Sade Olutola
DEAR READER
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Andulka
blake kathryn
Product Placement
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
art blog(derogatory)
trying on a metaphor
Cosmic Funnies
titsay
i don't do bad sauce passes
Misplaced Lens Cap
Not today Justin
shark vs the universe
Keni
AnasAbdin
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$LAYYYTER
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@biyoualwaysryan
I'm not even nearly as anti-LLM as most other leftists but part of approaching new technology is "hey let's think real critically about the application and scope of this so we can use it in ways that are worth it and don't cause mass scale societal damage" but the fact that it's being injected into fucking EVERYTHING makes any stance more cautious than "USE LLMS FOR EVERYTHING NOW AND FOREVER" so much more anti than the status quo that I don't even fucking want to add nuance
Elon Musk personally stepped in to unban the guys who posted pictures of my address and the inside of my apartment and then permanently banned my account for making a gay for pay joke yeah alright whatever man
This was the joke for the record
Rocky: we built our spaceship by unifying every mind on the planet to create a super hive mind, pooling out collective knowledge and problem solving skills to come up with a plan.
Grace: we gave the scariest woman I've ever met two coffees every morning, an unlimited budget, and enough legal immunity to cuss out any world leaders she wanted to and boy did she want to.
re ehrc guidance. which is not legally binding.
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
reblog this post to help a child break the law
so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.
anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.
about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.
now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.
this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.
in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.
so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.
you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,
or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.
we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game
a young witch trying to solve a gristly murder in the Italian alps during the Years of Lead
we got a full redbox and now we're playing go fish with the redbox movies
I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away
here's my dad and i taking it away
a redbox makes a wonderful addition to your patio
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
act like you belong there and you can get away with anything.
thinking about grace, not remembering why he was on hail mary, being confused as to why he had been willing to go on a suicide mission. he couldnt remember, but there mustve been a good reason, some factor that played into why he chose to go. some bravery he mustered that he didnt know he had in him. that even if he couldnt recall it, there was something behind the choice he made to embark on this journey- only for him to discover it was never his choice in the first place. he didnt take a heroic stand. it was not an admirable suicide but murder, all for the survival of mankind.
“Where are the trans men in history?” See. When you're born a gender that was forcefully married off, who had to live most of their life indoors, when you had to raise children, and had a lobotomy if your family thought you were a tad too odd, it's kinda hard to come out as a trans man now ain't it.
forever my lineage would use his wrong pronouns but not me
Diane, clear my schedule. I’m attempting a recipe that says “prep time: 15 minutes.”
this is all pewdiepie’s fault
I’m not joking. He helped ruin an entire generation of lonely cis boys with unfettered internet access. I grew up during his height and I was in middle school when he was at his peak of fame and the ‘racism and antisemitism is so funny’ cultural reset was like an avalanche with these guys. I don’t think it is all his fault but the gen z tilt towards regressive attitudes and the alt-right is due in large part to YouTubers of his era and his niche.
it's crazy how plausible all the shit the corporations do in the murderbot diaries is. that one scene when murderbot was talking to those humans who had signed a 20 year corporate work contract and it asked them if the contract specified 20 years by the standard local calendar or by a proprietary calendar created by the company was downright unsettling 😬 if the ceos of modern earth companies read these books they would probably start crying because the government won't let them do most of this in real life.
hey fun fact this has absolutely happened before. part of the push to standardize time/timezones was because factory employers had clocks set to the pace of their machinery. meaning of the workers were not doing enough, time would run slower until they had reached their goal. there is historical precedent.
I do think most childhoods are pretty traumatic just, by default. even run of the mill taking your shit, grounding you, setting strict rules (which would be absurd for an adult) style parenting. Physical and sexual violence on top of that is more fuel to the fire, and certainly contributes a heavy mental load, but children are fundamentally not treated like people by most of the world. They're an investment; a form of useful property that might someday become an endebted human being. This is the context under which all child abuse occurs; but the context itself is rather deplorable, don't you think?
