the Inktree

I have been called, and answer to: James, Jamz, Jim, Jimmy, Jimbob, Inky, and Witty (Jamesie is reserved for use only by my eldest sister.) I don't tag consistently, sorry :/

[garrettauthor]

I got real petty over on the Facebook page and IT WAS GLORIOUS.

[wintergrey]

This is me, going to check out Legendary Books now…

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Publisher: We think that the way the fantasy genre treats women is problematic so we’re going to try and do better

A Fool: If you don’t like it why don’t you make your own!

Publisher: That

That is literally what we just said we are doing

[garrettauthor]

GUESS WHO’S BACK, BIGOTED FUCKWADS?

BOY it feels good to be back in this particular saddle!

[garrettauthor]

AHAHAHAHAHA we have a winner for today!

[earthshaker1217]

😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣

[fandomsandfeminism]

Ahahahahahahahahshshshs

[benepla-deactivated20200506]

remember when Gravity Falls swept in, told its story in exactly how long it needed to tell it, and then ended in triumph and people still talk about it? I think abt that a lot

[breha]

honor ursula k. le guin in 2018 by envisioning a world free of borders and capitalism and also with some sick wizards, maybe a spaceship

[lochnessmonster-deactivated2019]

scorpia isnt butch. you guys just just think butch means “big muscles and short haircut”

scorpia grabs femininity by the balls my dudes!!!!! she performs femininity in such a way that excludes the male gaze but makes every dyke on this site swoon!!!

thats not butch!!!!!!!!

that’s femme!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kelasparmak-deactivated20260114]

“Cheery dropped down from the coach. Her leather skirt flapped in the wind. As one dwarf, the column swiveled to stare at her. Their leader went pop-eyed. ‘B'dan? K'raa! D'kraga “ha'ak”!’ Vimes saw the expression that appeared on Cheery’s small round face. Above him there was a clunk as Detritus rested the loaded Piecemaker on the edge of the coach. ‘I know dat word he said to her,’ he announced to the world. ‘It is not a good word. I do not want to hear dat word again.’”

— Terry Pratchett, “The Fifth Elephant” (Detritus has no time for anyone’s transphobic bullshit.)

[socialismartnature]

This sculpture by Issac Cordal in Berlin is called “Politicians discussing global warming.”

http://inhabitat.com/isaac-cordals-incredible-tiny-sculptures-offer-a-chilling-view-of-climate-change/

[clockworkrobotic]

the wildest thing happened to me the other day i found out a male coworker is into irish music so i told him that my dad is an irish musician and would he like to come to a session and he straight up irl said to me “name 5 irish songs your dad knows”

[clockworkrobotic]

he asked me if i play and i told him i played the fiddle when i was a teenager but havent played in years and he was like “oh cool. i play drums” as in a drum kit you know the famously folkish instrument the drum kit. bitch my name is molly o'reilly you really wanna challenge the legitimacy of my irish music involvement

[clockworkrobotic]

i can name 5 songs with my name in them

[drowning-moonlight]

Vader: I used to not understand why people cared so much about their dumb children until I found out I have a kid. If anything bad were to happen to Luke I would kill everyone in this room and then myself

[drowning-moonlight]

I’ve come to realize that this is literally exactly what happened in return of the jedi and I can’t believe I didn’t make that connection sooner

like this isn’t a joke the way I meant it to be, it’s full on canon

[timdrakeothy-deactivated2022031]

hot take: ‘chivalry’ is fine as long as it’s adapted to 21st century values. if you are a male, you SHOULD be aware that your female friends face certain issues that you as a male dont. acting on that awareness in a way that keeps your female friends safe, isn’t a bad thing.

like… opening doors isn’t rly chivalrous when it’s just a thing you ought to do for everyone. but real 21st century chivalry might be, like, standing between your female friend and the guy that’s trying to get her drunk, or offering to walk her home when it’s late.

if the ‘chivalry’ inconveniences everyone involved and you’re just doing it for your over-inflated male ego — ie, “no you’re the girl here, you HAVE to let me hold this door for you and do all these things for you even when you can do it yourself and im just slowing you down” — then it’s just outdated misogyny.

[wanderingquill]

Chivalry was literally designed to make nobles aware of their power and influence so they don’t unintentionally harm people when trying to do their job of leading and protecting people. Modern chivalry should carry on that sentiment of men and white people becoming aware of their own power of privilege and influence to help and protect the lives of their peers.

*Not to inflate their egos, but because it’s the good thing to do and makes the world a better place to be.

[elfwreck]

Chivalry, at its core, involves being helpful to people who don’t have your advantages. 

It involved generosity and protecting those weaker than oneself: including opening doors when doors were made of badly fit heavy wood and often got stuck,and women, especially undernourished exhausted-from-childcare women, had a harder time opening them. It involved not lying, and following through on your promises. (A guy who is consistently late with the accounting reports, which delays the whole team, is not dedicated to chivalry, no matter how polite he is on a date.) 

Chivalry is a code of ethics that involves dedicating one’s strength and skills in service to others; it’s not based on gender roles. 

[galactic-polywag]

Chivalry is a code of ethics that involves dedicating one’s strength and skills in service to others; it’s not based on gender roles.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Europe's right-to-repair movement is surging -- and winning

Earlier this month, European right-to-repair activists sounded the alarm, warning that the model right-to-repair legislation that had been proceeding through the EU legislative process had been hijacked by lobbyists who had gutted its core protections and were poised to make repairs even harder in the EU.

But Europeans rallied, and now they seem to have the upper hand. Pressure groups like Germany’s Schraube locker!? (Screwloose!?) have organised mass write-in campaigns and other ways of lobbying EU officials, to good effect. This week, they scored a victory over refrigerator design, securing an amendment to the EU’s pending Eco Design and Energy Label Directives (where the right-to-repair rules are enshrined) that will require refrigerator manufacturers to design their appliances to be repairable with everyday tools, and to supply their customers with spare parts and manuals so they can keep their property in good working order.

It could be a model for many kinds of devices, a return to the Maker Manifesto’s call for “screws not glue” and “user-replaceable parts.”

At the vanguard of the movement are people from ex-Soviet states, where deprivation was the mother of innovation, so that thrifty, ingenious home repairs were the key to human thriving. This ethic is also key today, if we are to reduce our material consumption, carbon footprint, and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in the name of securing the conflict minerals in our devices.

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/14/screwloose.html

[lavender-lily]

I was a little late to the Hozier party. I mean I loved Take Me To Church and I laughed at the dark forest prince memes and I even reblogged them, but I figured it was all kind of a tumblr exaggeration.

Then I listened to his album, wherein he sings about:

decomposing in a field with his love and getting eaten by foxes

being dug out of the dirt by his love, who he implores to kiss him “like real people do”, implying that neither of them are real people

observing the world as an outsider (“happy to lie back, watch it burn and rust; we tried the world, good god it wasn’t for us”)

rising from his grave to crawl home to his love

“the bog man”

and I realized, no, he’s just Like That.

[turquoisetigress]

are you telling me all of those are real songs and not just aesthetics tumblr made up

[lavender-lily]

Listen, I didn’t believe it either, but that’s absolutely what I’m telling you.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

You know, when I was in the Guides (you’re called Girl Scouts in America, right?) there were always people muttering about how it was regressive and anti-feminist and whatever, making us do girly things all the time, and I kind of internalised that. It wasn’t until I left for university that I realised exactly how damn much it had taught me. 

I knew how to cook. I knew how to light a fire, do basic first aid, swim, iron, do the laundry, wash-up oil-soaked frying pans at lightning speed, make a bed, change a fuse, hell, even build a bridge in an emergency. I found out the other day that one of my friends didn’t know what you were supposed to do when you burn yourself. On my first day at university, I met somebody who didn’t know how to to do the washing up. 

People had such a weird view on it when we were kids. They weren’t teaching us to be housewives. They weren’t teaching us how to look after other people, not really. They were teaching us how to take care of ourselves. I kind of wish I could go back and apologise for sulking so much about being made to learn the symbols on laundry labels. 

And if they taught me to paint my nails stylishly and flower-arrange like a duchess too, well, you can bet I have the best looking dorm room on campus. 

[informative-feminist]

People are so quick to shit on traditionally feminine activities… without realizing that basically forever, women have been the backbone of society. Laundry, cooking, childcare, etc are important and are honorable and respectable jobs/tasks, so long as they aren’t imposed on anyone because of gender. 

Everyone should know how to do laundry, cook for themselves, and do all the things listed above. If a man (or anyone for that matter_ felt he was above those things because they would make him less respectable, I’d actually lose respect for him. 

[earnedmagic]

topics apparent in traditional christmas carols that have Strangely Disappeared from modern canon:

the devil

the lord of this manor better give us booze or we’ll burn his house Down

alternatively, give us some cash

this plant is Red like the blood of Childbirth

i was wooed in the sheep field

what up, it’s the Devil again

goods or tuppence may be exchanged for a viewing of this wren we’ve killed

SWORD DANCE TUNES

we sing in thanks of the maidservant who let the mob into the laird’s home

dancing is a sin but do you think i’m gonna stop

unlikely

the apple crop better be good or next year it’ll grow fertilized with your blood

the winter is cruel but the laird is crueler

the church is also cruel

it’s lucky to give us money. in this case, the luck is not getting stabbed

really there are so many bangers

[fuckyeahcomicsbaby]

Different Stories Resonate with Different People

[lovingmyselfishard]

I will always reblog this.

[fahbee]

Now imagine if instead of saying “I don’t understand why you make these stories, but you do you” and fucking off to look at stories they do like, that character instead says “your stories are ugly and unwanted, no decent person should tolerate you making them” and rallies the others to ban the creation of these kind of stories, shame the creator out of town, and declare anyone who would want such a story to be nasty and gross.

[dankmemeuniversity]

[lauralot89]

Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]

Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?

this really does sound like an episode of black mirror

[architeuthism]

But wait, it’s even weirder than that!

[retroactivebakeries]

This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.

[crazy-pages]

…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.

This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.

[crazy-pages]

Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.

Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.

This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.

[garbage-empress]

As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.

[transhumanist-viking-deactivate]

Anti-trans group admits bathroom predator myth is made up

Empirical research shows bathroom predator concerns are baseless.

“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions.”

COLOUR ME FUCKING SURPRISED

[transhumanist-viking-deactivate]

I want people, in particular cis people, to read this and understand what it means.

It means that these groups, these organizations, are so Hellbent on getting trans people outlawed, hurt, and killed, that they will openly lie and admit to lying to stir up emotions. They have no qualms with actively lying and distorting reality. 

They have no qualms about misleading people. Actively lying to people. 

They don’t care how immoral their actions may be, how much their rhetoric flies in the face of reality, as long as it reaches their end goal of the destruction of “transgender ideology.” 

MassResistance and all their ilk want us dead, and should never be trusted, not even for the most trivial of matters. They should be rejected, reviled, despised, because nothing they do is in service of anything but hatred and evil. 

And in case anyone actually doubts this, and wants to cry “fake news,” here’s MR’s actual article. Should it get deleted, here’s an archived version. Some choice bits under the cut, if you want to see how vile these people really are. 

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