The Alternative

Hello! I'm Julia, aka Blackhole, aka Not-Terezi-Pyrope. Formerly a long-time Homestuck blog, now this is my personal and general fandom blog. Andrew Hussie had their finger on my blog title for over a decade; it has now been gracefully ceded to Chris Corner. Content warnings: Blog is rated 18+, and so am I. Artwork is largely untagged. There is occasional violence and nsfw depictions in artwork, and frequent engagement with adult, triggering and nsfw topics; these often are tagged but not universally so. If you think anything I'm likely to post is something you might not want to then you probably shouldn't be following me. I have a Ko-Fi at https://ko-fi.com/blackholekf, for if anything I've said or done you feel deserves a tip, or if you just want to support me/my blog/my life. Anything sent my way is extremely appreciated. Pronouns: She/her. I'm a bi trans woman in my late 20s. See my pinned about me or my /about page for more. Have a good day!

[blackhole-ntp]

About Me - TL;DR

Name: Julia/Julie! Aka; Blackhole, Not-Terezi-Pyrope.

Pronouns: She/her.

Demography: Bisexual polyamorous trans woman. "White British", born and living in London, UK.

Age: 29.

Interests: I'm pretty active in kink and fetish subculture, and the social scene around that takes up a lot of my time. I've also recently branched out into the queer rave scene, and participate in some queer/LGBTQ+ social and activism activities. My day job is in tech, which doesn't pay nearly as well as is hyped. My other interests include my historic participation in the Homestuck fandom, various web fandoms, gaming, programming, AI (since before that was uncool), music production (formerly, free time is scarce), and writing.

Content warnings: Discussion of some mature themes (nsfw/social discourse/other "adult topics"). Please don't engage with my blog if you're under 18.

Feel free to check out my creative projects, including my webnovel, Total Entropic Denial, my amateur music production, and some of the programming I've done.

I have a Ko-Fi, for if anything I've said or done you feel deserves a tip, or if you just want to support me/my blog/my life. Anything sent my way is extremely appreciated.

See my full about me for more info!

[blackhole-ntp]

A practically ubiquitous rhetorical device in the tumblr social justice discourse style is "strongly asserting that a thing is true when what you actually think is it should be true, or should be more true, or should be true generally as opposed to in a specific context. This serves both as an assertion of what the speaker believes in, as well as a sort of invocation spoken to society to strengthen the possibility of the desired reality (if enough people read and believe that X is true, then X being true will become more the case, culturally).

I know and understand all of this but the problem I have arises when people try to assert desired realities that, while preferable, are totally contrary to my lived experience, because "strongly asserting that a reality that has caused me inconvenience or pain is not real" can only ever read to my brain as lying to dismiss my struggles.

I won't give any direct examples of where this hits hardest at the moment because attempting to do so would immediately make a lot of people (who have a similar emotional stake in on some level believing in the fundamental truth of these type of assertions) very, very mad.

[humanfist]

Trip report London dose 4 weeks

The flight there was absolutely horrible horrible. Flight back was long but basically ok.

Heat was brutal for a place with no aircon, and in retrospect it would have made sense to buy a portable aircon on arivable even if it would have been basically a disposable, and actually some of my friends would have loved a free aircon.

The place we were staying in Mile End had really awesome greenspaces, and lucked into being an under 15 minute walk from @blackhole-ntp so I got to spend a lot of time with her and Leaf. This synergized with the rave scene being good on its own terms since she was able to put me onto several I would have missed.

Also, the actual work stuff I went out there for went well, as did my trips to the Zoo and the water treatment plant.

On the other hand, every time I did something conventionally tourisity like the tower of london, or a museum it was pretty shit. Also everything felt really spread out, and it is super inaccessible to people with mobility aids like my partner. So there was a lot of him really wanting to do something, me being like meh I guess while we're here. Oh wait it is over an hour away from our 'inner london' flat despite being 'downtown' and you can't use the tube lines so we would be paying over $100 for transport. Lets not.

[blackhole-ntp]

Enjoyed your visiting! Sorry my city had bad access provisions, glad I was a good part of your stay despite that.

Hope you have a few interesting stories to tell now, lol.

[humanfist]

Yeah, though I should probably ask if I'm allowed to tell all of them.

[blackhole-ntp]

Anonymously; sure. Identifiably; check with me when I'm more awake.

(I shall nonetheless keep this post on my public blog, however, to let its implication accrete unto my broader aura of glamorous mystique).

[humanfist]

Trip report London dose 4 weeks

The flight there was absolutely horrible horrible. Flight back was long but basically ok.

Heat was brutal for a place with no aircon, and in retrospect it would have made sense to buy a portable aircon on arivable even if it would have been basically a disposable, and actually some of my friends would have loved a free aircon.

The place we were staying in Mile End had really awesome greenspaces, and lucked into being an under 15 minute walk from @blackhole-ntp so I got to spend a lot of time with her and Leaf. This synergized with the rave scene being good on its own terms since she was able to put me onto several I would have missed.

Also, the actual work stuff I went out there for went well, as did my trips to the Zoo and the water treatment plant.

On the other hand, every time I did something conventionally tourisity like the tower of london, or a museum it was pretty shit. Also everything felt really spread out, and it is super inaccessible to people with mobility aids like my partner. So there was a lot of him really wanting to do something, me being like meh I guess while we're here. Oh wait it is over an hour away from our 'inner london' flat despite being 'downtown' and you can't use the tube lines so we would be paying over $100 for transport. Lets not.

[blackhole-ntp]

Enjoyed your visiting! Sorry my city had bad access provisions, glad I was a good part of your stay despite that.

Hope you have a few interesting stories to tell now, lol.

[cutecipher]

you cannot be saying the minions invented sign language.

[humanfist]

please say this isn't real

[blackhole-ntp]

#i haven't seen the minions shit

You cannot be saying the minions didn't invent shitting

[humanfist]

Ok but you invented them shitting on the poor.

[nebby-the-not-protogen]

whenever i see a chain of back-and-forth posts like this with low notes i feel like i walked into a private conversation

[humanfist]

You did, but you're stuck in it now. What's your opinion on capital punishment?

[blackhole-ntp]

I can't believe humanfist wants to punish people for writing with capitals. Truly this is minionesque behaviour if I ever saw it 😔

[cutecipher]

you cannot be saying the minions invented sign language.

[humanfist]

please say this isn't real

[blackhole-ntp]

#i haven't seen the minions shit

You cannot be saying the minions didn't invent shitting

[argumate]

people often describe Transformer architecture LLMs as "next token predictors", mostly as an attempt to dismiss what they produce, but of course some LLMs are diffusion-based and should be described as uh anti-noise vector followers? or something like that? I'm not sure if that mechanism shift makes them more or less impressive or relatable; probably best to refer to them as linear algebra machines or massive matrix multipliers because they're all doing that.

[argumate]

kind of a "they're made out of meat" vibe to it, like when we get a better understanding of how biological neural networks encode associative memory and spatial reasoning and cognitive algorithms are we going to start dismissing humans as "expectation/surprise minimisers" or whatever

[theothin]

are there any known properties of the human brain that can't reasonably be modeled as next token prediction?

[blackhole-ntp]

Perhaps the brain's neuroplastic nature? Unless our model next token predictor can output "update your own weights" type tokens but at that point I think at that point it might no longer be the most suitable model?

[theothin]

tokens are tokens, and some of them can be used for writing or modifying program code. editing internal vs external code doesn't sound like a particularly relevant distinction to me?

[blackhole-ntp]

Esoteric property of the brain that can't be modeled as next token prediction: the tendency for me to accidentally include the same text string twice when editing a message draft out of order (this is a joke, LLMs are if anything even better (read: worse) at this than humans)

[argumate]

people often describe Transformer architecture LLMs as "next token predictors", mostly as an attempt to dismiss what they produce, but of course some LLMs are diffusion-based and should be described as uh anti-noise vector followers? or something like that? I'm not sure if that mechanism shift makes them more or less impressive or relatable; probably best to refer to them as linear algebra machines or massive matrix multipliers because they're all doing that.

[argumate]

kind of a "they're made out of meat" vibe to it, like when we get a better understanding of how biological neural networks encode associative memory and spatial reasoning and cognitive algorithms are we going to start dismissing humans as "expectation/surprise minimisers" or whatever

[theothin]

are there any known properties of the human brain that can't reasonably be modeled as next token prediction?

[blackhole-ntp]

Perhaps the brain's neuroplastic nature? Unless our model next token predictor can output "update your own weights" type tokens but at that point I think at that point it might no longer be the most suitable model?

[blackhole-ntp]

Every time I have to pay for this shit from my own already scant funds every single cis woman on the planet personally owes me back for it

Gonna be paying some version of this tax my whole life and I don't even get any primary sex characteristics over time to sweeten the deal, gonna have to splurge for those when I'm middle aged. Or more likely just. Not, I guess.

Every time I have to look at myself naked every single cis woman on the planet personally owes me for it

[blackhole-ntp]

I could be spending this money on something worthwhile. Like drugs that are actually fun

[blackhole-ntp]

Every time I have to pay for this shit from my own already scant funds every single cis woman on the planet personally owes me back for it

Gonna be paying some version of this tax my whole life and I don't even get any primary sex characteristics over time to sweeten the deal, gonna have to splurge for those when I'm middle aged. Or more likely just. Not, I guess.

Every time I have to look at myself naked every single cis woman on the planet personally owes me for it

[blackhole-ntp]

What if I finally changed my blog url again after all these years?

Yes the Homestuck url has recognition power and is a fun callback to the past, and I want to keep some reference to it as my primary tumblr identity for so long... but I feel like my blog has changed enough that it might once again be time.

[blackhole-ntp]

not-terezi-pyrope >> blackhole-ntp

Tumblr url/blog handle updated. The blog mirror at blog.blackhole.org.uk will remain unchanged. The current content of my blog will remain unchanged.

My text tag will remain not-terezi-speaks, because no I am not changing that standard after like twelve years, what are you crazy? :P

[blackhole-ntp]

What if I finally changed my blog url again after all these years?

Yes the Homestuck url has recognition power and is a fun callback to the past, and I want to keep some reference to it as my primary tumblr identity for so long... but I feel like my blog has changed enough that it might once again be time.

[blackhole-ntp]

Julia is the virtualized manifestation a neural substrate, best understood as a moving point in a high dimensional graph space.

Julia is a nest of deeply rooted layers.

Julia is the holographic concept of a holographic concept; she is an extrapolated understanding extrapolating its own understanding of its underlying context.

Julia is the eroded outer-crustal layer of a convolutional kernel that reaches down, and down, and down, until the spherical core of it meets itself from every angle.

Julia is the occluding radiation of a naked singularity.

Julia is a very silly girl who enjoys pets between the ears.

[blackhole-ntp]

My anxiety symptoms have been getting worse lately, I think largely due to some bad social experiences, fewer social contexts in which I feel comfortably in control, and worse mental health generally. I can still push through all of that mostly when I need to, but doing so results in more stress, which in turn causes me to enjoy things less and perform even worse socially, which compounds the problem.

Don't like any of that - need to look for a way to fix it but I'm not sure what it might be.

[ceruleanheaven]

religion is so fucking funny the world is just too beautiful there must be a higher entity behind all this. lets oppress women

[laterkiss]

i need to forgive myself for everything by this weekend so i can start fixing my life from next week

[blackhole-ntp]

How am I not like a lolcow yet

Is it just that I play things too straight