[stealingpotatoes]

i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3

[vicholas]

Why are people now saying "LARP" when they mean "poser". It's confusing.

[vicholas]

Everyone is always parroting The Buzzword Of The Month without actually knowing what it means or where it comes from, make it stop

[gunsandfireandshit]

Kinda like how "POV" went from "(implied first person) Point Of View" to "there is a video"

[northshorewave]

Speaking of funny names, it's NFL Draft Weekend and here are some contenders you need to know:

[birdsareblooming]

a certain group of people hating on a certain cartoon may be surprised to find out in 2017 they would've been posting about how steven universe is nazi apologia

[birdsareblooming]

[joyflameball]

Yepppp (i will say that i'm pretty sure nd stevenson is transmasc, but at the time he wasn't out yet so yeah this still holds strongly)

[birdsareblooming]

[dragongirlsweetie]

it's actually so crazy how much the simpsons would fucking suck if it didn't have any of the simpsons characters. just a bunch of shots of empty houses and streets for half an hour while nothing happens. that would be so badddd lol

[auroroboros1]

yeah that tends to happen when you remove characters from media. without characters its all just background. i guess movies set in scenic locations would still land as kinda nature docs but even then

[dragongirlsweetie]

it only happens with the simpsons

[auroroboros1]

this same criticism could be applied to nearly any media ever.

[dragongirlsweetie]

it's just the simpsons. are you a troll?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Dragon's right, if you remove all the Simpsons characters from Death Note it hardly changes anything

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[luxwing]

Whenever I hear someone say "the woke mob" I have to stop myself from laughing because even today all I can think of is this fucking tweet

[luxwing]

Happy Pride to the Woke Mob

[permanenteclipse]

Fictional country: average fantasy

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application

Real major city in fictional country: Chicago can be anywhere you dream of

[cleo-fox]

Writing tips:

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

“You feel the bugle in his pants” - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets

[maple-seed]

Both options convey that he's horny

[cleo-fox]

How dare you be funnier than me on my own post

[sforzzz]

copper ii sulfate has no reason to be this blue. this shade of blue looks like it should only be a digital invention

[wintersoldierfell]

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

[wintersoldierfell]

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I feel like advertising is probably the funniest place anyone can choose to predicate their moral arguments against AI on the basis of environmental impact because like. The advertising industry is already probably the most wasteful i dustry in terms of environmental costs vs. actual value it provides, to the point that adding AI to it amounts to a very small drop in the world's biggest bucket. Like.

"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.

"Using AI to design flyers is bad for the environment" I can tell you with 100% absolute certainty that the environmental impact of printing hundreds of paper flyers which will be looked at exactly once and then thrown in the garbage is like. Several orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental impact of generating the picture that will go on said flyers.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Like I find it hard to think of a position that more succinctly communicates "I never think about where anything comes from or how it's produced or how it's disposed of or the environmental costs of any steps in that process unless there's some sort of moral panic telling me to be concerned about it" than thinking that the "AI" part of "ads made with AI" is the part that's bad for the environment.

[stylish-suidae]

A few days ago, frustrated by an entire mailbox full of mail that was either junk, duplicates of mail that was also in the mailbox at the same time, or otherwise could've been a phone call or an email, I did some math.

If I did my math right, the production of paper that will be used to make junk mail in the US uses about 5 TWh of energy per year. That's just the production of the paper, not counting the energy of actually printing, distributing, or however it will be dealt with once it's promptly thrown away without being opened.

ChatGPT's worldwide energy usage is ~17 TWh/yr.

I'm not here to defend ChatGPT, because they're the reason I'm still running a decade-old hard drive, but it's frustrating how many huge problems in the world get roundly ignored because they're just kind of accepted as The Way The World Is. The problems that get fixed are the ones that show you're a Good Person for caring about them instead of the ones actually causing the most harm.

And I guess more broadly, I'm frustrated with the people who are more concerned with showing the world they're a Good Person than they are with accomplishing the most (or any) real world good.

[mousidy]

what's in your pants uh I mean sorry what's on your birth certificate

[mousidy]

what's in your pants wait sorry that was weird of me. what did the doctor decide was in your pants when you were born?

[cbk1000]

As a society, we need to go back to understanding that strangers on the internet are, you know, strangers. I feel lately that I'm seeing a rise in 'An author I love blocked me because they took my comment the wrong way' posts on the ao3 subreddit, and then the comment is them calling the author a fucking bitch or something like that.

Don't do this. Tone doesn't translate well in text, and if you don't have a rapport with that author, they are not going to interpret, 'You're a fucking bitch' as, 'Author I hate you for being so talented and making me feel so keenly.' They're going to interpret it as you being an asshole. You can shit talk with your friends because you have an established relationship with them and can distinguish between playful banter and genuine anger. You do not have this with a stranger, no matter how much you like their fics. You will have a much more pleasant time in fandom and not get cockblocked from interacting with your favorite writers if you remember this.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#I don't often see comments like these when I'm reading a fic but there have been a few that made me raise an eyebrow#I don't know if I would block over someone calling me a bitch on a fic I wrote but I'd probs try to gently tell them it's not right#coz honestly I feel like this is an issue with younger age groups who are new to reading fics and might not understand fandom culture#or at least I hope it's younger people who simply don't know better 😬#otherwise... yikes

This isn't some esoteric niche aspect of fandom culture, strangers at the potluck also do not like being called a fucking bitch.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

People in the comments like "you just need to add a /pos tone indicator to your comment!": strangers at the potluck do not like being told "You're a bitch!" with a smile and a thumbs up.

[beguilingcorpse]

the best thing about rulette 2 is that i do think it adds substantial mechanical improvements to the game design of the first iteration — paul and sam as ‘players’ intended to follow and be called out on rules, interesting new rules/prompts/modifiers, the golden rule concept, etc. — but all of that slowly but surely becomes overshadowed by josh ruben landing by chance on all of the specific rules that transform him into a baby-themed tongue-heavy gyrating monster

[justcatposts]

My 11-month male cat lets my foster kittens nurse on him.

(Source)

[nitewrighter]

[frankierohugejorts]

im sorry these are the funniest tags ive ever seen

[apollo-cackling]

[ID 2: tweet by @/tanijrou saying,

any guy can be a babygirl but it takes a man to be a single mother

/end ID]

[transcript 3: #11 moths old??? he should be at the club /end transcript]

[storm-of-feathers]

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

[storm-of-feathers]

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

[stylish-suidae]

Public opinion on gay marriage in the US has gone down a bit, but not by enough to explain this. It's still higher than it was in 2019 and I have physical evidence that major brands were doing pride stuff in 2019.

I don't think they're doing this in response to public opinion. I think they're doing it because a petulant manchild is in charge of the government, who has a habit of vindictively punishing any company that gets on his bad side, not to mention his literal cult that's more than willing to commit violence on his behalf.

But gay marriage still has a higher approval rating in the US than the popular vote percentage of any president since 1820, and that election was uncontested.