This one really hurts. Anthony Head had that rare kind of presence that made a character feel warm, sharp, funny, and quietly heartbreaking all at once.
Giles will always be special to so many of us.
Rest in peace, Anthony Head 🖤
Sade Olutola
Claire Keane
Today's Document
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Jules of Nature
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

titsay

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
d e v o n

shark vs the universe

tannertan36

if i look back, i am lost
Mike Driver
h
Misplaced Lens Cap
$LAYYYTER
DEAR READER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
we're not kids anymore.

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Portugal

seen from Malaysia

seen from Netherlands

seen from Japan
seen from United Kingdom

seen from France

seen from Norway
seen from United States

seen from Hungary

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Finland

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Lithuania

seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United Arab Emirates
@tearsoflittlecrystals
This one really hurts. Anthony Head had that rare kind of presence that made a character feel warm, sharp, funny, and quietly heartbreaking all at once.
Giles will always be special to so many of us.
Rest in peace, Anthony Head 🖤
there will never be anything as funny as the mutual disbelief between long form and short form fic writers about each other's style.
short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.
meanwhile long form writers look at people writing 1000 word one shots like god I would cut off my left nipple to be able to say anything concisely. i would love to play with multiple ideas. free me from the shackles of this child I have birthed. i love them but I now must take them to t-ball and doctor's appointments and they're going to destroy everything I own.
Women with this energy are my type 😮💨 lol
It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.
get in loser we’re gonna try again despite it all
yet another post on my dash lamenting that writers can no longer use xyz thing because AI has "stolen" it and I just.
guys. can we please be for real right now. I am not changing the way I write because of some fucking machine. I was here first. AI can fucking change if it doesn't want to be confused with me, end of story.
Annual deer post:
If you see a fawn laying down on the ground all alone, leave it alone. It is not lost, it does not need your help, do not pick it up, do not move it.
This behavior evolved to keep deer young safe. The baby is very small, very quiet, and hard for most predators to see. A young fawn cannot keep up with a fleeing mother deer, which is their primary problem-solving strategy. So while the mother goes elsewhere to graze, the fawn stays safe and hidden. The mom will be back.
Leave the fawn alone.
This is always good to pass around this time of year, but I would like to add something for the few of us who might be encountering the moose kind of deer.
Moose are deer, but moose have the opposite strategy. They stay close to their babies, and their primary response for anything getting close to their babies is immediate violent murder. If you do see a baby moose by itself, leave. Leave the baby alone and leave the area, preferably quickly. Momma is at most 30 yards away and has already kicked on the kill bill sirens.
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.
We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
I think less of friends I've known for decades because they use it, and they admit to using it.
16x20 oil paint on muslin I did of @snailune (they/them) for class
there's this guy who works at the convenience store next to my job and every time i come in he tries to upsell me. i'll get a gatorade and he'll say "that's it...? isn't it snacktime?" i'll get a snack and he'll say "just that? don't you want more?"
one time i got a huge pile of stuff and he STILL said it and i said "dude, you would not be satisfied with all the riches of heaven!!" and he said "i don't even get a commission. i just love doing this."
and then i couldnt come in for a while and then i came in again today for just a charger. and i said "that's it today" with a smile. and he looked at me with a gleam in his eye and said "no it isn't. you'll be back later. you'll have to get thirsty eventually, won't you?" with this conniving smile that made me realize i WAS thirsty. i'm out of my depth here. help
OP I think that might be the Devil
500 years from now there’s gonna be some film historian who’s entire career is built off of searching for a copy of goncharov
and they're never gonna find it cuz they fucking took it off poob
girls will be like “this shade of green 😍” about every shade of green they see, and they’re right
the holy grail types of fanfic
Friendly reminder that these only happen slowly, carefully, with lots of reader encouragement, engagement, reflection, and support, and an ending is never a guarantee.
Writing communities are gardens, not subscription services
Writing communities are gardens, not subscription services
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
One thing about the Hollander men; if you hit them with a social situation they don't know how to react to, they will straight up leave ✌️
call that the Hollander Goodbye
thoughts and prayers to ilya, who is marrying into a family of flight risks 🙏