Welcome to the weird place

I'm kinda just vibin' in here

[mousidy]

very strange cottage industry on youtube of giving exhaustive "critiques" of harry potter that amount to things like "the magic school is dangerous and that's bad!!!" and treating that with equal severity as the fatphobia or the slavery apologia, then patting themselves on the back as if this amounts to some kind of praxis

cinemasins is not praxis lol. how about materially supporting and protecting trans people from joanne and forgetting about her wizard books

[mousidy]

I loved harry potter growing up. it made me feel seen as an abused and closeted kid. I idolized and looked up to joanne, wanting to become an author like her

then she started funnelling all her wizard book money into destroying the rights of my people and I resolved not to give her any more of my money

I didn't have to reevaluate the quality of her writing to do this. whether she's good at keeping her worldbuilding consistent or whatever has nothing to do with my decision to boycott her work. who cares how good or bad her writing is. she's killing trans people

[jayalaw]

OP, you get it. This is exactly the problem.

[isuggestusingyourlocallibrary]

I suggest finding a different book at your local library!

[jayalaw]

Bruh.

I WORK in a library. And I read about twelve books at a time. And I’m drafting a Harry Potter rebound reading list organized by genre and time period.

It isn’t about the book; it’s that once the books meant something about love, justice and courage. It’s a case where what we got out of the art was what we put into it. For some that was making music, for others creating charities and for those like me? Committing to be braver. And now that the art is tainted, no amount of writing quality will change that taint.

That’s why those videos saying the books were “always bad” don’t help. The book quality is the lower priority versus the author becoming Dolores Umbridge!

[isuggestusingyourlocallibrary]

I was seconding op's point, not trying to tell you to do more. I agree that whether or not the books are good doesn't matter. Your reblog was the one put on my dash so it's the one I reblogged, I'm sorry (genuine).

[jayalaw]

It’s okay. I’m sorry too; so many people reblog judgmental stuff about HP fans, complete with recommending the books I read as a kid and adult, that I reacted with judgment rather than taking a step back. Definitely agree that libraries should be used more and saved.

[explicitlyrics]

swifties always going on the "you just hate women" defense like first of all Taylor Swift is not a woman she's an unskippable ad

[loth-caatgirl]

actually yes this needs to be kept as part of this conversation

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tumblr tags from astroterran reading: i have a slightly nuanced opinion of taylor swift, i do think that she is an unapologetic capitalist monster who would burn her family alive if she thought it would make her 50 cents, i do think she is ultimately a creatively bankrupt hasBeen, but i do also think she gets a lot of hate for being a woman, you cannot mention her name at my workplace without 50 middle aged men instantly calling her variations of a whore /End ID]

[boomimhere]

What Happens When Your AI Companion Can Be Seen

Reporters covering the AI companionship space tend to focus on the chat. It's the easy part to describe. But the more interesting story right now is happening on video, and SweetDream sits near the center of it. At sweetdream.ai, video calls are available with select characters, and the people using them describe a shift that's hard to capture in a feature list.

The mechanics are straightforward enough on paper. You build an AI girlfriend exactly how you want her, choosing appearance, personality and voice, and the platform's chat keeps track of your history so conversations build over time. From there you can send voice messages, take real-time phone calls, and, with the right character, move to a video call where she actually appears and responds. The continuity is the point. Nothing feels disconnected.

Set against competitors like candy.ai or ourdream.ai, all working in the same emerging field, SweetDream's edge is consistency across the whole experience rather than one flashy trick. The video call is impressive, but it lands because everything leading up to it already felt real. That's the detail most observers keep coming back to.

[karvina]

this girl was showing all the signs of being a secret mermaid so i pushed her into the pool and she turned into a forty foot long mosasaurus which is tbh way cooler

[karvina]

not really sure how to get her out though

[karvina]

for those of you asking why i pushed her into the pool in the first place: i work for a duplicitous small town aquarium and i'm trying to kidnap mermaids to jump through hoops and shit to entertain tourists and make money. fucking obviously. now that i know she's actually a mosasaurus though i Have fallen in pure-hearted love with her

[sexygrammaticalerrors]

[thedupshadove]

Opera plot: Local Noble realizes that his affections for Pretty Village Girl have a rival in the form of Honest Laborer. Having read enough romances to know that a girl asked to choose between a rich man and a poor man will always pick the poor man, whereas in a love triangle between two rich men it's anyone's game, he decides that his chief object must be to elevate his rival's wealth and status as quickly as possible. What the Compte de Genre-Savie over here forgot to account for, however, was the overwhelming power of the Pygmalion Effect, and now he has to deal with watching two people he's in love with develop ever-stronger feelings for each other. Eventually all of this resolves via...I don't know.

[queenofattolia]

#first of all: ''comte de genre-savie'' is PERFECT. just great. absolutely no notes.#I would love an opera with this exact plot. bonus points if the comte is genuinely genre savvy#he keeps bringing up opera tropes only for the other characters to look at him like he's insane.#the score is diagetic to him; when he points out reoccurring themes or transitions to minor keys#the other characters ask him what the hell he's talking about. the whole chorus gets together to sing about how#comte de genre-savie is going mad. the comte tries to sneak away and keeps getting pulled back in.#I wonder if you could even push it further - have it so that only the comte can speak or 'hear' spoken words;#all other characters communicate in recitativo secco or formally composed songs#then you can have scenes where the comte is speaking but the other character in the scene can't hear him.#this can be played for laughs (the comte tries to order something from a shopkeeper; the shopkeeper walks away as he's talking)#and for dramatic effect (the Honest Laborer is singing a heartfelt duet with the Pretty Village Girl#and neither of them can hear the comte saying 'I love you' in between their lines)#........I am into this actually. I had to convince myself that this wasn't just cyrano de bergerac but no. it isn't. I'm into it.#upon the stage (via @notbecauseofvictories)

[parkchanwoohoo]

That weirdo billionaire obsessed with stopping his aging/taking his son's blood to stay young has, as far as I can tell, taken a hero dose of shrooms that led him to fall in love with one of his employees(?) and is now attempting to use his wealth to find a cure for her endometriosis? Which like, sure

[parkchanwoohoo]

This is so funny

[foldingfittedsheets]

As I rang up a sale today with a very nice couple the woman was spelling her last name. I am very bad at taking down letters so I was going slowly as she spelled it out.

As I got to the end I saw “berg” and my brain caught up a little and prompted that that means “mountain” in German. My eyes then flicked back to the first part and I started giggling.

I looked at the woman and asked, “Does your name mean ‘Cheese Mountain?’”

Her eyebrows shot up and she asked, “You speak German?”

“Not very well, but I still have basic vocabulary.”

“It does mean Cheese Mountain,” she told me with delight.

“I love that so much. That’s the best name ever.”

She told me it was her maiden name and she’d always loved it and had gone back to it after a divorce. She also said she met a German woman once who saw it and was befuddled by such a name but I think it’s incredible.

[liberalsarecool]

Billionaires can't play by the rules of society.

[inkskinned]

she's singing in another room and my dog is asleep at my feet. my grandma asked me why i haven't found a man yet and i laughed. oh, you know. i like my house clean.

my girlfriend is also my man is also "my partner" if i'm in a professional setting. yesterday we went to a ren faire and a man mimed at me - you're together? and at my delighted nod, his baffled, you're gay? made me laugh. a woman with rainbow hair said i love the two of you together. you're both so beautiful it's absurd.

my dad introduced my partner as my "..... friend. or whatever" the other day. he knows we're dating. in the same way, i was never able to get my sister's husband to stop saying that's gay like it's 2008. he still uses the word fa***t, and my sister's defense of him has always been well, he's just kidding.

my lover and i dance to old music in a tiny kitchen. we judge new music together and take food critique very seriously. we watch love is blind before we fall asleep and agree that if they had a queer season, it would be bloody but also make for excellent tv. of fucking course queer people would meet someone for 2 weeks and agree to get married. what are you saying.

at a bar with friends, a man puts his hand on my wrist. got a boyfriend? and yes, i do have a boyfriend, she's amazing. i am texting her while i wander around a gas station named after geese. i am visiting a swing state for a wedding. in the candy aisle i overhear: she's actually like a lesbian it's disgusting. two teenage girls with packaged sandwiches in their hands, giggling. no literally, like. i'm not, like. okay with her being there while we're all, like, naked and changing.

my girlfriend and i tailgate, drink gin and cider out of cups. from the frat group beside us, a man corrects himself with one of his friends: bro, i mean, nonbinary entity, and it makes everyone around him laugh, myself included. he razzes his friend the same way i would have killed for at 19 years old - like nothing happened, he continues: you apply sunscreen like an alien. he does a little sassy (and fairly accurate) dance interpretation of the motion. his friend is laughing so hard they're crying.

i am lucky, i live in a safe neighborhood in a safe state. my masc passenger princess comes up from DC. i drive her for an hour to where all the leaves are a violent arrangement of color. we walk along the trails, letting autumn into our blood. in this part of the state, there's a lot of pickup trucks and trump signs. when we chastely kiss before getting into the car, i accidentally make eye contact with a woman holding her child's wrist. she looks disgusted. she looks fucking pissed.

two hours later my girl and i are eating dinner on a patio, soaking in the last warmth of new england sun before the chill of winter sets in. we are giggling and trying to talk through plastic vampire teeth. at another table, i see a young woman sit up straighter. i watch her watch us. she blushes and takes her partner's hand from across the table. shy, like the taste of evening has just become something deeper.

it's worth it for this moment, i think. my lover is still humming the same song she's been singing for four days straight and i don't want to kill her for it. her guitar is beside my bed. her toothbrush is in my bathroom. in a few moments i will make us lunch. we are lucky enough to have found each other. it is lucky enough to be in love.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

there are teenagers whose parents met on tinder

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

facebook.com is legally old enough to drink in the u.s.

[juststories-mdni]

Please stop...

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

myspace's former user base is mostly middle aged now!

[cleptrophese]

why are you doing this to us

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

netflix is old enough to rent a car!

[jewfrogs]

the change from AD to CE feels really emblematic of how surface-level and meaningless the supposed secularization of the western world is

[jewfrogs]

Common Era is definitely preferable over Anno Domini, if only because christ is no lord of mine, but it’s only less christianocentric in that it doesn’t overtly make reference to christ in its title. the benchmark is still the same. you’re still measuring when the common era began using the (supposed) birth of christ, separating history into “the period before jesus” and “the period after jesus”. this conception of history is no less defined by christianity than it was before, except that now it’s easier to ignore because you’ve draped it in a “secular”, “modern” veneer and done nothing to actually unpack the ways in which western society intrinsically centers christianity.

[iamemeraldfox]

Okay now I need a point in history that could be a benchmark to start counting the years from, and would be a common point for most of the world

What year would it be today?

[sarah-ankh]

UTC

Coordinated Universal Time.

The system by which every computer in existence now keeps count of the passing seconds.

And I mean that literally. To a computer system "now" is a number that represents the total number ov seconds that have passed since midnight on the 1st of January, 1960.

1960/01/01 00:00:01 is literally the beginning of time as far as a computer is concerned.

This would be the year 66UTC

[homunculus-argument]

Hey what if dragons are a "no such thing as a fish" kind of situation?

The reason why they're so varied in appearance, but roughly similar in a handful of some very specific traits is a matter of covergent evolution, they're just creatures that all happened to end up as the ones to fill out the same ecological niche.

[relsage]

Oooh like crabs! and trees

[homunculus-argument]

Everything will eventually turn into a tree, a crab, or a dragon.

[time-thy-pyramids]

Hunter-gatherer's approach to manufacturing textiles:

Find a suitable 3D mass

Peel off its outer layer to get a 2D sheet

Agriculturalist's approach to manufacturing textiles:

Produce a 1D filament

Shape it into a 2D space-filling curve

[stealingpotatoes]

hi girls gays and gamers i'm currently posting from my new DESKTOP PC that is NOT AN EVIL LAPTOP i have seen the light and realised i should get something that doesnt require its last rites the second that one (1) component craps its pants

trying to recover my SSDs at home was a Failure so I'm gonna take it in to the tech shop and get them to tell me if i need to have a mental breakdown or not yayyy

[lastoneout]

I love when people try to gotcha me on my stance that all sports should be gender integrated with "even American football???" because I can instantly come back with "oh lmao, no, I don't think ANYONE should play American football at all, it's way too dangerous" like nice try but I know no amount of testosterone is going to protect you from the profound, life ruining health issues caused by getting repeated severe concussions over the course of several years. No one should play this sport.

[sculptedfromclay]

[kingdomkome21]

Do these quotes REALLY have anything to do with Wonder Woman?

[sculptedfromclay]

…

[ominous-signs]

You guys should talk about your ghost experiences if you have them actually, and want to share that is. I’m so curious.

[json-derulo]

not a ghost experience or even a supernatural one, but a bizarre unexplained occurrence that keeps me up at night nonetheless: I once found a real, perfectly intact pumpkin sitting on my doorstep one morning in mid-march.

fresh. showed no sign of having been frozen and thawed out. not carved or smashed or anything. no knock, no note, no nothing. I asked every friend who knew my address and none ever owned up to it, or even seemed suspicious. all shared my bafflement about how someone would even get a fresh, whole pumpkin in florida in mid-march. it's been years at this point and I have never gotten even a whiff of an explanation.

if you're ever looking to pull a completely harmless prank that will live rent-free in the target's mind forever...miraculously acquire a large, unwieldy, wildly out-of-season piece of fresh produce, abandon it on their doorstep, and never, ever tell them who or why or how the fuck