realizing many people don't know about infinity train creator owen dennis' among us show from years ago, which has been trapped in unreleased limbo all this time and was just dumped on streaming this morning with no advertisement. they don't even know about its weirdly stacked cast
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
so this knight came to my wizard's tower one day and asked me to cast a spell that would allow him to take his beloved princess' hand in marriage. pretty typical this kind of wish, and i had just the spell. a combo of "turn person into a royal" and "transform appearance to match romantic ideal", easy. he paid handsomely for it too, so how can i says no?
turns out his princess is a lesbian and nobody knew, so when i cast the spell it made him into a beautiful princess. she asked for a refund right away and begged me (cryin', held me at swordpoint) to turn her back, but i says to her, i says, "The die has already been cast, and your fate is now sealed!" which is my way of sayin' "no refunds".
turns out, bein' a princess weren't so bad for her and she was able to take her sweet and beloved princess' hand in marriage. seems like everything worked out.
but then, surprise of my life, they both show up to my tower and my spell was undone. some dark sorcerer shithead (some kinda sketchy royal adviser who wanted to usurp the throne, a million like 'im) had removed my enchantments and turned our princess back into a knight. but she didn't want to be a man no more and asked me to redo the spell. gladly i changed her back in exchange for fuckin' up this sorcerer shmuck, (could be a threat to my business, you see) gave 'er an enchanted sword an everything. to my shock, the other princess takes the sword and vows to get this guy for me.
now i got all this guy's magic shit and good graces for life with the queens of the land, plus the best advertisement money can't buy. "yes, i am in fact That wizard from the story of the princess knight!" classic.
anyway, all that to say, no i ain't changin' yous back. you'll be mommy's pretty little maid and you'll like it.
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.
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
you can explain the material things that could be done to make trans women's lives easier, and someone who thinks misandry is real will show up like "that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, abolishing gender". and then they wont abolish gender
a lot of people say "abolish" when they mean "re-naturalize." they don't want to make sexgender systems more visible and work collectively to dismantle them. they want to make them invisible and insist there is nothing there to dismantle.
I wasn't sure about letting this Hydromancer into the party at first, but it turns out her sword arm is unparalleled, and she only dabbled into Hydromancy so she could intentionally contain the enemy's blood after she rained countless slashes upon them like a meteor shower on the clear night sky for the express purpose of striking a pose, muttering "zan", and then releasing all of the blood on their wounds at once in a spectacle that the villager elder described "sick as fuck".
every time a trans man who does not want to be called a twink gets called a twink I will personally go out into the world and rend 1 parked car to shreds with my teeth. cut it out
walk with me for a moment. let's think for a sec. I'm not upset but I do want people to understand. do you think assigning a label associated with feminine features, hairlessness, skinniness/lack of muscle tone, and high pitched voices is something that most trans men would feel comfortable being associated with? why or why not?
of COURSE there are trans men who don't mind it, or trans men who actively enjoy being called a twink. but I am not hairless by choice. I WANT fat and muscles and body hair and a deep voice. and a lot of trans men that get called twinks DO HAVE THESE THINGS, yet they get called "twink" anyway. why do you think that might be?
it's okay if you've done this in the past. maybe just check in before you call your friend or acquaintance something with so many specific, potentially disheartening associations!
I wonder if the inverse occurs with trans women getting called "butch" too. because there are many wonderful butch trans women!!! but if you call trans women "butches" for traits like short hair or body hair despite otherwise feminine presentation, maybe think about why that is? is she really a butch? or is that just her body? just ask first!
nonbinary people too. are they really "masc presenting" or is that just their body? are they really "fem presenting" or is that just their body? let's all try to be a bit more cognisant of the language we use to describe the trans people in our lives, yeah? [: it's worth thinking about. don't worry yourself into a hole about it, of course! but it's something to check every now and then.
What do you mean “chat” is now referring to ChatGPT and not twitch chat? What? What? What the fuck? No?
When I address chat I am speaking to a presumed Greek chorus of real human people shitposting on their lunch break, not a machine that devours lakes to covert electricity into slop.
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.
This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.
Anyway one of the best things you can do for engaging with political discourse is to stop viewing different analytical frameworks as competing teams or a decorative element to add to your bio, and instead view them as what they are: Methods of interpreting stuff that happens in the world, some more reliable than others, some more tailored to specific situations than others.
And then also recognize that sometimes individuals deploy those frameworks badly.
Which in turn means that when you see an absolutely shit take from someone who's usually spot-on with their analysis inside their preferred framework, you can just go "oh, they're outside their domain of applicability, what a shame" and move on with your day.
A big one to avoid is taking the knowledge from a framework meant for analyzing large-scale power structures, learning about how those affect material conditions at population levels, and then starting to go "ohhhh am I being Bad At The Framework if I try to change my material conditions with individual actions" to which the answer is... no. That's just outside the scope of the framework.
That's all to say that when you see someone from any branch of feminism starting to slip into "gals, is it heteropatriarchal if we do lesbian BDSM" you can just laugh to yourself and go "haha, she's individualizing the systemic analysis" and move on instead of trying to formulate a Theory Of How Being A Good Girl For Dommy Mommy Is Actually Super Feminist to counter.
"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot
i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832
