\o/

no idea what I’m doing // queer af // they/them // same pseud on ao3 // credit to @nervouscupcakeinspace for the pfp

[oliviadumhan]

Thank you for hearing me. You shouldn't have had to give up your voice to be heard. THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) dir. Rob Marshall

[genderkoolaid]

maybe im crazy but there's something i've noticed with how like. both zuko atla and hamlet (hamlet) are male characters whose stories heavily center on their struggles with trauma and guilt, who are shown to be emotional, and who i see running jokes about them being whiny bitchboys whose trauma is something to be mocked, who should've just manned up and quit whining etc etc. do you see what i'm getting at here. like. idk i've just never found it comfortable how people will make a big joke out of zuko's "obsession with honor" when it is, textually and explicitly, about him being literally exiled by his abusive father after being violently hurt by him in public and sent on a suicide mission that represents just how much his father hates him and sees him as a failure.

and people are SO eager to blame hamlet for everything in the play (which is a tragedy, thinks are kind of required to go wrong) meanwhile Claudius, the guy who murdered his brother and basically tells his grieving nephewson that its gay and stupid for him to be mourning his dead father a month after he died because its now his unclefather and motheraunt's wedding, somehow gets off scott free despite being the actual reason for the entire play's plot. you see what i'm getting at here?????

i don't want these male characters to be like, woobified and for people to pretend they've done nothing wrong, to be clear. to do that would be a disservice to these stories which put effort into making them nuanced, rich, and flawed people. but like hmmmm why are people so quick to mock traumatized emotional men for being traumatized and emotional, and specifically insinuate that they would be better people if they stopped being so emotional and affected by the objectively insane shit they are going through.

[omgthatdress]

I've talked about this before, but if anyone out there is looking for body-positive workout material, Richard Simmons remains unparalleled.

It's all low-impact aerobics, meaning it's for fat people- people who aren't naturally athletic and aren't seeking to get super toned and super jacked but still want to move and be healthy.

that, and they're FUN. Like srsly his workouts are so FUN to do. There's a lot of his stuff in free low-res versions on Youtube and I can only hope that some day soon his estate releases his stuff for streaming at a higher res.

[victusinveritas]

[ralfmaximus]

Years ago back when I worked in cubicle land, we were hiring junior software developers. They didn’t have to have a ton of experience, just a willingness to learn, and some demonstration of their software skills. Like: show me a program you wrote (any language) or a web site you designed. Anything.

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team. 

And yes, his cubicle was loaded with ceramic frogs.

[kewsi3542]

[beatrice-otter]

[image description: screencap of Julian Bashir with an uncomfortable expression.

Text: somewhere inside me there is a room I haven't entered in years. I think a younger me is still sitting there, wondering why I never came back.

/end id]

[shithowdy]

american blackbirds are icterids but european blackbirds are thrushes but american robins are thrushes but european robins are flycatchers and they are named robin because (checks notes) brits in the 1400s called them "robert" on account of they are just some familiar guy who shows up in your yard. hold on post canceled is that really why they are called that? what the fuck. they did this with jackdaws and magpies too? i can't even be annoyed. how human. "who's that? that's bob." fuck dude it sure is.

[tincar87]

They were not kidding, they ACTUALLY put Captain James Tits Kirk in a shock collar and a harness holy

[elljayvee]

the thing about star trek is that we're almost never kidding, especially about the things that sound objectively insane, like a man in fetish gear on prime-time 60s tv

[plentyblush]

They churned me, Jerry

[psychotic-gerard]

love seeing revisionism in the wild “free the nipple never meant you can walk around topless every where that’s still sexual harassment it just meant for like breastfeeding and stuff”no it literally means you should be able to walk around topless anywhere because get this. breasts aren’t fucking sexual organs.

[roguebombshell]

I remember when I was about 12, I watched a show on TLC that followed people as they got somewhat uncommon medical procedures.

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

"Free the Nipple" was calling out arbitrary bullshit like that, because someone just existing with their body parts should not be considered obscene, and the double standard that men can be topless but women can't is so blatantly ridiculous. All nipples are just nipples. If you get turned on or bothered by them, that's on you.

[detectivehole]

[wildehacked]

You know, this fandom AI scandal really makes me think about how I absolutely would be using AI if I were coming up now.

I don't have a great imagination—I don't get a lot of genius ideas that come to me in wholecloth. I also don't come up with plots very easily, and my eyes are bigger than my stomach a lot of the time—I'll want to write about, idk, a heist, but I won't know how to come up with a heist to write about.

When I was a baby writer? Even an intermediate writer? I totally would have used AI to get around that stuff. I would have used it to help me come up with ideas and prompts, I would have used it to help me come up with heists and backstory and evil villain schemes, and all sorts of stuff. I know I would have, because I'm inclined towards laziness and impatience, which is why I'm a decent cook but a bad baker. I would have skipped the messy boring steps of figuring out what I wanted to write about—and how to do it—so that I could tell the kind of story that I wanted to tell.

And so I never would have learned that I don't get genius ideas that come to me out of nowhere, because imagination for me happens on the page, not in a daydream. I have to sit down and start writing in a character's voice, and then the idea unfolds itself (or it doesn't! and that's instructive too!). I never would have learned how to write my way through topics I find intimidatingly complicated—sometimes that means learning to write an actual heist story, and sometimes there's ways to tighten the focus on the parts of the story I'm actually interested in. Learning what to put in soft focus and what to keep in the foreground and what you can leave in impressionist watercolor and what has to be photorealistic is part of the craft. Realizing you don't have the skill to do something yet, or don't have the skill to do something easily yet, and figuring out how to do it anyway is how you become a better writer.

I don't know that there's a solution yet. I can't even blame the baby writers making these choices, because again, I 100% would have done the same thing.

But it makes me so sad, because there's all these young artists who aren't learning the things they should be learning, and that means they're not going to get better. Maybe the art they're making right now will seem better than what they could have made without AI, but it's not going to improve. And the thing about AI is that it can't innovate, it can only repeat and remix. So what's going to happen to those writers in ten years, when their skills haven't grown from where they are now, ie baby-intermediate big-eyed and small-stomached writers? They're not gonna level up. There are so many stories that won't get told.

idk. I'm really glad I'm not a baby writer right now. I'm glad I have a foundation of skill that I can keep building on, so in ten years I won't be the same writer I am now.

if you're a baby writer, and you've used AI, I get it, and it's okay—but it's not good for you. it's not good for your art. it's false nutrients. I want you to grow. That's not going to help you grow.

[wildehacked]

Another thing I'm thinking about:

It makes a ton of sense to me that you could be legitimately writing good stuff right now with the assistance of AI. I think if I fired up Claude or Chatgpt or whatever, right now, and asked it to give me a plot, or to give me a scaffold, or to add a complicating element, I could write something really good. Because I'm a decently good writer, and more than that, I'm a decently good fanfic writer—I'm used to folding in ideas and plots and story elements that aren't original to me, and doing something fun with the result. I think I could use AI to make something, in this moment, that was 1) inclusive of sincere artistic labor on my part, and 2) a really fucking good story.

I bet there are a lot of writers who are doing exactly that, and who feel angry that people are treating the whole work like it came from nowhere, instead of something that they made themselves, when they DID make it themselves—most of it, or part of it, or the seams of it, or something. That really makes emotional sense to me. I would absolutely, ABSOLUTELY be doing this if I were nineteen. I cannot stress how much I would be doing this, and feeling happy and proud of the output—and I wouldn't even be wrong, because I WOULD have put real work into it, and it WOULD be good.

but aside from all the other reasons I find genAI repulsive—the climate damage, the theft of time and labor and expertise, the damage it's doing to literacy and truth and the foundations of what it means to communicate with another person across time and space—I'm a big enough age to know empty calories when I see them.

that story would be good!!!

but it wouldn't help me with the NEXT story. what it would teach me as an artist is how to write a story with AI, and that's naturally the skill I'd keep leveling up, because whenever I hit a weak spot, I'd use the AI to help me, and my other creative skills would atrophy and atrophy and I wouldn't be learning how to do anything NEW, and eventually, you bet your ass my taste would atrophy too, because that is how palates work. it's olestra for the brain. it feels like it's filling you up, but it's not. it might taste like a real potato chip on the tongue, but you'll die of malnutrition if you tried to live off it (and you'll have a really bad time in the bathroom later.)

again, no real conclusions except that I'm really grateful I get to shield my nineteen year old self from this kind of decision, and I feel really, really bad for the nineteen year olds trying to be creative right now.

[nudityandnerdery]

From the media that brought you "Millennials are killing [insert industry here]" articles for years and years and years, now we have....

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

This is a goddamn dystopia, we know this, right?

[rabid-transcendentalist]

[winteriine]

genuinely this reminds me of that one tumblr post about that cult indoctrination technique where they make unreasonable requests of you, and when you refuse, suddenly it’s YOUR fault for having a sense of self-care. it’s YOUR lack of commitment, YOUR lack of dedication — not the insane request of a company that does not actually care about you.

the idea that failure is an individual failing and not the oppressions of a broken system.

this is just flat-out manipulation. it really always has been, but this is the form it’s taking nowadays. crazy

[normalcei]

Not all dogs have jobs and I think they should get to wear little vests too

[maidthings]

secretary birds look pretty normal but for some reason people have collectively decided to photograph them like they're [takes a moment to find an acceptable way to say this] women

[maidthings]

<-normal bird photography | typically reserved for pin-up posters ->

[hotboxtheclown]

#more people should take pictures of women swallowing lizards whole

[cheesest1cks]

@itswrenly

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[memewhore]

[bananahomo]

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

[minakittengaming]

This is huge. Sharing for my US friendos.

[zillyblog]

Hospitals like to hide these policies under a lot of successive links in obscure places, so if you don't see anything right away, keep looking! Get friends to help! Make it a scavenger hunt. A game where you're assassins sent to slit capitalism's throat