I’m so tired of the “why do people hate aspecs, they aren’t doing anything?” argument. I know that it is an attempt to support us, but it fails so spectacularly to understand aromanticism, asexuality, and any other aspec identity that it’s actively frustrating.
We are doing something. We’re rejecting allonormative ideals and that’s a massive thing to do. We’re actively fighting not just to help other aspecs, but to help everyone, because amatonormativity (and allonormativity as a whole) hurt everyone. Single people who want to find a partner but can’t also deserve to be able to exist.
There are so many issues with the expectation of marriage, including:
A single income isn't enough to get by anymore
Having a spouse is almost necessary under the current medical system
Society shames and pressures people who are single to get into relationships constantly
Rejecting allonormativity means fighting against these things that hurt everyone.
So, no, aces and aros and other aspecs aren't "doing nothing." We're doing quite a lot.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.
Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.
Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.
I'll say it again:
Rumination is a compulsion.
Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.
I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.
And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.
Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.
Like this was genuinely life changing for me.
Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:
Genuinely insane to look at the Yuki & Choso vs. Kenjaku battle from a critical perspective; it's like Akutami intentionally designed a case study of their own misogynistic writing. It's like a satire of Jujutsu Kaisen.
The reason for this is the way that the two phases of the fight—Choso v. Kenjaku and Yuki v. Kenjaku—contrast each other.
Choso comes in first, clearly set to lose against an overwhelming antagonistic force, but he pulls out all the stops, gets creative, and outshines our expectations—he doesn't win, but he manages to force Kenjaku into revealing more of his power set, even though the technique Kenjaku was already using was so oppressively strong. It's a really cool moment! It feels like victory! It's especially satisfying to see it done to Kenjaku, who's spent the whole manga until now out-weaseling opponents who should beat him in a straight power contest. It's even more satisfying that it's the son he abused and discarded. All the character writing until this point lends more gravitas to Choso's little victory.
Then we have Yuki—Yuki has been set up nearly from the start of the manga. She's the renegade Special Grade, at least of comparable power to Satoru Gojo. She appears in numerous backstories and has a significant impact on the current state of the plot—she personally taught sorcery to Todo, easily the second-strongest active student at Jujutsu Tech, and it was her influence that inadvertently set Geto on the path to become the main villain of the original series. In the lead-up to her fight with Kenjaku, we learn that she has history with Tengen, in fact, she was a former Star Plasma Vessel who refused the merger, literally rejected and escaped the inevitable tragedy of one of the major earlier arcs of the series. We don't know her technique. We just know that she's a big deal, and that she was able to singlehandedly, instantly save the entire heroic cast at the climax of the Shibuya Incident. And finally, she's gonna fight.
And lose, and die. After one fucking fight, in which she severely underperforms compared to what we were lead to expect, failing to force Kenjaku into any new power reveals except when she literally suicide bombs him (which fails to hurt him at all). Even before her death, she needs Choso to come in within one chapter to double-team Kenjaku. Does she have cool moments? Yeah! Her technique is awesome. But the fact remains that she had 100x the buildup that Choso did, and still got fewer cool moments, over the course of a longer (yet still abnormally quick) fight, she accomplished less, and the author (by writing it as Yuki's own dialogue) explicitly positions her imminent death as a way to redeem and motivate Choso.
The thing is, Choso is a man, and Yuki is a woman, and this is far from the only instance where that seems to be the deciding factor in who gets to "have their cake" narratively. It's just the most blatant. Again, it's so barefaced in its misogyny that it feels like it's satirizing the manga.
There's a very good reason I, and many others, had this as our wake-up call that JJK was going to shit.
Nobara and Megumi are the two main trio members aside from main character Yuji; they are the mainest characters to not be him. Until, that is, Nobara LITERALLY DIES and it has zero impact on the plot. There is one subsequent mention of her, and she does not distinctly influence the direction of any character arc, even that of the main character, who was closer to her than to anybody else, and who literally watched her be killed in front of him. Megumi, meanwhile, gets his body snatched, and the entire rest of the manga becomes centered on getting him back. His loss is positioned as the greatest, most gut-wrenching tragedy in Yuji's life. Nobara's still not even mentioned, by the way. At no point is it discussed, or even thought by Yuji, that Megumi was the closest living connection to Nobara. Neither by explicit statement nor narrative framing is Yuji's fervor to get Megumi back ever linked to how Megumi is, in a very real sense, the one thing Yuji has left of both his closest friends. Nope. It's just Megumi. Near the very end of the final battle, we see one panel of Nobara. She's put there right beside Junpei and Nanami—two somewhat impactful, male side characters.
Todo literally lost all the means to use his technique last time we saw him. Miwa is a specialist in barrier techniques, domain defense, and swordsmanship, three things that are obviously extremely useful against Sukuna, who primarily uses blades, and has an insanely lethal domain. Miwa spends the Sukuna battle standing in a dark room, asking kindergartener questions about barrier techniques—again, her own fucking specialty—so that men can explain it to her, and only comes in one singular time to defend Maki from Sukuna's domain. Maki, who should not even need defense from that domain to begin with, but she's a girl, so. Todo comes in with a nonsensically restored and massively buffed technique, which he is somehow totally accustomed to after less than a month of training. He proceeds to save the lives of half the cast and absolutely jump the main villain for multiple chapters straight. This one stings especially badly, because Miwa was so harshly dismissed for the whole rest of the manga. She's internalized the idea that she's useless to the point that she literally introduces herself with it. A good story would use this as the setup for Miwa being key to something in the future, ending up useful despite what everyone else told her. JJK, being a misogynistic story, simply affirms that Miwa is useless.
Clarifying that I know Nobara doesn't literally literally die. Consider that she very clearly had for most of the manga until Gege randomly brought her back in the last 5 chapters without foreshadowing.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.
It's been pointed out many times but still. What the fuck Bruce. He can't endanger a child, he must protect Jason from the knowledge of what happened to his father, but Jason's older than a career cop and therefore a good replacement for dick, who is, need I remind you,
Is also not a child. Who is definitely older than this kid
Let me highlight that
A homeless kid whose mom just died like 11 months ago* and is at the oldest a 12 year old. Is older than a man in his fucking 50s, yet too young to learn about how his dad died. The cognitive dissonance is off the charts. What the fuck is wrong with Bruce?
Why is there so much emphasis on every detail of Jason’s incorrect choices rather than the fact that Sheila sold him out. Hindsight is worthless here. There’s nothing to learn. Any robin would’ve done the same thing in his shoes and any other time it would’ve turned out ok for them. ADITF is the one** comic where a child is killed off for real and it is only this noteworthy because of how rare and counter to everything that had been established it was and is. Comics are full of lessons and meanings but Jason’s death was a senseless tragedy. The joker didn’t consider the ramifications of what he was doing and tbh I don’t think Starlin and O’Neil did either. There was no way for Jason to live through writers who wanted him dead. Why does it have to say something about his temperament, why is it proof he was predisposed to this? No I’m serious where exactly are you getting that?
**I know it isn’t the only one but it is one of only a few so you get what I mean
Blogger that doesn't know what victim blaming is but knows it's bad voice: I'm not victim blaming. I'm just saying that this character deserved to die for not following the rules and it's their fault they got murdered. That's not victim blaming. I mean I'm not saying they deserved it exactly but if they didn't want to be beaten and killed they shouldn't have done what they did. Anyone who says this character gets victim blamed is just lying to make other characters look bad for simply stating the truth. The truth being that being brutally murdered is just the natural consequence of not listening to instructions and that it's the seventh grader's fault for getting killed. He literally brought that upon himself it's not victim blaming to say that
I’m sorry but any Batman fanon that has Jason closer than cordial with Tim is immediately a no for me. Because even putting aside the fact that their personalities pre-52 just don’t mesh well, there’s no coming back from “I died and my dad erased all evidence of my life, then I came back to find out that a rich nepo baby brute-forced his way into my spot, covered up my death and took credit for the last three years of my public life, and has been shit-talking me for getting murdered.” Even being distant coworkers with that guy seems like it’d take an enormous amount of restraint.
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.
text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]
And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", but it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.
They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?
I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.
i do think the concept of individual instances of male sexualization vs the pervasive sexualization of women in comics kicks peoples ass. because to be honest superhero comics have a long history of misogyny, and the way every female character is drawn as a pinup no matter the context of the panel is part of that. and there are plenty of cases where men are drawn to show off their ass or muscles, but its never to the same degree of objectification as it is to women. the costumes, the poses, the storylines, everything contributes to the disrespect female characters get in comics. not to mention, most times men are sexualized in a comic's art, its in a single panel and the rest of the book they are drawn normally. whereas with women, when an artist is sexualizing them, there are no panels in the book that dont have her arching her back or showing off her tits in some way. every time a man is sexualized its individual, and every time a woman is sexualized its contributing to a culture of misogyny
this is so true!! especially about the point of it not being to the same degree of objectification, because comic companies have always catered much more to their male audiences. and to said audiences those over-exaggerated muscles they see on male characters show way more than just the male character being "hot." it shows that they're strong and buff and "manly."
also, considering that the male audience that comic companies cater to, mostly, are straight men—it's almost never just about "how hot" a male character is. if there are panels focusing mostly on their appearance it's usually to show "how desirable" the character appears to female characters. i can think of several instances where this has happened with, for example, nightwing (the 1996 chuck dixon run where he was in the shower and black canary walked in, the grayson run written by tom king where he was sexualized by a group of girls). there's a big difference between that (aka: male writers wanting it to be clear to the readers that the character is hot and sexy and gets women to fawn over him all the time) and how female characters are just TITS and ASS and there to be ogled at.
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.
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.
I'm here to see what all the fuss is about @hedgehogcryptid - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
