I Should Be Sleeping

[hasthecityrearranged]

So I took him underneath my wing, And that is where he stayed, Until one day...

Melanie La Barrie as Hermes, Dylan Wood as Orpheus, Hadestown West End 2025: @callmelasagna’s master

[txttletale]

imagine that your favourite band was on a generational run of albums, putting out 10/10 after 10/10, four singles a year you'd bet money on becoming classics of the genre. now imagine that between every record they also released a full length album where they covered jingles from cereal commercials and songs by white youtube rappers about five nights at freddy's, and these releases got a hundred times the promotion and airplay as their normal stuff: that's what it feels like to enjoy magic the gathering

[phantomrose96]

I'm thinking about AI again because we're in the Nexus that creates Torment for profit.

And there's a thought rattling around in my head over the fact that a lot of the issues with AI are not brand new to the technology era--a source of chronic and easy misinformation; a technology that causes people to withdraw and isolate and often self-harm; an environmental scourge; an absolute machete to critical thinking, disciplined learning, and meaningful study because why bother with hard and long tasks when you can get fast and easy dopamine hits--all of these can be applied to social media as well.

But something makes AI so foot-to-the-gas-pedal worse in such a festering and pervasive and sudden way, and I think my conclusion for that lies in this emergent technology debuting to the public already under the control of big tech mega-conglomerates who--and this part is critical--were absolutely panickingly desperate at the exact moment ChatGPT hit the scene.

And I'm going to bother you with graphs about this. Because I think it will help explain a lot of the Full-Shove-Down-Throatedness you've no doubt noticed with AI.

And like to back up a second--modern social media is controlled by these exact same mega-conglomerates. But the social media platforms didn't start that way. They were a lot of guy-in-his-basement style inventions--tumblr included--which developed to serve an organic and natural niche people wanted. No throat-shoving yet. Most of us (tumblr demographic) were probably sparkle-dogging on deviantart and--yeah whatever--superwholocking over here. And that was by no means perfect or necessarily even good but there was opportunity to ease in and learn the good and bad.

THEN the mega-conglomerates got it and Facebook is a festering cesspit and Twitter is Like That. But there was a bit of a gradual enshittification there, and I imagine most people following my blog are old enough such that you were able to recognize what enshitted itself and disengage appropriately.

AI--for all the way its ills mirror social media--was born a fully formed fucking asshole directly into the cradles of big tech. And it's weird to consider the technology behind LLMs is not, inherently, evil. And that feels weird because it never really had the chance to exist in the public eye in any capacity before it was the throat-shoved and desperate weapon of big tech downright begging you to rot your brain out your ears and steal your work and pollute the earth and stop thinking and stop trying and stop learning.

Which maybe then begs the question, WHY the crazy desperation? Why the complete disregard for sense, law, legal ownership, and customer voices? Why does 'fetch' need to happen and why do Tech CEO's talk about it like they're gonna bite the cyanide pill in their molars if you don't buy a fucking gemini subscription.

Well I promised you graphs.

Here's your first graph. And here's a little fun fact for those following at home: ChatGPT came out Dec 20, 2022.

This graph shows the stock price for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (nee Facebook) between August 2016 (10 years ago) and Dec 20, 2022.

Now see that peak right before the start of 2022? Cover the downward side of it with your finger. Go on. Don't you see a beautiful exponential future of infinite growth? Don't you love when exponential growth is forever? Some of those returns were 400% in just 5 years. Sure, Covid caused a blip but what's a global pandemic in the face of a bullish stock run?

Okay now uncover the right side. That side is the screaming crying sobbing coaster of rich people feelings. And they were so very in their feels.

I'm zooming in on the graph for you. Welcome to November 2021 to Dec 20, 2022.

If you bought Amazon at peak? You were down 50%. Meta at peak? Down 60%. And every rich person investor is a money genius until the market turns, at which point it's panic to right the ship.

There were whispers of recession all throughout 2022 and it made the tech market crumble, because tech stock prices are highly speculative, and they ride market whiplash with more aggressive slingshotting than companies grounded in material value.

And then something happened on Dec 20, 2022. Obviously you know, I've said it 3 times. ChatGPT released. And oh boy.

Companies started promising AI. Investors started listening. The stock prices got happy.

Welcome to the graph 2022 to current day

And if the dance is working, they don't fucking stop dancing.

Do you WANT AI? Do you NEED AI? Will it actually help you? Might it in fact harm you? Will it harm the planet? Will it harm learning, and discipline, and the vulnerable, in the exact ways big tech companies are shoving it down people's throats?

Who give a shit! Whogiveasshitwhogiveasshitwhogiveahit. Money up! Desperate crying tech company HAPPY now. Money happy now!

Now the entire 10 year graph looks like this

And that scary scary scary scary drop off in 2022 that course corrected itself nigh exactly on December 20, 2022?

Well, you love AI, don't you? 🙂 As long as it's shoved down your throat.

[annabelle--cane]

what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.

what I say: sex isn't real and you can't have it

[setulose]

Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do

[setulose]

I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[whyamihereat4am]

Look I don't think Supergirl (2026) is secretly a perfect masterpiece or anything (I personally thought it was like. a 6/10 fun time) but I do think it's wild that Tumblr isn't going crazy for it because this Kara is one coattailed suit away from being a Tumblr sexyman. she is the flawed messy female character people have supposedly been clamouring for. she's the popular archetype of a gruff self-destructive alcoholic middle-aged man begrudgingly having to look after a kid and growing fond of them but genderswapped and also 23. she's allowed to be visibly messy and kind of gross and her hair is constantly all over the place and she literally cries, screams, throws up, and pisses onscreen. she's caustic and mean and puts up an act of carelessness but has a heart of gold. she's heavily traumatised and coping with it terribly. if anything happens to her dog she will kill everyone in this room and then herself. she spends most of the movie in a trench coat and baggy band T-shirt. she gets into bar brawls and breaks a guy's hand. she is Going Through It 24/7 and looks the part. she stabs a guy in the throat. how is everyone else not obsessed with her.

[lastoneout]

I love when people try to gotcha me on my stance that all sports should be gender integrated with "even American football???" because I can instantly come back with "oh lmao, no, I don't think ANYONE should play American football at all, it's way too dangerous" like nice try but I know no amount of testosterone is going to protect you from the profound, life ruining health issues caused by getting repeated severe concussions over the course of several years. No one should play this sport.

[malibuklaus]

[galadriel1010]

Sometimes you get a brief glimpse into the American worldview and decide that you don't want to know.

[transcyberism]

I cannot stress enough that this meme is entirely literal. there's no reference or subtext you don't know. these are simply the objectively most popular works of art from each denomination.

[miketon]

if i made a video game where you get to pick the gender of the player character i'd make both the options be nonbinary and you can either have they/them or it/its pronouns. those are your only options

[bug4932]

been a while for a comic! been thinking about the dallons again, particularly with henghost posting amy snippets. these kids have issues.

[ispyspookymansion]

i like a trans headcanon as much as the next guy but sometimes it really boils down to “that character has not had enough agency and/or introspective freedom in their life to have transitioned by the time we meet them in their story”

[hugintheraven]

If you see a character that is stated to be female, "Trans Headcanon" can mean she's a transwoman OR that she's a closeted or egg transman. And reverse for a character said to be male. Brainwashed child soldier raised to fit a mold or whatever is not an impediment to the truly adept trans headcanonner.

[patronsaintofweepingmothers]

2009

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

[dragongirlsnout]

2000-2002 Saturn SL1

[miss-wizard]

its shorts actualy

[awfulpunk]

this is insanely racist and I haven't even seen much about this online yet

[checkyourasianbias]

after Bad Bunny won they added a Latin song category and after Rosé got three nominations the grammys added a k-pop/c-pop/j-pop category they have always been afraid of well-performing artists of color challenging white artists in mainstream categories

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

👏👏👏

[fox-bright]

So--when I was in my mid-twenties and the Disaster Ex tried to make me kill myself, the local mental hospital didn't have any beds open in the usual ward for attempted suicides.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

That was in 2009. Things are worse now. I think about them still. I hope that they're all right.

[likorys-shimenawa]

And in case some people aren't aware: anorexia is deadly. There is a point at which your body looses the ability to digest food and you are no longer capable of improving.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

I really hope that at some point all of the healthcare professionals willingly prescribing GLP-1s to women in Hollywood who emphatically Do Not Need Them lose their licensure, it’s utterly obscene, the entire entertainment industry is now full of people happily enduring medically enhanced starvation in the name of Beauty

[beetleju2e]

i tried posting this a weekish ago and got immediately smote off the whole entire tumblr.com. lets give it another try

[kushblazer666]

araki in nebraska: fuuuuck dude what if there was an enemy