The Cool Blog

Journey on courageously my fair knights and brave maidens

[beemovieerotica]

hate it when pets learn words, my dog flips out when he hears "greenie" so we had to start saying "G word" but now he knows G word so we have to say shit like "are we out of emerald indulgences"

[anik]

i love this guy

[shytreeking]

Actual marketing tactic that DOES exist btw. I can't remember the term, but all major businesses have special roles specifically for people who understand how to manipulate human behaviors & emotions. Why are snacks at the checkout area? Temptation. Why is candy so low to the ground? Children. Types of store lighting can affect peoples mood. Cheaper products are low or very high so people won't look for them. Branding companies have this as well for packaging & logos that hide products lack of quality & manipulate people to impulse buy.

I know damn well I watched a documentary on this in high school, but that was quiet awhile ago. Everything is designed to subtly manipulate your perceptions & tastes. Once you see it, it's everywhere & you can work against it out of pure spite.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I don't know if this is still a thing but they used to go so far as to make the flooring material in big stores in shopping centres slightly softer than the floors outside the store, so that customers would stay inside a bit longer since people have (largely subconscious) preferences about floor textures based on how easy they are to walk on and how much they hurt tired feet. The amount of research that goes into choosing the lighting in makeup and clothing stores is bonkers. Bakeries often smell a lot more like fresh bread or donuts than their actual baking activities would create -- they pipe the smell out front on purpose. Grocery stores are deliberately laid out to be very slightly confusing -- not confusing enough to impede buying, but confusing enough to send people down a few wrong aisles to look at products that they wouldn't otherwise see. Signs are often placed in aisles so that you have to go into the aisle a bit to read them clearly, or at least take a good look down it.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

tumblr keeps giving me these ads with straight up porn in them (like, nude dickriding) and while idgaf about seeing porn I really am like, exhausted by the double edged swords of "terms of service" and "advertising".

I can't post images that show too much of my stomach, because notable body fat trips whatever alarms are up in tumblr HQ. but advertisers can show me skinny white girls bouncing on it all day long bc like, they're advertisers.

we live in advertising world. companies have more rights to "expression" in public than individuals. once you notice it you won't stop seeing it. you have a moral duty to resist it.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

getting tired of these kinds of responses. "you're only seeing porn because you look at porn and the ads are connected to your data huehuehuehue" like it's some kind of gotcha.

I am a sex worker - a porn creator. Yes, I spend a lot of time on porn sites! sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Do you think I should be? I'm on testosterone, sometimes I jerk off four times a day. Get over it.

When I said "idgaf about seeing porn" I meant it! What I DO care about is the fact that I as a user and a worker cannot post my creative labour on this website, but that advertisers can show me whatever they want, including AI generated Attractive People doing my job. The implication that they're doing this with the use of tracking cookies makes it worse, actually. I don't like living under surveillance. Do you think it's funny? Or do you think that was part of the problem I was trying to talk about from the start?

[laterkiss]

everytime i want something i should be shot in the head

[laterkiss]

wanting to get shot in the head for wanting something is also wanting

[starcrier]

and you know what? i am REALLY sick of these ads that are openly mocking people for being concerned about the products they’re selling.

Amazon’s super bowl ad where the Alexa mocks Chris Hemsworth for being worried about giving spy software control over his entire life. Waymo’s ad with the intro “the robots are coming!” mocking people who are rightfully extremely concerned about sharing the road with, or riding in, self-driving cars.

i don’t know, it’s just genuinely insane to me. “Oh, you have legitimate concerns about our shitty product? sounds like you’re just lame!!!” like what kind of “quiet part out loud” marketing is that?

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[ralfmaximus]

Periodic reminder that older versions of Office still work on modern Windows and does everything you need. Office 2016 is available from the Internet Archive and will save your ass.

Plus, spell check won't hallucinate new words!

[hyprrrem]

wikipedia editors in the project hail mary 'verse scrambling to change mentions of "person" to "human" when the information about eridians gets dropped globally

[cigarettesvertigo]

Maya Deren on amateur filmmaking

[cigarettesvertigo]

Maya Deren on amateur filmmaking

[anarchistmemedistro]

[important-cat-pics]

[taytei]

ITS HJS BIRTHDAY EVERYONE

[frankendykes-monster]

This is what I was alluding to when I discussed that the volume of name changes you have to make as a trans person highlights the ridiculous amount of documentation attached to you.

[creekfiend]

physical therapy was good, and then we went to visit the gay leathermen in atlanta to ask them about shoulder stabilization and they were very nice and we had a lovely conversation. I love gay people. talking to gay people energizes me. it was a bit funny how the guy I was speaking to about it clearly had to totally recalibrate his brain around how small I was. it's very funny interacting with the kind of super butch gay men who mainly interact with other super butch gay men and have them sort of go "huh. I forgot about the tiny lesbians." like he was like "yeah yeah you're pretty small I guess" when I first mentioned the display ones being too big, I'm a way where he clearly sort of thought it wasn't that much of a difference, and then when he was trying to adjust it to sit on my shoulders he was like "oh you're like SMALL small" 😂 yes sir. all your tall muscular display mannequins are over twice as large as my body, that is correct. my shoulders are very narrow. yep. you wouldn't believe how narrow it is possible to be.

ship described how they were when we entered the shop as like how horses act when a dog enters the paddock. like, initial startlement? slight apprehension? mild confusion? cautious investigation? this is a mammalian quadruped but it is not horse? ? ? and then finally "oh ok this is fine this is normal this is a regular animal who I can be regular around"

it's fine that all my analogies for types of social interaction involve animals, do not worry about this even a little bit.

[creekfiend]

yes yes yes. exactly this. I'm so happy to know that we have both shared this experience across space and time

[lichen-soup-scribe]

I (a tiny trans man) once went into a gay sex shop in Cap Hill in Seattle looking for a leather cuff-style bracelet but they were all far too large for my dainty wrists. The associate (a burly man in a pup hood, a jock and not much else) cocked his head, thinking, and then was visibly struck by inspiration --

he led me over to the cock rings, some of which were leather and fastened with a snap, and suggested that perhaps one of those would work?

[creekfiend]

ksksjfhf help that's so funny. "well sir, I don't know about the cuffs, but is your wrist perhaps approximately the circumference of an ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE TONKER?"

[dogpuppy]

[nineteenyearoldmeblog]

im fucking crying

[crazysodomite]

[soppingwetratboy]

Being told what to do is great because then you know what to do