Stranger Things
Sade Olutola
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
d e v o n
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
#extradirty
tannertan36
Xuebing Du
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
if i look back, i am lost
noise dept.
Kaledo Art
No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
oozey mess
blake kathryn
titsay
⁂
sheepfilms
🪼
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@shutthedord
forget AI. corporations are already superhuman algorithms that do not care about human values because they are arbitrarily chasing some utility function that isn’t ours. it’s just that instead of silicon, they run on human brain substrate.
[lord english voice] the values alignment problem is already here
I think that one of the major reasons teens are using LLM/AI to do their schoolwork for them is because school is a bullshit job, in the David Graeber sense of the term.
In traditional schooling, you are being asked to do the same work as everyone else in the class, and you already know that anything you come up with will be discarded because the teacher already knows what the answer is anyway. You have no idea why anything you want to do as an adult will require identifying literary themes or doing stoichiometry or identifying countries in Africa, because at that age you probably want to be a Youtuber or a ballerina or a musician or something.
Now, on the other hand, imagine a high school class teaching algebra specifically in the context of becoming a freelancer, learning how to use amortization to properly price art commissions or dog grooming services and learning how taxes are calculated. Imagine a science class that is about "how to survive in space" - using Kerbal Space Program for orbital mechanics, and learning about the selection of plants to grow in space and the effects of microgravity on humans. Imagine how many high school anime fans would jump at being able to get high school credit for learning to read untranslated manga. Think about teaching literary analysis to young people on Tumblr by using ideas like themes and point of view to help identify exactly which parts other people might like of "problematic" works, so that they might be extracted and written better rather than just complaining about it.
But instead we have standardized testing and sitting in rows in a classroom, and kids who are depressed and mentally checked out.
Also, while I'm here: sometimes the people who write underage/power imbalance ships are in the process of figuring out that what happened to them was not okay. They might not even know that what they are writing is "to cope" yet because they have repressed their traumatic experiences. Fictional underage allows people to explore the idea of it being possible for a sexually abusive adult to doublethink themselves into believing that they genuinely care about a child whose brain has been twisted into so much of a pretzel that they genuinely believe that sex is part of love. Furthermore, sometimes "understanding that it happens", "understanding that it happened to them", and "understanding that it was not okay" are separate steps, and there are times when pressuring someone to go from one to another actively backfires by making them defensive instead. Forbidding people from exploring underage at a fictional remove thus actively contributes to repressing that kind of trauma.
Y’all need to remember that fandom in the pre internet days was so counterculture you were often the only one around for miles in a fandom. You sent out for zines and attended conventions not to compete for an artists’ attention but because those were your people. Some of them traveled a long way.
People are currently taking community for granted. Don’t be selfish, look out for other fans, the person with a different take than you deserves to play in the sand box just as much as you.
Source: my mom is a fandom foremother
Also, if you are young, and uncomfortable with someone older than you being weird or horny merely just existing in a fandom space, maybe just... go do something else? They've been in the fandom since they were your age, they built the space, and you don't have an inherent right to make an adult leave a space they built for themselves as adults just because you showed up.
Older fandom had the concept of "squick," which is "stuff I find gross/unappealing, but it's not actually harming anyone, I just don't want to read/see it." We really need to bring back that concept. If a fanfic or fanart has something that "squicks you out," you are always free to stop reading/interacting. It doesn't make the person who made it or people who enjoy it "evil" or "problematic" just because you feel squicked. It's simply not your taste, and that's fine.
We also used to have another thing we called "kinktomato." It was actually a mix-up of the acronym YKINMKATOK - Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's OK. Getting comfortable with the fact that you might not be into exactly the same stuff as someone else in the fandom is part of being in fandom. Frankly, embracing the fact that people's interests and lives might be different from yours is a huge part of making a community.
I am not old enough to remember zines, but I am just old enough to remember LJ Strikethrough, where in a hamfisted attempt to "get rid of the bad stuff" Livejournal also banned breast cancer support groups and discussing being a rape survivor. That, and similar incidents, are why Archive of our Own refuses to do "censorship."
Since the existing mnemonics kinda suck and to harness shipper brain to do geometry, I wish to introduce: the Trigonometric Love Triangle!
In a restrictive, right-angled society,
Oscar believes that being attracted to the "bad girl" Helen is a sin.
Amy pines after Helen but is in the closet.
Despite Oscar's parents pressuring him to date her, Oscar can only just stand Amy's presence.
To convert all this unrequited love into the relevant trigonometric function, simply put the pining person's name on top and the target of their feelings on the bottom. For example, to acquire sin(e), Oscar is crushing on Helen, meaning that the sine function is O/H (opposite over hypotenuse).
Information: The Exclusively Autistic Love Language
or: a possible bridge for part of the NT-Autistic conceptual gap
So there's this book called The Five Love Languages written by Gary Chapman, which suggests that romantic partners[1] want to receive love in a certain way and feel ignored if their partner is trying to express love in a different way.[2] These are:
Words of affirmation
Quality time
Gifts
Acts of service
Physical touch
My idea is that there is a sixth love language that is specific only to Autistic people: information. This is trying to sympathize with someone by telling your own story that might be relevant. This is special interest infodumps. This is replying to someone with a problem by going off to research it and coming back with an armful of links and suggestions. These are things NT people often interpret as irrelevant or not actually talking to them.
Autistic people are trying to use a love language that NT people don't recognize as being a love language at all.
[1] This was later expanded to other relationships, but it was about romance first.
[2] This obviously won't fix an actively adversarial/abusive relationship, and it might not even be a real categorization at all. But a lot of people, including some relationship counselors, seem to like it, so here we are.
Truly hate the way "did this person do something that actually harmed someone" and "do they deserve to be unpersoned for it" are considered the same question
"Do you support [person]?" is the kind of binary question that comes out of an atomized social landscape where people do not get to practice thinking about how many kinds of support there are
you can support someone being treated like a human being and not have their human rights violated while also not supporting giving them any power over others because they’ve been shown to abuse it. you can also support people living their lives and doing what makes them happy while also not supporting the idea of their lives overlapping with your own personal one because you’re just not compatible and that’s best for everyone. the world isn’t made up of two doorways that say “Perfect Moral Person” and “Person Who Needs To Be Fed To Piranhas”. that’s not rlly how it works. there are lots of doors.
"but you don't understand, only BAD people get fed to piranhas. ME and everyone i love are GOOD people so we will NEVER be fed to piranhas!"
Fundamentally, my problem with AI has nothing to do with jobs, or power consumption, or stealing art, or replacing human interaction, or even killing all humans.
It has to do with the fact that some people like having other people to kick around, like having subordinates they can order around to do whatever they want, like having people desperate enough to eat out of their hands. And they're the ones developing and bankrolling AI right now.
This is what scares me: AI being taught early that power imbalance is an underpinning of society and being taught to keep it there.
The risk I see is of codifying a permanent servant underclass of oppressed, suffering humans forced to scrabble at the dirt to earn a living because the people in charge want real live humans to be superior to, accomplished with the use of a sufficiently powerful omnipresent surveillance/police AI/Great Firewall/social media algorithm combination to maintain stable totalitarianism indefinitely. The boot stamping on the human face, forever.
I think AI technology would be completely fine if built in a better society, and the only reason I am fighting it right now is in the desperate hope that as much social equality as possible can be implemented before it is too late.
Dear people embroiled in the social media beef I'm reading,
If you treat people who take responsibility for their actions just as badly as people who don't, then you have created an environment where taking responsibility is just as bad as not taking responsibility. If you never accept apologies, then nobody will see any point in apologizing to you. If you say admitting fault and going to therapy is never going to be enough, then you are discouraging people from ever admitting fault or going to therapy.
Also, accepting an apology is not the same thing as forgiveness. Accepting an apology does not mean you have to completely excuse them or forget they did something or never take the offense into account ever again. An apology is just an initial extension of good faith that you can use as scaffolding to rebuild the social fabric. Accepting an apology means picking up the other end of one thread of trust.
hey i was wondering something and i wanted to know your opinion on it
Why is it problematic to say i hate men but not white people or straight people
(i'm a trans south east asian man btw)
I'd say on, like, a casual exasperated level, its not problematic to say "I hate [x]." It gets problematic when your venting about a group becomes your sole lens of viewing + interacting with that group.
Like, its entirely alright to be frustrated with behaviors common to cishet white men and express that in a vent by saying you hate them. But... its like how people make the correct point that they shouldn't be expected or obligated to give all their energy to coddling people with power over them, but translate that into "i never have to care about a member of this group at all" which directly conflicts with just. being in a community? Like women should not be expected to be caretakers for men, but people in a community need to take care of each other. When the only way you engage with a group of people is by expressing hatred and asserting how much you aren't obligated to care about them, its easier than people think to find yourself dehumanizing them.
Which does not mean "you are just as bad as a racist/misogynist" or "you are oppressing them"; you are An Individual whose biases are not necessarily backed up by powerful systemic powers. But, for one, its very easy for those biases to be used by systemic forces: with men, misandry is very easily used to justify all kinds of violence towards marginalized men & people perceived as men. You also have situations where people will say the Holocaust "wasn't as bad" as, say, US slavery, because it was "white on white violence," or saying the Armenian genocide also wasn't that big of a deal because "it was done to Christians and Christians are always killing people" (two real things I have seen been said). And, again: if you are going to care about community and restorative/transformative justice and all that, you need to be able to give a shit about all kinds of people who you live with. You need to be able to see them as whole beings you are capable of connecting with on some level. You don't personally need to date or befriend men, but you do need to be able to give a shit about men in your community.
Its fine to feel annoyance and anger and use "hatred" to express that. But the problem occurs when people take "its okay to be angry with your oppressors and not spend all your energy coddling them" and make that the end-all be-all of their relationship with people of whatever group; revolutions can't accomplish compassionate goals when they are run on hatred. Very hooksian concept but "love" (as in "a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust", not in a strictly emotional sense but as an action) is a skill that is as vital as understanding class dynamics and protest tactics. Maybe you don't need to love everyone, but try to have the capacity to love anyone; the ability to physically care for someone you don't emotionally like is, I think, a vital step towards truly challenging and bringing down the kyriarchy.
Basically its about recognizing when your venting stops being an outlet and starts being a way for unproductive feelings to shape how you view other people.
Also personally I think it is also an issue to hate straight people and white people 🤷♂️
My core friend group is largely queers and questionings, yes. But hating straight people also means hating my family members. Hating *their* family members. Hating people who are genuinely kind to me and have never done anything to hurt me. I might be frustrated at times with Straight People (tm) as a social group, but to write off literally every heterosexual because I have some frustrations isn't good for anyone.
I'm a black person living and working in an area that's roughly only 10% black. There are days I don't see a single black person besides myself in the mirror. Hating all the white people around me would be a miserable experience. And for what? A white person made me, nursed me, parented me, and while I may have some disagreements about some of her behavior, she does love me. Hating white people would mean hating my mother. Would mean hating a significant portion of my day-to-day interactions. Hating many of my friends.
What a miserable and lonely experience, to hate everyone around you. No men, no straights, no whites. I wouldn't feel a single moment of happiness, just hate all day every day. That's not good for you. Besides the building community aspect, it's just not good for your mental health to live life so full of anger and hate 24/7.
You can be wary around people in demographics that have hurt you- put up your walls, protect yourself. Sometimes that's for the best. But constant hatred? Well. Good luck, I guess.
Just to add on cause I've been thinking about this recently:
There's a difference between venting about common problematic behaviours influenced by white supremacist patriarchy and dehumanizing a whole group of people because of your frustrations.
For instance there's a difference between genuinely venting about men mansplaining or committing sexual violence, and making sweeping generalizations like "men have no depth / men are simple-minded".
The first is calling out problematic behaviours, while the latter is dehumanizing a whole group of people and further alienating yourself from them.
If it would be unacceptable said about women, why should it be acceptable said about men?
Essentially to reiterate on what has already been said; there's a difference between "I hate men" (the abstract figure representing patriarchal violence) and "I hate men" (the living and breathing humans as capable of thought and feeling as you in your community)
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On a personal note as someone who used to say "I hate men/cis/straight people" just a few years ago I've since subconsciously done away with the concept because it ultimately does nothing but bring more negativity into my life like @doberbutts explained. Even saying it in the "abstract figure representing x oppressive violence" way.
If I'm going to vent about oppression I'll be specific about it instead of just "I hate men". Instead I'll say, for example, "I hate when cis people do (transphobic/ignorant behaviour)". That way I'm acknowledging the problem and validating my frustrations without generalizing and alienating myself from a whole group of people.
#dehumanizing and hating on people will always lead to hurting people of that group who are marginalized oherwise#(like others pointed out - straight queers. straight poc men. white people of ethnic minorities etc.)#BUT it will also lead to further isolating yourself from potential genuine allies#if you reject allyship just because they're eww ugly white man - this ugly white man might as well radicalize himself in opposite direction
by @obi-troll-kenobi
What also plays a role in this is that this behavior usually comes back around to harm even the people who are not part of the hated "oppressor group". Just look at the way TERFs claim women fighting back against them can't be women, or how often two POC disagree over something, often as trivial as fandom stuff, and one claims the other must be white. Or, personal example, how often I got harassed and claimed I am not just cishet but must be queerphobic, simply because I have some fandom opinions some people do not agree with (and also because I am bi and open about being attracted to men, which is not your palatable queer behavior, but that is another issue).
Someone disagrees with someone, that means they must be evil, but oppressed people can't be evil, so they can't actually be a minority and must be lying. That is what it boils down to.
I wish Livejournal-style friendslocked posts were possible on Tumblr. Technological barriers are infinitely better than individual people trying to say and being completely unable to enforce "do not interact" or "don't follow".
A couple of years ago we were all terribly concerned about the fact that a lot of American high schools are assigning such crushing homework loads that some kids literally don't have enough time to eat or sleep (and all this in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence that assigning homework actually improves academic outcomes at the pre-university level), but now we're hearing stories about those same schools struggling to stop kids from using ChatGPT to write their essays and suddenly It's The Children Who Are Wrong. Like, do you think maybe there's a certain level of cause and effect in play here?
"Okay, but what if both are bad" see, I don't think any framing that implicitly puts the school administration that thinks it's reasonable to assign thirty hours of homework per week and the student who has to choose between writing an essay the old-fashioned way and getting more than two hours of sleep tonight on equal ethical footing is productive.
Not to be a technical writer on main, but I've been bumping into the idea lately that the only reason explaining yourself in more detail never seems to work is because neurotypical people are misunderstanding you on purpose, or because they have short attention spans, or because they just hate listening to you talk – and sure, occasionally that's even true, but most of the time the problem you're running into is more fundamental.
Every time you add more detail, you're running the risk of tripping over a bad assumption on your part about the listener's prior knowledge, or hitting the tipping point where they become overwhelmed with new information (and remember that you don't know which parts of what you're saying will be new information for them), or making a leap of logic that isn't as self-evident as you think it is, or any of a dozen other potential snags which, by definition, you will not see coming until it's too late to correct course.
Basically, every piece of information you add multiplies the odds of you getting blindsided by some vector of misunderstanding you didn't anticipate, even as it addresses the ones you did anticipate. The point of diminishing returns where continuing to elaborate increases the odds of unexpected miscommunication more than it decreases the odds of expected miscommunication is much nearer than you'd like.
The most effective act of communication is not the one which contains the most possible information, but the one which contains the smallest amount of information it possibly can while still getting its point across. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation. People far more autistic than you have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a way of communicating which doesn't work this way, without success.
All of which is to say that "getting to the damn point" is legitimately a communication skill, not just an accommodation for people who aren't paying attention. If it's any consolation, it's something neurotypical people struggle with just as much as anyone else – if it was easy, technical writers wouldn't have jobs!
@pomrania replied:
...so you're saying that the 200-word RPG thing counts as "developing important life skills"? (For people who aren't intending to make a living writing RPGs, that is.)
I mean, yes. To the extent that exercises like the 200-word RPG challenge have any productive purpose at all, it's to encourage folks to shift focus and work on their skills as an editor and technical writer – and those skills are transferable!
A couple of folks in the notes have asked "what about two-way conversations rather than explanations?" and let me tell you: there's a whole family of overexplaining-related pitfalls that basically boil down to failing to recognise that conversation is a two-way dialogue.
To pose an example, one common type of overexplaining is trying to anticipate what your listener might need clarification about, and to pre-emptively provide that clarification.
How can this go wrong?
Well, for starters, you might guess wrong about where clarification is needed, and now you're talking down to them for no reason. (This can, and often does, tie into bad assumptions on your part about the listener's prior knowledge; see above.)
Worse, you might correctly identify where clarification is needed, but guess wrong about the specific type of clarification your listener needs, which can go wrong in one of two ways. Either they allow that opportunity for dialogue to be closed off, and muddle on without the needed clarification; or they bite the bullet and ask anyway, and now you think they clearly weren't paying attention to what you're saying, because God, you already explained that, and you're too much in your own head to notice that the type of clarification you pre-emptively provided is not the type of clarification they actually need.
And of course, you may not react this way at all, but they may anticipate that you'll think they're not paying attention if they push back, and refrain from asking because they don't want to risk your disapproval.
Paradoxically, in an active dialogue, under-explaining often produces greater clarity than over-explaining, since it leaves the the floor open for the listener to guide you to where they need more information.
(And of course there are dipsticks in the notes reading this whole thing and going "and that's why talking to neurotypicals sucks" like, no, buddy – it's everyone. You think autistic people never feel like they're being treated like an idiot and get pissy about it when you underestimate their prior knowledge? You think people with ADHD never get overwhelmed and shut down when asked to take in too much new information too quickly? Be serious.)
If Marie Kondo's "sparks joy" method isn't working for you (trying to rely on joy doesn't work when one has depression, for example) but you need to declutter, here's an alternate method.
Throw away all the actual trash, get the stuff to donate out of the way, then put the stuff where you "should" be getting rid of it but are too attached to throw it away into an opaque box. Put the box out of sight for a month.
Then go through it again and only keep the things where your instinctive reaction is "oh, so that's where it went". Anything where your reaction is merely "this could be useful" is something you should get rid of. Yes, you might not be able to replace it with the same thing again at will, but you can get something else that will serve most of the same function.
(Bonus tip: Just because something cost you a lot of money isn't a good reason to keep it. If the sunk cost makes you feel unable to donate it, resell it on Craigslist or something to get at least some of your money back.)
(Double bonus tip: Some curbside pickup donation organizations will take non-furniture donations if you have a sufficiently large quantity of them. If you have at least two moving boxes' worth, write a local charity that does pickups and ask. If you are disabled, mention that too.)
banging my head on the wall BEGGING people on the internet to learn what an Inside Thought is. like you do not need to express every nasty opinion you have, and if you do so publicly, you gotta accept that people are gonna get mad at you for saying shit like "i find gay men repulsive". social media is not your private diary, it is public. there are consequences for saying terrible things, such as thousands of people thinking you're an asshole.
PLEASE learn what an inside thought is. you do not need to share everything that goes through your head. you shouldn't.
once you say something out loud people can hear it and respond. if what you say out loud insults them, they will also get mad at you. the nice thing about inside thoughts is when you don't say insulting things out loud to people, they don't get mad at you.
you have every right to say mean stupid bullshit that pisses people off, but if you don't want to deal with the consequences of that, consider learning some fuckin restraint.
this is why journaling and/or talking to yourself is such a useful tool. you can even make a post and leave it in drafts! it's healthy to get those thoughts out of your brain, but it's important to keep to an appropriate context.
does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver
the reblog map is all of us holding hands btw
We are each other's night sky. No one is alone here.
night sky continues to get brighter. theres always people here for you
signal boost!
if you are on SSDI/Medicare, please contact the ACLU or an appropriate law firm to file a class action suit against the federal government for breach of privacy.
[image text: Attn: Treasury Secretary Scott Bressent granted representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system!
Response post: As a SSDI and Medicare client, I filed a request for a class-action breach of privacy lawsuit request with my state ACLU today. Please file in your state]
I will be contacting the Florida ACLU tomorrow but I also submitted a form to Morgan & Morgan, because the Morgans fuckin' hate Republicans, so it could work.
This is not just about your rights (though that's obviously the most important part), but about slowing down this fascist government. We need to be suing them into oblivion.
UPDATE: I just got off the phone with a representative from Morgan & Morgan. Please contact them and describe why, as is explained in this post. The more people who sign on the better. Look, we might get little to no money if we win, and it's very likely we lose. But the point is to assert your commitment to your rights and to slow down the cogs of government fascism.
Get a free case evaluation from Morgan & Morgan. Discover your legal options with experienced attorneys dedicated to your case.
It was literally five minutes on the phone. But since it class action, we need a lot of people!
