PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@teddyakababy
Happy May Day all. Solidarity and all that jazz. For your brain, some history on May Day and how it came to be: 1. The Zinn Education Project: May 4, 1886: Haymarket Tragedy
2. IWW Historical Archives: The Brief Origins of May Day
3. NPR : What is May Day? For the most part, the opposite of capitalism
Thinking back to the first story I ever started writing down (I was 7 or 8) about a group of stray cats who, every full moon, took the form of human kids. They actually were human kids, who had been killed (all at different times/by different people). Their bodies were each dumped by the side of the road where a cat had been hit by a car previously, and their souls landed in the cats' bodies. Eventually they all found each other and decided that every full moon, when they shifted, they'd try to solve each other's murders one by one. It was going to be a series, with each book focusing on a different kid's murder mystery. I told my mom about it once, briefly, and she said "Those cat books (warrior cats) are making you creepy."
Just finished writing this manuscript, the first story I ever started. 23 years in the making. Never give up, even if your mom calls you creepy 🖤
NEVER GIVE UP PEOPLE WE’RE GONNA GET THE STRAY CATS AND DEAD KIDS STORY
It’s so crazy that suicide prevention is just people going awwww don’t!! Awwww come on noooooooooo stopppppp
One of the best ones I saw was a thing noting that every single one of the few survivors of suicide jumps off of the Golden Gate Bridge realized, on the way down, that the problems they were killing themselves over actually were fixable or could be worked through...except for the now - extremely unfixable - problem of gravity.
Went to the Holocaust Museum in DC once. There was a video interview of an Auschwitz survivor who said he and some other prisoners stayed up all night with a man who wanted to kill himself. The man didn’t kill himself and survived to liberation.
In the video the survivor said “Never seek a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And they’re all temporary problems.”
Hearing that from a guy who survived the Holocaust rewired my brain a little bit.
I think something a lot of people don't understand is that depression is not suicidality, and suicidality is not depression. People can, and are, depressed without being suicidal, and sometimes suicidality peaks as people are emerging from depression. Suicidality is a wave, and the trick is to allow that wave to crest and subside WITHOUT acting on it. Whatever it takes to ride it out. For some people that's distraction, like watching television. For others it's calling a friend -- not to talk about the suicidality, but just to talk. For others it could be as simple as going to sit in a coffee shop or library, because the presence of other people is a huge diminisher of suicide risk. That's what suicide safety planning is about. It's like having any other type of emergency plan, like a plan for fire or evacuation. It's making a plan when you are in the frame of mind to do so, so that you can just DO the plan without having to think about it when the occasion arises. When you're in the midst of suicidal ideation, or even intent, you're not in a problem-solving mood. So knowing past!you, with the help of a therapist hopefully, came up with the plan and all you have to do is follow up until the wave crests and subsides, is what allows you to see another day.
ETA: Here's a link to a safety plan. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/988-safety-plan.pdf
There’s a really compassionate and well-written paper/book/thing called Suicide: The Forever Decision that’s written specifically for people who are currently suicidal. The letter to the reader at the beginning is wonderful and deeply understands how to talk to someone who’s suicidal without preaching or talking down to them.
It’s very honest. It’s very clear. It’s very kind. It presents you with a lot of information and a lot of understanding and lets you take it all in like the autonomous human you are, and make decisions from an informed place. It goes over the reality of suicide attempts, pain involved, likelihoods of survival, after effects of attempts, and how to get help if you want it after reading all of that and learning about the reality of suicide attempts.
You can read it for free here: https://qprinstitute.com/pdfs/Forever_Decision.pdf
No one can ever stop you if you’re really determined. Only you can stop yourself. If you’re suicidal and there’s ANY tiny part of you that wants a chance to not go down that route, but can’t convince the rest of you yet, give this short book a try. Or share it with anyone you know who might need it.
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
oh shit
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Y'all know what to do Tumblr.
“i also choose this guy’s dead wife” was easily the #1 funniest thing to ever be written on the internet.
you can know the punchline but you can’t stop it from punching you.
i do also feel the need to add that phil8248 really liked the joke. he said his wife had always had a dark sense of humour, even about her illness and death, and seeing the joke made him feel like he was laughing with her one last time.
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 feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
Settles down on your dashboard gingerly and with a big heaving sigh
Trots onto your dash with youthful curiosity and zest for life
one thing i am quite grateful to Brian David Gilbert for is the phrase "If you needed ME to tell you that... I'm glad I told you that."
it has been etched into my brain for the past six years, fundamentally altering how i consider knowledge gaps held by others, as well as myself. people usually need to be told stuff before they can know it! that's how knowing stuff works! this is an extreme example played for laughs but it's a legitimately helpful philosophy!!
I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.
bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.
mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
Guys I think something is wrong with my Tumblr because I keep getting the pumpkin from Halloween instead of the Christmas version 😭
Now we know what happened to them hobbits
lord the peasants are so loud today
pheasants. PHeasants. The birds
Don't you mean classist Typo, as in discriminating against poor people, and not classicist, the type of academic who studies antiquity in southern Europe?
don't worry guys I got the fire extinguisher
Achievement unlocked!
Fire post!
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE POST IS ON FIRE
World Heritage Post
