Dying at the same rate as everyone else

[secondlina]

That dumpling can groove.

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

[hil-arrr-y]

Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:

This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.

[curliestofcrowns]

useful

[blownfromthesunintothesurf-blog]

Alison Green’s advice works. 

[sw-or-gtfo-deactivated20211219]

Alison Green got me all my interviews from 2012 onward, I am reasonably sure.

[vanitycats-deactivated20170527]

Alison Green is basically my life guide.

[intentandinvention]

Mine too - she was my most visited website for the first few years of my working career, and I cannot emphasise enough how much her advice helped me navigate how to behave in a work environment. You name it, she has an answer for it. Definitely a life hack.

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Hey someone suggested I use ChatGPT to figure out adulting today, and as I was going through the mental list of places I'd rather look, I realized "beloved strangers on Tumblr dot net" was on that list.

So if you have an aspect of adulting that you're really good at-taxes, budgeting, cooking, insurance, credit, time management, house upkeep, anything-please feel free to reblog with any tips.

[notcruvusmemes]

Not me, but @bitchesgetriches has a lot of great resources for many of these topics on their website.

[bitchesgetriches]

That's us! Professional internet adults, specializing in financial stuff! We recommend starting with our Grand List of All Articles, or one of our Masterposts:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need To Know About Taxes

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Increase Your Income

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Retirement and How to Retire

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Credit and Credit Cards

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Investing for Beginners

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need To Know About Living Independently for the First Time

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Repairing Our Busted-Ass World

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Self-Care

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Getting a Job, Raise, or Promotion

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Saving Money and Being Frugal

[stuckinapril]

“Do it scared” “do it badly” it’s time to drop the guide for do it alone

[stuckinapril]

Doing it scared and doing it badly is one thing, but no one seems to talk about doing it alone. When you feel so isolated from your friends and your family but you have shit to do and you have to get it done no matter what. When your support system really is only you. For any myriad of reasons. We do not talk enough about doing it alone.

[housemousecooking]

Want guides? I do Guides.

💪 Doing It Alone

💪 Doing It Alone When You Don’t Have a Support System, This Is for You 🧠 1. Mental Anchors to Remember You are not broken because you don’t

Other things? Job, Food, Car, Home, Health, Money. Plus a request form.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Doing it alone the next 1,282 days

[thatweirdthingoverthere]

Reblogging because this made me feel less alone about being alone

[loveridden1999]

more singers should add gut wrenching screams in their songs. for me. on my behalf.

[bugechoes]

Very different from my usual stuff but here's a collection of TMA fanarts from my sketchbook

[paperrobins]

WOAHHH THESE ARE AMAZING!!!

[youre-only-gay-once]

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

[purgaytorysupremacy]

if you’re wondering why spellcheck and grammar check is worse now, it’s because they replaced it with AI! 🥰

now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.

ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!

people make the same spelling and grammar mistakes so often, AI thinks that’s the way you say it because it is a PATTERN DETECTOR and cannot THINK let alone use language.

[youre-only-gay-once]

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

[bonesdontmelt]

My toxic aroace trait is that I have only ever seen evidence that a grand total of two (2) people in the universe actually experience romantic and sexual attraction on a scale that everyone insists as normal, and that is Gomez and Morticia Addams

[212thghost]

im still not over Jordan Kennedy.

the exterminator that crawled through endless tunnels smothered in ants forced to become one with them. when exactly did Jordan become part of the colony, truly? was it when he was metamorphosed, when Jon took him and made him something else, or was it when he could not tell where his limbs ended and the rolling tide of insects began? was it when he first arrived at Amherst’s house and followed, of his own conscious volition, the ants inside? there is so little we truly know about Jordan besides what he becomes. 

he asks Jon, “am i still me?” and there is no answer to that. is Jordan still Jordan? is the butterfly still the caterpillar? is the ship of theseus still the same ship if it has been remade? do we, the audience, even know Jordan? what do we know about him beyond the fact he was an exterminator, knew more than the average person about the supernatural, and was kind enough to give Jon peace of mind but not kind enough to resist being an avatar when given the option of going back to innocence. 

as Jordan speaks you can hear an agitated buzzing of what can only be insect wings–he is now the queen ant he has been desperately searching for, the sole being that controls and colony and feeds off the fear they cause. Jordan is remade into the very thing he feared with every part of his soul. he feels sick and wrong and unfathomably different, but he still cannot deny how good it feels to no longer be the scared one. 

when given the choice to go back to being an innocent victim, he vehemently says no. he was in hell and he still is, but no longer the one being tortured. Jon equally saves him and damns him. how could he go back? how could he willingly choose to be relentlessly tortured, drowning in his own fear and so, so, many ants? to think that there are some people who would choose to not be an avatar makes Jordan all the more interesting. he didn’t ask for this, he does not want to be an avatar in any way, but in the end he still cannot fathom being anything else. anything is better than the ants, even if it means inflicting that fear onto countless others. it’s a completely unfair choice but he makes it all the same. 

Jordan did not want this, but like Jon and the Eye, he chooses it. 

and Jon’s decision here, to make someone into something new completely against their will. time and time again, we see the Eye manifesting as a betrayal of consent. Elias makes Jon into the Archivist against his knowledge and will, Jon cuts the bullet out of Melanie while she’s asleep, Jon and Elias seeing the secrets and pasts of others, and finally Jon turning Jordan into an avatar. the true horror of the Watcher is this betrayal and breach of consent. being perceived and watched is fine if you agree to it, if you share a secret willingly and gladly, and even the most horrific knowledge is best processed when prepared for it. but the Eye does not ask–Jon does not ask. he takes Jordan and remakes him and calls it mercy. not only has Jordan been utterly remade, forced to feed off the very fear he once experienced, it was never a choice he had any real say in. not when it mattered. 

i can’t help but wonder if Jon’s words were true. when Jordan says he doesn’t know how to scare people, Jon says, “you’ll learn,” which holds an almost uncanny resemblance to how Elias answered his own questions. Jon learned how to scare people and most of all, he learned to like it. Jon, like Jordan, didn’t want to be an avatar but he did choose it, in the end.

i can’t help but wonder if over time, Jordan accepted that he was a part of the colony. when the world was reset, i wonder if he missed the ants even as he hated himself for it? did they make him feel loved like how the wasps loved Jane? could he hear their singing? did he finally understand Jane, the being that had haunted his nightmares? did he ever feel whole again, without the trillions upon trillions of ants crawling through his tunnel-like veins? did he have to learn to walk without the weight of wings? 

when the world was set right, what happened to Jordan? did he go back to being the same Jordan before the tunnels, before becoming the leader of the colony, or was he a piece of something that was once whole and never can be again? 

Jon tells Jordan “i helped you,” but did he really? he saved him from his torment but brought upon him one that, all things considered, might be even worse.

[soul-hammered]

[weabooweedwitch]

I love that the pandemic actually definitively proved a lot of those "hard" questions for us. Masking up reduced cases of the flu to almost nonexistent numbers and we had zero flu deaths for a time. The welfare and social service and unemployment programs helped keep people living paycheck to paycheck out of poverty, and those stimulus checks some folks keep complaining about actually massively benefitted the common man and the economy. Individual personal travel was so extremely restricted on a global scale that we basically have concrete proof that individual restraint in terms of driving cars or travelling means absolutely nothing by comparison because the mass pollution is coming from the fisheries and the corporations with private jets and container ships. Working from home actually has massive benefits for a company like productivity boosts and better mental health of employees while also saving gas

and we're just. Willingly going back to how everything was before. We were shown how to do things better and the people in charge said "that's nice but we just want to get everything 'back to normal' :)"

[roach-works]

we’re not willingly going back to how everything was before. we are being forced back into it by members of the ruling class who found out that making things better for almost everyone else made them feel bad.

[silly-jellyghoty]

Let's not forget about any of these things. Let's reblog and schedule this post to pop in in the future to remind us of what we may have forgotten a little.

[cwicseolfor]

Do not forget.

[inkskinned]

i have chronic pain. i am neurodivergent. i understand - deeply - the allure of a "quick fix" like AI. i also just grew up in a different time. we have been warned about this.

15 entire years ago i heard about this. in my forensics class in high school, we watched a documentary about how AI-based "crime solving" software was inevitably biased against people of color.

my teacher stressed that AI is like a book: when someone writes it, some part of the author will remain within the result. the internet existed but not as loudly at that point - we didn't know that AI would be able to teach itself off already-biased Reddit threads. i googled it: yes, this bias is still happening. yes, it's just as bad if not worse.

i can't actually stop you. if you wanna use ChatGPT to slide through your classes, that's on you. it's your money and it's your time. you will spend none of it thinking, you will learn nothing, and, in college, you will piss away hundreds of thousands of dollars. you will stand at the podium having done nothing, accomplished nothing. a cold and bitter pyrrhic victory.

i'm not even sure students actually read the essays or summaries or emails they have ChatGPT pump out. i think it just flows over them and they use the first answer they get. my brother teaches engineering - he recently got fifty-three copies of almost-the-exact-same lab reports. no one had even changed the wording.

and yes: AI itself (as a concept and practice) isn't always evil. there's AI that can help detect cancer, for example. and yet: when i ask my students if they'd be okay with a doctor that learned from AI, many of them balk. it is one thing if they don't read their engineering textbook or if they don't write the critical-thinking essay. it's another when it starts to affect them. they know it's wrong for AI to broad-spectrum deny insurance claims, but they swear their use of AI is different.

there's a strange desire to sort of divorce real-world AI malpractice over "personal use". for example, is it moral to use AI to write your cover letters? cover letters are essentially only templates, and besides: AI is going to be reading your job app, so isn't it kind of fair?

i recently found out that people use AI as a romantic or sexual partner. it seems like teenagers particularly enjoy this connection, and this is one of those "sticky" moments as a teacher. honestly - you can roast me for this - but if it was an actually-safe AI, i think teenagers exploring their sexuality with a fake partner is amazing. it prevents them from making permanent mistakes, it can teach them about their bodies and their desires, and it can help their confidence. but the problem is that it's not safe. there isn't a well-educated, sensitive AI specifically to help teens explore their hormones. it's just internet-fed cycle. who knows what they're learning. who knows what misinformation they're getting.

the most common pushback i get involves therapy. none of us have access to the therapist of our dreams - it's expensive, elusive, and involves an annoying amount of insurance claims. someone once asked me: are you going to be mad when AI saves someone's life?

therapists are not just trained on the book, they're trained on patient management and helping you see things you don't see yourself. part of it will involve discomfort. i don't know that AI is ever going to be able to analyze the words you feed it and answer with a mind towards the "whole person" writing those words. but also - if it keeps/kept you alive, i'm not a purist. i've done terrible things to myself when i was at rock bottom. in an emergency, we kind of forgive the seatbelt for leaving bruises. it's just that chat shouldn't be your only form of self-care and recovery.

and i worry that the influence chat has is expanding. more and more i see people use chat for the smallest, most easily-navigated situations. and i can't like, make you worry about that in your own life. i often think about how easy it was for social media to take over all my time - how i can't have a tiktok because i spend hours on it. i don't want that to happen with chat. i want to enjoy thinking. i want to enjoy writing. i want to be here. i've already really been struggling to put the phone down. this feels like another way to get you to pick the phone up.

the other day, i was frustrated by a book i was reading. it's far in the series and is about a character i resent. i googled if i had to read it, or if it was one of those "in between" books that don't actually affect the plot (you know, one of those ".5" books). someone said something that really stuck with me - theoretically you're reading this series for enjoyment, so while you don't actually have to read it, one would assume you want to read it.

i am watching a generation of people learn they don't have to read the thing in their hand. and it is kind of a strange sort of doom that comes over me: i read because it's genuinely fun. i learn because even though it's hard, it feels good. i try because it makes me happy to try. and i'm watching a generation of people all lay down and say: but i don't want to try.

[nb-stingray]

*SUNRISE ON THE REAPING SPOILERS*

Reading through the SoTR tag and honestly, I fully disagree with a big criticism point, which is that the prequel is turning Katniss into some Chosen One.

I fully read it as the reverse! That Katniss’ life and role and victories are the sum of not only her parts, but every single person who has owed someone else, something that could not be repaid.

Haymitch being friends with Katniss’ dad is not some shoehorn??? District 12 has 10,000 people at the time of the 75th games! They had one school! Everybody knew everybody, so it’s not a surprise that two Seam boys knew each other or could be friends!

Beetee and Wiress and Mags being there wasn’t some “Avengers Assemble” moment, it was 3 Victors being punished like all Victors were (except Beetee had an even worse go of it, proving something Katniss observed in CF, which is that Victors’ children had a higher odds of being chosen or outright rigged).

Even younger Effie and Plutarch??? They were career Hunger Games staff canonically??? It made sense for them to be there??

Idk people have been talking about this book as a cash grab and not talking about the poignancy of how every action Katniss Everdeen took was influenced by the character and love of those before and around her.

[physical-manifestation-of-spite]

I Died For You [A Malevolent Animatic]

Voice acting and audio by @malevolentcast , who very generously sent me this audio file to use for this animatic. Thank you for creating such a beautiful show.

Background and details under cut

I began this animatic early last year after finding the audio on TikTok. Once I heard it, I was immediately struck with the thought of how those first couple of weeks in the Dark World would be for John immediately after Season 2. It seemed perfectly fitting, how John might be tortured by his guilt and uncertainty if Arthur was even still alive, and that torment would only aid his regression to his more… Kingly qualities.

I began to draft the thumbnails of the animatic in my sketchbook before transferring it to my digital workspace, which was incredibly intimidating at the time. This was my first independent animatic. In last year’s InvictusCon, Harlan popped into my stream as I was explaining my animatic thought process to my viewers, shaking with both excitement and terror. I was stunned when he offered to voice it himself. The next day, he sent me the audio file. To this day, I am still stunned he spent so much time and effort to create something. It was the encouragement I needed to finish a longer-form animatic. It may be only a minute and some change, but this is a whole year of my life condensed - my obsession, my adoration, my passion for not only this podcast but for art in general, both visual and audio.

It’s by happy accident that I finished this right at the cusp of the Season 5 finale. It almost perfectly slots in. So… let’s all pretend that this animatic took me a month to do rather than the year I spent sweating on my couch and complaining about the number of times I forgot Arthur’s wooden finger.

[vickozone]

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Reminder that you can block most ads on Android. yes, including youtube ads.

Steps: Download Firefox -> Install uBlock Origin extension.

That's literally it. Enjoy ad free web browsing while we still (barely) have it!

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Note: this works for browsing done in the Firefox app. It won't block ads in, for example, the youtube app. BUT, if you use Firefox to access youtube.com, congrats, no ads!

edit: also you can play youtube videos with the screen off/while using other apps. Just click three-dots -> Extensions -> Extensions Manager -> Video Background Play Fix

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

↑↑↑ reblog this version pls 😘

[the-autism-album]

Also, if you prefer using the app, there's stuff like revanced and other patched APKs for Android . Revanced also has support for patching out ads from Tumblr APKs, which has been a lifesaver for me . Removing those weird autoplaying dashboard ads is so fucking worth it

[lavenderfables]

Maybe this next cup of tea will fix me.

[tgirl-thucydides]

[jessthecheesewitch]

[finallyimadeanaccount]

[justgot1]

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then t

Archive link

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion...

...Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story...

...Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

-----

Absolutely astonishing. Holy shit, the incompetence. In normal times, heads would be rolling. But let's watch as they do absolutely nothing. Incredible.