ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to deny location sharing and turn off personalized ads and reject all non-essential cookies and not set up siri and face ID
Cosimo Galluzzi
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
will byers stan first human second

if i look back, i am lost
d e v o n
🪼

blake kathryn
RMH

No title available
h

pixel skylines
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
styofa doing anything
todays bird
Monterey Bay Aquarium
$LAYYYTER

★
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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@chekhovsarmoury
ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to deny location sharing and turn off personalized ads and reject all non-essential cookies and not set up siri and face ID
This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer
Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."
It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.
I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.
The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:
From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002
I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"
But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.
I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird
things humans are known to do when stressed:
-hallucinate
-cry over what seems to be small things
-become furiously angry over what seems to be small things
-hit a self destruct button over and over again
-lose all sense of reality
-becoming straight up unable to communicate
-view every situation as life or death
-experience delusions/become vulnerable to irrational worldviews
-perceive hostility where none exists
-become extremely nauseous and/or throw up
-stop engaging in sleeping/eating/basic hygiene
-stop processing sensory input
-process way too much sensory input all at once
-lash out at others/themselves
-and more!
being able to recognize when a human (ie. you or another person) is so stressed out they cannot think clearly is VERY important for conflict resolution and diffusing emotional crisis. highly recommend trying to train yourself at being able to recognize that state of panic- there is a point in which logic and rationality is useless and you have to address the underlying emotional issue first. knowing that saves everyone a lot of pain and struggle.
im so sorry that you're doomed by the narrative but i really need you to answer my message on Microsoft Teams
My job had a training on AI and I was surprised how honest it was about AI’s limitations and problems, and we spent our activity time finding errors and issues with responses made by AI. But it did beg the question, why would I use this
The trainer was like, think of AI as an intern, student worker, or new coworker! They can do tasks for you, but be sure to carefully check their work.
We just established that this “new coworker” is racist, sexist, and can’t do math - why would I ask for their help??
The thing is, there’s a deep cultural assumption of the importance of a category of “new on the job and bad at it” that is based around aspects of those sorts of positions that just simply should not apply to AI… and AI hypemen have gotten very good at exploiting that cultural assumption. No one actually keeps around “student workers who suck at the job” because those interns are helpful. You keep them around because there is a learning curve, and if you want the reward of having experienced employees, you must submit to the mortifying ordeal of herding newbs.
An AI tool cannot learn on the job. It simply can’t. Expecting it to is like expecting that your car, once you put enough miles on it, might spontaneously decide to convert itself to a model with four wheel drive and regenerative braking. It’s an intern that will never get better. It’s a new coworker that will always be “new”. You can “help it” to come to the correct answers, but it will never learn from that help, because training a model and using a model are two different things.
The only reason that new hires who can’t do the job correctly aren’t deadweight is that they’re an investment. AI tools that you have to babysit aren’t an investment; they’re a subscription service to virtual deadweight.
statements like "It's wrong to masturbate about a person without their consent" and "It's wrong to do something that quietly arouses you while you are in public even if no one can see it" show that a person's understanding of morality basically involves magical thinking. like I wrote this post on the toilet. That's not the same thing as me literally shitting on you
the only valid person in the replies like at all
I firmly believe that how feminist a book is is better demonstrated by its background characters rather than its mains
What I mean by this is that a book may have “feminist” female leads who are strong, competent, complex, whatever, but how do they portray women just...existing in the world? Are there women in the background, or is the fantasy novel with its strong independent Action Girl protagonists set on a background of generic male soldiers, guards, councilors, shopkeepers, messengers, and wizard apprentices? Are minor characters ever women when there’s no particular reason for them to be? When women appear in the background of your story, do they have any unique qualities that hint at a complex picture we’re not seeing or do they slide seamlessly into Pampered Noblewoman, Prostitute and Vaguely Maternal Older Woman Who Runs A Tavern Or Something?
If your protagonist is a fighter or magic user, do you show other women in those roles? If your society is more relaxed about sex discrimination, have you built a world that looks like it?
Have you built a world where your female characters don’t all have to be The Best At Everything, or is almost every female character placed where she can be extraordinary next to a bunch of male counterparts? Are you comfortable letting a female wizard or warrior be average or unimportant, or does she have to be one of the most skilled and powerful of them all, able to match or best all the men around her? On the other hand, are you comfortable having a female wizard or warrior be indisputably the most skilled or powerful out of the wizards or warriors, without drawing attention to her gender, placing her in competition with men, or having her be an exception to the rule because she’s female?
Are you letting your female characters be mediocre and un-extraordinary? Your world is full of powerful sorceresses, fierce battle maidens and calculating noblewomen, but do women do things in this world other than be Exemplary and Great and Awesome? If you’ve established that women do business and fight, do you have female soldiers carousing at bars and vaguely dull female Evil Minions Of The Dark Lord bumbling around doing evil bidding and female apprentices slacking on work or is every background woman we see competent and controlled and intelligent and doing whatever it is she’s doing without error, whereas only men are allowed to be foolish, impulsive, mess things up, or just be shown unflatteringly during the couple sentences we know them? In other words, does the world show women being unapologetically human beings or are all your female characters basically making up for being women by not doing anything that would badly represent their gender?
In particular, if you’re trying to show a society with gender equality, that means the dark lord is willing to hire women who are bumbling idiots as guards, and not just that some female wizards climbed their way to the top and became As Good As Men because they’re so badass they can snap god like a bunch of uncooked spaghetti.
BONUS ROUND: Aang/Katara (ATLA) VS Kylo Ren/Rey (Star Wars)
Aang/Katara
Kylo Ren/Rey
I just looked through OP's blog and every single poll is a popular m/f ship vs. reylo (with similar results). I don't understand.
There was an actual bracket, but reylo got obliterated in round one, and after the poll was done, someone suggested it would be funny to do a "bonus round" where every tournament contestant is pitted against reylo to see how many ships, if any, reylo can beat
I hope it's none.
It is beating exactly one of them.
NOTHING could have prepared me for that
sent this message to my coworker today and he sent me this screenshot with microsoft teams's suggested replies... incredible 10/10 no notes.
it’s been a few days and he loves it
I don't know who might need to hear this, but I wanted to share something beautiful I had the opportunity to witness.
In the chaos and uncertainty around us, there is still so much love and hope.
A few weeks ago, a local international student nervously approached me and asked if I could photograph his wedding reception. We barely know each other — so much so that the only real thing he knew about me was that a) I was a graphic designer and b) he had seen me hold a camera. And the only thing I knew about him was that he came from overseas to study engineering in the U.S.
He explained that his friend (and expected photographer) couldn't make the trip. I sympathized and told him I had a similar situation with my wedding, but then he said something that made my stomach churn.
Almost all his family and friends overseas can't make it. So can't the bride's, as she's studying abroad as well. With the warmest smile, he says while he wishes his family could be there to celebrate, he's so lucky to have great friends who are helping them put on a small reception.
I told him I had it covered and I wouldn't accept payment. Photos like this will be invaluable over time, and I wanted to pay it forward as the volunteer photographer at my own wedding did.
The wedding was this weekend. I cried during it.
His fellow engineering students became wedding planners. A church opened its doors free of charge. Families of local students caught wind of the event and handled the food, learning cultural dishes from the bride and groom's home countries. A mom group banded together to make table centerpieces. A recently married couple donated their leftover decorations. There were almost one hundred guests. Most of us didn't know each other.
It was the most beautiful wedding I've ever seen. Not just because the bride and groom were so deeply in love with one another, but because strangers saw an opportunity to be kind. In a community where hate of anything 'foreign' seems to fester, a bunch of people saw two lovebirds separated from their families, stepped in, and said, "how can we celebrate love today?"
All I saw was love. Maybe we're not as doomed as we think we are.
hate it when the people who I love are suffering due to circumstances beyond my control 👎 there should be a sea monster that I can slay to fix the problem
nobody ever gets locked in a tower or chained to a rock at sea anymore - it's always some shit like chronic illness or ptsd related depression
Anti-revenge narrative this, anti-revenge narrative that, I personally think that Inigo Montoya had the right idea when he stabbed Count Rugen in the gut and said "I want my father back, you son of a bitch"
A lot of revenge arcs end with the hero saying "there's nothing you can do to bring my loved one back, so me seeking revenge is pointless." The Princess Bride's revenge arc ends with Inigo Montoya saying "there's nothing you can do to bring my loved one back, so there's nothing that can save you."
your current favourite modern Star Trek series?
Discovery
Picard
Strange New Worlds
Lower Decks
Prodigy
Starfleet Academy