Fandom old. I like your shoelaces. Terfs get outta here. This is a very random blog, so unless pawing through miscellaneous cabinets is your hobby, I don't recommend you follow me.
as a lover of historical fiction and art about women and horny art and silly art i am so so into this premise. everyone can't stop being like "ohh his is dick made of wood too" it's magic dumbass. i am obsessed with how this sounds like an obscure medieval european folk tale. peter dinklage plays a basketmaker with the power to bring life to inanimate objects for an spinste's sexual pleasure. suspend your disbelief about his cock and have a little fun
#I assume his dick is ribbed for her pleasure and well-lacquered#like yes I assume the wicker guy who is ostentatiously 100% wicker everywhere we can see also has a wicker dick#I also assume a basket-making wizard who can make a whole-ass articulated dude out of wicker in one month#while *also* keeping up with his bill-paying day-job baskets#knows how to make a dick where none of the pokery is anywhere near the jiggery#sorry to everyone who's only seen shitty big-box store baskets that are made out of spite and neoliberalism#his dong is wicker and also perfectly fit for purpose#wicker? I hardly knew her! etc.
beautiful + true tags from @tyrannosaurus-trainwreck
I love this type of Minoan pottery sm aghhh I love that it's called marine style. The octopus with those cartoony big eyes are so cute i need one to decorate my room
"Underlying conditions." That's what killed them. Not the virus, not the measles, not the tainted lettuce. Underlying conditions.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. go to work. go out to eat. don't be afraid.
They weren't killed by the slashing of the CDC. They weren't killed by the administration's demonization of masks, that brought on by the vanity of one man who didn't want his bronzer to come off. They weren't killed by an industrial food system which will only do things Right if it's forced to, if it's inspected and made to, and over which there are far fewer watchdogs than there used to be. No! Don't worry. They were killed by underlying conditions.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. the engines must keep running. don't be afraid.
Don't think about the fact that 12% of the population, or just about the same percentage of the population that marked themselves as Black on the 2020 Census, has diabetes. Don't think about the fact that 10% of the US population, or approximately the same percentage which has blue eyes, has at least one autoimmune disease. Don't think about the fact that 6% of the adult US population, or approximately the same percentage as 'people under the age of five', has a chronic heart condition. Don't think about the fact that the CDC says that 40% of the US population is obese, and that is an "underlying condition," too. That percentage? It's about the same as every US resident between the ages of 25 and 54.
don't be afraid. don't be afraid.
"Underlying conditions" is a way to wave away responsibility, yes, but it's more than that. It's a way to put separation between the average citizen and the two people -- so far -- who have died from food infested with parasites, the two people who literally shit themselves to death because the Trump administration has fully abandoned all of its proper functions in order to strip down everything it can get its hands on and cart it away for itself. It is not enough to grift billions through American Liberty World Financial Bitcoin, Gold Shoe, And Bible-Printing Emporium. It is not enough to set up a literal "please bribe the President" ATM for foreign governments to shovel cash in via cryptocurrency. They have to grab everything they can that isn't nailed down, and to do that, they have to rip everything they can out of the walls, fire everybody they can get away with, and shuffle the money into ICE, and from their into the pockets of friends no-bid contracts.
It is not enough, and so they whisper "underlying conditions," because that tells so many Americans, "Hey. Don't be afraid. It's okay. You don't have 'underlying conditions,' right? You are good and virtuous. You have done Everything Right, and are thus blessed with Good Health. You have Worked Hard and Been Proper and thus you will not be touched by the seemingly-random hand of fucking death hiding in a bag of Kroger lettuce." It's the same voice that says, "You don't want those layabouts getting disability and cheating you out of your money, so we should make it harder," except now it's saying, "Actually, just like COVID, the only people who died were the people who were sick already, and obviously you only have underlying conditions if you weren't taking care of yourself, which you are, so don't worry! We don't actually have to do anything. This will sort itself out."
don't be afraid. don't be afraid. after all, it's not you. it's them.
I have an underlying condition. Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. It's a genetic condition. I didn't find out I have it until my 30s, when the damage started to show. So when someone tells me they don't have to worry, because they don't have any underlying conditions, my response is "Don't be so sure."
The first time I traveled to Tucson I was in a car full of zooted children. I would've preferred being one of those children, but alas, any medication that makes me sleep also makes me sleepwalk. And after an incident where I tried to climb out of the car while it was still going sixty (thank God for seatbelts), I was condemned to a childhood of car trip sobriety: No more poor-man's time travel. No more ambien. One less morally ambiguawesome parenting decision from my crazy-ass dad.
I was talking with him when it happened.
I can't remember exactly what we were talking about - something to do with our final destination in Mexico. But at some point, we woke up my little brother.
(Nothing good happens from waking the dreamer. Best case scenario, the dream ends. Worst case, it doesn't.)
I remember starting when I felt one of his small cold hands reach up to grab my shoulder. Our dad did the same, and it jerked the car a little bit - startling someone whose hands are on the steering wheel has its risks. Dad and I both turned to look at him, but he wasn't even looking at us. He was leaning over the console, staring into the red and purple sunset ahead, watching the rolling skyline of Tucson like it was drowning in dreams. Like he was drowning in dreams.
We waited for him to speak. It took a while. Normal social conventions don't apply to people when they're unconscious. The fact that he could talk was just some broken line code in the fabric of the world.
"Wow," he said at long last.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" my dad replied. And my little brother shook his head like he just heard the silliest thing in the world.
"It's terrible," he said. "Awful. Is Mexico always like this?"
"We're still in America," my dad said back.
My little brother squinted into the sunset, doubt and derision etched into his face. After a few seconds, both emotions softened, and he nodded in wonder.
"Eagle feathers," he said, chuckling softly. Like he'd just solved some clever little riddle. Then he fell like an angel into something deeper than sleep.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
(There is a word for angels that fall.)
𓆙𓆙𓆙
The second time I went to Tucson, I hid from the sun.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to do down there. Society accommodates it in ways you just won't find anywhere else. When it's 109 outside with single digit humidity, of course you stay indoors. Of course the outdoor markets open at 6 pm, and of course they don't close until 11. Of course. You make the sun mean enough, and everyone becomes a vampire.
So I roamed the streets at night, kicking up red gravel, watching coyotes wander in between the sea of strip malls. Strip malls are such an Arizonan atrocity. Nobody bothers to build up because there’s nothing to be gained from density. The city will never be walkable, because the problem isn’t infrastructure. It's the sun. And you can't solve the sun, so you might as well lean into driving. Mash the whole city flat and crawl through the dust like rattlers.
(I met a man once, by the canals, that said the strip malls were some sort of American curse upon the inheritors of Johnny Appleseed. There's one God in this world, he said, and it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone. So this is our hell.)
Still. It made the days long down there. Lurking at night and hiding all day gives you something like cabin fever. I needed something to do outside. Something that was outside, but also, somehow, inside. What's inside and outside at the same time? What kind of klein-flask ouroboros nonsense fits that bill?
Kartchner caverns.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
I wouldn't say the caves were like walking into Dante's hell - more like finishing the journey. At some point in my life, I'd blown past limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, and anger. I'd spent two decades plus change living in the fires of heresy. Every layer past would only get colder.
And each step into that cave did.
My tour guide and psychopomp was a friendly old man. Familiar in the way that all old people feel familiar to me. I view the world more as a pile of metaphors. He viewed it primarily as water-soluble minerals.
It was a good work dynamic.
"These here," he said, gesturing to a long, slender series of impossibly frail stalactites, "are called soda straws."
They were beautiful. I can wax poetic at the keyboard, but in real life, my exclamation of wonder is primarily Hot Damn.
"Hot damn," I said, and he nodded good naturedly.
"They're pretty fun aren't they? Took a few eons to make 'em but I think it was worth the wait."
I was charmed by the way he talked. I knew it was just a fluke of tenses, but there was something funny about the way he described them - as if he personally oversaw each of the dainty little spires. We went further, and he pointed out more formations as we came across them.
"Behold!" he said just a few feet further. "Fried eggs!"
And I had to admit: There were fried eggs.
"Behold!" he said further still. "A shield!"
And lo, there was a shield. It didn't look terribly shieldlike, but who knows - maybe he made the shields first and got better as he went along. The eggs were beautiful.
We kept walking, deeper, and deeper into the cave. At the surface, it had been hot enough for my sweat to dry into a stinging white powder. Down there it was cold enough to see my breath. The feeling of descending into hell was replaced with the feeling of being swallowed by some ancient, fossilized snake.
"We call this serpent-stone," he said, gesturing to an expanse of wall.
And then all I could see was the snake that was swallowing me.
Now, I want to bring something up right about now. At this point, you might be tempted to write off the unease that I was feeling as claustrophobia. Which would make sense - caves unsettle a lot of people. But not me. I'm borderline claustrophilic. When I was a child, I didn't feel comfortable reading until I was wedged somewhere. Behind a shelf, or in a cabinet, or even underneath the beanbag my parents had intended for sitting. Those were my happy places. I liked being crammed into tight spaces.
I did not like that cave.
The section of serpent-stone narrowed the further we went. The room started off maybe six feet wide, but eventually it narrowed down. First to five, then four, then three. Two. And it didn’t stop at one.
The old man put me in front at that point. Said that if I got stuck, he could just push me forward. Didn't occur to me until I'd gone another hundred feet forward, sideways, that maybe getting dragged out would be better. But I was strangely reluctant to bring it up. I’d already let myself get cornered. There was nothing to be gained from letting him know my thoughts.
But the only way to keep them secret was by going forward. So I poured myself through the crack, slick as slip.
There's a grain to the scales of serpent-stone, both in the shape of the formations and in the texture of the individual pieces. They're metamorphic, but there's enough sediment left to ‘em that they have a grain. They bite when you go one way, and slide when you go the other. It felt like I was ratcheting myself in. Even if I could slip forward more, I didn't think I could go back. Not without wearing myself down into something skinless and screaming.
Water began to pool up in sections. It was cold enough to avoid the stink that still waters normally carry, but things stranger than algae festered in the waters beneath my feet. The puddles felt thick, almost slimy. A dozen steps later I saw little ropes of the stuff trickling down my feet.
Eventually, it got so narrow I couldn't turn my head. I could still hear the old man behind me, but only through little things - the occasional sharp inhale, or steps just an eighth of a beat off from my own. But never words. I remember stopping at one point, just to get pushed, just to know he was there. And he refused. All I heard for fifteen minutes was his breathing behind me.
He'd called my bluff. There was nowhere to go but forward.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
I don't know why it took so long to get dark down there. I wasn't carrying a flashlight, and if the old man had been carrying one, I'd have seen it bob with his steps. There was a sort of soft glow to everything but that had faded hour by hour. Eventually it didn't matter that I couldn't turn my head sideways - I wouldn't have been able to see the man if he'd been two inches in front of me. I walked, and I walked, and I walked, and just when I was about to get stuck for real - stuck in a way where I wouldn't be able to step forward, where I'd have to be pushed (or dragged back along the sharpness of the scales) - I popped out of the serpent stone crevasse like a cork from a bottle.
Plunk.
I can't tell you the relief that I felt at that moment. It didn't matter that I didn't know where I was, or how I got there. I'd never been claustrophobic in my life, but at that moment, I couldn't stand even the proximity of the crevice. I scrambled forward, stumbling over the rough cave floor, desperate and eager to find the next wall. To get some sense of where I was.
I never did. Even as I calmed down, even as the relief of being free of that infernal vice sat upon me like a crown, I never found another wall. Anywhere. I walked until fear made me crawl, as low and blind as any worm. I crawled until my pants tore and my knees bled and my spine ached.
And I found nothing.
When the vastness of the space truly sank in, when I realized that leaving that first wall had been a mistake, I turned back. But some choices can't be unmade. There were no walls. Not anymore. No matter how far I crawled, how hard I tried, there was no end. There was nothing but perfect darkness, broken stone, and endless snaking trickles of cold cavern water.
I dipped a finger in one of the rivulets. Just to feel it. Just to ground myself in something. I felt the waters slither past, and I found something like sight in their motion.
Water always goes down. Whatever else I lacked down here in the stone, in that moment, I knew up and down. And for the first time in hours, I had a choice. A real choice. No instinct or panic or too late realizations: Up or down.
I went down.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
I’d visited a rope factory once. Watched the threads dance and spin and weave into something mighty. I got a blind man’s sense of that from my trickle. I felt it meet more of its kind, braiding into them like thread. I liked pretending it was still my rivulet, but eventually, I had to admit it was lost in the mess. Picking out one thread from a rope would be easy, compared to picking out one trickle from a river.
Funny how water can drown in itself.
The first contaminant to the water was iron. I could smell it in the air - strong as blood. It should have unsettled me, but I’d smelled water like that before. My grandpas well-water stained everything it touched rusty red. His sinks, his showers, his fields. Even his teeth. He was wealthy enough that he could've wiped the stains off decades back, but he told me once that he liked the way it made other people uncomfortable. The way it reminded everyone who saw him smile that by sacrament or soil, they too drank of god.
The next contaminant was the thick water from before. Apparently, the stagnant pools weren’t as still as I’d thought. Somehow, over strange eons, they too could seep through the stone and make their way into this deep river. It was scentless, but I could feel it catch around my ankles on some steps. It seemed like a memory from a different life. I just didn’t feel like the same person that crawled through the serpent-stone crack. I was just some stranger wearing his shed skin.
Then at long last came a smell of deep sulphur 🜏. It was an odd contrast with the sharply cold air, and the strangely warm waters. It was the least pleasant of the bunch, but I endured it well. I followed until the tears streaming down my cheeks felt as normal as breathing. Until the rush of the river was replaced by the pounding of waves.
I’d arrived on a beach. I couldn’t see the ocean in front of me, but I could hear how vast it had to be. There was a terrible stench, worse than the sulphur - the smell of some vast death. Godly carrion. A wound in the world long left to fester.
I sat there on the beach of that ocean. Afraid to let those dark waters touch me. Thinking and waiting and worrying about what would happen next.
A voice spoke just twenty feet behind me. I recognized it. I never would’ve recognized it before, but there was a knack to the way this place wore me thin. Like a razor getting sharpened instead of a shirt going ratty.
“You’re very close,” the old man said, and I remembered him from all those years ago - sitting cross-legged in the moonlight by the bank of the canal. Looking up at me, eyes dark, and calling me over to tell me a secret.
There's one God in this world, he said then. One God. And it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone.
So this is our hell.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
I turned around. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have been able to see him. I shouldn’t have been able to see anything. But I could see the outline of where he was on that shoreline. Not as a bright thing, but as a darker shade of absence. A little hole in the dark.
I could have run. But that would’ve required taking my eyes off him, and at that moment I couldn’t bear the thought. He was the only thing to see down there. The only reason I had eyes. But somehow, more important than the joy of seeing was the feeling that as long as I kept my eyes on him, he was trapped. Pinned to this world like a butterfly on cork.
There was a half second pause. The voice was a memory, but seeing through the gaps was new to me. The thing in front of me wasn’t an old man. It wasn’t even good at pretending. I was oddly embarrassed that I’d ever been fooled by it. What I was looking at was something older than this cave. Something trapped down here so long it could not bear the thought of light. The dream of something dead. The sloughed skin of a snake.
The first apple eater.
I could see shades of absence. More than the hole in the dark. I could look at the thing and feel the place where its wings should have been. Its first ones, at least.
It lunged for me.
I’d forgotten it could do that.
It slammed into me like the water from the bottom of a dam. The power was nothing compared to the cold. I couldn’t see a thing, but what I could feel made bile climb up my throat.
It was melting. Running down itself in little streams, like snow melting in the sun. Like the river I followed all the way down here. A hand ran over my face and I could feel it pouring into me, and in my fury I did the only thing I could think of: I reached up, and I wrapped my hands around its neck, and I clenched so hard that I could feel the tendons in my wrist sawing up through my skin, taut as piano wire.
It was like squeezing wet clay. It deformed under my touch, stretching longer and thinner and smoother even as the muscular length of his impossibly long body wrapped around me. At some point the fists beating on my chest turned into wings. Stolen wings, to replace the ones that were stolen from it, and there was a scream in the cave it was so awful that I prayed it wasn’t mine.
It was a terrible race. We were killing each other the same way. There was no question about someone dying here in front of the empty throne of god. I just didn’t want it to be me.
Eventually, it could stretch no more, and my hands could crush more than just nightmare and shadow. The wings beat on me weaker, and weaker, until eventually some cartilage in its great neck snapped under the pressure of my thumbs.
It was like cracking a glow stick. There was a flash of light, brief as thunder, and I could see the waves in front of me. An ocean of rotting meat and bones. The outline of some great, dead serpent, fifty feet tall. And a tower of dead bodies, stretching back to ages that I could not recognize. The only corpses I could recognize were those at the top, with their strange helmets and iconic breastplates.
Conquistadors.
When the light went out, the body went with it. Most dreams don’t leave anything behind. Even when they’re made by gods.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
I don’t know how I left the cave.
I followed the river up. At some point, it stopped being the river I followed down. The tributaries feeding into it spread out like a fan, and fool that I am, I kept picking left. It shouldn’t have worked. Part of me wonders if I somehow bent the river to my will. Filled in for the dead thing bobbing in the lake, or the echo that I strangled on that starless shore.
Or maybe I just got lucky.
I can remember finally breaching the incline and seeing an exit into the desert. Not the one I stepped in through, but good enough. I can remember getting closer and closer, before stepping out into the burning sun. I thought it was finally over.
I thought wrong.
I can remember looking into the bright blue sky and seeing exactly what my little brother saw on that drive all those years back.
I don’t know what I killed down in the cave. Some dead thing in the dark, dreaming it was alive. An altar of blood and bone, designed to hold a fragment.
But the real thing sat there in the sky. Curled up so tight and so smooth, you could mistake it for a ball. Waiting, and watching, and hating. Alive but dreaming death. The mould that stamped out the form of what lay in the cave.
Quetzalcoatl, I learned later. The feathered serpent.
I moved the month after that. Went somewhere north, somewhere cold, somewhere that a snake wouldn’t follow. Most days now, I look up, and I just see the sun. A flaming ball of gas. A little, red, star.
But only most.
𓆙𓆙𓆙
𓆙𓆙𓆙
𓆙𓆙𓆙
𓆙𓆙𓆙
𓆙𓆙𓆙
𓇳
Thanks to @qsatisfaction and @foldingfittedsheets for being my editors on this piece. And thanks to @dr-robert-chase-apologist for providing the prompt.
Soo I have a blood kink... someone reported a post about it like this one time and I got a message from tumblr asking if I was okay and how to get help if I needed it. Was actually cool I didn't know it was a thing that tumblr would do and until now didn't know exactly why that had happened other than something with that post but not that they had this whole set up
Legalizing copyright infringement would be dismantling one of the few limitations on the white urge to steal from Black Art and Black Artists. The practical application of it would be anti-Black as fuck
this argument makes so many assumptions that I disagree with that I don't know where to start
Steven Spielberg has received criticism for buying the film rights to MLK's speeches, and further controversy stems from King's estate.
In 2009, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks company paid the estate for film rights to King's words, along with his life rights, which allow a person or company to make content based on an individual's story. DreamWorks has yet to produce or direct Spielberg's planned King biopic, but the rights have caused complications for numerous filmmakers. (Neither Spielberg's literary agent nor King's estate returned Broadly's request for comment.)
King has received only one major biopic, 2014's Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay […] Instead of using King's speeches, DuVernay wrote original monologues that sounded like soliloquies the civil rights leader could have given. […] When asked about the changes in 2014, DuVernay told the Washington Post, "We knew those rights are already gone. They're with Spielberg."
every single member of TLC declared bankruptcy in '95 because despite selling 10 million copies of CrazySexyCool worldwide and having all four singles on the Billboard top 5, they were still $3.5 million in debt to LaFace Records, at the time owned by a German company controlled by an ex-Nazi family. copyright law protects who from what now?
Legitimately insane ask to send in a world where one of the main uses of copyright law in the music industry in the 80's and 90's was suing black artists for using a 5 second sample of a beatles riff in a hip-hop song or shit like that.
I left it in the comments but I’ll say it here. Rapper Biz Markie’s 1991 album “I Need A Haircut” was famously the basis of a lawsuit over his sample of Alone Again (Naturally) on one of its tracks. His loss in that court case effectively killed the decade of open sampling in hiphop that had preceded this and resulted in every copy of his album being seized and destroyed. Anyone who doesn’t see a problem with the result of this case essentially hates hiphop
I've been nervous to send you an ask for a while so sorry if I sound insane or wildly misinterpret your characters, but...
I really appreciate the undertones of genderqueerness I see in some of your characters. I don't know if it's intentional, but the way they present feels a lot like the way I do gender as someone who uses they/them pronouns but is still by and large perceived as fem because of the way I dress. Róża not fitting in with other women, Maun not knowing where she fits within a hard binary gender system, and Beksa hating having long hair and preferring to wear masculine clothes all speak to me on some level. Especially Beksa because all I wanted to do as a teen was wear fancy suits and coats out and about :')
Anyway, your characters mean a lot to me, I hope you keep creating and I hope you have a lovely day <3
Hi! Firstly, you are free to interpret my characters any way you like ^_^ There will likely be some interpretations I don't enjoy, so maybe I won't want to discuss them, but your thoughts are your own! If my art speaks to you in some way, that delights me in itself.
Secondly, it's true a lot of my characters have an aspect to them that is meant to explore gender in some way... that has always been A Theme for me. The worldbuilding I intended for Orla (and in that, Maun and Beksa) was meant to highlight that a strict binary is difficult and limiting for everyone, regardless of identity. But particularly so, obviously, for anyone who can't fit into the boxes provided.
I poured a lot of my own experiences, frustrations, and relationship to being a woman into my characters. It really means a lot to me when I see it resonate with other people. It's particularly interesting and moving when people who have totally different experiences and identities from mine tell me my characters resonate with them. I think that's a testament to the depth and complexity of the human experience.
I feel a bit awkward not saying much beyond "yup, you're right, the theme is there!" but some of the Lore feels a bit too vulnerable to share, lol. Anyway, I hope this does express accurately that I appreciate your words so so much!
I have been hearing a lot about constituent services and how they can be the key for folks hanging on a lot longer than we think they should (Susan Collins, apparently?). do you know more about that? who has particularly good/bad services that you know of?
Constituent services are hugely important for the survival of a member of Congress, it just isn’t talked about that often because it’s boring. Along with their DC office focused on congressional duties, every member of Congress also has at least one office in their district for constituent services.
This is essentially customer service work for stuff related to the government. Is the Social Security Administration taking too long to process your mom’s paperwork? Complain about it to your representative’s district office and they’ll get in contact with the SSA to push your paperwork through. Small business having trouble accessing a federal grant? VA hospital not taking your medical claims seriously? Looking to arrange a Capitol Hill tour during an upcoming family trip to DC? Every member of Congress runs a constituent services operation to help people in their district out with stuff like this.
Regardless of people’s political views, they always remember whether or not their local congress member’s office was useful to them when they needed help interacting with the government. Good constituent services can build a permanent support base across party lines, and bad constituent services can be enough to turn members of your own party against you. There’s been some speculation that this difference helps to explain why AOC and Tlaib survived primary challenges while Bowman and Bush got beaten. But there’s no public measurement of how good a particular office’s constituent services are outside of a few awards for the top performers each year, so it’s hard for outsiders to know for sure how good an office is except to talk with people from the district who’ve interacted with it.
Tiny Bastard is supervising my crafting activities.
I decided I don't want to make bone pendants directly on my nice tapestry placemats anymore and I don't want to sacrifice my cutting mat to this project so I decided to make a dedicated resin jewelry station.
I needed little trays with a dark background for planned arrangements, I needed someplace for toothpicks and pins, i needed someplace to keep my tweezers so I wouldn't keep losing them, i needed a moveable flat surface with gaps for bails so that the pendants can lay flat but i can also move multiple curing pieces to a UV lamp without shining a UV light on in-progress pieces.
I believe this will meet my needs and also keep me from spilling resin on my placemats.
In June, I had the first real hurdle in my relationship. I won't go into the details, but I was on a narcolepsy medication that makes people more prone to addictive behaviors. It did so with me.
During this time, my closest friend was extremely busy with work, I couldn't afford therapy because I was struggling to even make rent, and I didn't have someone I could talk to.
I have OCD. One of my compulsions is "checking" and it often takes the form of googling. Googling a word I know just to check that the definition hasn't changed. Googling whether xyz is normal. Googling how to choose some relatively unimportant things.
I googled all kinds of things. I googled to find out if there's a word for intentionally letting someone hear you cry in hopes that they'll comfort you. (Not because I was doing that, but because I had an overwhelming urge to.) I googled odds of relationship survival after addiction. I googled how to tell if your partner has stopped loving you.
And Google ai overview answered every single question. And on mobile, when I was curled up in the dark at 4am, there's a convenient text box to ask the AI a follow-up question. And the AI says things like "that's a hard situation to be in" and "that must be painful to hear"
And I'm not a fucking idiot. I know perfectly well that AI is trained to be sycophantic and that talking to a fucking LLM about my relationship fears was a massive mistake.
I was also terrified, alone, heartbroken, and desperate.
I spent literally hours of time googling questions on AI mode. Holding conversations with the AI. I have stickers on my laptop and water bottle that say "AI Hater Club" and "generative AI? Nein danke" and I wish Sam altman would fall off the face off the earth.
And none of that mattered. I was desperate. I recognized that, and once things began to calm down (my doctor took me off of the narcolepsy med and put me on a medication for addiction called Naltrexone, I was able to start therapy again, my partner and I worked together and took steps to repair what was damaged) I stopped turning to it for an open shoulder.
But I realized a few days ago that I hadn't stopped using the ai entirely. I would Google "best [item] on a budget" and instead of reading a cnet link that reviewed multiple brands, instead of checking consumer reports, I expanded the AI overview and asked follow-up questions.
I'm currently finishing up an astrophysics internship for the summer. Usually when I don't know how to code something, I look at the documentation or find a post on Reddit or stack overflow to explain. Instead, I was asking Google overview for instructions on how to use sys.argv. At no point was I vibe coding, but I was basically asking Google ai to walk me through it like a tutor.
And then, last week, I realized that I no longer Google things the same way. I used to search like "pokemon sun and moon original release date" but lately I've been searching "what year did pokemon sun and moon come out?" Even my checking OCD has changed. I used to Google "n30i mask cleaning +seal +oily" and now I Google "I use a resmed n30i CPAP mask and it keeps losing its seal when I'm trying to sleep. My face gets kind of greasy when I have it on. I already clean it with CPAP wipes every day and run it under water to rinse, do I need a different kind of mask?"
A few days ago, the news about Hank Green using LLMs to find research papers dropped, and I saw his response on Reddit. I saw the way he talked about the dopamine hit he got from it. And something clicked.
I had to install a different OS launcher on my phone so I could change the search bar widget to Firefox search instead of Google, because that's the only way to ensure I don't get the ai overview when I Google something. It's actually really frustrating because I instinctively search in long rambling questions, which does not work well. But I'm having a hard time going back to how I was.
People who suffer from AI addiction are not idiots, we aren't moral failures, we aren't traitors. We are victims of a predatory system and we need support, not smug superiority aimed in our direction.
Reblogging myself to add that when I first started this post, I was so afraid of the backlash that I was writing the post about my "friend" who came to this realization. Because y'all are fucking disgusting with how you treat people who aren't pure and untainted by the sin of using LLMs.
I hope you don't mind me adding your tags. They say what I'm thinking in a much less angry way.
#thank you OP for sharing this story #i have been really bothered by some of the ways people are talking about hank green and this sums it up well #there's a lot of talk about how 'being busy / stressed / neurodivergent isn't an excuse' #but he's not using it as one #he's not like. expecting immediate forgiveness #he's saying that he's realized his relationship to AI tools and his work in general is unhealthy and he's going to rethink it #and it really bothers me how little sympathy i've seen some people have for that #you can absolutely be disappointed—we expect better from a public figure with his values #(and as he's said his loved ones also expect better from him and so does he) #but we can't treat people who confess to having an unhealthy relationship with AI the same as AI sycophants #those are not even slightly the same thing #OP i'm sorry you've dealt with addictive AI behavior and i'm glad you're doing better now #and that Hank Green's situation has helped you recognize and mitigate the patterns you were still stuck in #i'm sorry for how the rhetoric about him must feel like it reflects on how people think of you #as a fellow AI hater we AI haters need to get rid of this idea that using AI ever makes you tainted and morally suspect forever #it helps no one and does so much harm
Dear heavens, are we now excommunicating people because they are Tainted and Unclean? LLM AI is a *systemic problem*, not a moral purity problem. I avoid Wal-Mart and Amazon because I find them abhorrent, but I don't judge people who need the convenience or cost savings more than I do because abstaining isn't going to ultimately solve that problem. I've never touched LLM AI, and avoid AI search results as much as possible without being OCD about it, but I don't think it's right to judge people who fall into that trap. If anyone says "I realize I shouldn't be doing this, and I don't want to be doing this", they are far far more likely to be an ally against "this" than someone who doesn't do it and doesn't care.
#even the salem witch hunts had clemency for anyone who said they were a witch and didn't want to be one anymore #let's try not to let them exceed us in benevence
Tags from @kiralamouse because they're INCREDIBLY good.
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