Chaotic disaster human semi-successfully masquerading as a responsible adult. Or might be secretly several cats in a cloak. No promises. Fan of stories in all their forms, especially fanfiction as an interactive, transformative medium that sometimes does violence to the original canon. The author is dead and if they're not spinning in their grave at what you did to their stories, you're not trying hard enough. Fans deserve Harry Potter more than JK Rowling does and we should get it in the divorce. Also fan of Star Wars, the Locked Tomb, CATS the musical, Tomb Raider, Penny Dreadful, Lovecraft Mythos, Victoria Goddard's Nine Worlds stories, fairy tales, folk tales, and a shitload of garbage 80's-90's-era sci-fi and fantasy. Source of spontaneous fandom meta essays, shitposts, and the occasional fic, as well as the tendency to find something shiny about practically any subject under the sun (or above it, or including it). Yes, I reblog things in their gazillions all at once because the queue system has extra steps, bite me. Yes, my inbox is as abandoned and overgrown as Sleeping Beauty's tower, bite me some more. Fiction is tagged In which I write. AU speculations and other things that may eventually become stories are tagged story building.
Sorry nothing to see here just this desperate ache for the age of TV when we would have 20 or more episode seasons with holiday specials and mid season finales and hour long events and the show would be like 7 seasons of that. And some of the episodes were filler and some were plot and some were good and some were bad. And that was ok because you had like 140 episodes to parse through so what if one was bad. There are 139 other ones. And sometimes that one filler episode is the best of the whole show. Or sometimes that one background detail in episode 57 is so important for episode 83. And then the show came to a meaningful ending, maybe a bit longer running than it should have, but it ended on everyone’s terms.
Would love to see an AU where Jaster is the Mandalorian equivalent of Indiana Jones -- still trying to get into the Jedi Archives via legal and less-than-legal means.
Jaster: It belongs in a museum!
Jocasta Nu: It is in a museum!!
Jaster: Not your museum!!!
Then a brutal fight between the two about whether or not the Mandalorian artifacts in the Jedi's collection were ethically taken.
Unlike the British Museum, the Jedi did ethically obtain every object in their collection, and they kept the receipts for everything.
Jaster counters that they're not doing such a good job protecting their collection since Tor Vizsla's waiving around the Darksabre like a glow stick at a rave.
Jaster and Jocasta are forced on one of the galaxy's worst road trips to recover the stolen sabre from Death Watch.
Eventually, with the Darksabre restored to the Jedi (as Tarre Vizsla intended), Jocasta and Jaster establish a robust inter-museum loan system between their institutions, which somehow brings peace to the galaxy.
we need to periodically remind everyone that a headline not including a person's name isn't an attempt to erase their identity from the narrative, it's just not good practice to put someone's name in a headline unless the reader can be expected to already know who they are
I’m sure this will get buried but for the sake of answering all your FAQs
- they’re Opawz pet specific dyes. Non toxic made specifically for dogs. Once they’re set and rinsed they can groom themselves normally, they pose no danger to her in any way, no fumes, there’s no bleach involved
- my dog is trained with cooperative care skills, the process is not stressful for her, she gets paid heavily for her cooperation and looks forwards to the opportunity to earn extra snacks with the grooming
- she’s a mini American shepherd, her name is Yoshi
now that we have successfully nitpicked the difference between poisonous and venomous it is time we nitpicked the difference between parasite and parasitoid
stop saying "gen z brought back bush-era purity politics" i grew up in the bush era and even then people weren't saying that you're a sex addict for having boring marital sexual congress in the same house as your children. this is just plain unhinged
Literally almost every millennial I know has a memory of accidentally walking in on their parents or hearing their parents having sex. It's fucking normal. Human beings have sex. Your parents fuck. Get over it. Being weird about it isn't healthy.
I never once overheard or walked in on my parents having sex.
You know why? Because even when I was small, they would TELL me and my sister that they needed some privacy for a couple of hours so they could make love, and requested that we not bother them unless it was an emergency. And I would say, "Cool!" and give them a thumbs up and go back to playing with my legos.
Because my parents gave me age-appropriate sex ed and I knew that sex was a good and normal and healthy, yet private, part of their relationship. I didn't think it was wrong or gross or mysterious. It was just a thing that adults do when they're in love, and sometimes they do it to make babies but mostly they do it because it feels nice and is a way to express that they love each other.
Actually, I take back my original statement: once, in my late 20s or maybe early 30s, I was home for a holiday or something and overheard them having sex late at night. And I smiled and thought to myself that it was nice that the two of them were still in love and making love, because they were nearing their 80s and had been married for over 50 years. And then I put in headphones so I didn't have to hear it anymore.
This is maybe the only thing where I feel like I'm the only one being normal about it.
I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TOMORROW (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. After that, it’s Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:
if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.
Or, put more succinctly:
if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.
There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.
It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:
What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:
Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:
This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":
Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:
The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.
But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.
This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would lose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.
In other words:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI
Then: AI = 0
If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.
If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:
Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:
https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794
(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)
And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI
Then: AI = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I was in a long-term relationship that fell apart partially because I was ace and my partner was very much not, and every time we looked for relationship help we got told that I was the problem. Not just that a significant mismatch in sexual desire could be a problem in a relationship, but that it was My Fault, Specifically, for not being willing to suck it up and have a bunch of sex I didn't want. To my ex's credit, he cared about consent much more than any of the professionals we talked to and refused to pressure me even when my (lesbian, billed as progressive and pro-LGBT) therapist was actively telling him to.
But it meant that we had absolutely no help or support when we were trying to work on the relationship in ways that *did* value my autonomy. There's basically no advice for people who want to try to make a relationship where there's a big desire gap work that isn't "well you should just have sex anyway" or "just break up lol". And that sucks!
Sometimes breaking up is necessary, and that's what ended up happening with us because there were other reasons we worked better as friends, but there *should* be better frameworks for discussing what people want and need that don't automatically assume that one partner's feelings are automatically more important or valuable than the other's.
I was dating someone who wanted to be accommodating and work with me to figure things out but lacked the EQ to do so in any effective way. It was my first relationship and I was still figuring out what being ace meant for me. It’s been eight or nine years, but I still remember very clearly the moment I realized we’d been approaching the entire discussion as if my orientation was the problem to be solved, and that it would be equally as valid to say that hers was.
She was significantly less impressed with this revelation than I was, but I tried to hold on to it ever since (although obviously the real problem wasn’t either one of us, but the mismatch and the lack of tools to deal with it). I think it’s super important to remember that we aren’t the ones in the wrong while our theoretical partners are the ones in the right. I was surprised by how much I’d internalized the assumption and I don’t think I’m the only one.
The other frustrating aspect of this is allo relationships will often have periods of time where libido does not match (I'm not derailing and this will swing back to asexual people)
Just after giving birth, during a family crisis, during a mental health episode, during health problems, during stressful periods at work
There are a lot of times when one person is horned up and raring to go and the other has no interest
And the solution often presented is that the person who is going through something should just put out because they are the problem instead of like...finding ways to engage in non sexual intimacy to reaffirm closeness
An asexual person is going to get 10x the amount of pressure and blame put on them and no advice on how non-sexual intimacy can help their relationships and if they get that at all it will only be to sell it as a bridge to sex they don't want.
I really hate the selling of intimacy as only equaling or facilitating sex. Intimacy comes in many forms and should be explored more by every couple as a non sexual act. And it the given importance it deserves. In fact I would argue if we as a society put more value on non sexual intimacy more relationships would be happier and healthier
And asexual people would stop getting shit for being themselves.
All of this, in ace AND allo relationships alike, is toxic as fuck. If someone is trying to pressure you into sex you don't want: that is wrong. That is sexual harassment at best and potentially sexual assault.
As an asexual, there are a lot of things I wish allos would learn from us. Right now I want you all to understand we ALL deserve better than this. Consent fucking matters, and sexual assault or harassment within a relationship is NOT okay!
Heh, she’s speaking Portuguese! Here’s what she’s saying:
*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”
Luis Roberto and Jurandir are people names (Jurandir is especially a name associated with older men) so it’s extra funny that the cats are named that, heh.
Because of The Day That's In It, it's become traditional at the Ebooks Direct store, on this date each year, to make a particular piece of reading available free.
This means that, for the next twenty-four hours, you can download the tale of how the Fair Folk of Dublin were threatened by a terrible alien force (that is to say, Late-Stage Capitalism in a particularly nasty form...): and how to save themselves from being wiped out, the Good People sought the help of Ireland's first superhero.
The 12,000-word novella Herself is free today!
Just go to the ebook's page at the Ebooks Direct store, go through the checkout process (naturally you won't be charged anything!) and download a copy.
And happy Bloomsday!
(With the usual warning to any British residents who may pass through: even though this is a freebie, due to the paperwork associated with Brexit, we can't let you "purchase" it through the store. Our apologies.)
