the very spirit of vexation

july eliot, 31, eastern us, writer, librarian. bi; They/Them or He/Hir. i do tarot readings hmu if interested! we can neither confirm nor deny that the magic was inside you the whole time. my URL is indeed my birthday: if it is also your birthday, welcome to the organization. there are no dues. once a year we wish each other a solomn happy birthday.

[bashircore]

This tweet has changed my life btw

[bashircore]

Here’s a guide of what I’ve determined the meanings to be

walking around - self explanatory

fellowship - hanging out with friends

deliciousness - having something tasty

transcendence - feeling that you have reached a different level of some sort; alternatively, when you do one of the other delights to the extreme and feel really good about it. (you know transcendence when it happens)

goofing - having a good laugh at smth

amelioration - working towards the betterment of something, for example, working on a skill you hope to improve

coitus - fuckin’

enthralment - becoming incredibly engaged in something, hyper focusing on something

wildcard - anything that you feel was a delight in your day that does not fit one of the above delights

[fraddit]

When you stay in a hotel room, do you unpack your suitcase into the provided closet and dresser?

always

sometimes (explain in tags if desired)

never

never been in a hotel room/bald/etc

Voting ended onAug 16

[godlessondheimite]

jeff goldblum is the type of guy who gets mistaken for gay because he’s jewish. nathan lane is the type of guy who gets mistaken for jewish because he’s gay. stanley tucci is the type of guy who gets mistaken for gay because he’s a mild-mannered italian, which is jewish. seth meyers gets mistaken for jewish because of everything about him. zachary levi gets mistaken for jewish because everyone wants him dead. tom cruise gets mistaken for gay because he is.

[chekhovs-raygun]

weird al gets mistaken for jewish because he's played by elijah wood, who is.

[slyandthefamilybook]

Daniel Radcliffe gets mistaken for Elijah Wood because they both played the main character in mid-2000s fantasy films. Elijah Wood gets mistaken for Jewish because he gets mistaken for Daniel Radcliffe, who is Jewish

[xenogears]

Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that

[the-lincyclopedia]

Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go the Odyssey?

Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.

[fidgetyhands]

And this doesn't mean you need to read / watch / listen to absolutely everything! (not that that's remotely possible)

It's perfectly reasonable that I have decided, based on ambient cultural information, that Ready Player One will not be my jam and I'm not going to read it. What that means, though, is that I have very little information about Ready Player One. I am not an authority on Ready Player One. If there's a discussion of the character development or worldbuilding or plot structure in Ready Player One, I can listen, but I can't really contribute, because I have not read it and thus am missing quite a lot of information about it.

There are more things in the world that I am not an authority on than there are things that I am an authority on, and that's okay! I should just be honest with myself and others about it.

[queer-as-city-folk]

Would She Cheat on You? the bus

yes

no, I trust her

I would never date the bus

Remaining time: 5 days 22 hours

[seren-starlight]

Person who makes coffee incorrectly: You can't make a cup of coffee without breaking a few eggs

[aurpiment]

* Vietnamese person who makes coffee really, really well

[wizardarchetypes]

oh you didn't know? your parents didn't tell you? yeah there's actually a Migraine God. there's a disorganized cult of devotees who dedicate their infants to him. Yeah haha your parents must have been involved when you were born. The reason you get migraines now is because you were promised to his Dominion and you haven't even acknowledged him once all this time. So he's really mad at you. It's crazy how common this is. Yeah, I hear ya; it's not fair that he allows parents to supersede their infants' autonomy but you can't exactly imagine that the God of Migraines is a really chill guy, right? Huh? Oh yeah you can start committing acts of devotion to him now; he'll forgive you. But heads up, migraines is all he can do. Yeah, he gives you them to acknowledge your devotion also. Pretty much either way it's migraines. A way out? Yeah, you can have a baby and offer it in your place, but I've always thought that'd be a pretty messed up thing to do. Plus, he doesn't like, take your baby. He just gives it migraines. So now you have to raise a baby. And with migraines. Through the teething phase and everything. Yeah, it's really messed up. I heard a few people are gonna maybe get together and kill their parents and see if that does anything. Anyway I gotta run, I have ground beef thawing at home. Yeah, sloppy joe night. Every Sunday haha. It's the little things : ) Anyway best of luck

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

[penny-anna]

Really need to try and get deoncelerised popularised over 'filing the serial numbers off' for the pro pubbed fic trend before it's too late

[penny-anna]

Benefits of deoncelerise:

A single verb that rolls nicely off the tongue

'filing the serial numbers off' implies strictly a removal of copyrighted information; reworking a whole book often involves more than a simple find and replace and is a constructive process rather than just a removal.

Evokes the spectre of The Onceler; in the process acknowledges the cringe inherent in the process

[penny-anna]

Important to stress that 'deoncelerise' is not an inherently derogatory term; it is cringe but whether it is cringe (affectionate; free) or cringe (embarrassing) is context dependent

[homunculus-argument]

We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.

[micromontage]

sunday evening dont trust yourself hold the line

[faithmitchells]

hnweek26: day four - favorite dynamic emerald and oj haywood nope (2022) dir. jordan peele

[aropride]

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[kropotkindersurprise]

however stupid you think the average American voter is, you are probably still overestimating them

[marxistmentor]

[yourivygrows]

well well well if it isn’t august slipping away

[ndnbutch]

I feel like there’s also a racialized element haunting the conversation around shaving that I haven’t yet seen anyone really address (at least on my dash, I’m sure people ARE talking about it in general because I cannot possibly be the first person this thought has occurred to). there’s like the very basic point that if you are someone who grows thicker, courser body hair then you will be more prone to painful ingrowns and shaving regularly will absolutely exacerbate this, it was a thing I dealt with for years when I was still shaving my body hair and having stopped doing that has been tremendously helpful for my bodily wellbeing. but also overall I do think racialized people (obviously especially racialized women) can be more heavily targeted by the pressure to shave. not even necessarily because of the claim that we are “naturally hairier” or whatever because that’s really not universally true and I don’t think it’s super helpful to parrot that. but in my experience our body hair, largely regardless of its appearance or quantity, is frequently treated as more unsightly and less acceptable than that of our white peers for any number of reasons. and I do think that should be part of the conversation around abolishing a culture of shaving. it was something that impacted my life from a very young age in a way that was markedly different from and often actively enforced by my white friends and classmates.