happens

if i look back, i am lost

Love Begins
Show & Tell
wallacepolsom
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

@theartofmadeline
art blog(derogatory)
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Misplaced Lens Cap

Kaledo Art
dirt enthusiast
Monterey Bay Aquarium

roma★
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
noise dept.
almost home
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@quilljoy
happens
When all you have is a handsaw, every problem looks like a beautiful lady in a box. And you have a magician outfit. And people are watching.
do not forget the patron saint of these weeks that we celebrate ourselves proudly and openly in the streets
her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.
remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.
thank you, Marsha. we remember you.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
under 18, AI is a net positive
under 18, AI is a net negative
18-29, AI is a net positive
18-29, AI is a net negative
30-45, AI is a net positive
30-45, AI is a net negative
46-60, AI is a net positive
46-60, AI is a net negative
over 60, AI is a net postive
over 60, AI is a net negative
Question 2/3
How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?
Frequently (multiple times per month)
Often (multiple times per year)
Occasionally (a couple times per year)
Rarely (once every couple of years)
Never :(
Question 3/3
If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?
under 18, more inclined
under 18, less inclined
18-29, more inclined
18-29, less inclined
30-45, more inclined
30-45, less inclined
46-60, more inclined
46-60, less inclined
over 60, more inclined
over 60, less inclined
Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!
🫶
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."
Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
I did a report on book banning once.
Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.
But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"
Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.
I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."
I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:
All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...
Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.
But I still won't advocate for banning them.
It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!
A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.
It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.
It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!
You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.
excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy
for pride today i am sharing possibly the funniest thing i have ever seen on a college tour
this was probably about five years ago and this picture still makes me laugh
thats the safe zone
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.
Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right?
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
In times of plenty, humans can take in many more kCal of energy than they need, and store it on their own bodies to save it for later. Even the most sedentary or unconditioned human can survive for a while without food, thanks to this adaptation, though humans do need water.
Humans come in many physical morphs and phenotypes, though most of them are bipedal and laterally symmetrical, which makes their physical capabilities far more variable than many animal species.
Lightweight individuals may be able to live on far less sustenance than larger specimens, and may exhibit superior climbing or stealth abilities.
Others may be endurance runners, though sprinters capable of impressive acceleration in a bipedal species exist.
Still others may have extensive protective soft tissue and fat reserves, capable of enduring extreme temperature and environmental fluctuations.
There are more color and keratin-configuration morphs than are able to be classified: suitable for any climate and ultraviolet light risk level in their planet’s usual orbital range.
Humans may also reach fairly impressive sizes, capable of feats of dexterous physical strength well-expected in the harsh and varied environment of Sol III (or ‘Earth’).
Physical mutations are extremely common, resulting in individuals with not only variant physical capabilities but variant mental states and social needs. Do not assume loner variants are less capable than pack-running individuals, or aberrant or seemingly-crippled individuals are any less capable.
Humans are capable of bonding and forming social groups despite any physical or mental variance, forming mutually beneficial gangs that need not follow any ‘optimal’ structure. Unlike many species on their planet, reproduction is not an essential drive in forming these gangs; humans are driven to gather and survive even without the need or instinct to prolong the human species. Some forms of strong human bonding do not include sexual reproduction at all, or are sexual in nature but are not reproductive. All humans, if psychologically suitable, are capable of caring for children even if they did not produce them.
Humans are not only are sexually dimorphic but also sexually variant: while some developmental traits are common between individuals of the same physical sex, others vary so widely that there may not be significant difference between physical sexes in some individuals, or individuals may be wildly different from others in their same sex typing.
Do not classify humans or evaluate threat based on reproductive sex, coloring, body mass, length, or other biological information.
Humans traditionally engage in restrictive social codes, absolutist religions (though they may divorce absolutism from their spirituality and segregate it from their science and reasoning potentials) and other forms of social control because it is impossible for any one group to control any other group due to their variance without enforcing a taboo. They oppress each other due to a survival-coaxed need for authoritarian power structures during their early development as sapient species on a planet with forbidding terrain, poisonous plant life, dangerous animal species, and unforgiving climates. They are warlike and have experienced hatred and suffering throughout their development, at the hands of their own species far before other sapient life forms were made known to them.
As a balancing mechanism for their culturally imprinted memories of hatred and war, humans also are some of the most emphatic sapient in the galaxy and are capable of forming emotional connections with non-human, non-sapient, or even completely fictional individuals. While they are warlike, their penchant for philanthropy and self-sacrifice is legendary.
“but shrouded black figures are scary!” not when ur muslim. its the funniest fucking thing. this is labeled on pinterest under shit like “classic horror” “scary phone wallpaper”
but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)
or this pic of me
or this pic of me
like its so funny i can’t be scared of shrouded figures it just looks like me.
if i saw this i would just be like “Assalam alaikum sister, dope sword you got there”
I mean I think a part of the ‘scary background’ bit is the thing where the individual in question is staring directly at the viewer from a foggy pond in a dense forest. And also the literal burning halo
sounds like a normal Friday night. if a sister wants to go on a walk in the evening who am i to stop her. if she has a burning halo that’s the will of god.
okay yes but also a lot of these companies arent like firing every human employee. they still have plenty of human employees whose jobs are now at risk. and it isnt the executives that are gonna feel the consequences of this, its the remaining human employees
like yeah karma is a bitch but its not gonna be able to significantly touch the people who deserve it, and a lot of other people are gonna be hurt along the way
[ID: A red button pin with black capital letters that say "Every gay transphobe is a traitor".]
evil great lakes
lake inferior
lake normal
lake offtario
lake hurton
lake michigan
400k words into the slow burn they havent even met yet
Here's the original post (on FB, alas)
[ID: Screenshots of a Facebook post of user Zed Potts on April 3rd, 2026 at 8:10 PM reading:
The one thing about Al that most people don't seem to get, the really critical thing, is that this whole thing isn't a "tech miracle" it's just the wal-mart scam. When wal-mart moves into town, the first thign they do is they run a bunch of sales, for years and years.
not because they care. Not because they just really wanna help. But because they really want to drive every single store that sells the same things they sell out of business. And because they don't really want to (and can't really compete) on the quality front, they do this by just leveraging deep pockets to offer really, really, really cheap prices. They do two things with this: First, they close every single other business that sells the things they sell. Second, they manage to get everyone used to shittier versions of the stuff they used to have higher standards on - it may not be as good, but hey, it's cheap, and who can complain these days?
Al art costs a LOT to make, and it costs way way way more to build the machine models that make it, and this money all goes straight to creating a bunch of waste power, heat, and pollution. It's the anti-environmentalist effect your mother told you about. But it's virtually free to you to use right now, even for the paid services. Do you know why?
Because they want you to use it. They're trying to kill off every source of news writing, picture painting, song singing, book writing, movie making, library storing, lesson teaching, code writing, information sharing, community building, thought thinking they can POSSIBLY manage to replace with worse (but cheaper) versions that can run through machines they run
and then they can charge you for it, and get BACK some money for the billions and billions and billions of dollars that they keep pouring into this stuff.
The people who build this stuff aren't your friend. This product isn't cool. It's not "no big deal" when you share an Al thought, or project, or message - it's about you willingly hopping on board with the people who want to kill everything you love so they can run a zombie robot version of it that they can rent to you later when it's all you have left. this isn't a "conspiracy". It's not secret. It's just the fucking plan and it's right out there in the open and these people even say it out loud if you'd start listening.
End ID]
Mostly accurate, but what I'm missing here is that a lot of these AI's don't want to charge YOU for it.
They want to get you hooked in AI as your main search engine and then charge advertisers to determine the results when you ask for the best new smartphone.
They want to get you hooked on putting all your e-mails through AI and then charge companies for your data, your most private thoughts.
And of course they want to get states, military and big coorporations hooked on AI and then charge them a fortune. So your taxes go to an AI that decides which neighborhoods to police, who to accuse of insurance fraud, and who to kill by drone (already all happening now).
Plenty of these services might continue to be free for you because you are the product.