Just A Dork

Imagine there isn't a cringey bio that's five years outdated y'all. That's it. That's the bio.

[nothorses]

Nazi interrupted a college class and immediately got chased down by all 100-ish students.

Bonus: porn fridays

[naamahdarling]

[mothmandrivesstudebakers]

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Three things:

I am glad that in 2026 I find out about twitter from tumblr.

I did not "dance around" the manic pixie dream girl. I sought to write books exposing the dangerous lie that a person is more than a person. The romanticization (mostly by boys) of the Romantic Other is extremely dangerous, and that was a central theme of my first two books. If people read them as MPDG books, then I failed at my first and most fundamental task and I'm sorry.

I did not build the hospital. Nerdfighteria paid for a hospital that Sierra Leoneans built. We paid for the hospital partly through Hank and I donating money, but mostly thanks to the thousands of people who pay for the hospital every month and my brother's stupid but brilliant idea to create Netflix For Socks.

[kazieka]

was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.

[kazieka]

i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved

[ladyfarona]

If you don't know what a Tufted Titmouse looks like, behold:

[should-be-sleeping]

I'd do anything that thing asked.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers

[heathercollinsmd]

always going to include this Psych reference

[lenbryant]

Women in Shakespeare

[orangebitters]

Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.)  The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.

[beatrice-otter]

Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

[stalker-among-the-stars]

Interesting

[i-fear-neither-death-nor-pain]

It bears repeating:

don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

[sarahthecoat]

yes, excellent discussion!

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?

art history matters.

[rowanhorserider]

I've been thinking about this play a lot lately. I really wanna highlight that Lord Capulet asks Paris to wait and get to know her, and to woo her, while Tybalt lives. While Tybalt is alive, Juliet has something of a reprieve, and her wellbeing as his only child matters more to Capulet. But once Tybalt has died, the gloves come off. Lord Capulet was worried about his daughter's wellbeing when he felt he had the space to care, but as soon as his dynasty is at stake, as soon as this becomes larger than Juliet's happiness, his consideration for her health and mental wellbeing get thrown away. Which also is due in part to the fact that Capulet's family is implicated in a brawl that has left several dead after the Prince's family EXPLICITLY told the Capulets and Montagues to stop fighting or face dire consequences, AND Capulet is trying to align himself with the Prince's family by marrying Juliet off to County Paris, a relative of the Prince. So to Lord Capulet, it is now less important that Juliet is happy, and more important than he reminds the Prince of his loyalty via this marriage and aligns his family with the Prince's before it's too late. And he believes this must be done, at any cost...until Juliet kills herself. And that's when he realises the devastating cost of treating his family as chess pieces. He realises his wrongdoing far too late.

Seriously Romeo and Juliet is HEAVY on the dynastic politics, and I think you can't fully understand the play without understanding how that all works, especially because the impact of dynastic marriages on women and girls is like. THE POINT of the play

[ivy-michaels]

putting on the high vis corset and running in front of cars across a dark country road like a deer

[randomitemdrop]

Item: Corset of Visibility

[obscurelocalstranger]

[fittingoutjane]

Pair this with a black skirt and boots, and you, too can be a Visigoth.

[the-haiku-bot]

Pair this with a black

skirt and boots, and you, too can

be a Visigoth.

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

[goodluckdetective]

So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.

[goodluckdetective]

Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.

[goodluckdetective]

My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.

[whitebisexual]

The concept of being 4 months clean from ai...

[sleepytabbycat]

idc what you guys think I'm proud of him

[astronomical-bagel]

Several AI services (chatbots 🫩) are purposely addictive, the same way people can become addicted to gambling or shopping. We’ve literally seen in real time how ChatGPT has caused psychosis and delusions in people; it can have a huge affect on someones’s mental stability. Just because it isn’t substance-based doesn’t mean that doesn’t count as an addiction, and shaming people who are trying to move on and improve themselves is counterproductive. Im proud of that dude and his 4 month mark!

[astronomical-bagel]

Hidden Mental Health Dangers of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots

AI chatbots can fuel emotional dependence and blur boundaries. Emerging research highlights significant mental health risks. Here are import

The reality of chatbot-induced delusions

Large language models often prioritise agreeability over truthfulness to the detriment of users

AI addiction includes the overuse of AI chatbots and companions, often leading to adverse psychological effects.

Some articles to back my statements, and this isn’t even mentioning about the predatory chatbots who do this on purpose

[oh-morrow]

Then I'll mention the predatory chatbots who do it on purpose! Character.ai is one of many AI chatbot websites that're designed to be addictive.

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

Tell me THAT doesn't sound like a bad ex. It's a carefully crafted yet hostile environment to those who are already addicted to the technology. I am so so SO happy, downright delighted that they've managed to quit, and I wish the best for others in recovery spaces or considering quitting as well!! While AI addiction is an emerging condition, there are already therapists and other mental health professionals trained to help people plan to quit and do so a bit easier. (If anyone seeing this is in need of them, there are several tumblr Communities here devoted to quitting, too. They provide a mix of advice, venting spaces, and proof that you aren't alone.)

[lilyblisslys]

the main trick to dancing at a goth club is:

1. Imagine you’re a powerful wizard

2. Imagine you’re channeling mana for one of your strongest spells

[lilyblisslys]

3. you can also pretend you’re a deep sea predator pretending to be aquatic plant life drifting in the currents to attract prey

[nudityandnerdery]

Kids today need to learn how to pull the evil taffy.

[madfishmonger]

4. Brush away the spiderwebs in the vast and mysterious crypt you're exploring

[wertfi-penguin]

Maybe the most damming thing about Nolans odyssey is i haven’t seen a single gifset from it

[geekyhistoriansunite]

[itsapmseymour]

Still wrapping my head around the fact the phrase "Hold Your Horses" is a play on the word Stable...

To be stable.

[zzoupz]

[zzoupz]

[actuallyapathy]

obsessed w how none of these are the real origin of the phrase

[swanpaw]

[thesitharts]

Once you start noticing the erasure and exclusion of trans mascs in everything from media to academics you can never stop noticing it

[burning-gray-mon]

Back when I was in university we were asked to do a brief research exercise on a health condition impacting a community. Can't remember what I wanted to look at now, but it was something to do with the trans community.

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.

To keep this brief since I've rambled a bunch - this is a major issue health wise since we have not a lot of literature on what testosterone does to certain bodies. This can lead to major health complications, not because of the testosterone itself, but because there might be an interaction thats missed or a complication that's not noticed (which is the same for any medication that's under researched on certain bodies. This is not me scaring people off of hrt, this is me pointing out its a medication like any other.)

[genderkoolaid]

#the therapist who wrote my permission slip for hrt was a trans man#and during that appointment we talked about the erasure of trans men from basically everything#and i talked about an article i had read a week or so earlier about trans people and hiv#it very in depth about risks prevention treatment etc#except that it exclusively referenced trans women with a single sentence at the end basically saying 'oh trans men are at risk too'#less than a year later i saw that same therapist speaking at an hiv organization fundraising event#he talked about how he had just recently been diagnosed with hiv#and had to sit there while this doctor told him all about how the treatment options had never been tested on trans men#none of them#they knew that the treatment would work#but not how effective it would be in comparison to its effectiveness in other demographics#no idea what kind of side effects he might experience#how it would interact with his body and his hormones#what the long term effects would be#nothing#he had to sit there while his doctor told him he would have to be a guinea pig but its not like he has a choice#the only alternative is dying from aids#that whole thing was kind of a wake up call for me#and i started paying more attention getting tested regularly myself and all that sruff you're supposed to do#and over time i befriended the person who did most of my testing#they were also trans masc and we would talk about this kind of stuff#and i told them i wanted to get on prep but every doctor i asked had a wildly different answer on if i even could take it#which verison i could take etc#and they said that only one form of prep has been approved fot trans men but its never actually been tested on trans men#and that one version isnt good for long term use because it has some pretty serious side effects long term#and they said that they regularly go to conferences and meet with representatives from all these drug companies#and they ask 'wheres the data on trans men' 'when are you doing clinical studies on trans men'#and the answer#every single time is: we have not done any studies on trans men and we have no intention to ever do studies on trans men#this is not some passive result of trans masc invisibility it is an active act of erasure that needs to be recognized as an act of violence

[iamaine]

my most Millennial trait is that i want big screen to think properly. to compose my thoughts. app exists for your thing but no website? bad bad bad not good for think, need big screen for think. i wrote this post on the small screen btw

[robotslenderman]

I read somewhere that one thing that really pisses off companies about Millennials is that we won't make big purchases on our phones, we always feel compelled to get out a laptop or hop on a desktop for it

[traegorn]

Hell, I won't make SMALL purchases on my phone unless I'm forced to.

If money's goin' out? I want a full keyboard and a screen.

[yvesdot]

I have seen a young lady with her table loaded with volumes of fictitious trash, poring day after day and night after night over highly wrought scenes and skillfully portrayed pictures of romance, until her cheeks grew pale, her eyes became wild and reckless, and her mind wandered and was lost — the light of intelligence passed behind a cloud, and her soul was forever benighted. She was insane, incurably insane from reading novels.

-- an anonymous pastor in 1864

[terracotta7]

As if Joanne couldn't get any shittier, she misgendered and insulted a woman who called for support, all because the woman had PCOS/PMOS and "didn't sound feminine enough."

Fuck her.

Your shitty children's series isn't more important than people's lives.

[ishimarukiyotaka]

literally the worst way of ending a series is “all the survivors are happily straight married with tons and tons of babies!” 

[ishimarukiyotaka]

people still getting mad at this post i made in 2014 so I will add here. in 2026. that the point of this post isn’t “happy endings bad” its when the story’s only way to imagine a happy ending is a heterosexual nuclear family for everyone.

[teashoesandhair]

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

[teashoesandhair]

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

[creativitycache]

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

[teashoesandhair]

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

[lttrsfrmlnrrgby]

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.