Just Trying To Live

24 they/them I’m using this blog to explore gender shit, express and catalogue my interests, and to vibe.

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[drchucktingle]

WOW I AM INCREDIBLE. I AM MADE OF BLOOD AND ELECTRICITY AND I CHANGE THE WORLD ALL THE TIME. VERY COOL

[gaypudding]

My account is officially the same age as I was when I created an account on this hellsite (affectionate)

[drchucktingle]

I LOVE BEING A WRITER IT IS COOL AND FUN

[inkedmyths]

The problem with being a Creative Person is I want to create all the things. I want to draw a little drawing. I want to write a fic. I want to write a book. I want to paint with watercolors. I want to paint with oil paints. I want to animate. I want to make something out of clay. I want to sew a dress. I want to play a song on the ukulele. I want to play a song on the cello. I want to play a song on the harp. I want to write a song. I want to write a musical. I want to make a webcomic. I want to make a video game.

I want to do EVERYTHING but I don’t have the TIME or MONEY or MOTIVATION

[butt-rice]

i wish there was a way to say "you're right, but this is really ineffective and even counterproductive messaging to anyone who doesn't already agree with you" without sounding like an asshole

[weirdtranssexual]

i mean this in the nicest way possible but some of you need to learn how to be annoyed

[weirdtranssexual]

people are going to annoy you and that’s not a reason to burn bridges or blow up relationships

some people will even annoy you often! some people aren’t good at social cues and will therefore be frequently annoying! still not a reason to blow everything up!

[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.

[runningonspitensunshine]

i need everyone to get 300% more insane about mercymorn right the fuck now. this is a lady who spent ten thousand years learning everything there is to the human body to the point where she could just modify a person blind. just reach in and and tie harrow’s lil noodle spine into a knot, bypassing her lyctoral shielding. seduced her best friend, worst enemy, and sworn god to steal his sperm (it’s also apparently implied she just. summoned it out of his balls instead of collecting it the normal way) to help a terrorist make a baby from it.

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.

god fuck what is wrong with me. what is wrong with you guys. be more insane about mercy she deserves it.

[dragosballz]

movie called technically blonde where she goes to trade school instead

[inertial-reel]

No but you don't understand. Rocking up to Welding class with 100% barbie pink tools is such a POWER MOVE.

"Jeremy, I'd really like my orbital sander back ^_^"

"... didn't know it was yours..."

(Legit excited, no sarcasm) "Someone ELSE has the original Box 20-Volt Brushless Cordless Detail Sander with Dust Management?!?!?!?!"

"...no..."

Teacher walking up like "Miss Woods, is that a nail file"

(Elle, blasting compressed air to get rid of the nail file sand)

"Actually, its an emery board. But yes! :D It's a finer grit than what we have, and I've always found these easier to handle"

"...Ok, fair enough."

Elle making friends with the 6 year old daughter of one of her classmates. (Child care ain't cheap, I get it. Bring your kid to class)

Elle learning how to drive a forklift/motorcycle/semi-truck

Elle giving an impromptu lecture in the break room about what gifts to give their wives/girlfriends/mothers

Fucking laser cut "bless this mess" sign on her locker (I lied. It would totally be live, laugh, laser)

Elle's car breaks down and 20+ dudes coming out to show her how to fix it. (And realizing her mechanic is ripping her off)

Every single guy in the building filled with instant despair when she gets with one of the butch lesbians in the program.

Gimme plzzz

[kla1991]

Proposal: She takes her car to a mechanic and it's beat for beat like the original movie scene at the dress shop, where the mechanic *tries* to rip her off and she nods along and then eviscerates her with precise technical details.

The rest of Elle's class now shun that mechanics' shop and tell everyone else to as well, so that place ends up going out of businesss, which allows someone else in the class to open up a sparkling pink and perfectly trustworthy shop of his own.

[gnocchioli]

Imagine all the things I could do if I just did them.

[thedreammweaver]

We need an alternative to doesthedogdie cause they’ve started fucking paywalling warnings that include timestamps for triggering moments.

[thedreammweaver]

Like what the fuck

[autisticharrywells]

I just checked and

Need to read about trigger warnings? Please click the whimsical dog icon for more information!

I recommend Unconsenting Media. Not as comprehensive as DoesTheDogDie, but if sexual assault is a trigger for you, it’s a good resource

[troglobite]

rbing again real quick--i and other(s?) have noted in other rbs that this is almost never done. it's for very few properties, and it's only for timestamped warnings that are done in-house, not by users.

there are still timestamps available for warnings on those same triggers for those same properties. just bc there's a paywall on something doesn't mean other comments and timestamps can't be posted or read for free on that property or that trigger.

see here:

i don't have an account and haven't paid for anything on the site, so all of those comments are what i'm seeing for free.

i had to search and search to find anything that had paywalls, and had to resort to looking at The Substance, as referenced here. i've been using the site regularly since the op posted and have never organically encountered a paywall on anything, including on very popular properties.

i don't see any reason to stop using the site--everything is still available for free. they just have added another way for some ppl to choose to pay some $ (in addition to ads), since this is a completely free service, and no website is free to maintain.

as an example, someone with the money could pay to see the timestamps, and then leave a free comment with the same timestamps for others if they wanted to.

[sarith-kzekarit]

I've seen this post on my dash a few times now and I want to boost this specific addition. I've emailed the owner of the site to get clarification on this, and I was told the motivation behind this. He wanted to start paying some people to memorize all 200+ triggers on the site, sit down and watch popular movies/shows to thoroughly analyze whenever any trigger pops up, and note down timestamps and details of them. Ads unfortunately do not cover this (they probably only cover the site's base upkeep), so the subscription service is specifically to pay these people. Community comments have never been paywalled and are still accessible.

He thanked me for my feedback when I expressed confusion and concern about the paywalled comments being mixed in with the free comments, and has since updated the site to make them clearly distinct, along with a preview of what the paid comments look like:

He was very transparent about it all and very kind. He also said this was his mistake and is trying to clear it up. Please continue to use DoesTheDogDie.com, it is an excellent resource and there is nothing else like it!

[carrionhearted]

Sorry for infodumping about my special interest out of nowhere, you said a keyword and it activated my unskippable dialogue

[rappersdoingnormalshit-blog]

[st3fan00]

Why Wayne got socks in the jacuzzi

[whitegirlsaintshit]

those are his hooves you bitch

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

happy 10 years of those are his hooves you bitch

[whitegirlsaintshit]

why the FUCK am i still on here

[afemalesebastian]

"Sewing is a gateway drug to thinking through complex problems. It seems really simple; culturally, we make it women's work. Let me tell you: real sewing at any kind of level of proficiency is a bloody magic trick. Sewing, like mold making, involves mental frames that require one to think inside out and backwards. It requires one to work on an order of operations that is often taking into account the reverse. It's a really, really important skill, and if you learn how to sew, you're mostly on your way to carpentry and welding and sheet metal work. I'm not kidding: these are planar forms meeting under rules and conditions. And if you can make a sleeve work, I swear to God, you could build a house."

--Adam Savage

[huckleberryhal]

Grandma Ferret. (X)

[huckleberryhal]

Today’s Grandma Ferret

[magicratfingers]

REAL TEARS I AM CRYING REAL TEARS

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

it's really funny how the entire world basically just blew the fuck up six short years ago and nobody wants to admit that that may have had some lasting consequences lmao

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

like so much of Everything today is premised on the idea that the earth-shattering catastrophe which happened within living memory of everyone older than a third grader has had no meaningful material or psychological effects on the general public and i don't think that's good, lol.

"(some of) the top-line economic indicators (sorta) recovered (in most places) so everything is fine and we don't need to talk about it" is not a sustainable framework for interfacing with reality

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

"why is everyone so angry and paranoid now?" "why is politics so dysfunctional now?" "why is [x] [y] and [z] now? blah blah blah"

2020: