Hyperfoci and Doodles galore

It's me! Horror fan, nerd for tabletop gaming and amateur artist in my 30's (art tagged as #fearandramen draws), and listener of many many podcasts (there are...a lot of Magnus Archives posts here, with Silt Verses and Hallowoods post on the rise). Agender, they/them. (Spiral/Vast Vibes always welcome)

[artyphex]

Me: Yeah I’ve been really into the podcast space lately-

Someone: Oh! Do you have any recs? 

Me, about to unleash a 50 page mental power point on Why You Should Listen To The Magnus Archives on this unwitting victim: Glad you asked 

[themakeupbrush]

Thayna Soares at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

[duckatrice]

look. look at my book.

Happy Pride, I just self-published a book with gay and horrors called Flame-Keeper, Frost-Daughter.

Here's the absolutely gorgeous cover, made by our own @antiquedeuce

There's lesbians, there's a prominent enby, there's discussions of grief and dealing with the expectations others have for you when you're just a kid but they see you as the key to everything, there's monsters and ghosts and magic and a weird horrible old woman.

There's a second book also that I'm working on now which I hope to release in less than three years ideally, it would be great if I could release it next year but The Day Job is a thing.

Check out the ebook on Barnes & Noble and/or Kobo!

Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter

Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for books, NOOK ebooks & magazines. Shop music, movies, toys & games, too. Receive free shipping with your

Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter ebook by Kaitlin E. Kime - Rakuten Kobo

Read "Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter" by Kaitlin E. Kime available from Rakuten Kobo. Featuring a slow-burn sapphic romance and a subverted Ch

Print version coming later this month (I hope) if you like a real object you can hold in your little pizza hands

I'll have signed copies of the real book on my Ko-Fi later on also, so stay tuned for that

Thank you for looking, have a good weekend

[duckatrice]

Perhamps you would enjoy a free sample? A little five chapters to taste? Well here they are! (You can also get samples from the ebook shop pages but I might as well use this pdf I made right)

Yay book!

[natureisthegreatestartist]

Take a look at these African peach moths (Egybolis vaillantina). The shades of blue on their wings are so striking against the bright hues and dark edgings. Living art, right?

[ckret2]

getting scambot messages from random accounts that clearly used to be normal active blogs is sad enough. you know that there used to be a real person on that blog until they were tricked into handing their password to the digital fae.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

RIP to the blog that used to DM me to tell me they liked my new chapters. Their last known words spoken before being turned, 17 hours ago: "Ggs!" They were praising someone's deadlift.

[ckret2]

the message they tried to get me with is probably the same message that got them, so for anybody who hasn't already been warned about the signs of a zombie account:

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

they got one of my treasured followers, and they can get you too. don't fall for their tricks. know the signs.

[transcyberism]

Tumblr support never asks you for your password except through the normal login page. Ever.

Basically no legitimate tech support service ever will, because it's incredibly unsafe to send passwords in plain text even disregarding the phishing threat. If someone asks for your password, NEVER give it to them. Treat it how you would treat your social security number or credit card details. Only enter it in verified, encrypted (https) pages like official login/auth dialogs with the correct domain name. Human tech support workers should never need plain text access to it.

[skittlesandham]

Cooking up something for my fellow tma fans out there >:)

This is actually my animation project for school, I'll be posting more behind the scenes as production continues. Materpost - Behind the scenes 01

[annabelle--cane]

gothic horror is when there's a location. cosmic horror is when there's an unauthorized fucking Thing. folk horror is when you're outside.

[paper-mario-wiki]

counterpoint

[theeldritchcorvid]

cosmic horror is when the Thing is Not Familiar, the Location Makes No Fucking Sense, and the Outside is BIG.

gothic horror is when The Thing is Of Your Own Making, the Location has a Deeply Bloody History, and the Outside is Wet and Cold and Is Caging You In.

folk horror is when the Thing Should Be Familiar, But Is Not, the Location Should Be Pleasing, But Is Not, and the Outside is Trying Very Hard To Kill You

[dogmotif-deactivated20240505]

the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura

[chillyfeetsteak]

man people really just say stuff on here huh

[lame-kid-on-couch]

Noooo haha don't spread racist ideals and colonizer propaganda by idolizing white european aesthetics above all else and denying the life and accomplishments of native peoples on their own lands

[brehaaorgana]

People have been living in the downtown area of Tucson, Arizona for at least 4,500 years. The greater Santa Cruz river valley has been occupied by humans for 12,000 years.

You see this?

That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).

This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.

Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.

below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:

Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:

I don't need to look at some 12th century European castle to see age.

[aetherograph]

Also want to point out that many Indigenous nations literally decided to prioritise NOT building permanent buildings. That was a choice they made. You know what permanent human-created things they left instead? THE LITERAL LANDSCAPE. Even though the settlers did their best to destroy it, the landscape was still tended and shaped by Indigenous people. Every biome that exists here was created by some nation or other, every plant was encouraged or discouraged by the local people who ranged in that area.

But more to the point: I don't need fucking buildings to know that people have been here millions of years, the people are here telling me that, and I fucking listen to them.

[onefey]

you're going about your normal day when, suddenly, surprise! you've been pokémon mystery dungeon'd!

unfortunately, due to budget cuts, the pokémon assigning quiz has been canceled. instead, you must spin THE WHEEL, assigning you a random, unevolved, non-legendary and non-mythical pokémon. you must now go on some sort of world-saving adventure as this pokémon. good luck!

tell me in the tags what you rolled, and how you feel about it - for bonus points, you can spin the wheel again for (or just take your pick of) a pokémon to be your partner.

bonus rules:

you're not shiny unless the wheel tells you you're shiny

take your pick of regional forms and evolutions (for example, if you roll vulpix, it's up to you whether that means normal or alolan vulpix)

apply whatever logic you like with regards to gender

have fun and be yourself!

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[duckatrice]

look. look at my book.

Happy Pride, I just self-published a book with gay and horrors called Flame-Keeper, Frost-Daughter.

Here's the absolutely gorgeous cover, made by our own @antiquedeuce

There's lesbians, there's a prominent enby, there's discussions of grief and dealing with the expectations others have for you when you're just a kid but they see you as the key to everything, there's monsters and ghosts and magic and a weird horrible old woman.

There's a second book also that I'm working on now which I hope to release in less than three years ideally, it would be great if I could release it next year but The Day Job is a thing.

Check out the ebook on Barnes & Noble and/or Kobo!

Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter

Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for books, NOOK ebooks & magazines. Shop music, movies, toys & games, too. Receive free shipping with your

Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter ebook by Kaitlin E. Kime - Rakuten Kobo

Read "Flame-Keeper; Frost-Daughter" by Kaitlin E. Kime available from Rakuten Kobo. Featuring a slow-burn sapphic romance and a subverted Ch

Print version coming later this month (I hope) if you like a real object you can hold in your little pizza hands

I'll have signed copies of the real book on my Ko-Fi later on also, so stay tuned for that

Thank you for looking, have a good weekend

[duckatrice]

Perhamps you would enjoy a free sample? A little five chapters to taste? Well here they are! (You can also get samples from the ebook shop pages but I might as well use this pdf I made right)

Yay book!

[duckatrice]

THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Physical copies are now available for pre-order!

It still feels really weird looking at an actual book that has my words in it, but I really like how the formatting turned out.

In July, I hope to have some signed copies available on my Ko-Fi page; we'll see how that goes!

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[trippedintoa-volcano]

Imagine that everywhere in the mechanical engineering world suddenly got infatuated with lasers.

Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.

Someone shows up one day and says "I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star."

And it's a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven't seen this exact size of laser much since that's not really standard, but that's a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn't call it new -

"HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!" The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.

Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. "Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!"

More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.

Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a "Death Star innovation", it is just that they made a bigger laser.

Ford's next truck comes out and it has "Death Star integrated headlights", where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.

An electric toothbrush is now "Powered by Death Stars" and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you're being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.

Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.

The lamp business gets in on it. "Here's a Death Star powered lamp!" These guys haven't even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They've just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven't ruined their lamp about it.

Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world's problems. If it's not working, you should stick a laser in it! That'll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it's even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like "Death Star powered washing machines". What the fuck does that even mean?

Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone's blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.

You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.

You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they're causing a lot of harm, so you don't like them much.

"Oh, but they're still such new tech!" they reply. "They'll figure out how to make Death Stars that don't burn your eyes out soon, and then it won't be an issue anymore!"

Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.

But by this point they have replaced roads with "Death Star Powered Pathways", which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.

And you think you are going mad.

And they are still just FUCKING LASERS.

This post is about AI.

[memewhore]

[themakeupbrush]

JoliPoli

[etirabys]

– Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist

[argumate]

I mean that’s sweet but he bit her goddamn finger off

[etirabys]

yeah, but he was sowwy!

[phaeton-flier]

Man that probably sucks, trapped having the emotional maturity to recognize when they’ve permanently hurt someone but not the ability to understand in advance how to—oh wait humans do that too, it’s basically the classic human condition

[tsarina-anadyomene]

[aceinthetrap]

Dynasty Flowchart (Extended) – Nüwa Hanfu

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]