of the fascination with Ima, personally, is that Ima is straight up, unavoidably an abusive person to Kako (and, kind of Everyone including himself)...AND, that under the right circumstances he can, will, and does actively try to be a better sibling and a better person (even if he's still a catty little shithead).
I don't think every abuse narrative needs to have abusers and their victims reconciling, and I also think more abuse narratives need to have victims actively cutting ties with their abusers, AND I also think that the game ultimately lets Ima off way too easily wrt the terrible way he treats Kako (and everyone else, but especially Kako).
But...it still matters to me that Ima does genuinely suck and yet when he's sincerely and unavoidably confronted with how badly he hurt Kako in the pursuit of not losing his only remaining family, Ima genuinely regrets it and he tries to do better by Kako.
Plus the sheer like...behavior differences from R0 to 2ndScen ALONE are so fascinating to me and unfortunately I might have to unavoidably discuss Kako more to talk about that so maybe I save it for another post so this doesn't get even longer.
I like that ima's a little shithead to Gaku and it's deeply funny that both tsukumos are the living embodiment of that one john mulaney skit about middleschoolers.
Ever since I played Amn-sia M-mories I've been thinking about this bc TLDR one of the routes is your step-sibling who is in love with you and actively exploits your amnesia to pretend to be your boyfriend and LITERALLY imprisons you. And maybe I just ignored or missed the context for why he's like this beyond "wow he's such a crazy obsessive older brother" bc of how viscerally I loathed him from the outset, but it was so fucking horrific every step of the way.
...But then I look at Ima, who genuinely treats Kako like shit and does several of the same things (like. preventing her from leaving his room for days on end because he's crashing the fuck out) and like. It's abusive as all fuck and it's genuinely horrific and Kako deserves to never forgive him for any of it. But...with Ima, I can at least understand that he's genuinely being pushed to his emotional limit for actually-traceable-and-meaningful reasons. (and in circumstances like Calamity, he's pushed entirely past his limit to the point of being a danger to himself and others, or becomes passive or actively suicidal like in Mystery)
Like, in R0, he wakes up in an unfamiliar place only to learn that not only has *he* been kidnapped, but so has Kako (and he tried so hard to keep her safe, he TRIED); he learns that he literally has an explosive planted in him, and I'm sure that's plenty traumatizing (even if Ima refuses to outwardly express it) given how Ima regularly has to let his bodily autonomy be violated for survival's sake. ...But then he finds out that *Kako*'s bodily autonomy was violated, and on top of that, some FUCKING BASTARD could kill her (or both of them) for any reason or no reason at all at the metaphoric flick of a button.
And they're told they need to fight, and all Ima can think of is Kako bleeding on the ground during their "graduation ceremony" and how that's his little sister, his only family, and how if she dies, he'll be alone. They promised they would never abandon eachother like their family left them, even if they had to die together to prevent one of them from being alone. (and you could get into a million things about the fucked up coercive nature of their suicide pact and how it mutually hurt both of them as a coping mechanism.)
And he has to protect her. He has to. He Has To, no matter how badly it chafes because Ima *can't* be alone, he has no-one else. And the events of R0 are *constantly* reaffirming his logical fallacies that no-one is trustworthy or compassionate, and pushing him harder and harder into a corner as everyone else decides to fight (and even obedient and well-behaved Kako is suddenly turning and snapping at the hand that feeds and that alone has to be such an incredible shock, let alone the surrounding circumstances).
And everything just *spirals* until Ima lashes out physically in desperation.
His negative character arc in the first half of R0 feels very earned comparatively, given the established context of the Tsukumos as abused orphaned children whose life experience proved they couldn't trust other people, and I quite like the fact that Ima *does* have extremely maladaptive and unpleasant trauma responses, much like Darumi (and I guess you could argue about Kurara and Yugamu as well). I just would like if Ima had also gotten a good, meaty independence arc like Kako, because he deserves to learn (even a tiny bit) to be more of his own person instead of her shadow or a husk. (The shit in Mystery vexes and haunts me...)
Plus, I just think Ima is a fascinating example of parentification?? I definitely Grimace about his death-line in 2ndScen, but I interpret it as equal parts "i love you and i want to be in your life and be able to do better by you, even if we aren't the same as we are now" and Ima trying to deflect a little from the sheer trauma of death (something he pretty obviously has a lot of trauma surrounding). Like...Kako was completely inconsoleable in the wake of their parents death and that would have been perfectly normal, even if she *hadn't* predicted their deaths and been *such a coward* that she may as well have murdered them herself. I'm admittedly very unclear about the nature of their relatives' abuse, but, Ima (already a strong but dependant personality) looked at what was happening and realized that no adult would take care of either of them and that Kako was in no state to take charge. So...Kako becomes pliant because she's never done much on her own, she was never taught or given the support once their parents died, and Ima insists he has it under control. ...and Ima becomes a homeless single parent at the age of, like, 11.
Like, yeah, there's definitely a much skeezier interpretation of Ima's various commentary and comparisons to being Kako's father-figure that I actively ignore, but I think he's also very genuine (for once) about the fucked up way that, despite being functionally the same age, he was forced into the role of surrogate parent. And I...idk, for all I often disagree w the way Kodaka and co handle certain aspects of his character, I really like how that emphasizes that Ima functionally didn't have a lot of his older childhood (and it's debatable how much Kako actually got to be a child, despite Ima infantilizing her, given the severity of their survival situation and how few opportunities they likely had for any kind of comfort).
ON A HAPPIER NOTE: While he's very much a jack of all trades in service of survival, I really love that Ima can play music and clearly takes some pleasure in it (given he offers to play for Takumi casually in the rec room). I like to headcanon that he can play multiple instruments, especially the trumpet (and he used to torture neighborhood kids with it) and piano, and that, had their backstories been real and their parents hadnt died, Ima might've organically grown up to be a big band or jazz musician to compliment Kako's detective schtick.
