Faux Talks

I'm on A03: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FauxPause

[elodieunderglass]

Have I told you guys about finding four-leaf clovers yet? You just “read” a patch of clover for the square shape formed by the paler inner markings. Where you find one, more plants will carry the mutation. I always find too many, and have always had too much luck to be good for my character, so I left these for you 😘

[gay-victorian-astronomer]

@linearmoss

[linearmoss]

Oh, neat!! I can do that too, but I'm much better on clovers without the markings. I mostly look at the shape of the overall clover -- I think it's a similar technique? They catch my eye because the leaves form a square shape instead of triangle (or another, weirder shape, if you can find a five- or even a six-leaf. I once found a seven-leaf, years ago... Wish I still had it!)

Though, honestly, usually I just glance over and catch them. My elementary school had a patch of clovers without markings, and I'd spend my childhood picking four-leafs, so I think I trained myself to see them as a kid.

I'm actually very bad at finding clovers with these markings, probably because my eyes are looking at leaf shape, so the stripes are too much extra visual clutter. I will be trying this technique for sure, though. It's raining like hell outside tomorrow unfortunately but maybe Thursday! (I'll report back if I find any!)

[linearmoss]

Oh, and a tip for anyone going out hunting! It's way easier to find four-leafs in patches with big clovers (like in op's photos) than little ones. Unmowed areas are your friend. Not sure if it's a question of frequency or just that my eyes are shit and I can only actually see the giant ones, but either way -- bigger is better!

[elodieunderglass]

Absolutely it’s about the shape! I also spot the unmarked ones by looking for squares. 🍀 has a completely different rizz than ☘️

Also, clover-hunters can join me in being annoyed by the emojis 🍀 ☘️ because they depict oxalis/wood sorrel, don’t they? Once you see it……

[elodieunderglass]

☘️

Still isn’t a clover!! Will never be a clover!

That’s woodsorrel!!!

[kiragecko]

[Images show a hand in a cluster of clover, bringing attention to 5-leaf and 4-leaf clovers. End ID.]

Sincerely love posts like this, where people aren't recognizing that they naturally have a specific and rare way of seeing the world. There's no unhealthy pride on display here, just an excitement to share a skill and allow others to have fun with you! But, maybe you're missing the fact that most people CAN NOT SEE PATTERNS WHEN THERE'S TOO MUCH NOISE.

For the majority of people, the amount of detail in a field of clover is overwhelming, and their brains will stop processing it. Some may need to look at each clover individually in order to see it's shape. A few people, like my husband, would need to pick each clover up, to isolate it from the other green, in order to see any details.

This kind of skill is probably on a spectrum with synesthesia. Not diagnosable, just distantly related. Shapes jumping out for you, obvious and clear. It's a cool skill! I'm sure you worked at refining it - I'm not trying to diminish that in any way! I'm just even more sure that most people would not get your results with similar amounts of effort, because their brains do not naturally DO that.

And that delights me! Love seeing people skilled at what they do, no matter how small that thing they do is. I love seeing how people's brains work. And I love how you want to share that skill, so we can do it too. Lovely post!

[yuriwinged]

the prince has begun practicing curtseying in the mirror. which could mean nothing.

[heydocverdant]

we have good news and bad news, my liege. the good news is that we now know what that curtsying was about: you will be pleased to know that, after several heartfelt conversations between your child, the court jesters and a myriad of singing woodland creatures, you are now the parent of a proud and joyful new princess. the bad news is that, due to a series of events related to the dragon-sized hole in her bedchamber wall,

[illmoraineakoi]

I love the insinuation that the second the princess realized she was a girl and thus actually a princess, the dragon was there. That thing wasted no time. It heard "princess" and was like "I need no further invitation, here I come."

Gender affirmed by Dragon. Amazing.

[heydocverdant]

pretty sure you’re literally the only person who understood my vision on this accursed post

[16tinyfrogs]

on watching a parent age

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

[theriu]

OP, this is genuinely a masterpiece, three poems in one, moving and well crafted. Please tell me you have submitted it to at least some poetry contests, and if not, please do so.

[sharkfintrigued]

[transfemmbeatrice]

average dnd party

[funny-tik-toks]

[virtualgirladvance]

love the camera guy even gets to bump into a mirror for us

[athelind]

Okay, I love everything about this hall of mirrors:

Traditional mirror mazes are dark and creepy. This one is brightly lit, and colorful.

The triangular grid makes it that much more disorienting.

The pillars help to obscure the difference between the mirrors and the openings -- so it doesn't NEED to be dark.

All of this combines to make it much more fun and entertaining and much less "I gotta get out of here before Mr. Dark drags me off to the soul-sucking carousel".

[ataraxetta]

if a fic writer or fanartist has put your favorite ship into a top/bottom sex dynamic that you don't like, the best course of action to take is to move on with your life without saying a single word about it to or about the artist

[stegron-and-his-dancing-dinos]

Been going through the Nightwing solo runs and just read through the Nightwing 2024 annual, and I’m sorry but Bea Bennet secretly being a spyral agent the WHOLE TIME is one of the dumbest and worst plot twists I’ve ever experienced

[croaksac]

the complete and total defeat in the prosecutor's voice at the very end..... im 💀💀💀

[bogleech]

Havent seen a lot about this on tumblr so maybe not a lot of people know:

He was wrongfully raided by police in 2022

He used footage and names of the specific cops in posts, videos and songs making fun of them

The cops sued for defamation and cried in court about the songs ruining their lives

He won anyway

[creatingblackcharacters]

I love how unapologetic he is. And rightfully so!! How you gone cry about being embarrassed when you weren't crying about barging into my home and threatening my life? No one was worried about anybody's children when they weren't the right color. They good. 🤷🏾‍♀️

[wintersoldierfell]

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

[wintersoldierfell]

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

[wintersoldierfell]

#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't mean "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Fucking read.

[inkydandy]

I meant to get this done in March and of course it didn’t happen. But, Dick’s got so many birthdays, I figured I could post it whenever.

And when in doubt, always consult good ol’ Al

[galileosballs]

"Why is it a problem if students use AI to get through college"

Because if you demonstrate to me that you're willing to set aside concern for truth, evidence, and verifying things with your own eyes whenever it happens to be inconvenient for you, I have a solemn responsibility to make sure you don't get into medical school.

[galileosballs]

"oh, but this course is just a distribution requirement, it's not for my major"

Does saying things that are true and that you know are true only matter when someone is giving you a little prize for it?

[galileosballs]

Tumblr doesn't like to do this kind of ethics, so I have to phrase this carefully, but it's a question of character. And a person's character is clearest when they're being asked to do the right thing even when it doesn't matter to them.

I don't want to live in a world in which doctors and lawyers and politicians just ignore the responsibility to research and verify when it's inconvenient for them. When they're busy. When they have something they'd rather be doing. The world I live in is already too full of those people in positions of power. I'll be damned if I let there be more of them.

[galileosballs]

Some of the responses to this have been, in essence, "well, it's not our fault for being raised in a bad educational system that prioritizes grades over comprehension". And you're right, it's not your fault.

But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.

So why do you limit yourself to only achieving what it values? Do you not aspire to be better than a system you know is wrong? Don't you want to change the world?

[oceanmonsters]

If you haven’t seen the meme, it’s three photos of me showing my flapjacks to the judges and then a quote, I don’t remember saying this but apparently it’s how I talk, says “Started making it, had a breakdown, bon appétit”

James Acaster on his Bake Off experience - Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999

[pandulez]

[alexaloraetheris]

The Man The Myth The Legend

[cosmonaut775]

Hey do y’all remember when Boeing fucking killed a guy last year. And we all said “huh I guess Boeing fucking killed a guy” and then went on with our lives. And everybody knew that Boeing had fully just fucking executed a guy and nothing came of it. Like there was no police investigation no justice no nothing. Like literally EVERYBODY knew that Boeing had full on murdered a guy to silence him and there wasn’t any consequences for them. Kinda crazy.

[flamie87]

and there was even less talk when openai did the exact same thing more recently

[flamie87]

So for those who are, very understandably uninitiated on this story:

On 23 October last year (2024) the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji who worked on organising and gathering data for OpenAI until 2022 when he begun thinking about the morality of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that what OpenAI is doing blatantly violates copyright law and decided to leave the company altogether in August 2024.

After he came out with this accusation he was set to appear in court to testify against OpenAI’s data-gathering practices, something which had the potential of being a complete disaster for the company and the generative AI industry as a whole.

That was until 26 November, just days before he was due to appear in court, when he suddenly and mysteriously was found dead inside his own apartment. Investigators concluded that the death was self-inflicted, something which his family has disputed.

There was also “sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood spots”, and his apartment showed signs of having been ransacked for evidence: “The pin drive is missing. His computer was messed up.”.

Overall it feels pretty clear-cut what happened, that is to say that OpenAI had him killed because he was a legitimate threat to their business, indicating that they are fully aware that the way they’re gathering data is completely illegal.

Sources:

Alys Davies, 14.12.2024, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment. BBC News

Barney Davis, 16.1.2025, Suchir Balaji’s family demand outside investigation into OpenAI whistleblower’s death. The Independent

Cade Metz, 23.11.2024, Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law. The New York Times

[encodedincommotion-deactivated2]

it's crazy how plausible all the shit the corporations do in the murderbot diaries is. that one scene when murderbot was talking to those humans who had signed a 20 year corporate work contract and it asked them if the contract specified 20 years by the standard local calendar or by a proprietary calendar created by the company was downright unsettling 😬 if the ceos of modern earth companies read these books they would probably start crying because the government won't let them do most of this in real life.

[radioorpheus]

hey fun fact this has absolutely happened before. part of the push to standardize time/timezones was because factory employers had clocks set to the pace of their machinery. meaning of the workers were not doing enough, time would run slower until they had reached their goal. there is historical precedent.

[duckbunny]

[handsaniti]

Companies will also go back to this if we let them.

Your clock will only tick if you ring up orders.

Your clock will only tick if you flip burgers.

Etc., etc.

Corporations are not your friends. The only reason we have the very flimsy and pathetic labor rights we have at all is because our ancestors died for them, and the support for them got rolled back the millisecond the government was able to manufacture consent for it.

[anonyymoose]

piece of media you feel crazy about at formative age is truly like the hotel california. you can check out but you can never leave

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[geardrops]

the accent really makes this

[caressthosecheekbones]

The Godmother

[mockwa]

🐯 🐯 🐯

[bunjywunjy]

good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose

[ari-nemera]

It’s cuter when you recognize that the lion with visible spots is a juvenile. There’s a very high chance the other lion that runs over to investigate is the MOTHER.

The first lion is asking for comfort because she was given a big spook!!! and she needs mommy to tell her it’s safe and ok!!!! (What’s cuter is that mommy clearly reassures her, and goes on to take the parent role of ‘deal with the scream rat in order to protect my large and easily frightened daughter’)

this is all in all an adorable video 10/10

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Who Would Win?

Three apex predators

OR

One Screaming Long Boi

[sylvansart]

“Ahhhhhh!!!! Aaaaahhhh!!!”

[gluten-free-pussy]

Miss Mongoose has HAD it