Hail and Well Met @cicadaclock - Tumblr Blog

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batmanisagatewaydrug

nosferatu? no. tuferatu. no es mi problema.

quorpiest

no mi circo no mis feratus

aweekerfuffle

You're a doctor. You've been taught the phrase "first, do no harm."

A patient comes in with a flesh eating bacteria that is rapidly spreading up their leg. The only way to save their life is to remove their leg.

So what do you do? To help the patient is to accept that you must also harm them.

You're a good doctor. Of course you remove the leg and save the patient's life, because trying to exercise a choice that will result in no harm is impossible where there are only two bad outcomes, but one is unquestionably worse.

This post is for for leftists in the US who still think either not voting or going with a protest vote in the next two major election cycles is an acceptable choice, when you know full well the Republican will cause more harm.

sailoreuterpe

"Remember when [evil thing] happened and no one cared??"

Actually, many people cared. Thousands if not millions of people cared a whole lot and talked about it and tried to help. Sadly, [evil thing] was drowned out by ten other calamities or crises or human rights violations within a week. And I'm genuinely sorry, but I only have so much energy to give for every new horror popping up constantly these days.

sailoreuterpe

Also, sometimes the media is actively suppressing news about [evil thing].

unamusedsloth

Nude Portraits series by photographer Trevor Christensen

julianlovesdogs

This is my new favorite thing

whetstonefires

‘portraits of people reacting to nudity’ fresh, inspired, art sfkas;lk

headspace-hotel

according to the notes, yes, the subjects do know ahead of time that he will be nude, so yes, this is very funny and cool

quasi-normalcy

So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?

quasi-normalcy

I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.

quasi-normalcy

I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.

quasi-normalcy

Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.

livingauthorssociety

Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.

lilly-kittyeyes

"Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did?" Yeah....

cerastes

People don’t even say w00t anymore.

cerastes

This sux00rz…

linkeduniverse

biglawbear

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

biglawbear

You have to understand. I watched the movies maybe once as a kid when they came out twenty years ago. I've somehow avoided learning like anything about these books my entire life. Literally everything about these books was a complete unknown and surprise to me. Totally blank slate going on. I barely even knew how it ended.

Holy shit.

biglawbear

Frodo didn't complete his task. Sam literally carried him up Mount Doom. And when he got to the end, he couldn't throw the Ring away.

But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn't have been destroyed.

So Frodo's journey saved the world nonetheless.

And it broke him.

It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn't of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.

He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.

But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.

And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.

But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.

It's amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre's core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.

But Frodo couldn't resist the Ring completely. He wasn't superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn't either. He wasn't so special that he was invulnerable.

I'm not okay. Holy fuck you guys.

biglawbear

It's been a week and I'm still not over this, I'll never get over this.

Something that I've been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.

The task was too much and it broke him and that's okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn't treat it as a bad thing.

This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It's treated as good and necessary. They don't heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they're done.

And in Gondor's march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he's taking with him don't have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that's okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren't shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren't manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn't do it.

I don't know man. I've held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I've been going through it and it's understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I've had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I've seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I've gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.

Fuck me, man, I'm currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.

And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.

And it says that you can't endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.

How am I supposed to move on with my life after reading this?

three--rings

Certainly there are many messages within Lord of the Rings, but you have to think that Tolkien would have been happy that this message in particular was still being conveyed all these years later.

secondlina

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

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omg the girlies

omg the girls are saviiiiiiiing wiiiildliiiiife

highlyillogicalandroid

Not all heroes wear capes. Or trousers.

poppy-tarts-stuff

Not leaving this in the tags

asukam

I saw this on insta and someone commented asking her how she knew they were in there and she said that she saw the mama duck with only one duckling and thought it was suspicious so she stopped to check and hear them quacking down there... :') <3

uncomfortablecliche

the way the momma duck sped up once she saw her babies yayyyy

eleilinnrallin

This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that's brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!

newtsoftheworldunite

Translating this into tumblr's preferred public service announcement format for this kind of alert:

redstonedust

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

ralfmaximus

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

twitblr

🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈

isa-ghost

This is one of the most adorable Pride posts I’ve ever seen

granola-peasant

What I love about the imagery of the turtle is that it’s sending the message that they are protecting themselves by being in their shell. It’s not about deceiving straight people (like we are often told), but about the turtle’s own safety. They’ll come out when the time is right and they feel comfortable. 💕🏳️‍🌈

poetry-protest-pornography

Come out when it’s safe for you 🏳️‍🌈❤️

liberaljane

🧵 THREAD: This #PrideMonth, don’t forget that the fight for queer liberation didn’t start or end with marriage equality.

💪✨ We need to keep fighting for our rights.

Here’s are a few examples:

💋 Before the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, same-smex smexual activity was illegal in fourteen U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. military

👶 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t adopt in all 50 states. Before the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, laws varied wildly by state.

🏳️‍🌈 Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosmexuality as a ‘mental illness.’ In December 1973, a vote was successfully held to remove it.

🗳️ Before 1974, there were no openly gay elected officials. That changed with Kathy Kozachenko, who became the first openly gay American elected to public office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

🎖️ Before 2011, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” banned LGBTQ+ people from serving openly in the military.

💍 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t get married in all 50 states. At the time, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard.

💼 Before 2020, employers could legally discriminate against queer and trans employees. It wasn’t until the U.S. Supreme Court held that an employer who fires or otherwise discriminates against an individual simply for being gay or transgender is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

fimbulvetr-now

I think this is also important for people who are young enough to not remember when we didn't have these protections.

While it's amazing that some folks can't imagine a world without these rights, it's important to be aware of how nascent these wins are, and by extension, how fragile they are

orpheuslament

if i had a dick i would love to have a disappointing orgasm in the shower while thinking of something or someone that i felt i should not be thinking about & then stand under the water with my forehead against a wall watching the proof of my guilt & shame go down the drain