Starry, starry nights

I'm Caleb (He/him). Hi! I'm a queer guy who has no idea what's fucking going on. Tune in for a spam of whatever has tickled my fancy at the time.

[theweirdwideweb]

[freebroccoli]

REGRET TO INFORM YOU YOUR SON HAS DIED FROM TRENCH FOOT LOL HE SERVED WITH COURAGE AND HONOR LOL PLEASE ACCEPT OUR DEEPEST CONDOLENCES LOL

[pmamtraveller]

Fish-shaped interlocking paving stones.

[teratodentata]

I was convinced for a second that Pikmin Bloom had church themed Pikmin, realized that would be ridiculous, imagined a Pikmin on a cross and lost my mind laughing. So I had to draw it.

[nariiminus]

[junglejim4322]

This person wrote a manifesto I ain’t reading all that but this is literally the type of behavior im talking about the idea hobbies all cost money is so removed from reality if you have the time to pick up your phone and write 7 paragraphs on how im victimizing you with my offhanded post you have the time to watch a movie on YouTube with your very same phone instead come on now. How is you freaking out on the internet helping any of these issues

[turbozarky]

things that dont cost money: hiking, walking, birdwatching, identifying plants, drawing (you have a pen, reading (library), collecting rocks, dancing, singing.... etc wtc etc

if you cant find a hobby you can afford, thats a you problem. and if youre posting online, you have a device to do that, get some free games, trawl wikipedia, study something. stop picking fights online and do something else.

[theonceandfutureharpy]

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

if you can write an essay about it on your phone you can write fanfic or poetry or something on your phone also and it will be much nicer for everyone involved, including you

[prismatic-bell]

You can also make a hobby out of volunteering. One of my favorite things is the one day a month I get to go work with my nonprofit.

Pick up trash in the park or along the road! (Make sculptures with it!) Visit people in the nursing home! Take a free online course! Hell--make a podcast! Host a PowerPoint party! Write letters to old people!

You! Have! Options!

[tlirsgender]

I feel like . A lot of Being Autistic is giving people way too much benefit of the doubt cause you're trying not to have a social anxiety paranoia doom spiral but sometimes they really and truly just are treating you like that & you have to be the crazy one & be like I know you're fucking lying to me

Like oh yeah no it's not that I didn't notice. I've just been ignoring it. Yknow. Which somehow feels worse and stupider than if I really didn't know any better

[wizardarchetypes]

I used to work with a woman who was extremely nasty-mean to me for absolutely no reason at all. She was generally unpleasant to everyone, but it was obvious to me (and to another coworker) that she had something very pointed against me in particular and made it no secret. It got so bad that I made several official complaints, and my supervisor said, "that's just how she talks to everyone. She's super blunt, but she doesn't mean it! Maybe you're just misunderstanding her tone because you're Autistic?"

Later during my 6-month employee review, the same supervisor said, "sometimes when you correct people, you can come on a little too strong and intimidate or offend people."

We went over the specific instances he was referring to, and I said, "I don't think I was unfair or too harsh in any of those situations. I think I was just straightforward for clarity."

He said, "maybe you don't realize your tone is too harsh because you're Autistic?"

So there it is.

If someone's very obviously singling you out to be outright cruel and unfair, you must give them the benefit of the doubt, because you're Autistic and cannot understand.

If you're being straightforward and normal, but someone thinks you're being unfair, you do not get the benefit of the doubt, because you're Autistic and cannot understand.

And when you point this out to allistic people, either they don't believe you, do not care, or do not try to understand.

[pipermintz-deactivated20260402]

I feel like if humans swallowed rocks like birds do to help grind up food we'd have so much fun with it.

Can just imagine all the girlies on tiktok going "I know this is a bit controversial but I honestly love using limestone as a gastrolith. Not only can you readily forage it but they are just so pretty when smoothed out after regurgitating them"

and then all the comments would be like " girl 😭 😭 calcite dissolves in stomach acid!! Just use quartz if you want a pretty gastrolith like 💀"

[eternalfarnham]

I like this site. Y’all just shotgunning counterfactual timelines

[3liza]

desegregate all sports now. no more gendered sports. its stupid

if you absolutely must, in primarily muscle force-based sports, create competitive classes like in boxing except separated by body comp, not just pure body weight. i mean, if you must. this will eliminate any tiny advantages in muscle mass. some will say basketball should have height classes but frankly some of the NBA's most impressive players were not tall so idk that this actually matters ever

the primary athletic impediment to all women is overwhelmingly cultural and psychological. i have won probably half the physical competitions with cis men that i have engaged in, friendly or otherwise. even without the benefit of a lifetime of people trying to make me throw or hit balls, i have won wrestling matches, sparring matches, funny backyard foam sword fights, video games, equestrian activities, dance, endurance tests of various kinds, etc. i'm small and weak. men think theyre stronger and more skilled than they are, women think the opposite about themselves

humans just arent that differently-sized or -shaped, as a species. we have almost no sexual dimorphism at all compared to the vast majority of other mammals.

animals that have similar levels of sexual dimorphism to humans, for example cats, dogs, and horses, do not generally have competitive events segregated by sex. the dog agility trials dont normally have separate leagues for male and female dogs (gendered competitions exist they're just unusual). because it doesnt matter. there is no kentucky derby 2 just for girl horses. thats not a thing

remove all gendered categories from online shopping websites and universalize clothing and shoe sizing. im sick of having to search two entirely different sections of ebay when im just trying to find a nice velvet loafer in size 39 EU. what the hell is "women's clothing"

[3liza]

POSTING CORRECTION

i stand by everything i wrote here with one exception: i would like to correct my statement that animal competition is “not generally” segregated by sex. i dont know what percentage of animal competition is gendered, but there are actually a fair number of sex-divided animal sporting and showing events. saying otherwise was ignorant. these include for example some types of dog, cat, and (naturally) poultry showing competitions judged on cosmetic characteristics, and a lot of the professional horse racing field ends up being de facto the domain of male horses (i looked up why since horses have very low sexual dimorphism and the answer seems to be a complicated interplay of fillies being destined for being pregnant a lot if theyre successful racers, mild differences in weight during peak racing years, and the horse sport being weirdly culturally regressive about gender which horseblr will explain further if asked, but seemingly not really due to actual performance differences in horse sexual dimorphism which was interesting).

i shouldnt even have included this point in my original post since 1. i didnt know what i was talking about 2. the post is about humans so it wasnt relevant anyway

the times wishes to apologize for the error

[sergal]

my favorite mashup emoji is this one and i wish it was real so bad

[coastal-mangos-one]

[seymour-butz-stuff]

Time to feed unprofessional managers what they’ve been dishing out for far too long.

[beaniebaneenie]

Couple things here, for when you do this to people: 

1. if you get the “answer my call” text, NEVER ANSWER THE CALL. 

They are calling you because they want to have the conversation verbally, and be able to lie later about what they said or didn’t say. Force them to continue via text or email- force them to continue the conversation in writing or not at all. 

2. “Lack of 2 weeks notice is unprofessional!” or the other version, “Not providing notice is illegal!”

No it isn’t. Neither is true. 

And in the US, all states except Montana are “at will” employment (though you may hear an employer refer to it as “right to work” to make it sound better, it’s the same thing). Sure, at-will employment means they can fire you without cause, BUT! It also means that you are not legally required to give a reason for quitting, or to give notice of any kind. 

Is it polite to give notice when you can? Sure. Do bosses expect it? Absolutely. But that does not make you legally required to provide it. 

3. The only thing I would change in the worker’s interaction here was their response when initially asked to come in. 

Employee: “Hey Mark. Sorry I’m unable to cover the shift tonight because I’m studying for my exam tomorrow.” 

Don’t give a reason for your lack of availability. It may be tempting to. You may feel rude if you don’t. 

DON’T DO IT.

You do not owe your boss any information about what you do off the clock, and any reason you give will only ever be used against you. 

Boss: “Hey I need you to cover Jasper’s shift tonight.”

Employee: “Sorry, I’m not available.”

And leave it at that. 

Do not elaborate. 

Do not offer additional information. 

When you boss asks you to elaborate, because they will, be polite but firm. “With respect, that’s personal. I’m sorry, but I’m unavailable to cover this shift/work late/come in early/etc.”

Be a broken record- you’re unavailable. That’s the only information they need to know, and it’s the only information they have a LEGAL RIGHT to know. 

Please stop giving your bosses information they don’t need to know and don’t get to have, because they’re only going to try and use it to fuck you over later. 

[reasonandempathy]

My job is HR. The above is completely accurate.

[pips-squeak]

rb to explode a terf ^_^ nonrefundable ^_^

[thickness-protection-program]

[voyaging-too]

I don't want to be overly dramatic and overly negative about the AI translations I've been working with. They are bad, yes, but I don't want to overstate their badness because that would obscure the specific points I'm making. Some AI translations, the best AI translations, are not that bad. Some of them are still bad to the point of being unusable, but others are better. They're not good, but they're mostly serviceable, and it's extremely impressive that a machine can come up with something serviceable, something comparable to the work of a very mediocre human translator.

A client who hires a subpar translator who accepts being underpaid, in order to avoid paying professional rates for a professional, is getting subpar work. A client who uses AI to get work cheap and fast is getting worse than subpar work. But AI is getting better, it might soon be at the point where laymen can't tell the difference, and then, using AI instead of paying a human will mostly be a labour rights issue, and that's a far thornier question. (Note that I'm not talking about using AI translators to read something for yourself, or to communicate in your daily life: I'm talking about AI translation for publication, using AI for something you expect other people to pay money for.)

My actual point about AI translation is that even when it's fairly good, when it makes few errors and conveys the message intelligibly, it lacks something. I'm not talking about heart and soul here, nothing to do with some intangible human quality: I'm talking about specificity. AI works with great averages, and so it automatically irons out nuance. If you write something unusual, AI will assume it's an error, instead of an intentionally unusual statement. This is regression to the mean, and based on the texts I'm working with, it's an Anglophone, American mean. If you say something that's true of 1980s Hungary, it might slightly alter the sentence to "make sense" for 1980s US. Some alterations are factual, these are more serious errors but also easier to edit out. But other things are harder to catch, slight shifts in tone and valence, an erasure of the original, specific, non-American perspective, and the end result is a text that doesn't have anything wrong with it, but is markedly simpler and dumber than it should be. And flattening complex, knotty, peripheral perspectives into something closer to a monoculture is, in the long term, intellectually devastating.

[a-k1tty]

A while ago, I was proofreading AI translations of subtitles. The video was an interview with a couple of game devs talking about their game. “The game” was frequently mentioned. And then, all of a sudden, the translation talked about football. I did a double take. Where had that come from?

The original sentence went somewhere along the lines of “from the veterans who have been with us for a long time to young people only just getting into the game” and the AI translation assumed that there was only one game young people could be getting into. It had to be football. So that’s what it put in.

That moment really clarified for me this regression to a cultural mean described above. Only one thing made cultural sense, right? Too bad the actual video was about something entirely different.

[voyaging-too]

Yes that's such a great example of what I was talking about! And this one is obvious enough and weird enough that you could catch it in proofreading, but if the mistake is subtler (or if there's no proofreading, and let's face it there usually isn't), someday soon we'll end up in a world where everyone likes football and drinks beer and does, says, thinks, believes only the most statistically average things to do, say, think and believe.

[tinybed]

[comealongphil]

dawn dimmadome? wife of doug dimmadome, owner of the dimmsdale dimmadome?

[punkrorschach]

actually she took the dimmadome in the dimmadivorce

[alexiaroselikethewine]

I get that sex and drugs are fun but even im like. at least have a 3rd thing. at least one more hobby. you can have a 3rd hobby. this isnt a purity thing this is a some of u are fucking boring thing.

[kittygirltitty]

rock & roll

[alexiaroselikethewine]

girl i just walked into that one like a coyote with a painted tunnel

[dragon-in-a-fez]

met someone the other day who had a mouse problem and thought they'd fix it by getting cats. normal thought process so far right. but they got two Maine coons. and I was like. you got the Lazy Affection Machines? the cats that have hunting.exe uninstalled at the factory to make room for Lårge.dll? nature's answer to the weighted blanket??

[wizardarchetypes]

i'm forever haunted by my inability to whistle because i truly tried. i watched youtube videos and practiced in the mirror again and again with no results,

until 2020 when i was living on a boat completely alone in quarantine during the heat of lockdown. i woke up at 1 am from a dream in which i was whistling. i sat up in bed and i thought, "oh my god, i get it now,"

and i whistled. i whistled a tune, even. i took a video of myself whistling just to prove it to everyone.

i went back to bed. in the morning, i couldn't whistle anymore. i only have the video as a reminder of the time i was briefly possessed by a whistling ghost who took pity on me.

[sheishine]

Listed four Ancient Sea Creature Diorama prints in my Etsy shop!

*Please note* U.S. orders ship once a week on TUESDAYS due to limited access to a faraway drop-off location.

古代海洋生物ジオラマ・ポスター（ほぼA4）を４種類 Etsyショップにアップしました！