healing my inner child via the queer media I didn’t get to have as a kid. they/them. Mid thirties. ND af. mostly byler, i write fics sometimes :) otherwise memes & analysis - specifically picking apart queer subtext. And anything else I like, e.g. birbs 🦅
(template for commenting on fics if you don’t know how to! Authors love comments we live or die by them 🥺)
Bridging the Gap - where did Mike sleep after the roller rink? 🤔 For @pika-cthuluuuuu
First connection after arrival - in which Mike & Will have a conversation after Mike arrives in Cali. (And some beautiful fanart for it - by @green-garbage 🥺💓)
Shed Scene Reprise part 1 and part 2
Re: Lighting up a Room. The Van Scene from Mike’s POV. His head is full of static noises (homosexually). For my 1000 followers celebration! 🥺 (The fanart @gmaybe666 did for this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me omg sobbingggg 😭💗 details here!)
Popcorn: a Byler first date ficlet for @duskandwandlight 🥰 Feat. hints of Elumax, also feat. platonic!Elmike being powerful af. ALERT ADORABLE FANART by @gmaybe666 🤩🍿 And here too!!
Will’s Crush: a post-painting sleepy convo. The cute hc and fanart I used as prompts are tagged within. Enjoy!
ST S5 E01 - The Painter (Pt 1) - El and Mike finally have a long talk, during the course of which Mike discovers he might not have his story… straight, if you will… regarding Will’s painting. My longest fic to date!
Analyses
Why El needs Hopper’s parental love, not Mike’s romantic love (link)
El needed to hear everything she wanted to hear from Mike to realize that Mike is not what she wants (link)
El and Choice - also El / Mike / Will triangle and El / Mike / Max triangle analysis (link)
Other cool cats’ posts
Probably my favorite post about why Byler makes sense as the narrative direction of Stranger Things, by @queerxqueen
An excellent summary of why it matters that Mike Wheeler is both gay and just a normal dude TM - and why that will shake the straights tf up, as it should. By @wakeupthemembersofbylernation
Is S4 finale too soon for requited byler? No. True as heck words by @admirablespoling
Well V2 initially seemed to slap us in the face and call us a slur but this post makes it make sense (or gives the suffer bros too much credit - who knows!) Def recommend a read if you’ve lost byler hope. by ceIiasaint on Twitter
How the gen aud may be feeling re: Mike, El, and Will after S4. A really good read by @merthurfan-blog
Videos analyzing Mike’s scenes in S4 and concluding that “gay” and “byler.” By @naturallybrielle on tiktok
Visual/cinematic analysis of the subtext re: Mike Wheeler in ST S4 which concludes that byler. By Joanna on Twitter
Decor
Patch on my jacket
Art on my wall
My scout badge
Poster on my wall (not a joke this time lol)
Events
The Byler Big Bang 2022! Get involved folks!
Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.
Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.
Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.
I'll say it again:
Rumination is a compulsion.
Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.
I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.
And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.
Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.
Like this was genuinely life changing for me.
Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:
I have a neighbor in her late 80s who I have lived next to for the past 4 years since I bought this house, that I have to re-introduce myself to every time she spots me outside. She remembers that I am her neighbor but cannot remember my name (unless she's talking to my partner, in which case she does remember my name but not his).
She has a truly ancient tiny dog whose pastimes include shitting on my driveway and picking fence fights with Fenris. Occasionally she will ask me to do his nails and he's actually wonderful for them so it takes like 3 minutes tops. She also will usually hand me whatever bill she has in her wallet for it- sometimes it's a 1, once it was a 50, usually it's like 5 bucks.
Now I have tried refusing her money and even gave the 50 back and wouldn't accept it. I then came home to the $50 bill taped to my back door the next day after work. So, you know, I'm kind of stuck accepting whatever she tries to give me because she WILL tape the money to my house somewhere otherwise.
(Once she gave one of her granddaughters a gift that required batteries and was distraught that it didn't come with any. Knocked on my door to ask if I had any. I haven't used my spare batteries in ages so I just gave her a whole pack. Refused to let her pay for them. Three days later a pack of batteries plus ten bucks was taped to my door. So this is not an uncommon occurance.)
Anyway this time she didn't have any money to pay because we're all fucking broke as shit on this block and she was really upset because his nails were starting to curl and once again I did them in like 3 minutes and when she apologized for not being able to pay me I just waved her off and told her not to worry about it.
I came home on Monday to my backyard being totally cleared of winter debris and the growing collection of winter dog shit as well as my fence repaired in two of the places that broke when the tree fell on it. I texted her adult son whose number I have and he confirmed he did it because he was happy that I helped his mom out with her dog. I tried to explain that it really does not take a lot to do the dog's nails but he similarly refused to hear it and said he'd be back in a few days to finish fixing the fence.
Idk why I thought he would be different from his mother. But I guess I get free fence repairs for the price of doing an old lady's dog's nails once every couple weeks to months.
you don’t realize how important lunch is until you’re wandering around thinking about how unloveable and untalented and uniquely cursed you are and then it’s 4pm and you finally eat lunch and you go Oh. oh right.
we all know adult humans dont get enough enrichment but the other day i was walkin home past an empty playground and impulsively ran over to spin myself on this zipline merry-go-round contraption for a few minutes and it really did feel like it unlocked some neglected part of my brain. like damn we really should all go outside and play more. fuck. they werent kidding with this play time thing. have you guys heard about play time. it could be huge.
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
today's the brown shrike! you're likely familiar with its sister species, the loggerhead shrike, arguably the most famous of the family as it's the only one which resides in the contiguous U.S. today's representative ranges across a huge amount of Asia! with a large range, there's predictably geographic variation - birds that breed in Japan have bright rust-colored backs, those which inhabit China and the Philippines are a misty grey, the soft brown type species migrates between South Asia and Siberia, so on and so forth. rarely, an exceptionally adventurous individual finds their way to Europe or North America. the fellow getting his hand bit is from the U.S. west coast!
birds often travel back to the same wintering areas they've lived in year after year. its black mask fades to brown in its tropical winter homes, and females tend to have scallop markings on their chests far more often than males do. it prefers areas open to the sky that have at least a few trees and shrubs - it shares its family's characteristic behavior of skewering prey on thorns, sharp branches, or human fences for storage and impressing other shrikes. this is the source of the family's fame, being simultaneously a small unassuming songbird and ruthless predator. it usually takes insects, with the occasional small lizard or bird. they declare their territory by singing from the tops of their thorn bushes with closed beaks, and are often heard incorporating other songbirds' calls into their own song. (incidentally, some related shrikes use the family's mimicking ability to copy the calls of small songbirds, luring them into attacking distance. rude)
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.
sex is a distraction from your true purpose in life which is to go to the aquarium and look at the fish and go "wooooooaaah.... fishies". cmon guys we all need to lock in.
women’s bodies weren’t “made” to do anything, nature didn’t “intend” anything, no human action is “unnatural” and there is no inherent “purpose” to a human life
