Nubaris/Snow | she/her | twenties | Spain | art once in a blue moon | fanventure/fantroll blog | rotates between a bunch of assorted interests, including but not limited to: (a select portion of) homestuck, hiveswap, splatoon, touhou, deltarune + undertale and probably others i’m forgetting | Rogue of Hope | Caprinius
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.
IT'S THE LAST DAY to pre-order my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, at my Kickstarter. Get it as a print book, a DRM-free audiobook or ebook,, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.
It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.
For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.
Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.
There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:
Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:
There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:
The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.
If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.
This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.
All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.
Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.
So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.
But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).
But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.
There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.
But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:
It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.
Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.
This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.
But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.
Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.
For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.
The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:
I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.
But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.
Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.
Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.
Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If you wanna support an Indigenous LGBTQ+ artist who is very much relying on any and all shop orders and freelance art opportunities to pay their bills, consider checking out my online shop!!! I'm running a 20% off sale on everything!! Just click the link below and/or use the code "GAY" at checkout!!
Visit TeleKitnetic at Ko-fi for 20% discount off Shop
And thank you so much to everyone who's supported my artwork endeavours all year!! You all give me the confidence to keep going through it all!!
How about we just have like... hey trans people, post your pay links or wishlist or whatever you got. No limits, no trans excluded, intersex welcome, any and all genders off the social conventions included. Promote other people's stuff too if it will help. I'll just reblog em a bunch. This is for everyone, anyone, and it should go without saying not to use it to police who is in our community. We are better than that.
I need a reblog to share your info, please use those, not comments or tags. I try to reblog immediately every instance I see between 10am and 10pm, everything else goes into the queue.
Additionally, Reddit has some donation resources, which are outlined and linked in this post. However, there are potential difficulties associated with these resources, with more details in this post.
Potentially useful links as I find them: Guide to Fundraising.
I'm nonbinary and my partner is trans (in a much more visible way than I am). I just got laid off, and unemployment is a fucking joke. I'm trying to get certifications to prove I can do what I've been doing for the last 10 years, but they all cost money, and we live in the most expensive place in the US and don't have a good way to get out (also leaving would almost certainly mean going to a place far less safe for us).
If you wanna throw a dollar or so my direction, I would be very grateful
my last paycheck was slightly over $400, and i desperately need to get my windshield replaced before it shatters, & my brakes need fixing soon, soooo.... tbh now would be an awesome time for a random act of kindness. 😮💨💜
my partner @pyrussprite / @breadball is also an amazing digital artist & takes commissions!
My partner and I are both getting several surgeries soon, which will be both gender affirming and medically life-changing in nature. Hospitals cant feed us because we have some extremely high maintenance allergies, so on top of normal recovery cost, we need to get enough microwavable/pre-packaged food to last several weeks of hospital stays.
How about we just have like... hey trans people, post your pay links or wishlist or whatever you got. No limits, no trans excluded, intersex welcome, any and all genders off the social conventions included. Promote other people's stuff too if it will help. I'll just reblog em a bunch. This is for everyone, anyone, and it should go without saying not to use it to police who is in our community. We are better than that.
I need a reblog to share your info, please use those, not comments or tags. I try to reblog immediately every instance I see between 10am and 10pm, everything else goes into the queue.
Additionally, Reddit has some donation resources, which are outlined and linked in this post. However, there are potential difficulties associated with these resources, with more details in this post.
Potentially useful links as I find them: Guide to Fundraising.
I am gently also reblogging this not only for myself, but for all the people who need help in the notes.
Trans nonbinary, and currently dealing with medical issues that have kept me out of work for over a month. I have a gofundme and anything at all, even just sharing, helps immensely. Thank you.
Maha and her family previously had a verified GFM to pay for basic necessities like food, medical care, and some form of shelter. Horrifically, the person running their former GFM has stolen from them and hijacked their campaign.
Below is Maha’s new GFM. Her previous GFM was vetted by el-shab-hussein and nabulsi on their vetted campaign master list, on line 163.
I am physiotherapist Ahmed Khalil Al-Habil
from palestine _Gaza
I have been dis… Ahmed Alhabil needs your support for Support My Family To
Maha has been hospitalized due to serious complications from an infected tooth. She is particularly vulnerable to this type of infection, which almost killed her last year. Thankfully her husband has returned from Egypt, but both he and Maha are unable to work and thus cannot pay for her hospital bills. They are over $700 usd in debt for her treatment and Maha is about to be kicked out of the hospital.
As I said, last year a very similar infection almost took Maha’s life. If she is expelled from the hospital, a worsened infection is an inevitability. She still has a high fever and needs to remain hospitalized. PLEASE help her continue life-saving treatment!!
Please help my autistic sister survive benefit sanctions and get through June!!
Monday, June 1st: Hello, everyone. I'm Gem, and I am trying to set up a crowdfunding campaign for my sister Cheryl, as Universal Credit recently sanctioned her for 91 days, and she needs urgent help to survive the coming months.
As stated in my previous post, my sister, who is in her 30s and autistic, recently caught the flu. While she was unwell, her unemployment advisor requested that she submit her CV for a job application. Unfortunately, due to her illness, this important task slipped her mind, and she ended up applying a few days later than expected. As a result, she has been sanctioned for 91 days, until July 15th, leaving her with a minimal welfare payment of just £7 for the entirety of June. (Evidence)
This is clearly not sufficient to cover her bills or purchase groceries/pet supplies. However, thankfully, due to the help of our previous post, she was able to pay off her utilities, and today she was awarded a hardship payment of £150 to help her until the end of June. She is also awaiting word back from an appeal regarding the sanction
Unfortunately, she still has £214.91 in direct debits due in the next week and needs assistance in covering them. I also have a £93 bill due this month that I need help with. It is also my birthday on the 19th, so I would really appreciate it if anyone could help us!!
I know this is a lot to ask, but if anyone could spare any amount to help my sister and me get by, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would mean a great deal, and sharing helps just as much.
Benni, one of my fellows in the Baltimore Rock Opera Society, just survived a horrific house fire and lost everything but her cat and the clothes on her back.
Benni, my niece, and her beloved cat, Stinky, experienced a life-changing tragedy w… Denise Cumor needs your support for Help Benni & Stinky
Please check out her fundraiser if you're able to donate anything so that she can rebuild her life.
Hey, everyone; I'm sorry to be asking for help again, but it's that time. While I currently have an extremely limited and unreliable source of income to help with covering food and medicine (and I don't know how long that will remain viable), I'm still deep in the red mentally, physically, and financially. I wish I had been able to make this post with more of a runup to the deadline, but my current housing situation is extremely poorly equipped to handle the heat wave this area is experiencing, and I've been battling the resulting illness just to stay conscious a fair amount of the time.
For those who are unfamiliar with my story, more in-depth explanations of what has gone down up to this point are available here. To summarize the important parts:
I am a severely disabled queer trans person with long COVID, living in poverty after escaping a series of abusive living situations involving neglectful caretakers, physical and emotional abuse, financial and sexual exploitation, and domestic violence. The most recent of these, which I escaped earlier this year after a murder attempt which the law did nothing about, was my family who have mostly cut ties with me since.
I have almost no income, and since my escape have been living out of Airbnbs with the help of donations online. I have been trying to get into a more stable housing situation and apply for disability for quite a while now, but have been met with walls and obstacles at every turn; right now I am simply trying to a place where I don't have to lose sleep over where I'm planning to sleep next month, let alone how to pay for it.
My current housing is not safe for me to keep living in, for the reasons I mentioned as well as many others. I can't leave before July 26th, but if I can raise the money to return to my previous Airbnb--which, despite not being perfect, isn't Literally Falling Apart, and has a relatively trustworthy host who likes me and only ended our first tenancy due to a genuine misunderstanding--I will be back in a house with actual functioning A/C and plumbing, where strangers are not constantly cycling in and out in large numbers with little accountability for bad behavior, and where my host is not constantly trying to trick me out of hundreds or thousands of dollars.
I have severe autoimmune-induced nerve damage, including spinal injuries, and cannot drive, use any software not accessible from mobile, hold a steady job, or safely leave the house. I have to be extremely careful about even what position it's safe to lie down in without causing myself further injury, and because of this--combined with long-term abuse, neglect, food insecurity, and illness--I am severely weak and atrophied. I may have at least one abdominal hernia as a result, though jesus christ I really fucking hope not lol
The autoimmune aspect of my condition is extremely heat-sensitive, and my health spirals rapidly when I am too hot for too long. Not only does this cause pain, brain fog, and worsening nerve damage, it makes me prone to severe, dangerous repeat infections that have already caused me lingering lung damage and hearing loss. I am also extremely vulnerable to heat exhaustion and heat stroke, especially with the medication I am on to control the inflammation.
There is a horrendous heat wave going on where I live, and with the timing it will almost certainly segue straight into one of our godawful summers with no reprieve. We're talking regular heat indexes of 96°F with humidity that has not gone below 70% at very minimum for weeks straight. It's really fucking bad, y'all. I am terrified at the idea of being trapped outside when I am already struggling this much indoors.
All of this together is to say that if I am unhoused for even a day or two, I will almost certainly die or suffer serious, permanent injury, including loss or impairment of my ability to walk or use the bathroom unassisted. I do not have the ability to carry my belongings with me, either, so being unhoused for even one day will almost certainly mean losing everything I own and starting over. I absolutely cannot afford to do this. If it happens I am fucked.
The expenses I am currently trying to cover, in order of urgency:
$800 (the amount of this month's rent that I do not currently have, and do not foresee raising by the 10th without help. This is the top priority.)
$800 (first month's rent for the other place, which is due at time of booking. If I wait too long to do this, it may end up booked out from under me for months again.)
$150 (replacing the cushion of grocery money I've been lucky enough to build up for this month, which is currently earmarked for rent)
$190 (rent for the remainder of my stay in the current place, due July 10th)
$800 (rent for my second month at the other place; I am really hoping I won't be expected to start paying this before I've even arrived for the first month, but all my efforts to figure out how the fuck the payment scheduling works have failed, so better safe than sorry. May be due July 10th)
$130 (the rest of my grocery money for this month, which I may or may not be able to cover myself especially since I may have to start paying my own phone bill soon)
Every donation helps, and I am so unbelievably thankful to everyone who has helped me get this far. As hard as this year has been, and as hard as this summer will be if I live through it, I am alive because of you all, and for the very first time in my 30 years of life I am not actively being abused. I am struggling but I am still fighting, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to keep working toward a better life for myself instead of dying on the street.
Please help if you can. Moogle is my best and dearest friend and I am so grateful to everyone who has helped them survive this long. Please: I don't want to lose them now. Please signal boost if you cannot help directly.
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
titsay
