Pretty + Witty + Gay @kaidadragonfly - Tumblr Blog

It’s extremely fucked up that some ppl try to make you feel stupid and immature for hoping for a better world. You say you want world peace and mfs think you need a pacifier; dawg, I just don’t want ppl dying from violence. This idea that ppl simply must die as casualties of war is misanthropic to say the least.

girl-with-bones

where's that quote about how the child is actually right

girl-with-bones

prettiestplatypus

Pokopia is pretty neat (don't ask how many hundreds of hours I put into it)

Bonus Panel:

wretchedly

"I asked ChatGPT—"

Well I asked GDT (Guillermo del Toro) and he said some of the most casually unhinged shit I've ever heard. it was beautiful and it fixed me.

ristay

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

Follow me on Webtoons

ruby-white-rabbit

The window visual did me in I’m wheezing

floralpopie

greatmountainfloofsquatch

WELP

doctor-seamonster

I haven’t seen this in years and yet it is burned into my memory forever.

anotherdayforchaosfay

This is on the short list of Eternal Reblog because it’s fucking legendary.

magrowette

An honourable candidate for the @hellsite-hall-of-fame

excuse-me-thanks

“i should take a walk for my mental health” boring, tired, i don’t even really wanna do it tbh

“i need to check the perimeter” i need to check the perimeter

queencalicoanne

It's been years since I've read a Discworld novel and I don't remember what the actual plot of The Shepherd's Crown was.

What I do remember is fucking sobbing in my bathtub because of how obvious Pratchett made it that he was aware his time was coming and he wanted to face his own mortality, and did so by taking Granny Weatherwax with him.

For those who don't know Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's eight years before he died, and advocated for the legalization of medically assisted suicide. He was open about how he struggled with Alzheimer's, and how he wanted to die while he was still himself.

I don't remember the plot of the book, but I do remember Granny Weatherwax cleaning her home, taking a bath and dressing in her finest clothes, then altering her "I ATE'NT DEAD" sign to say "I IS PROBLY DEAD" before laying down to pass away.

I remember Death greeting her with a kind judgement when he came to reap her soul.

FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT.

Like, it's so glaringly obvious that Pratchett was expressing that control he craved over his own end. Dying with dignity and leaving a positive impact on the world. Granny Weatherwax knew it was her time and took every detailed preparation she could. I think Pratchett did the same with the Shepherd's Crown.

xenosaurus

it’s a shame more vampire media doesn’t pull from vampire bat behavior because they’re such sweeties. they can only survive their incredibly specialized diet because bats will share blood with colony members that didn’t find a meal! there’s evidence that suggests the donors sometimes initiate this behavior themselves by approaching hungry bats! the colonies are mostly harems of females with a few males but they’ve been observed letting unrelated males in when it gets cold so they can all stay warm! cute little social critters!

xenosaurus

@yupekosi your tags have created such a beautiful world

anexperimentallife

(wake me up) wake me up inside (before you go-go)

voyaging-too

I don't want to be overly dramatic and overly negative about the AI translations I've been working with. They are bad, yes, but I don't want to overstate their badness because that would obscure the specific points I'm making. Some AI translations, the best AI translations, are not that bad. Some of them are still bad to the point of being unusable, but others are better. They're not good, but they're mostly serviceable, and it's extremely impressive that a machine can come up with something serviceable, something comparable to the work of a very mediocre human translator.

A client who hires a subpar translator who accepts being underpaid, in order to avoid paying professional rates for a professional, is getting subpar work. A client who uses AI to get work cheap and fast is getting worse than subpar work. But AI is getting better, it might soon be at the point where laymen can't tell the difference, and then, using AI instead of paying a human will mostly be a labour rights issue, and that's a far thornier question. (Note that I'm not talking about using AI translators to read something for yourself, or to communicate in your daily life: I'm talking about AI translation for publication, using AI for something you expect other people to pay money for.)

My actual point about AI translation is that even when it's fairly good, when it makes few errors and conveys the message intelligibly, it lacks something. I'm not talking about heart and soul here, nothing to do with some intangible human quality: I'm talking about specificity. AI works with great averages, and so it automatically irons out nuance. If you write something unusual, AI will assume it's an error, instead of an intentionally unusual statement. This is regression to the mean, and based on the texts I'm working with, it's an Anglophone, American mean. If you say something that's true of 1980s Hungary, it might slightly alter the sentence to "make sense" for 1980s US. Some alterations are factual, these are more serious errors but also easier to edit out. But other things are harder to catch, slight shifts in tone and valence, an erasure of the original, specific, non-American perspective, and the end result is a text that doesn't have anything wrong with it, but is markedly simpler and dumber than it should be. And flattening complex, knotty, peripheral perspectives into something closer to a monoculture is, in the long term, intellectually devastating.

moniquill

fraterrisus

Can't believe this didn't happen on Tumblr. We're slipping, people. Thread under the cut. Source attached to post.

wizardshark

“lol Android users be like-” your phone is designed to break down after a year, your apps are all programmed to draw unnecessary power after 2 years, all your accessories and hardware are arbitrarily made with only 1 kind of plug in mind so you can’t use them with anything else or get them from anywhere else, the cables are 150$ and break in a year, your phones will not charge if there is lint in the port, the stores will ask you for 150$ to remove that lint, the phone itself is 900$

But your chat bubbles are blue so that balances it out right

wizardshark

they literally removed the audio plugin and called it a benefit that it can now only work with their arbitrary wireless headphones. They coloured the phones a pinky gold and sold it for twice as much.

This isn’t a drag against you this is a drag against apple, the company. Their products are price hiked to an insane, impossible degree. They aren’t selling you the product, they are selling you the superiority of being able to smugly say you have an iphone.

They deliberately built up a culture of apple supremacy (especially as a class barrier but i aint even gonna go into that), and now people are making posts like “lmao android users have a bad camera” (they dont) or “lmao android users send bad snapchats” (the android version of snap is deliberately coded to force lower resolution images in order to, surprise, get people saying that exact thing to further encourage #iphoneculture)

Buy an iphone if you want lord knows I’ve bought frivolouss things but can you PLEASE recognize youre being deceived??? theyre playing you every single time you make a post about your iphone and buy into their culture to squeeze more and more money out of you and divide the market and inevitably the classes.

wizardshark

this post is older than the term Enshittification

kaidadragonfly

I mean, iPhone generally last a lot longer than most Android devices.

I've had both and prefer most things about Android but frankly don't trust Google anymore and decided Apple was the lesser of two evils.

The single port thing was a real problem until the EU forced Apple to use USB C and now it's mostly a non-issue but also my wife has an iPhone from 2020 and it's still working perfectly fine and getting security updates (and its single Lightning port hasn't caused any problems... aside from it being annoying it needs a special cable).

Apple has their issues but they are fundamentally a hardware company and do actually build pretty good hardware that lasts a long time.

wizardpotions

You all need to understand that autonomy and especially bodily autonomy NEEDS to include being allowed to do things that are bad for you. True bodily autonomy includes being allowed to do things that are risky, drugs, cosmetic procedures and the like. Bodily autonomy needs to include being allowed to get high or smoke or get a BBL. The important part is education about the risks

wizardpotions

Yes even that thing you hate and think no one should ever do. Without this mindset someone elses opinions will try to take away something you beleive is your right to choose as well

kaidadragonfly

If someone wants to do something dangerous and has informed consent unless it is dangerous to someone else they should be allowed.

(I can see arguments for, say, not allowing parents to play Russian Roulette or something.)

pocket-deer-belly

my harassers don't have anything real to accuse me of other than associating with trans women who they think i should throw under the bus so i think that's why i'm being badgered again about "knowing what happens on kiwifarms" as if it's a smoking gun

pocket-deer-belly

like the playbook is kind of transparent to me. they want to lolcow these women without consequence except i'm here, not having any even remotely significant personal scandals they can implicate me for beyond associating with these women. i have to also be discarded but the only way they can do it is by pointing to women they want to throw under the bus. i'm here to remind them that they have to actually meaningfully prove the guilt of the people they want discarded, and that's hard, because i don't think you should socially isolate people even when they have done harm, especially when they're already marginalized in one way or another.

so when i like, vaguely know what happens on kiwifarms because another transfem informed me, it has to be some smoking gun that i'm secretly scheming something. it reminds me of when i first became more well-versed in transfeminism people had to portray my knowledge and effort as chaser behavior.

what i'm saying is my harassers are trying their best to portray basic understanding of how trans women get treated in society, and giving (what they view as) an undue amount of grace towards trans women who are under constant scrutiny, as itself suspect.

hiddenramen-deactivated20250513

one of my greatest pet peeves in fiction, and it is truly stupid I know, is that no one seems to understand how genuinely hard it is to kill someone via stabbing. stab wounds have a mortality rate of like 5%. especially abdominal stabbing. tv shows and movies show dudes getting stabbed one time in the lower abdomen with a tiny knife and then they fall over. like what did he die of precisely. that man died of Small Knife

alltangledupinblue

Honestly, that one is not nearly so galling to me as these two linked ones

there is no safe and effective way to render someone unconscious. The only way you get unconscious from a punch to the head is hitting your head hard enough on the ground to get a major concussion/TBI. This does not result in waking up "a little woozy" some useful minutes to hours later, it results in brain damage. Any drugs which might do this are hard to get the dose correct, so you're as likely to not knock someone out or kill them as you are to send them gently to sleep.

Tasers do not knock you out. Again, the only way you can end up unconscious from a taser is head injury when your muscles all seize up.

It would be super narratively useful to be able to knock people out! I know why authors want it to happen! But human bodies don't work that way.

findingfeather

nb: the stab wound part is assuming a modern day setting; the fatality rate from ANY significant wound goes up substantially if you remove modern medical care, fluids to keep blood pressure up, and antibiotics.

The point though is they don’t kill FAST. Like not in seconds or even a minute or two. Not unless you hit the heart or sever the spine or hit an artery well enough to bleed out asap (cutting throats counts).

THAT SAID they do incapacitate somewhat more often than they kill, but it’s relatively unpredictable. Whether or not someone’s entire body freezes up in shock and malfunctions vs their adrenaline making it so they don’t even really NOTICE until they’ve lost enough blood volume to cause a mechanical problem vs being In Pain immediately…. those are all gonna depend on a huge number of inter-applicable factors that you can’t necessarily predict in advance. And even if the adrenaline part works you may still find that limbs or balance or whatever doesn’t work the way you expect, bc the stab wound had actually severed or otherwise impacted a muscle that was crucial for this action.

So while dude stabbed in stomach by Small Knife may - in a world where he will be taken to hospital and treated with modern emergency and ICU care - well survive, and even those who don’t have the above do have a varying chance of survival depending on luck, baseline health, and whether or not their intestines or stomach were kicked by the blade, stabbing someone in the stomach with a small knife is still LIKELY to make him curl up and fall over either immediately or within a short period.

Or he may be so hyped up it takes several minutes for it to slow him down.

Human bodies and injury are wild in a way: we are very fragile except when we aren’t and survive absolute bullshit; and also we are astonishingly hard to kill until we are made of glass.

So yeah, OP is partly right in that a paring knife is unlikely to be an insta kill on a human being of reasonable health and size, but at the same time that doesn’t actually mean being stabbed in the abdomen isn’t a life threatening emergency or that ON THE WHOLE, if you manage to stab someone in the gut even with a “small knife”, you have a good chance of putting them down ie making them no longer a problem for you.

And the fatality rate skyrockets where fast access to a modern Emergency Department isn’t available, so that doesn’t mean your characters can just shrug off a gutstab.

Second poster is 100% correct about rendering people unconscious tho. There is no situation that the human brain is meant to be tendered “unconscious” outside natural sleep, so it makes it very hard to do and means that ALL abnormal unconsciousness is risky. When a doctor or anaesthetist does it, they’re doing it VERY CAREFULLY with LOTS OF CARE AND LEARNING. And it’s still a risk! That’s why they avoid it if it doesn’t offer a big enough benefit to outweigh the risk!

plain-flavoured-english

As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus: