given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
My grandma just called and, among other things, said “You have hips. That’s good! Men like hips!” and then she interrupted herself to say “Women like hips. People of your preferred gender like hips. I can never remember”
And I was like “Thanks grandma! My preferred gender is none of them, no thanks.” and she was like “Okay, no one will comment on your hips!” very self satisfied, like “aha, I have figured it out”
I think like half her grandkids are some variety of not-straight and she can’t always remember which is which but she is the epitome of like “she’s a little confused, but she’s got the spirit!”
I told my grandma that I’d told my friends about what she said and that some of y’all had said you wished she was your grandma, and she said “Well, you can never have too many grandkids!”
So like…consider her your honorary grandma* I guess?
*if you want an honorary grandma, that is
Update on my grandma: I told her my hair was standing up, but instead of straight line it was diagonal and she said “That’s okay, you’ve never been straight!” and then laughed so hard at her own joke I thought she was going to drop the phone
When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*
#we dont use honorifics in my first language so whenever i have to select options (usually for flights) im always so confused#like what is actually the difference between miss and ms#i like miss bc it sounds more historical and im a historian so
"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)
"Ms." - prounounced MIZ, btw - is a third option popularized by gloria steinem in the 70s - mainly through her feminist magazine Ms. - which is meant to be a neutral term, usable for any and all women regardless of marital status (hence the soul destroying irony of the tags above). it gained wider general acceptance when geraldine ferraro, the first woman to be nominated as VP on a national major party ticket, started using it widely to avoid confusion, since she was married but used her maiden name professionally. eventually over the years it came into common use though i do think the brits are a little more critical of it than americans (as far as i'm aware lol)
"obscure facts only a tumblr user would know" and it's one of the most influential institutions of second wave american feminism. PLEASE open the schools
Hi. I'm an unmarried woman in her forties. I use Ms. and pronounce it "miz", though I don't correct people who accidentally use a soft S. I use Ms. because it's no one's business but my own whether I'm married, to a man or anyone else, and that's what Ms. means. It means fuck off, my marital status is irrelevant, just as it is for every man who uses Mr.
I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"
That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.
I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.
Also, I've taught English and worked as an editor for twenty years. I am quite literally the grammar police. This use of Ms. is a standard construction. If you didn't learn it in school, someone failed you.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
as a kid i always thought gotham was in michigan because i thought it was a midwestern city like chicago, and there was always shit going down at the pier or in abandoned factories and if michigan has anything it’s a lot of piers and abandoned factories. anyway turns out it’s probably in jersey.
one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck
there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown
there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for
there’s a whole class of freighter just for the great lakes
“63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes
mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy
MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW
imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand
“we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb
good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses
“kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay
i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there
michigan has plenty of abandoned theme parks for the joker to hijack
our most famous abandoned theme park is dinosaur themed so I GUESS WE KNOW WHERE HE GOT THE T-REX
we have a special kind of ice cream called superman ice cream and i think bruce would be really bitter about it and that’s hilarious
there are nine different species of bat in michigan and they have all lived in my kitchen at some point
michigan is full of mines both abandoned and active and bats love them
put an abandoned train station next to and abandoned mine and you have a totally plausible CRIMEZONE
and none of this is getting into the most compelling evidence
put a city in michigan and watch how fast no one gives a fuck
gotham, MI needs batman because who the fuck else is going to help
batman please save us from the cops and the state government
that’s what i thought but apparently metropolis is new york during the day and gotham is new york at night which means the dc universe has three new yorks which i think even new yorkers can agree is too many
here are some more michigan batman facts:
we already have evil clowns
when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin
there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it
rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them
michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it
batman vs superman: the deep dish debate
“who would name a city bludhaven” well we’ve already got bad axe and colon and gaylord and climax and grim and hell and frankenlust and gore and that’s just the first half of the alphabet
if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink
this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi
this is the charles t fisher house
here’s the james scott residence
welcome to michigan hope u like houses with turrets and fucked up clowns and evil men poisoning the water
I feel like Gotham could also be Cleveland/Northern Ohio, for all of the reasons listed, PLUS the time the Cuyahoga River *caught on fire* due to the pollution of it.
Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn't want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart."
Aro and ace activism is housing reform, is well-funded public housing, is an expansion of affordable housing, is allowing single people to get affordable and public housing, is rent controls to make it possible for single people to be able to afford to live alone on a single salary.
Aro and ace activism is healthcare reform, so that no one needs to rely on a spouse for health insurance, so that healthcare is available to everybody regardless of income, so that no one’s lived experiences or basic dignity are dismissed or overridden by doctors
Aro and ace activism is well-funded and expansive public transit, so that you don’t need to have someone on hand to drive you places if you are incapacitated, so that you don’t have to pay for an ambulance if you need to get to the hospital quickly
Aro and ace activism is disability and elder care services, so that no one needs a spouse to care for them, so that no one needs children to care for them, so that marriage is not a bind for disabled people, so that people on disability who want to and can live alone can
Aro and ace activism is community-building, it’s public events, it’s free social activities, it’s mutual aid, it’s activities that bring community members together without socializing relying on just a romantic partner
Aro and ace activism is developing a culture of believing when people tell you who they are and what they want rather than assuming you know them better than they know themselves
Aro and ace activism means a better world for people without “normative” desires or “normative” social support, which means a better world for everybody
Also acceptance of platonic partnerships and platonic marriages and a legal framework that normalizes the idea that a spouse doesn't have to be a romantic or sexual partner.
Religion in fantasy worlds: Everyone believes the exact same things about Green Nature Goddess and has official rituals for her that are the same everywhere
Religion irl: Technically it’s heresy for me to worship this skeleton but my spiritual advisor said that it’s legit so I’m gonna keep giving it offerings of yogurt
Religion in fantasy worlds: These are the rules. The rules are law. Nobody can break the rules.
Religion irl: Okay you say that there are “rules” but how exactly are we defining “rules” here? Like is a suggestion a rule? How are we defining suggestion? No come back. Listen. Are we going by nuance in the original language or are translations fine or-
High control religions/cults recruiting in fantasy worlds: Join us! For we shall all eat the moon! This is a legitimate position to have!
High control religions/cults recruiting irl: We have free snacks. That shirt looks sooo cute on you btw. What, you heard that we wanna eat the moon? The media is always telling lies about us you know. We may have some unorthodox opinions about the moon but, tell you what. Come get some snacks, make some new friends, maybe chat about the moon a bit. See what you think. We’ve got pizza.
Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:
To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler
You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it
If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life
If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.
Go through a sensory checklist.
SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights
SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.
TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?
TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?
SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?
INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.
Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.
This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.
If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.
PMT - psycho-motoric therapy - helped me a LOT. I still have trouble recognising my bodies' signals: not just stress but hunger, thirst, exhaustion, pain. I have tried exercising without help so many times, and I would just get injured every. Damn. Time. Pull my muscles, overwork my tendons: and then I'd have to sit down again until I'd healed and all of my progress was for naught.
Relearning how to recognize when my body was telling me stuff made my life so much better. I genuinely would not have dared to become a parent before starting this form of therapy. It's been almost a decade and I don't feel like I'm a brain with a stupid, useless set of appendages anymore: I finally understand my body and take joy in it.
If you have autism, I truly recommend you check out PMT. It made a ton of difference for me.
Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”
Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.
boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.
what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away.
how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.
and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.
what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.
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