Into the Open Air

Hi, I'm Claire, a twenty something in perpetual grad school who loves lots of things including dogs. Actually, it is mostly dogs.

[arcadeigannon]

kids, when you’re choosing your college schedule, you’ll hear a voice saying “just take the 8AM class. it won’t be that bad. you’ve done it for this long” that’s the devil talking

[woman-respecter]

suburban women on september 15 1967 tuning in to star trek and seeing fuck-or-die mode spock getting in a sweaty man fight with captain kirk in amok time

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[writingdose]

protect em dashes.

protect “not x, not y, but z” format.

protect short sentence stacking as a stylistic choice.

protect fanfic writers—who are kind enough to share their works with people to read for free—from ai witch hunts, speculations and accusations.

“don’t like don’t read” also applies to any fic that is ai-generated and any fic you think is ai-generated by the way. if you don’t like what you’re reading for any reason, you can always stop reading and exit the fic at any point. but harassment is never ever justified. no matter if you think you’ve found a noble excuse to do it. and also…

witch hunts, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does. if not more. I don’t want to see another innocent writer get driven away from the community because someone decides to harass and accuse them for using ai just because their fic happens to have “ai telltales” — the same telltales ai got from having been trained on millions of human-made works to mimic how real humans actually write.

[hotniatheron]

Zohran Mamdani what are you going to do about the situation on mount olympus above the empire state building

[killer-buzz-queen]

Today is the only day you can reblog this

[plaguedocboi]

I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.

It was not until well into my adulthood that I realized most people do not have complicated feelings about movies where people have to kill a scary alien monster, nor is that necessarily meant to be part of the narrative (unless it very obviously is). They just want the scary thing to die because it’s scary. I don’t have a real conclusion to this I just started thinking about it for some reason.

[plaguedocboi]

1. This reply is two words and they managed to misspell both of then

2. Yeah. Duh.

[memequeen-official]

[difty-dift]

[genericalosers]

[lizbukchoy]

[sophisticatedoyster]

[wizard-of-interesting-failure]

[watercolormagicalgirl]

[uhuh100]

up next, the triangle.

we know what hole that goes in, right?

[uhuh100]

that's right, the square hole!

[letssnowstreamwings]

tumblr-style performance art

[desinteresse]

Men who talk shit about gold diggers underestimate the grit it takes to put up with an insufferable man, even when money is involved. We should be thanking them for their service like they are veterans.

[little-trash-ghost]

Can't leave this in the tags..

[space-feminist]

"why we build the wall" from hadestown is really gonna trip up future media analysis students. they'll be like "ah a piece of media from the 2010s referencing building a wall to keep out the poor, clearly this is a reference to the president of the united states from 2016-2020", and then their professor will have to be like "actually the concept album for this musical came out in 2010"

[gatherround]

how i hope this conversation goes from there is like:

"actually the concept album for this musical came out in 2010 and the original song was written in 2006"

"so she knew about the wall 10 years before Trump proposed it be built?"

"well, let's talk about that...

...but that wasn't when the wall was first built...

...this shift in the '90s marked the start of an enforcement philosophy called Prevention Through Deterrence, which basically says that if crossing is made more deadly, fewer people will cross (fact check: it just means that more people die on the journey). From the start, the purpose of the wall was not to physically to stop people from crossing -- it was to make it more deadly to do so.

...and we can also look at the song metaphorically and expansively, as a reference to the policing of migration, to company towns, to gated communities, and the physical and metaphorical walls that throughout history have kept people in and out and defined who does and don't belong.

Sources: 1 & 2 / 3 / 4"

"...how did you just say a hyperlink?"

"why worry about that when you can use this show as an entry-point into a deeper understanding of capitalism's investment in coercive control over human migration, and its long history in the United States?"

"so the song only seems prophetic because the long history of policing and militarizing the border has been ignored, and treated as an outsider position by Trump rather than the continuation of bi-partisan policy dating back decades? and it can be seen to reflect larger patterns of capital controlling people's movement in order to extract land, labor, wealth, and ultimately life from them?"

"and the song slaps"

"....and the song slaps"

[the-seelie-court-official]

thank you so much for this well-researched response tho because, as a texan, the very concept that trump invented the idea of the border wall made me kinda. reboot. not mad at op! just surprised at the difference in our life experiences

[cogentranting]

Observed today:

Two little girls playing gently with a daddy long legs.

Girl 1: can it die?

Girl 2, in a calm happy even tone: of course. Like all living things it can and must die.

[beggars-opera]

The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat

[vinceaddams]

The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailor’s apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Here’s a link to the blog post about it, but I’ll just paste the whole diary entry here:

“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit. 

“Unfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your day’s work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.”

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“I was hoping they’d beat me and forget about it but to my horror they stuck my work up on the fridge”

[zackbuildit]

Not just any fridge-

The public fridge

[podcastwizard]

LIKES TO CHARGE REBLOGS TO CAST

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

you people aren't CASTING

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

NO

[justarandomgirly]

FUCK AI

[penandinkprincess]

listen i'm not advocating for exotic animals as pets, but i really just feel like cheetahs are probably different

i feel like we need to give them another shot as housebeasts

[penandinkprincess]

this is a critter who wants greenies and then to take a nap on the couch next to me, and i KNOW it

[penandinkprincess]

cheetah in House perfec t size for put inside! inside very Soft and Comfort cheetah sleep soundly put cheetah in House. Put Cheetah In House. no problems ever in cheetah in ho use because good Happy and Satisfy for human where sleep. House yes a place for a cheetah put cheetah in house can trust cheetah for giveing good love to humans in house. friend cheetah

[justasmidgx]

I mean, as someone who as worked in a zoo, this is fairly true.

Obvious disclaimer that you shouldn't have wild animals as pets.

But like, cheetahs are the only large cats that keepers will do free contact with. Hell, even most small cats don't get free contact. (Because small cats can be VICIOUS. They'll have a baby pallas cat wearing thicker gloves than when handling an owl. Because small cats can just be vicious.)

Like I think the only other cat at our zoo where I've seen free contact with was servals? Because I know they've used servals in shows to demonstrate their natural jumping ability. But I know servals can sometimes have a mean temper as well. Meanwhile they'll do the cheetah run and afterwards put the mic by the cheetahs and it's just like an engine with them purring. It's fascinating to watch when the message in every other large animal is "no free contact because it's dangerous even when they're born in captivity".

Legit if any wild animal could be adapted to a pet it would be cheetahs lmao. Only problem is they can be skittish and very anxious and that's why they're often raised around dogs in zoos to gain confidence.

[penandinkprincess]

congrats, i award you funniest take on this post

[invaderhogtwopointohno]

The Oddessy (2026) having its central theme being that the moment society allows justification of an immoral action that violets civic, moral and ethical law, even if it reaches the outcome needed to achieve a goal- there is no ability for that society to take back that justification- to its future detrament. The symbolism of the Trojan Horse also burning, indicated to Odysseus that while he won the battle, he sacrificed the rest of the world by making it okay to cross a line.

[artsekey]

Reading a book about the psychology of friendship (that, oh by the way, taps the ace and trans communities in its discussion not as clinical categories but by including anecdotes from people in those communities!!) and somehow it encouraged me to quadruple down on saying:

We literally do not have enough friendships. Our culture's obsession with romance over friendship is shockingly new (1850's on) and it is having a serious impact on our health across the board, specifically men. This problem has become sharply exacerbated in the last 20 years.

We need more friendships. We need more friendship in media. "But what if they kissed?" What if they didn't, and the love that was there mattered anyway??? Take my hand. Imagine this with me. A relationship unbound by law or expectation. People who choose one another again and again. To stay in each other's lives when there are no societal tethers holding them together.

Go read Platonic by Marisa G. Franco (PhD).

[antiquesintheattic]