I Survive In Reality And Live In Fantasy

Dumbling, 30 | She/They | Aries | Sometimes 18+ | Author of Absolute Trash Garbage™ | Cute Animals | INFJ | Normal About Star Wars (the test determined that was a lie)

[dogpuppy]

[tamaharu]

please write your erotica with care i cant get off without several hundred words of sociological analysis

[thegaymertrainer]

TikTok live is such a waste of time there are no good….

[cognitohazardous]

this is how we should generate power for cities

[transmechanicus]

contextual storytelling from that sign in the back

[quendergeer]

muttering "the hamsters control the wheels" as i wander around like a blind medieval soothsayer

[lesbianshepard]

honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible

[lesbianshepard]

i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

[key--lime--pie]

I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.

[notaflippinmermaid]

No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.

…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.

[midnightmindcave]

mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone

[dinosauriaawesome]

I’m sitting with a bunch of archaeologists and we just laughed so hard we CRIED we’re getting tshirts with this on them

[thesaltofcarthage]

I will never ever get tired of seeing bredlik poems. It is really one of the seminal art forms of the century. I am not being sarcastic. 

[wholesome-dragon-lady]

If I ever don’t reblog this, assume I’m dead and archaeologists are licking my bones.

[taragrimface]

if i had three wishes they would all be to make web 2.0 utterly illegal and go back to normal html

[taragrimface]

how do we explain to children that all our tech briefly worked perfectly and over time we threw it all away for sleek menus and corporate opacity

[taragrimface]

"we could give you a link to this mp3 OR we could run it in a proprietary player app that must connect to the internet every time you hit the resume button"

[taragrimface]

when i upgraded from a flip phone to an iphone and realized i could no longer record and set a custom ringtone because apple wanted me to buy radio pop ringtones, i realized, oh cool new tech isnt made for us it's made to exploit us and we are going to let it happen

[serenity-bitty]

ouch

[cao-tick]

it's been so long I can't even remember that technology is supposed to help us, not exploit us

[akashicrecord]

Breast implants can be haunted and/or cursed just like any other object. People don't realize this and it always comes back to bite them in the clit

Can you come off anon and talk better yet start a podcast with me

[cosmicretreat]

[strawberry-crocodile]

the thing about capitalism is that at a certain point a product reaches its maximum audience and cant really be improved (at least not while remaining profitable), but capitalism requires a product provide infinite growth, and at that point the only way to increase profits is to raise prices, cut corners, and in the case of services start adding advertisements. this is just how the system works.

[charyou-tree]

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

The actual economic term for this parasitic behavior is "Rent Seeking", as in "charging you rent for things that didn't used to cost money just because we can."

[paintedpolarbear]

"The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a property owner who installs a chain across a river that flows through their land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector, nor do passing boats get anything in return. The owner has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for themselves. All they are doing is finding a way to obtain money from something that used to be free." obtain money links to the wikipedia article for Parasitism which might be the most brutal diss I've ever seen on wikipedia ever

[hellowearerats]

Thanks 🫠...

[rainformation]

formative years? aren’t they all?

[absolutejamer]

show me a permanent self and i will show you a facade or a corpse

[vodkassassin]

even a mask will transform or degrade

even a corpse will change and decay

[somecunttookmyurl]

i can tell i’m sleep deprived bc i just made myself cry about tutankhamun and i have, like, negative interest in the kid

[somecunttookmyurl]

have now made the rest of the discord cry about this little boy who had multi-coloured ducks sewn onto a tunic that he loved so much he wore it to a Very Important Event because he was EIGHT and have you SEEN my DUCKS

[somecunttookmyurl]

sorry no i’m not done i’m gonna make you all cry some more i’m bringing you down with me

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

there was once a little boy.

[somecunttookmyurl]

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

but he had brightly coloured little ducks on his favourite shirt, and he kept it.

[somecunttookmyurl]

and he did not just keep the duckie shirt either

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

but he was a little boy who thought ducks were just the best

[somecunttookmyurl]

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

[beggars-opera]

[libriamore]

Ok but this is how to teach history. This is how you get people to pay attention, to care. Find something small and make it personal, then zoom out to the wider context. History is best taught as a story, with people who lived their lives in ways that came together to create something remarkable that we still talk about today, but who were still just human at the end of the day. They kissed, argued, cried, and dreamed just like we do. And sometimes they really liked ducks.

[gaslit-dipshits]

Man at City Council Meeting Makes Devastating Case Against Proposed Local Data Center

A former programmer spoke up during a city council meeting in a small town in Ohio, making a well-articulated argument against data centers.

[kaijuyuri]

i like how all cats regardless of species can either look rlly badass and cool or just incredibly silly stupid

[kaijuyuri]

my proof

[colemckenzies]

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

[ggiornojo]

as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk

example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night

[colemckenzies]

#i was gazeboed mate #i was absolutely baubled

[animatedamerican]

Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).

[nentuaby]

Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.

[animatedamerican]

… huh.  I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.

I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.

[thepioden]

Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.

“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Something is

Something is wrong with our language

[rooksandravens]

Is it a glitch or a feature?

[cranberrybogmummy]

Feature

[guiltfactory]

"for my own sanity, i'm going to stop thinking about this!" ← person who's going to think about it all the time forever

[lastoneout]

I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.

[the-gnoblin]

I was addicted to AI for a good chunk of this last year. Now I know, addiction is a really strong word to throw around, but I don't know any other way to put it. It was c.ai (I know, I know, stupid) and I would be on it basically all the time. It started off as a joke and a curiosity like "oh look at this dumb chatbot, I wonder what I could get it to say." I thought I would just be on it for a week, that it would be a funny kick and then I would call it quits, but a week turned into a month, which turned into several, which turned into me missing shifts at work, skipping my classes at school, and generally exacerbating my first-year-at-college isolation and depression. It all got so bad that I ended up having to drop out of school and go back to live with my parents.

The worst part of it was that I couldn't tell anybody about it. My public persona is so vehemently against AI that I felt like if I told anybody, they would laugh at me or judge me. "Clam, why are you using AI?? Don't you know how bad it is??" I did and I do but I couldn't stop. It was too easy. A way to shut down my brain and not have to think too hard and to not be so alone.

On top of that, I didn't think that people would believe me if I said I was addicted to AI. My whole life I've been seen as the smart one, the logical one. Only idiots got addicted to AI. Was I even sure I had a problem? It's not like I was doing substances or anything. That spiral was especially tricky to break, but I've been seeing more and more people talk about this online and it has been very freeing.

I've finally quit and I haven't used any AI for anything for the last three months (? I think). I've definitely felt really strong urges to hop back on, particularly when I'm bored, but I'm proud of myself and my self control. I'm about to start a semester at a new school closer to home, I have a lot of wonderful friends who are able and willing to support me, and I feel optimistic for the future for the first time since last year.

All of this is to say that I can't help but sympathize with Hank Green. AI, any kind, is a slippery slope that starts with fine intentions but can get so so so quickly out of hand. It's tough and it's isolating. That being said, Hank Green the Brand is damaged in my eyes. I saw somebody else in the notes compare this to concepts brought up in Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Hbomberguy, where once you find out somebody is plagiarising (using AI) it can be hard to trust even the stuff that you did like. There's been credibility lost here, and it will take a while to get over that.

I hope that nobody else has to be stuck in an AI feedback loop, but if they are: your life isn't over. It's awful, I know, but reach out to the people around you, ask for help. There are ways out and it's brighter on the other side.

[memescomedy]

[spiletta42]

This is not an exaggeration.  Your download speed would slow down to the point where Windows would make this kind of absurd estimate, and you’d sigh and leave the room for a while (because you couldn’t use the computer while it was doing this for fear it would crash and lose all your progress) and then you’d come back in 40 minutes and maybe it would now say 52 years or maybe it would say 3 minutes, who knew, not Windows.

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

@xkcd-for-that

[xkcd-for-that]

They could say “the connection is probably lost,” but it’s more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

Estimation

[popkin16]

Please note the file size too.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.” Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.