Things I do in the Dark! @caefire - Tumblr Blog

if I wrote a dystopian novel where the corrupt evil megacorporation that controls society has a fucking smirk for a logo, my editor would tell me to use a less heavy-handed metaphor

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

and yet

twinkiefairy

I love this because if I were to write a literary novel in the Western cannon that described the image of an apple with a chunk bitten off, any high school English student would tell you it is a Bible reference meant to represent the source of all evil and downfall of humanity and YET

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

theo-the-ghost

Imagine telling someone that the evil corporation that makes you waste away hours because they want you to watch more ads had made their name be a clock sound. They’d tell you it’s ridiculously on-the-nose

redstonedust

unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.

melanqueerly

Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.

phinarei

Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.

By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.

There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.

That's queerbaiting.

Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.

The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.

Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.

joyandotherstories

Reblogging to keep the accurate definition and examples of queerbaiting circulating in the world

smol-blue-bird

I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating

smol-blue-bird

There’s a whole paragraph that’s like “okay, find the keyboard. Don’t panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, that’s normal. Really, it’s fine. The extra keys don’t make things harder. It’s FINE”

smol-blue-bird

Thought this section was particularly interesting:

Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”

But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.

You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s being creative. It’s just running.

theriu

Somebody in 1975 had a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is not in any way “intelligence” than the majority of today’s intellectual minds.

madebykyra

My sister took more photos of my dress. I am very happy with how this turned out :)))))

Only one more weekend until the Renaissance Faire!!!!

mothermara

remember to bury the dead with a phone, everyone. these days the ferry terminal at the river styx wants you to download a fucking app

finelythreadedsky

#sooo would it be better for the phone to be fully charged or does it also have to be dead @h0wlcastle

hm by analogy to the ritual cancellation or 'killing' of items like swords, mirrors, or other metal objects in bronze/iron age burials by bending/folding/breaking them or (among the etruscans at least) inscribing them with "for the tomb," i do think the phone should also be dead. ideally also the screen should be very shattered so as to render it unfit for use by the living.

probablyasocialecologist

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

wire-smith

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

pterribledinosaurdrawings

Hi! I've been sewing for ~10 years and am finally ready to venture into sewing clothing (i want to start with a basic button-down Hawaiian shirt) but when I look at patterns online, I don't know enough about clothing patterns to recognize when they're AI, and a lot of them seem... suspicious. I'm mainly a quilter, so I can recognize those from a mile away, but I know nothing about apparel/anything-with-sizes patterns. Do you have any tips or recommendations for only buying legit sewing patterns? (I couldn't figure out how to ask from my side blog that is sp for sewing)

I used a purchased sewing pattern once in 2011 and I've drafted everything myself since then, so I'm not the right person to ask, but hopefully people will leave suggestions in the notes.

I guess the best way to tell would probably be to see if there's a blog or a social media presence indication a real human who's been around for years, instead of just a lone etsy shop that's popped up suddenly. I've also heard the ai scam ones are suspiciously cheap? I know there's also a website called Pattern Review.

Even though I haven't sewn any of these I would like to shoutout my friend Scroop Patterns, who is a real human & sewing/costuming teacher who I've been following for about 15 years and who puts a ton of work into her patterns and instructions, and thoroughly tests them. Even sews up at least one sample for each pattern on a cheap beginner sewing machine! She also has posts with the tester makes, and various other useful information on her blog.

None of them are button up shirts, so it's not what you're looking for, but she's got a nice variety of both modern and historical things that get very good reviews so I'm sure somebody seeing this will find them useful.

pomgore

i love learning about animals ive literally never seen or heard of before. what amazing diversity of life on this planet earth. what the hell is a japanese serow

pomgore

goat dog

onemillionwordsofcrap

Oh this is an excellent new beaft. Look at that thang. I'll take a dozen

onemillionwordsofcrap

Profoundly unserious, yet strangely majestic. Much like us all.......

bestiolin

shu katerina

vivid-sector

doomscrolling thru the weather app

wandringaesthetic

You should only write in present tense with extreme caution.

not because it's bad or anything but because if you do it even once you're going to be editing the bits where you shifted tenses out of your writing for the rest of your life

corvuscorona

if u write in present tense enough times in a row, you can switch this problem around & get confused when your present-tense narrator is talking abt something that happened in Their past. I recommend this bc it keeps u on ur toes

ach-sss-no

guys i made my first blackout poetry

heywriters

^^^

dduane

In the “No, no, we were just kidding” Hasty Pivot dep’t…

Citing backlash, ISBNdb removed its webpages about training AI, denied ever buying, scanning, or selling a book for AI training, and said th

In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text, and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse. The article also suggested that book authors who might be opposed to this use of their work could just write with manipulating and sabotaging AI models in mind. 404 Media spoke to booksellers and saw reports online detailing a sudden uptick in sales recently. “It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.” “Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” one of ISBNdb’s now-removed pages said. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.”

And yeah, sure, why don't all of us who value writing as art just spend the rest of our lives sabotaging that vital imperative by trying to screw up what we do enough to screw you up. Absolutely. Makes perfect sense.

(SIDE EYE)

fairycosmos

clicking not interested on something used to mean they stopped showing it to you

blackwatersinkingship

When I finish this whale shark lamp all 4 of you are gonna be So I'm pressed

blackwatersinkingship

She glows now, just so you know, and she's full of string deliciöusee string

god-sent-gender-bent

Are you gonna show us the lamp? 👀

blackwatersinkingship

Good news! Whäle shark lämp 🥰

hollyevolving

A lot more than 4 of us are impressed

racketghost

every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).

racketghost

[tags via : @heavenly-havoc]

andwhatexcellentboiledpotatoes

Can you believe that there are people who live so close to the ocean that they can just think “hey, I should go to the ocean” and then they just do???