Today's Special

she/her - Kim’s headcanon - Kimisms - writing, library metadata, and fannishness. INFJ, but in denial.

[thefairytaler]

My wife pointed out to me the other day that apparently most people were literally only taught how to say Sorry and not how to Apologize or even that they are different things so here.

If all you ever do is step 1, not only did you not apologize, but people will rightfully stop believing you and start getting pissed or hurt.

[cuzosu-blog]

If you learn about apologies in psychology, this is something they emphasize.

An apology that is meant is not just spoken; it is shown in actions.

So when you apologize but don't change, you prove you aren't sorry for your actions; you were sorry they had consequences. And then people don't trust you because of it.

[kimboatfloats]

Justice for Han Ji-pyeong

My current fixations are Kdramas and Cdramas. I love the love triangle ones.

I finally watched Start-Up and was devastated with who she ended up with.

Although this show had one of the best White Hacker Knight in Shining Keyboard scenes I’ve seen in any show ever.

Justic for Han Ji-pyeong. Maaaaaaan. Poor Good Boy.

[kimboatfloats]

Why people think I am highly religious:

1. I wear long dresses everyday because they are cheap, clean easy, and require no leg shaving, plus are cool.

2. Bumper sticker: “The Traveler is My Co-Pilot”

3. Loudly blasting the soundtrack to FarCry 5 when my coworkers show up. Yes, Lord, I keep my rifle by my side.

4. Excitedly mentioning the shrine I am making at home.

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dietspam16]

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

[deathtofun]

I told a guy his total was 13.21 and he said “wish it were that year, could actually get some good music on the radio”

[regularlesbian]

breaking news from the AP, our boys on the front have just sacked constantinople. take that, heretics. coming up next are the soothing lute dirges of bing crosby

[villainessbian]

*screams of a witch burning at the stake*

THOU ART CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

*Gregorian chanting*

13.21

*leper bell ringing*

HIGH MEDIAEVAL FM

*recording of John Lackland sobbing as he signs the Magna Carta*

WHENCE COMETH NAUGHT BUT LITURGIES

LITURGIES

AND MORE LITURGIES

*Templar knights praying out loud*

THIS ISN’T THY GRANDMOTHERES STATION

*Imagine Dragons - Radioactive starts playing*

[pride-knightess]

just remembered i have a degree in sound engineering and can voice act

[villainessbian]

OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER

[kimboatfloats]

I am a clutter collector, but had no idea just how much clutter a 4 (nearly 5!) year old’s bedroom accumulates.

Today’s goal was to clean my daughter’s room and rearrange it. I removed a low-hung shelf from the wall that we barely use and I got to work.

This clutter has accumulated since we moved in. She has a toy bin shelving unit that needed to be fixed and it was low on my priority list until going into her room became a walking hazard. No LEGO but enough tiny plastic pointy things to make my feet ache. Also walking on books is a travesty.

So Saturday I got the wood glue and screwdriver and fixed the shelving unit. Even used clamps and waited 24 hours to dry so hopefully that puppy won’t fall apart again.

Then today I put the shelving unit in her closet. Which meant I had to remove some lower shelves in the really horrible wire closet system. Then I took all the bins and girded my loins and took a deep breath and began to sort.

I take no pictures nor prisoners although I felt like my entire day was separating one horribly half-dead noise machine to another. This pile to that pile. This plastic to that plastic.

Only to take a break in the middle and discover that she’s uncovered the magical items mom has rearranged specifically so she can dump them out. It set me back a bit but at least I now know which toys she wants to play with the most and maybe I can donate the rest.

12 hours later and I am down to a box just of accessories for playhouses she’s received from people and a mound of clean clothes that need to be sorted by size and season.

But the floor is clean! There is area for her to play. And she will be able to clean up herself now. We can do it together.

[beardedmrbean]

they used to let kids have real fun

[afriendofblahaj]

There's an xkcd for that :3

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

It's always wild to me seeing comments about different toxins like this on information about random things in the past, but it's never discussed when it comes to cigarettes.

[stardustandtea]

Adding a relevant source on the polonium-210 in tobacco and how the industry tried to keep it quiet

[kimboatfloats]

Undead Protection Question

In Korean drama lore, evening primrose powder can be used to protect from all kinds of nasties if it’s grown in a graveyard.

Would any grave work? So if I found a dead spider and buried it, would that be considered enough of a graveyard? Does the ceremony of burial work enough that say I had a ceremonial burial of my super embarrassing poetry from when I was a kid, would that soil littered with the ashes of my bad rhyming schemes suffice?

[kimboatfloats]

Please Provide a Video

Tech companies who encourage customers to report bugs or errors, can you stop replying to the customers who report functionality issues to do extra work to show you what the problem was? Including recording a VIDEO of the error (like holy shit can you assume that everyone knows how to take screen captures with video?).

I gave step-by-step instructions on the error. That was already taking time out of my day to report (time I am not paid for and time you have wasted by having functionality issues in the first place). I purposely gave pedantic step-by-step instructions so it could be replicated. Now you want me to make you a video?

This is why nobody reports errors and your untested sites suck ass.

[kimboatfloats]

Home Ownership

Part of the joy of owning a home is walking past a boring wall, deciding that today we are free-handing a mural by giving a preschooler a bunch of acrylic paint and the two of us just sitting and painting on that wall.

Because I can. Because we can. Because I don't need to worry about a landlord because I'm the landlord.

So now I get to joyfully see our messy mural with the flowers I painted and the amazing storyline she painted that includes a vampire castle and a mummy cousin, because that's exactly what that large black blob she painted on the wall is.

Looking forward to more wall painting days in our future.

[m1211nasu]

"Human, take it."

[kimboatfloats]

“Kitty tigers are amazing” - my child 2026

[kosmogrl]

[kimboatfloats]

Iron pills taste like rust and blood.

My bank account exists in a void.

[kimboatfloats]

Thinking about AI again and how ultimately I have been disappointed with it.

It sucks that it’s been used to destroy artists and their livelihoods.

It sucks that it’s being used to generate writing.

It also sucks that now video isn’t immune to the shitty AI creep. And I hated ads before but it’s even more sinister to know that no artist was paid to make that shitty ad.

And the thing that sucks the most is that I just don’t find it as useful as it promised to be. It was supposed to offload all the mental processes that a person does. Instead I see that it’s just doing the basic job of any person who is capable of making a ToDo list. And it does it shittier. Like yes, it’s faster, but then you have to tell it how you want the list done. When wouldn’t it be faster to make the list yourself?

During a conversation about AI at work, my coworker made the comment that “It’s like men were trying to program what women do for them” and it stuck with me. The people I know who really gush over how useful AI is are typically men. They use it to plan their day, remind them of appointments, contact and write emails, and keep tabs on things they might forget.

So it’s no wonder I don’t find AI useful. I do all that shit myself and have trained myself to do it quickly. I also like learning how to program something or how to build a function so I don’t just want it to do it for me. (I hated WYSIWYG html editors because of that).

I also enjoy writing. I like how it feels to express my thoughts. I am aware of the voice I use because it’s the voice in my head. It’s grown over decades of reading and writing.

So AI is just like a skip to all that. But where does that actually get anyone? Relying on a tool (pen, pencil) is entirely different from relying on AI because you can still draw with a stick and dirt if you can use a pen… if you use AI to make art you can’t fucking draw a thing. It you use AI to write you can’t fucking write anything.

Art and artists and women’s invisible work and human labour just sold for $25 a month.

[kimboatfloats]

4am musings…

Critical Role Season 4 has been difficult to start not because it’s bad, but because it’s reliant on me paying more attention than usual.

I cannot just listen while driving or I miss entire scenes and feel like I just missed the Chekov gun that maybe will come up in the future and then I’ll be like “What fucking spell are they talking about?”

I miss Thursday, yet.

[frontmansdefender]

Source

[kimboatfloats]

My daughter came upstairs chattering about the man in the rocket ship who was alone and he needed a guitar and the earth and she wanted the song.

It took me way too long to understand she meant Chris Hadfield singing “Space Oddity” on the International Space Station.

I loved sharing the Artemis II streams with her. She just had to deal with mom bawling her eyes out being hopeful for the Star Trek future that we have been promised. Even if it’s not for me, maybe it will be for her.

I get so much joy hearing her sing “This is major tom to ground control” as she’s running around the house.

[kimboatfloats]

AI and Storage

I don't hate AI, but I do feel that there is something to Karen Hao's Empire of AI that rings very, very true to me in that there is no real need to have football field-sized data centers all over the world sucking power and using toxic gases to keep cool, only to keep requiring even more computing power. And for what? What do they need these powerful AIs to do? Replace humanity?

I only want an AI that is an assistant and not a replacement. I don't want AIs to be doing the exact things that humans do to show that we are creative. I don't want to see another email that uses emojis and bold text on each line because someone generated it with Chat GPT. Oh god do I hate that. I can't even trust that any clip art is human generated now without spending too much time image searching for an original. It's so sad that there are people using AI art to sell to others and pretend that it's actual human-generated content.

Today I realised that an update with Apple turned on Apple Intelligence (thanks Team America World Police). So I turned that damn thing off. But I have this feeling that even though I've turned it off, it's still there just sucking out the content from whatever I am doing.

I am so tired of the default being just on. Like you have to choose to have it off. Even my storage subscription for Google means that Gemini is just on for everything. Do I just go back to having 10 different google drives so I can store all my TTRPG books? (I don't even have any pirated material anymore so it's all legally purchased). But if I've loaded them up onto my google account does that mean Gemini has scanned them all for its gobbling up content to be able to generate more? Have I broke copyright for those fuckers just for a little more convenience?

I think it's time to buy a thesaurus and dictionary. I got rid of my old ones about 15 years ago, but now it's time to get as much as I can to be physical matter. It's time to buy physical books again. If I'm spending the money, it's time to create with pens and paper. I have been paying to get physical copies of things so I can just have it. Like I hate what D&D Beyond has done to D&D. I own the books. Why do I have to pay extra to have a digital copy of it? And why are you generating everything with AI?

I'm so tired.

At first I even liked using a LLM. I thought it was fun like using a random generator. I love random generators. It at first felt like a random generator with nearly infinite results. Just that I don't need it to generate infinite results and I began to notice that the results were not that different or unique so if anyone else is using it as a random generator, they're going to get similar boring-assed results.

I wasn't using my imagination. When I use a random generator list, it's usually a pushing off point where I come up with someone else. Doing it with Gemini and chatting back and forth, it felt like it was trying to force me to accept the thing it generated instead of going with what I interpreted it to be. Like taking away the creativity from me. It was exasperating.

Ever been in a group with someone who is like, "Yes and let's do this thing instead?" That's what Gemini felt like. Even when I attempted to tell it to stop doing that. It would remind me that I told it to stop. As if like a reminder that I wanted to curtail its creativity or something (I know! I know! Ascribing emotion to what is just algorithmic responses to prompts is asinine). BUT IT HAS NO CREATIVITY. IT ONLY HAS POSSIBLE IF AND STATEMENTS.

And last year Gemini was useless for gardening for me. All its advice was just stolen from the internet. Going to actual YouTubers to watch their videos and reading physical books written by expert gardeners gave me better advice.

And I stupidly used it for some therapy only to have it Yes, Anding me to the point where I was angry at it. There were no solutions that were peer-reviewed. Even when I required actual links to journals or articles for any advice. It gave me slop advice and slop links.

There is truth in the fact that it's now out of the box and can't be stuffed back in. The problem is that all the Pandoras that released it are all a bunch of imperialistic assholes who want not to make it do the things to improve humanity, but to take over doing the things that actually create joy and life in humanity.