Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!
Here's what I need you to do:
If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.
Yes, that's really it.
I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.
If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.
As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him — that’s where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
"I'm telling you how to find happiness while doing the dishes because you're going to have to do the dishes anyway, and YOU'RE SAYIN SOME JUVENILE SHIT LIKE,
'no I'll only be happy if I find a way to never have to do the dishes ever again, I'll actually structure my entire life so that I never have to do a chore, so I have a little bit more time to do FUCK ALL with; to watch your fucking stream with.'
THAT'S NAIVE BRO, THAT'S NOT HOW IT'S GONNA FUCKIN WORK.
The best thing you can do for your mental health is to lock in and be like 'I'm gonna make it as good as possible'. You will do the dishes and you will be happy."
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai
Sam Altman envisions AI as a metered utility like electricity, with pay-per-token billing. Critics see dystopian gatekeeping, supporters see
nothing Altman says can be trusted of course because he's a pathological liar (according to everyone who has ever interacted with him?) but this whole thing is incoherent: massive investment is required to create a utility that is too cheap to meter and doesn't earn any return; meanwhile open weight models will lead to a dystopian communist hellscape and must be stopped because they may deter the investment needed to create this unprofitable behemoth.
Reasons to boycott Nolan's The Odyssey (that I know of so far):
They shot in the illegally occupied Western Sahara as reported by Middle East Eye (thanks to @fuckyeahdavidandyonatan for bringing that up)
They dumped their props into a protected area of the Italian sea after shooting (thanks to @godslop for finding the article in English)
Zendaya wearing looted 3000 years old Iranian earrings for the premiere of the movie + having her stylist fly on a private jet just to get her a dress for the premiere in London
No Greek actors in a movie about Greek heritage
While people mentioned that Anne Hathaway was flown in to the set every day, apparently it was not on a private jet but on a helicopter that was being used anyway to fly in equipment.
None of these things are new in Hollywood or exclusive to the Odyssey, its director or its actors, but I do think we as audience should start holding Hollywood accountable when it disrespects our culture, heritage, environment, especially when it's movies that are this big and have a huge budged that would allow for more conscious choices.
Some very good and reasonable points, but for as much as I recognize the Iliad and Odyssey as extremely important works of literature for Greece I think it not having an all Greek cast is forgivable. No Greek actors, not even one? Yeah, that shows they probably didn’t care about including any in the first place. Is that a serious problem? Probably in the same League as giving the characters pants and filming in Iceland.
Still, if they were filming Beowulf and the cast was a bunch of Australians? I think the nords could survive such a wound.
So unless Greece is really starved for a win right now, which it very could be since my only reference for Modern Greece is 20th century civil wars and an apparently plummeting GDP, I think a swing and a miss for the Greeks on Nolan’s behalf is just going to have to be a bummer.
I don’t want to be a dick and tell Greek people their awesome folklore isn’t theirs to tell, but up against one of the biggest names in filming ignoring modern colonialism on multiple fronts and committing large scale pollution I think we can forgive a Shakespeare adaptation that isn’t an all English cast.
This isn't really about the specific take I'm reblogging (offensive as it is), but I'm morbidly fascinated by how virtually every conversation about how there are zero Greek people in the cast—even counting the five million-odd members of the Greek diaspora that a number of very bankable US actors belong to as "Greek people", which the very careful, mildly-worded Guardian article linked does—seems to get conflated with the cast not being entirely Greek as if these are the same argument.
Yes, there are racists making a big deal about how the characters and text are Greek, but a) they don't want an all-Greek cast either, they want an all-white cast, they're fine with all-Anglo representations of Greek people, and b) the complaint isn't about what the entire cast should be anyway. Nolan et al. didn't have to choose between Lupita Nyong'o and Any Greek People At All. That's a pure derailing tactic to trivialize the actual criticism and conflate it with something much easier to dismiss.
It's about the defense that it's representing the entire modern world while managing to exclude Greek people from their image of the modern world in a specifically Greek context— something that goes way, way back, because the ongoing existence of actual living Greek people rather than a long-lost fallen civilization whose works and artifacts are a common property of the world has frequently been deeply inconvenient to broad Western narratives and politics around it.
It's not unrelated to the other incredibly egregious instances of careless US-centric imperialism the OP was correctly highlighting, it's another form of it.
The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.
A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.
“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”
The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”
“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”
The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.
She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.
“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”
She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”
The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“I figured.”
“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”
“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”
“But the quest is just — done?”
“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”
“My parents?”
“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”
The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”
“I’m aware.”
“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”
“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”
The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”
Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”
The knight frowned. “What do you do?”
Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”
“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”
She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.
“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”
“We aren’t?”
“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”
whenever I feel lonely I think of the sum total of all individual human beings who contributed to cultivating food crops and I pick up a vegetable and ponder how thousands of years of intention from my species has brought it to my hand
If I see ONE more person say Senshi from Dungeon Meshi should be disqualified from the tumblr sexyman finals because "he's conventionally attractive" I'll be on the news
May I also remind prev that Ryland Grace is a character who existed for years before the movie and was just played by Ryan Gosling, he’s a character not the actor who played him
Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people
USA folks, that is a consistent temperature range hitting 113°. Death Valley temperatures. In Banda, it hovered between 116°-118° (47°-48° C) for a week straight.
This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:
I would also like to mention that Banda has significantly higher humidity than Death Valley even during the dry season so if those numbers aren't heat index adjusted, it probably felt even hotter than that.
I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …
It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.
You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?
That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …
Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.
And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.
And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.
Postman’s Park in the City of London has a wall of plaques in memory of ordinary people who died while saving, or trying to save, someone else. It’s heavy to read all the stories but it’s also a great source of renewal of faith in humanity.
I wish people were as scared of getting into a car accident as they are of being true crime'd. Maybe then they wouldn't be on their phones while driving.
True crime girlies will be like "wtf I would never go for a walk at night, what if the hash slinging slasher gets me" and then use their knees to merge with no turn signal in front of a semi while applying makeup with both hands
The thing I’m learning is that the more you love, the more it can hurt you, but the more you love, the more it’s worth it.
So you can either be safe forever, or turn yourself into the kind of person who’d rather not be.
If you care about something, anything that hurts it hurts you. But if you don’t care about something, it brings you no joy. Caring is suffering, and apathy is death. The only way to survive is to protect what you love, and to love as much as you can. And who among us asked for this? Who among the living came into this knowing our options? Nobody. But we still have to choose
Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.
Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.
Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))
