One of my biggest projects - an entire Hydrapple, with all the syrpents included! There's toothpicks in the main head's horns for rigidity, while every syrpent has armature wire inside them for poseability. And...
...that includes the two tail syrpents! All six syrpents other than the main one are completely removable along with the apple top, which has little hooks to hold it in place when it's on there. The apple base also has a plastic pot inside it, to help it hold all that weight.
The one thing they can't do is fold the bonus heads flat against the apple like the ingame model does, but they can get... some of the way there? although it does require something of a Noodle Vortex on the inside for all those tails to still fit in the apple.
Very proud of these good apple noodle friends and how well they turned out!
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my commissions are open - see my pinned post for more info.
(I don't offer things this big and elaborate (yet...?), but I can make you something simpler!)
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.
btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.
they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.
knowing that the past tense of "hang" is "hanged" when it's a method of execution can be very entertaining because you'll be watching a horror movie and someone goes "local legend says a woman was hung in these woods" and you're like "👀 good for her I guess"
that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.
Ok let me get this straight: you cruelly remove my primary olfactory apparatus then smugly hold it between your fingers saying “got your nose!” and are now expecting to be forgiven because it was “satire”????
everybody eroticizes oral and injectable estrogen but i really wish there was anything sexy about transdermal skin patches (my own method) but i think i'm blanking
there's not really anything sexy about the application because it's very anticlimactic. there's no actual ingestion, at least not that you can see or feel in the moment. for the same reason, you can't even get forcefemmed by patches because if a hot tyrannical trans domme sticks them on you, you can just peel it back off. there's not really anything stopping you. and no matter what you're left with a bunch of loose thin plastic everywhere and that's not really sexy. i suppose that you could peel a used patch off a girl and lick the sweat from it (because whew those things get damp on the underside), and that's promising, but then what? then what? you don't want to swallow it, obviously. you've just got a thin tab of plastic on your tongue then. it's gonna stick. horrible texture, horrible mouthfeel. and not to mention the fucking Lint Outline that all patches leave. buffing that off a girl with rubbing alcohol and cotton balls is kind of something, but just a ghost of how hot it is to prepare a girl's skin for an injection. like don't get me wrong, i love my patches very much as very convenient and effective medicine, but they are WAY behind the pack of other hormone delivery methods in terms of "sexiness of someone else doing it to you," and ultimately, isn't that the only metric that matters?
You would think, but the prescription instructions SPECIFICALLY STATE that patches shouldn't be applied anywhere close to the nipples because it applying transdermal estrogen directly to the breast tissue is a relatively significant risk factor for breast cancer!! And besides, it's not doing anything that a regular pastie or even just band-aids haven't been doing better for much longer. Tragic.
okay so i really do like the way that you're thinking, especially the bit about peeling it off with your teeth, but i feel like all the best ideas for eroticizing patches hit the hard ceiling of how depending on dosage, a girl can only have 1 or 2 patches on her body at a time, and each patch is non-reusable. and obviously there's an inherent eroticism to someone else doing it no matter what, but what i'm saying is that it's just LESS erotic than getting fed a pill or injected by a syringe held in someone else's hands, due to how anticlimactic the "ingestion" of the patch is
No, exactly. Their closest analogue is arguably just wound care: but applying an estrogen patch is no more inherently erotic than, say, applying a bandage to a minor scrape. The skin has to be clean and intact, so there can't be any blood involved, but still, you could obviously kneel before a girl (like you're proposing) and scold her for almost forgetting to change her patches again. You could delicately peel off the spent patches, and scour away the perimeter of lint that was left on her skin, while holding her abdomen to keep the area taut. And then you can open the new patches with a rhythmic tearing and peeling of plastic, leaving her to fidget beside you before finally applying the thing itself: to her clean, soft belly, just a brush away from her hips. it ought to go pretty low on her abdomen, you know, so she has to hold her waistband down for you. you can see the very top of some hair peeking out from beneath it as you press the patch to her skin completely. and when you're done, you're still very close to her, to her belly, to her hands holding tight onto her waistband, and you're looking up at her. and she's looking down at you. and maybe her hand is silently drifting to the back of your head, fingers sliding deftly into the thick of your hair like a bird returning to its nest: where it belongs. this is where you belong, too.
but then again the same could more or less be said of injections, also.
Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?
Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?
Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.
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