i've no idea what i'm doing but i'll roll with it

20s, she/they, lesbian ace, former treatment kid, white, jewish

[medeapalatyna]

You know I wish house of the dragon actually interrogated incest as a tool used by families to consolidate power and within families to dispossess women because aside from being played for shock value the Aemond/Daemon mother-fucking dreams kind of went nowhere and of all families the HIGHTOWERS!!! seem to be used to demonstrate the point that incest is an abuse tactic (wrt Otto > Alicent and Ormund > Daeron)

Like dawg why are we presenting the uncle/niece 2 for 1 combo of alyn and baela and daemon and rhaenyra as somehow morally ok incest couples. Why did the only interrogation of what dameon did to rhaenyra happen in s2 with those harrenhal dreams and then he was somehow absolved of everything by believing she should be queen because of a prophecy.

What are we doing here.

[medeapalatyna]

Even crazier when you consider that Corlys is pushing to legitimize Alyn with the implication that he will be the next lord of driftmark and Baelas paper thin excuse for not wanting driftmark is that "she is a targaryen and not of salt and sea" or whatever the fuck. Girl they are literally dispossessing you under your nose FIGHT BACK

[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.

[thefunkypenguinus]

The truth is, doing good research is time-consuming and inconvenient, even if it’s on a topic you profess to love. People will do anything to make getting work done easier.

I do physical therapy for a stretched muscle, and there are a few exercises that annoy me, but I know if I skip them once in a routine, I will take that as permission for myself to skip them indefinitely. I think that’s what using LLMs does for general tasks.

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[rudjedet]

And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.

They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?

I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.

AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and to make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.

[medeapalatyna]

You know I wish house of the dragon actually interrogated incest as a tool used by families to consolidate power and within families to dispossess women because aside from being played for shock value the Aemond/Daemon mother-fucking dreams kind of went nowhere and of all families the HIGHTOWERS!!! seem to be used to demonstrate the point that incest is an abuse tactic (wrt Otto > Alicent and Ormund > Daeron)

Like dawg why are we presenting the uncle/niece 2 for 1 combo of alyn and baela and daemon and rhaenyra as somehow morally ok incest couples. Why did the only interrogation of what dameon did to rhaenyra happen in s2 with those harrenhal dreams and then he was somehow absolved of everything by believing she should be queen because of a prophecy.

What are we doing here.

[dogtoks]

[higglety]

you're laughing. Those dogs were stuck on that large pile of snow until it melted into a tiny pile of snow and you're laughing

[ichorknight]

driving my chevy to the levee today

[ichorknight]

what the fuck

[greenbloods]

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?

Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer...

really good essay on children's fantasy

[evilvillain123456789]

I fail to see how the Monsters of Inc. were persuaded to care about the welfare of children who to them were no more than an anonymous, alien resource necessary for the convenience of their lives. They weren't even the same species of them. Yet they overhauled their whole energy economy to be more humane toward this hated other, which had no legal rights in their society, and which most of them had never even seen. It really makes no sense, if anything it's sort of a perversion, like if you actually lived with that level of concern and empathy you wouldn't be able to function at all. You would be, just, fucking debilitated. Just psychologically crushed. Idk it's just not that plausible to me. And Randall, the lizard. He isn't that fuckable either.

[systlin]

So my sister wants to start sewing more, because

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this

[systlin]

“Where did u get all this”

“Bets, u know I’m a 15th degree blackbelt of buying shit on the internet”

“oh yeah tru”

[hermesmuse]

Op can may we inquire about the website list

[systlin]

Linen; https://www.graylinelinen.com/

cotton and Silk thread; https://redrockthreads.com/

Linen thread and wool fabric; https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/ (they’ve got wool stuffs and worsted wool fabric for $15 a yard! I just got three yards of navy worsted wool I’m making a constellation winter skirt from)

More linen thread and wool; https://wmboothdraper.com/ (just ordered wool broadcloth to make a coat)

Silk fabric (THE best place to get silk lining fabrics and raw silk fabric):https://www.dharmatrading.com/

A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code  spring2020 for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/

Wool. You want wool coating for under $20 a yard? Sure you do. It’s here. Not a huge variety of colors, most are black or brown, but hey https://www.fashionfabricsclub.com/Catalog?refinementIds=4096748&Keyword=wool&pageSize=16

[wingedtyger]

I don’t know a lot about sewing, but I want to make or have my mom make some linen pants & shirts for when I’m watering, because it gets to 105 here and we have mosquitos so I need to be covered. What type of linen do I buy? Also, linen pajama shorts, yes/no?

(I’ve been wearing my renfaire pants which are a linen mix, I think. But the frikking mosquitos that hide in the tomatoes get my arms)

[systlin]

Medium weight is what I’d go with.

And linen pajama shorts is a HARD yes.

[beggars-opera]

Renaissance Fabrics is good for all sorts of things

Mood doesn’t specialize in natural fabrics but they do have basically every fabric ever made so

[the-merry-otter]

For wools, I cannot recommend Woolsome enough! They’re a bit more expensive then the above links, but they have a spectacular range of colours and weights, as well as diamond pattern and herringbone weaves. They also have a range of linens, though not as extensive.

Woolsome

Historical fabrics for re-enactors

[justgarb]

Tiedtohistory.com has sheer voile linen

The Linen Lab has a variety of weaves, weights, and colors available

Period Fabric has a variety of wools, but switch to the full website if you’re on mobile

[liminalbeauty]

Bernadette Banner did a quality test on all the linen she could buy online. This video is the result.

And this store is in Canada if you need to avoid the insane markup from the US right now-

Everyday Linen

Everyday Linen Our Everyday Linen collection features versatile mid-weight 100% linen fabrics ideal for garments and everyday sewing proj

[tothechaos]

me trying to convince myself that the whole spectrum of human emotions is a good and necessary thing to feel even if its not comfortable while im actively experiencing emotions that make me feel like my bones are being dissolved in acid

[computationalcalculator]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

[deramin2]

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

The Klamath River Runs Free

[supreme-leader-stoat]

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

[wizardysseus]

the thing about CC is that she did plagiarize. she was found guilty of plagiarism and banned from fanfiction dot net! she plagiarized pamela dean, among others, and lied about it repeatedly! it happened! and regardless of whatever else she writes, regardless of whether the publishing industry and her fans trust her not to do it again, regardless of how many times her wikipedia page gets scrubbed clean, that will always have happened! so it is not in fact cruel gossip, but a factually true statement, to say that she plagiarized and i'm not interested in supporting her or giving her the benefit of the doubt because she plagiarized and lied about it repeatedly! fuck!

[wizardysseus]

what really incenses me about cassandra clare — and forgive me for bringing this up again, but i don't think i've articulated this point yet — is not that i believe she is currently plagiarizing. any accusations i've seen about recent work seem to me to be superficial. but even if one could prove that she never plagiarized again once she started publishing, it wouldn't matter to me, because she chose to capitalize on her fandom history. while trying to distance herself from what she did, she made a brand out of the fanfic pen name "cassandra clare" and continues to profit off the reputation and fanbase that she amassed while she was, provably, a plagiarist.

you don't get to do that and bury the things that made you famous. as an individual, as a human being, she is capable of change and any other good qualities you may want to ascribe. but she built her career on lies. professionally, i don't understand why she gets to move on.

[toppingilyarozanov]

the worst part for me--worse than building her career on plagiarism--is that her career was also built on a truly reprehensible level of harassment. she told her followers to help get her unbanned from FFN (as if that would ever happen) and they spent months harassing the site owner and several abuse team members. one of them, after enduring extensive abuse, ended up in the hospital.

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

she has the career she has now because of her harassment of fandom as much as the plagiarism.

[alessandriana]

receipts

fanlore article

[visenyaism]

you really could do some compelling thematic work with the graybeards and the winter wolves. like they are a suicide cult come down from the isolated north to take the lives of younger people in this horrible kind of meaningless civil war they have little actual stake in because dying violently is more masculine AND killing yourself is expected of men of a certain age in this culture because surviving the winter is for women. Like Roddy the Ruin was following 15 yr old Oscar Tully around constantly encouraging him to escalate the war crime count on the Ormund-Gwayne season and throwing his life away at war because being already dead has caused him to lose the entirety of his humanity in the Criston Cole season would have been so interesting to get into at all. But the masses need their keys jangled I suppose

[mythalism]

period cramps gender dysphoria on the iron throne was so on the nose but it was good so i dont even care. what if your body physically recoiled at the seat you've placed it upon. what if the literal site where your body touches the throne is soaked in blood. what if you wanted to bring the symbolic phallic sword. what if you didnt because its not who you are. what if you started bleeding the moment you put it aside. how romantic it must be to be locked away in a castle and made to squeeze out heirs. how romantic it must be to be locked away in a castle and finally sit on the iron throne! what if it was uncomfortable. what if you werent made for this because no one is made for this. what if your womb was a grave. what if it was reminding you right now. what if the thing that you have resented as your defining feature your entire life decided to torture you during the moment you've waited your entire life for. your father bled on this throne too when he pricked his fingers on its sharp edges. is that blood any different? your two eldest sons are dead would you like a bodily reminder that you can have more targaryen heirs? isn't that what its all about? more targaryen heirs? more and more and more targaryen heirs? dont you want to give birth again dont you want to live in this castle and squeeze out more targaryen heirs? dont you wish you were your father your uncle your half-brother dont you wish you were literally anyone else. do you think you would have started bleeding if you just brought the sword. do you think you would have started bleeding if you were just someone else. dont forget your father bled too

[kuso-leon]

a message to all my mutuals:

[werewolf-transgenderism]

oh my god I just saw the cutest thing in the world. little Black girl with beads in her hair for the first day of school and the beads were pink then silver then a bunch of yellow then beige then grey to make them look like pencils 🥺🥺🥺 brb I will draw an artist’s rendition

[werewolf-transgenderism]

^ like this. waaaaaugh 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[patchoulism]