Queer masculinity is a rebellion in a sexist world

Jo, He/Him. Born in the 90's. Sometimes NSFW. Ask for tags. Posts are in English and sometimes Dutch. You don't need to out yourself to strangers on the internet.

[batteryacidlesbian]

A comic about how it feels trying to criticize The Stuff that people like after being told to like it

[vaspider]

Reminder to you and everyone you follow: back up your devices. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

I back my computer up every six months and was planning to this week. I procrastinated by a day, and my SSD corrupted* — I lost six months of photos, including old photos of my life from now-deleted tumblr post, thousands of words of my writing, and game save files (luckily I emailed my two main Minecraft worlds to a friend last week so I only lost a few days of work). Not to mention that now my Windows will be up-to-date, 2½ years further ahead than mine had been. I'm going to have to battle ai back when I get my computer.

If you make a lot of art, back your work up way more often.

Please.

*Also, maybe don't download exports of any of your blogs, even small ones. That's what corrupted my drive. Literally and directly.

I feel pretty uncomfortable telling people not to take exports of their blogs, though I’m sorry that happened to you. Backing up and backing up your backups is a very good idea, though!

[kmartradiodj]

You think you don’t need to do it right now; this is the devil talking.

I said for years I needed to back up all my baby photos and videos. Then my house burned down, and I have no evidence of my childhood whatsoever. I now spray fully formed like Athena during the advent of social media.

Back it up now. Do it for me, please. Do it for all the memories I have lost. Don’t live with the regret I have.

[the-haiku-bot]

You think you don’t need

to do it right now; this is

the devil talking.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[dramatic-dolphin]

the thing about the concept of gendered socialization is that so many people use it as like another kind of gender essentialism. you know it's not an immutable trait right. you can literally overcome it.

"i'm like this because women are socialized to be shy and quiet and subservient" okay good on you for recognizing it, but that's only the very first step. the next few steps are that you Stop Doing It. feminist thought vs feminist action.

[dramatic-dolphin]

and when ppl see a trans woman being confident and unafraid to take up space and decide it's because of her evil evil male socialization, i'm always like "wait you're saying this woman was raised as a child to be loud and confident and take up space? that's awesome, i thought that's how we WANTED people to raise girls? why exactly is it a problem now? 🤔"

like WHY are you telling trans women that they literally have to make themselves smaller and conform to the WORST gender exceptations of women to be seen as real women. since when is it evil and masculine to be confident, i thought we were supposed to be doing that. i thought that was feminism.

[proteusolm]

bitework with my miniature american pitbull terrier

[pmamtraveller]

Cats fight by Léo Forest

[vigittarious]

Redrawing Iñakis latest post

[justsomeguycore]

knock knock

[dismembered-jackalope]

who's there

[justsomeguycore]

deez

[dismembered-jackalope]

sigh

deez who ?

[justsomeguycore]

deez are the voyages of the starship enterprise

[explicitlyrics]

swifties always going on the "you just hate women" defense like first of all Taylor Swift is not a woman she's an unskippable ad

[loth-caatgirl]

actually yes this needs to be kept as part of this conversation

[pocketss]

distressing things to say to your friends

[nightlysleeper]

Odo receives the most crushing blow of his entire life

[orpheuslament]

no one talks about how straight up painful it is to be the bigger person when deep in your soul you just want to be a huge bitch about it

[glorious-spoon]

spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.

anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[perplexingly]

I’d give so much to hear their banters between Awakening and their merging

[qqchurch]

[qqchurch]

[qqchurch]

[imjunebitch]

calling ppl "larpers" to insinuate theyre fake fans of smth/poorly pretending to be smth is so fucking stupid cuz. tell me u have never met a real LARPer without saying u have never met a real LARPer. those guys care. they are fucking locked in dude. like LARP is a lifestyle its a commitment they care so much. they're not fake nerds either like fake nerds just repost LOTR gifsets and talk about how nerdy they are for being into like, fucking batman and stuff. LARPers know their shit. they read the whole Silmarillion. they know who Ambush Bug is. like get LARP's name out of your fucking mouth

[softlyfiercely]

i think we have done ourselves and our communities and our communication skills a massive disservice by flattening so many experiences down to "trauma" or "harm" and equating "feeling uncomfortable" with "being unsafe."

i recognize that this didn't happen in a vacuum, and a lot of us are responding to a culture that doesn't take our pain or discomfort seriously and has denied or downplayed real trauma for generations.

however, i strongly recommend trying out some of these framings and phrases in order to develop some healthier, more resilient understandings of ourselves and our relationships:

I would prefer not to

I had a bad experience

I don't like that

I would need more support to be able to do that

I'm not in the mood

That bothers me

I worry about [specific negative outcome]

I'm not up for that today

I'd rather do/talk about something else

I'm not the right audience for that

I need more information first

That doesn't seem worth the time/energy

not every personal preference or unpleasant emotion must be linked to a psychiatric diagnosis or a trauma trigger. constantly interpreting your experiences through this pathologized lens is not good for anyone.

if you are surrounded by people who do not take your "i'd rather not" seriously unless you can cite DSM chapter and verse, you have shitty friends and need to hang out with different people.

also, no matter who you are or how traumatized you are, you do not need to avoid every discomfort. it is true that for someone with severe trauma, a ptsd flashback can derail their whole day and cause genuine physical and psychological suffering. however. this is different than "someone mentioned a tv show that my shitty ex liked" or "someone at an event made me feel socially awkward." we all go through negative experiences, and convincing yourself that you are so damaged that the only safe way to live is by demanding protection from anything that could make you feel bad is extremely unhealthy.

you need to be able to function as a human being even when the world includes things that are unpleasant or even painful. if you train your brain to experience everything you don't like as a "trauma trigger," you will create a reality for yourself where you are constantly under threat and develop an identity as someone who cannot manage any situation not completely under your control. you are capable of feeling sad, startled, annoyed, offended, disgusted, or nervous. i promise.

and if you truly are dealing with trauma symptoms on a level that genuinely disrupt your daily functioning and ability to maintain healthy relationships, that is a signal that you need to start working on your own healing. your goal should be to find ways to reduce the impact these symptoms have, not to just give more language and weight to them so they can dictate more and more of who you are and how you move through the world.