one of my creative writing professors once said that to evaluate a work as good or not, first you ask what the work is attempting to do, and then you evaluate how well it does it. and this is how to judge everything from critical essays to romance novels to snack packaging to theory tracts.
the best way i can think to describe the experience of reading moby dick is you’re in line at the dmv and this guy behind you very loudly says “well who HASN’T had a gay experience” and then proceeds to tell you every detail about his life in between anecdotes about how great sperm is and how ropes work and sometimes he’ll say the most poetic shit you’ve ever heard in your life and them jump RIGHT back into explaining how a whale is a fish because 1) it swims in water and you’re still only like halfway through the dmv line
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
i saw a post earlier today and now i can’t find it but someone was like the only reason i get through studying is by saying “let’s go steal a grade” where they just imagine they’re doing research for a leverage con and they have to know all the information to pull it off successfully. I’m at my internship rn and i found the original score for the og show and redemption and let me tell you i have never been more productive
Replace imposter syndrome with the conman method! You're a fraud, and you're such a competent fraud that the mark is never going to realize what hit them until the gloat.
What helped me write trauma better is remembering that the nervous system learns predictions. If danger used to come after quiet, calm can feel threatening. If kindness used to come with a price, kindness can feel suspicious. So healing is not just “they know they’re safe now.” Healing is the slow, annoying, deeply unfair process of teaching the body that the old prediction is not always the present truth.
Norse mythology fails to convey the sense of terror that must have hung over Asgard every time Loki was gone for longer than eight months and three weeks
#okay but imagine the betting pool#is it gonna be half undead?#horse with too many legs?#a giant fuck off snake?#who knows! ( @much-ado-about-mothing)
Loki, holding up the newest baby Lion King-style: IT’S!!!!! A WOLF!!!”
underneath the rock: *dozens of creatures from all over Nine Realms muttering quietly, exchanging money*
#you fools #wolves gestate for only 2-3 months #and horses can be pregnant for over a year! #there is no period of time that they can relax for #literally any time he’s out of their immediate supervision #he might be coming back with another harbinger of ragnarok #bundled up in nappies [X]
never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱
the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm
[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']
SCREAMING my mom just called out of the blue to be like "hey have you ever read fahrenheit 451?? it's so good!!" and i was surprised she hadn't read it before but we chatted a little about the book and then at one point she goes "yeah i just never got around to it bc i didn't really like star trek" which of course had me going "huh?" followed quickly by "mom. mom do you think gene roddenberry wrote farenheit 451 or that ray bradbury created star trek." and after a veeeeery long silence she says, ".....this would explain some of the tonal differences"
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