Discoholic šŖ©
Product Placement
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
$LAYYYTER
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
EXPECTATIONS
ā
Stranger Things
I'd rather be in outer space šø
ellievsbear
izzy's playlists!
official daine visual archive
noise dept.
gracie abrams
#extradirty
The Stonewall Inn
NASA
Claire Keane
untitled
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from TĆ¼rkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@kayloulee
Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fish in Rimini, detail, 1518, fresco, anonymous painter from the circle of Gerolamo Tessari, Basilica di SantāAntonio, Padua
Hope St Anthony tried out some crowd work. "We got any crustaceans in tonight?" [excited clattering of pincers from that guy in the middle]
Alarm Off perfec t time for put lying in bed to t/hink! Inside very Quiet and Peace thoughts very productive put in Alarm Off. Put Thinking in Alarm Off time. no problems ever lying in bedd with alarm off because good Contemplation and Eyes Closed for difficult deep thoughts about day. alarmOff yes safe place to close eyes lie in bed can trust not to fall back asleep. friend bed
"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."
"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."
"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."
Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars
A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we
It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial
I had to go on a hunt for this but it was worth it. 100% agree
Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.
And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.
This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.
And I got an A.
The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.
Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.
But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.
I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.
Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.
The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.
ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.
Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.
However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.
I can remember being in computer class right before history and someone in the last ten minutes mentioned the class presentations we had next period and I was like.. fuck man I fully forgot
So I had a passing knowledge of ww2, as much as anyone, so i figured that I could bluff the context around Churchill and just get some of his details down and I'd be fine.
So I pulled his Wikipedia up and read it. Didn't have time to write a speech, this was gonna be adlib. Then I jumped on google images and pulled a picture that reflected one thing from each of his Wikipedia sections (like, early life (picture of a train set) education (Churchill graduating) early war (you get the idea).
Bunged the pictures into a powerpoint and read the Wikipedia again with the powerpoint alongside, adding subheadings to jog my memory. Pulled a couple links from the bottom of the wiki for the bibliography, opened and skimmed to make sure they weren't wild, and saved the damn thing
We were lining up outside class for history and the guys in the class are telling some classmates about how I'd just smashed out my whole presentation. I asked everyone to let me go first since the knowledge wasn't gonna last long, I was going off having just read Churchill's wiki lol
They all agreed (champions) and one of the girls said she'd read up on Churchill a bit on her presentation about the Queen, so she promised to nod or shake her head if I was completely wrong.
I presented. I know I spent a minute on each slide and spoke relevantly. I remember at one point saying Churchill excelled in school, saw my classmate was shaking her head, and pivoted to say he didn't do well with formal education but got into some of the extracurricular activities that'd benefit him come war time. She nodded. I continued lol. One of the lads complimented me on that one afterwards
I don't think I learnt much about Churchill with this study. But I absolutely learnt about public speaking. I was using skills in research and apply my contextual knowledge. I also learnt to rely on classmates, even tho we weren't friends at all she had my back because it was easy and kind and cost her nothing
I got a B+ and a comment about being one of the more engaging and charismatic presenters (that would've been the adrenaline, and my classmates were watching fascinated to see if I could pull it off lol).
The main perk of my presentation was the energy, which wouldn't've been there if I'd ai'd a script to read. And I wouldn't have this fun memory
I remember getting in a philosophy class in college (one I just took for fun), and realized that there was a paper due that day that I had 100% forgotten about writing. I lied and told the professor that I had forgotten to print it, but I had my laptop with me for note taking, so if he'd give me 5 minutes after class I would run down to the computer lab and print it off and bring it up. He said that was fine, presumably because I couldn't write a coherent paper in 5 minutes.
But I COULD write a coherent paper in 45 minutes, which is about the time it took me to slap together a dirty outline and fill it in, the way I had been taught to do in high school in my writing class. It wasn't gonna win any awards but it meant a B+ instead of a zero, and it meant I had an opportunity to work under pressure and practice skills I had learned. Skills I STILL use to this day, skills I have taught to others. Skills I use to help others edit papers. Skills I would not have and certainly wouldn't have been able to hone if chatGPT was doing it poorly instead.
That's MY B+ bullshit essay. I earned it fair and square, along with the bragging rights to having written it under my professor's nose.
I learned how to be a First Draft Wonder for most of my school papers. I knew the formula to make a decent paper, because it was drilled into me in High school taking AP lit and having 'essay quizzes' where we would spend a class period writing a short essay (BY HAND LE GASP) about our topic.
I am so good at papers, I know how to find the relevant information, I know what a reliable source looks like, and in college, I could lock myself in a study room and knock out a several page paper (with references) in just a couple hours.
ALL WITHOUT AI. I used my brain, the skills of information gathering I was taught, and my ability to use books and bibliographies to my advantage. Today, I can write up something tidy for work in a little bit of focus time.
I may not be able to influence the Youth. But I will beg all of you students to not become overly reliant on having some machine do that thinking for you so you can scroll Tiktok longer. Your brain is meant to be exercised, lets use it.
Yeah, that all tracks. You wanna know how I wrote an entire nonfiction book? I used the exact same skills I learned in school for writing essays--come up with a topic, research what you don't already know, make an outline, use the outline to structure the piece of writing, fill it in. It's just that this time I wrote 70,000 words instead of, say, 500-1000.
I think my first essay was....third grade? Maybe second? And I wrote hundreds of them just through high school, to say nothing of all I wrote in getting my Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Some of the essays in primary and secondary school were, quite honestly, bullshitting, because they were on topics that didn't interest me and I hadn't yet learned to use my then-undiagnosed anxiety, autism, and ADHD to trick myself into putting real effort into something I found boring. Even the low-effort essays still got me great grades, and they still helped me hone my writing skills. And they did eventually give me the tools to get me to focus on less-fun necessities.
Would I have been able to do that if I had had access to genAI and decided to use it? Doubtful. Would I have been able to write an entire book that was published by one of the Big 5 U.S. publishers? Nope. Because even if i had managed to trick them into thinking an AI-generated manuscript was my work, I wouldn't have survived the editing process without blowing my cover, and I certainly wouldn't have been able to show my expertise in the subject matter.
Even if you never do any work as a professional writer, writing teaches you ways to use and exercise your brain. It helps you to examine material critically and communicate it to others. You are cheating yourself of so much if you just wimp out and use CGPT.
I have a high reading rate and a high comprehension rate. In grad school they told us the the profs would each assign reading as if that was your only class it was on purpose. There was literally no way to read everything for classes on top of all the papers and thesis work. For me, can't read everything was about 80-85 percent of the material which was above average.
One of the tricks for articles is read the summary, introductory paragraph, and conclusion and speak early in discussion to show you know what the article is abut.
Another trick is divide articles up with friend(s) and brief each other.
Both in my upper division Medieval History undergraduate classes and in my graduate classes, we'd periodically get assigned the same book for a different class, which was helpful. I could skim my old notes and not reread it or just pick out certain chapters. (Not textbooks, but medieval lit type things. This would happen with classics, philosophy, theology texts, across different under graduate and graduate degrees. It happens).
Usually if I had to skip something important, I'd take notes on the class discussion and it was fine. I was an active class participants, my papers were generally early and heavily well resourced. This can buy you a lot of slack in college when you need it.
One time I got assigned "Little Flowers of St. Francis" and I didn't have time that weekend, so I skipped it. I listened in class, I made good notes. (Paraphrasing things makes them stick in your head the way just reading or listening won't. ChatGP can't stick things in your head the way writing things in your own words will.)
I truly intended to read it, but the back half of semester is busy and I also had two language classes in a full course load and papers and...
I actually used it in an essay question on an exam. Brother Juniper reminded me of the holy Fool archetype from Buddhist writings. I could easily remember a bunch of illustrative stories from class discussion I could use as evidence. I got a perfect score. She could not tell I hadn't read it.
I meant to read it over break, I really did, but there was a bunch of more interesting reading to do and breaks are always too short.
Over the ourse of the last wo under grad years and my medieval Masters program, it was a bout 50/50 it'd get assigned in whole or in part for one class or another, across multiple proffs.
The second time, i didn't even try to read it, but my hand was up in class with relevant comments and opinions. I'd casually reference something in a paper or essay here appropriate. A year went by and then another.
Eventually about a decade after it was first assigned i sold my copy away having never cracked it open.
I am convinced none of the people who assigned this book ever had a clue i hadn't read it.
I am not convinced this was cheating. I knew the information. The information was correct and i was using it correctly with my own spin.
My quality notetaking, my skill at chunking information with other disparate information, my skills at writing essays and papers, all of that was mine from long practice.
My brain doing the work.
LLM stuff slides right through you like olestra. It doesn't give you skills and it's such a passive way to do anything. Active note taking, active thinking, active writing, that builds skills.
One of my colleagues can say to me, I need a basic understanding of the research on [topic] for a meeting later today, help? and I can have them a one-page brief with a list of references inside of an hour. On one memorable occasion a colleague had to take over for someone else unexpectedly without context 10 minutes before a meeting and by the time she logged on to Zoom I had her a bulleted list of recent findings in the field and a short summary of the historical context.
Sure, ChatGPT would be faster, but the difference is, I'm right and ChatGPT is frequently not.
āItās easy to assumeā: someoneās misconception is about to be amiably corrected
āItās tempting to assumeā: someoneās assumption is about to be criticized
āItās comforting to assumeā: someoneās assumption is going to be read for filth
@21st-century-minutiae something for your blog?
The above is explaining three semantically similar statements with different connotations, in decreasing order of prevalence. In the early twenty-first century, native English speakers would understand the connotations implicitly, and would not need the detailed explanation of the above, which draws from the pattern.
In all cases, these statements serve as the prologue to some correction for a mistaken assumption, as explained above.
In the first case, the word "easy" is used to emphasize that the mistake is common, natural, and understandable, and that there is no shame for being mistaken on the given matter of topic. This is a very common turn of phrase.
In the second case, the word "tempting" is used to emphasize that the mistake is born out of some desirable motive. The biases that caused one to form the mistaken assumption as potentially sympathetic to the corrector. This is an less common, but known, turn of phrase, implying a harsher critique.
In the third case, the word "comforting" is used to emphasize that that the only reason someone is making an assumption is because they are coddling their own biases, even though any attempt at thinking things through would prove it irrational. It is the equivalent of accusing someone of sticking their head in the sand, like an allegorical ostrich. "Read for filth" is an idiomatic expression meaning to offer full, unfiltered criticism of something, ripping it apart. This is even less common to use, but the point would be understood as being a prelude to the harshest criticism of the three.
Woag they put me in the rhetoric museum
The chanclafone (Papua New Guinea)
i still canāt believe tyler said āi like stallions moreā on a yes or no question about horses
i canāt believe jason asked tyler what his favorite hand was and tyler looked so offended when jason saidĀ āstraight?ā and then answered withĀ āthree of a kindā
i canāt believe tyler, when asked about dallas, said,Ā āeveryone is good lookingāthe men and the women.ā and in the same interview said he does yoga and pilates for flexibility reasons
i canāt believe tyler had to open his mouth that wide to take a small bite out of a butterfinger
can you believe tyler decided that the best place to nap in before a game was cuddling up in between his friendās (jesse b) legs? because i canāt
ah yes, i canāt believe tyler never said ānoā to a kiss pic with his friend (derrek) but instead turned into a giggly mess with a dark blush and eye crinkles to accompany his wide dimpled smile
because i honestly cannot believe tyler said in a radio interview after being asked about scrosby, āi donāt kiss and tell so i canāt talk about sid behind closed doors eitherā to which the radio host immediately answered withĀ āi donāt know how kissing came in the conversation but weāll leave it at thatā and tyler followed that up with gigglingā¦ā¦ā¦.. iāll just try to process him going to a cowboys/patriots game and the first thing he had to say/tweet about the game was edelmenās tight uniform pants
#THIS SOUNDS LIKE SOME WILD AU WHERE A HOCKEY PLAYER IS TRYING TO COME OUT AND EVERYONE THINKS HEāS JUST JOKINGĀ #AND INSIDE HEāS LIKE āā¦PLSā¦.JUST BELIEVE MEā¦I AM SO BI PLS ITāS NOT A JOKEā #BUT ON THE OUTSIDE HEāS LIKE āā¦HAHAā¦HAā¦YEAH THATāS A JOKE LMAO UMā (via @confusedhockey)
Several wildfires are forcing members of a number of First Nations to flee their homes in northern Ontario.
āI had time to run home and pack a bag and get to the beach where the boats were waiting,ā said a member of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins). āWe literally had minutes to get on the boats and flee before it took our town. āOnce we left my house finally after packing what I could in a pack sack, the fire was right behind our place. We had to run to the beach and once we got there, it was only moments before the fire had jumped over the (train) track and was coming for us.ā
it has since been confirmed that namaygoosisagagun first nation has completely burnt to the ground. if you would like to help the community navigate an ongoing crisis, i urge you to donate to the anishinabek nation 7th generation, a registered charity seeking to improve the lives of first nations people. donations are going directly to members of namaygoosisagagun first nation.
if you're canadian, you can e-transfer [email protected]. if you're outside canada, they accept paypal as well. see more information HERE
Collins is gone.
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of yearsāfar longer than settlers have been in Canadaāand made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotÄn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racismālike Kashechewanābecause it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, menās and womenās joggers (all sizes), childrenās clothing (newborn to size 14), childrenās shoes, summer clothing, menās clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food
wÄ«ya ispÄ«h iyiniw-kiskÄ«yihtamowin pasikÅpayiki kÄwi askiy ta-iyihyÄ«makan
Look, itās a weird hill to die on, especially when I donāt really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and thatās important.
āSince it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.ā ā C.S. Lewis
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
-- G. K. Chesterton
I was raised in a "no scary movies! We don't like being scared uwu" household and it made me deeply unprepared for adulthood.
Adulthood is a state in which you need to get comfortable with being scared, because so much of life is scary.
You will not, in your lifetime, watch your horse disappear into the Swamp of Sadness. But you will see someone you love in need of help, and you will have to choose whether or not to provide that help, and you will have to accept when you try your hardest and still fail.
You will not, in your lifetime, be menaced by the Wicked Witch of the West, or No-Face, or Ursula - but you will learn that people in your life can become monstrous and untrustworthy when they don't get their way, and you will need to stand against them.
You will not, in your lifetime, become cursed by the iron-ball rot that drove the boar god Jigo into a frenzy. But you will find out that humanity and nature are one and the same, and that rage can pass between them just as fatally as disease.
Children cannot live wrapped in candy-floss. You need to be afraid of fiction for the same reason you need to be vaccinated: so that you will be better prepared for the real thing.
We don't tell children stories about monsters to tell them monsters exist; children know monsters exist, don't you remember being a child?
We tell them stories about monsters to show them monsters can be defeated and survived and escaped from.
OP: Why couldnāt traditional Chinese Yinpiaoé¶ē„Ø/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大ęå®éļ¼ęøč¶)
Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960ā1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.
Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.
This mechanism is known as qifengéŖē¼ (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046ā771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.
During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770ā221 BC), this idea evolved into hufučē¬¦/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.
The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618ā907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetongåå" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960ā1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368ā1912).
Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaoziäŗ¤å) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohaoē„Øč” (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.
Split-joint seals (éŖē¼ē« qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.
ALT
View on Twitter
https://archive.org/details/vhsinstructionals
Instructional and Educational VHS Tapes : Free Movies : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
me browsing this folder: omg omG I donāt know which one Iām more excited to watch, this Frontline episode from 1992 or this NOVA episode from 1984!!!
the NSA agent who can hear everything through my phone:
Yesā¦ YES! fucking hell I LOVE this! Give them all to me!!
IMMEDIATELY hit gold, thank you OP, i am respectfully stripping for you (1987)
Yay, 11 results for sewing! Iām interested to see what Nancy has to show us about embroidering with a free motion foot.
Edit: Ooh, 61 results for sewing in the VHS vault collection.
mutual aid and rent relief for S as she battles stage IV breast cancer
someĀ info:
The country they are currently immigrated to does not allow mutual aid, so this will be our only opportunity to crowdfund. Sā brother, L, is returning home for a week to arrange paperwork for their mother. Once he leaves, I will remove this fundraiser for S and her brotherās safety. Thank you so, so much.
Hello everyone, I am posting this on behalf of my three cousins, who are requesting mutual aid from the people online in more fortunate circumstances. They are three immigrant workers from the global south and medical refugees in a country in West Asia. Currently, my cousin S is fighting stage 4 breast cancer, and due to a deeply upsetting and misogynistic situation, she, alongside her brother and sister, all working class, were forced out of the home they were staying at.Ā
My aunt recently had the opportunity to come and help S with her illness; Unfortunately, while there, she suffered two heart attacks. I am gathering funds to support S in three ways. First is to extend our aunt's visa as she is in no condition to return home. Second is to alleviate their food and housing insecurity, as their combined income is eaten away by Sā cancer treatments and rent. Third is to pad their emergency funds, as Sā chemotherapy is unavailable in our home country and only available in where they are currently immigrated to.Ā Again, we are so grateful beyond words for all the help!!
Visa: 1,000 usd
Rent and food alleviation: 500 usd
Emergency funds: 200 usd, anything extra we receive.
Support L
Because of the sensitivity of the situation I can not divulge more information than I know some people will need, I am humbly asking for understanding; S is near homeless for unbelievably sexist reasons, rent takes up almost 50% of their combined income, and her cancer treatment is not available in the philippines, she will die here if she gets deported ):
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
Op's tags
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.
(ID in alt)
Approximately one THOUSAND felonies
Today in australia they started senate hearings on the bill the government hopes will make enough disabled people die or disappear to make us all less irritatingly expensive for them. We had two weeks to submit feedback on over 400 pages of complicated legal terms. They don't care what we have to say and they donāt care that this will kill people and disenfranchise disabled people across the country.
There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.
The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.
The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. Thereās a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".
If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.
I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.
Sorry we're too expensive to have rights, I guess.
Iām paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ā¤ļø
Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is āMartin and Bosco Dayā. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
until you go looking for them, you have no idea how many very kind and friendly middle aged or older hobbyspace weirdos would love to have many pleasant interpersonal interactions with you about, for example, fishing lures.
