you look so cool

cat, 25, she/her/hers

[skinandblood]

The casting announcements that I'm waiting for:

- Galina my queen

- Irina, cause i'm guessing we'll get to see Ilya's dreams

- Anya

- Chiron

- Chompy

[miskhos]

tonight i swore a blood oath to the minimum wage workers at my local subway

[mutinsfromthemoon]

one time in the locker room a rookie comes up to shane and ilya asking how they call each other, like “do you call him bro?” and shane and ilya both stop and look at each other and then break into a huge grin and say at the exact same time “BRO” and ilya goes “you’re more than my bro, you’re my homie” and shane’s like “broooo you can always count on me” and they dap each other up while the rest of the cens are laughing their heads off and the rookie is sitting there in his stall beet red from embarrassment.

[spicyvampire]

The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it

[cottagehillsunset]

Hayden is invited to one of Bood's barbeques some time down the line. It's a nice evening and the Centaurs are good people. But Hayden can't shake this weird feeling of unfamiliarity all night. And at first he chalks it up to him being at a Bood barbeque the first time, hanging out with a team that isn't his. And so he always ends up looking for Shane in the crowd because that's his best friend, that's his familiar person. Except the feeling doesn't go away as he watches Shane throughout the evening.

Shane is playing with the curls at Ilya's neck. He's laughing at a joke from Luca. He rolls his eyes at a chirp from Ilya who in turn presses an exaggerated kiss to his cheek. He's playing mario kart with Wyatt and Young at some point, all of them yelling and swearing loudly. He's holding Ilya's hand in both of his. He's talking to Harris about going back to the restaurant they went to the other day, you guys want to join us? He's hooking his ankle over Ilya's. He's beaming at Harris as he takes a picture of the couple. He's grinning at something Ilya whispers to him in Russia.

After dinner, Hayden's standing on the patio with a beer in his hand watching as Shane and Ilya chase each other around Bood's yard, a spectacle that is accompanied by loud cheers from the rookies that are watching them. At one point Shane full on tackles Ilya and they end up on the grass laughing and wrestling. Wyatt whoops and shouts "Hollzy Rozy wrestling championship back the fuck on!" joining the rookies, half of them chanting "Rozy" while the other is chanting "Hollzy".

And suddenly the weird feeling takes on a painful shape. Because it's not the team or the house that's causing this deep sense of unfamiliarity. It's seeing Shane, happy and carefree with his boyfriend and his friends in a way that Hayden has never really seen before.

[pragnificent]

Just in case anyone hasn't caught on -

The reason AI programs like Gemini are programmed to encourage you to let it make basic life choices for you like what restaurant you should eat at is because they intend to monetize your patronage.

It's just a matter of time before the AI stops offering you the most highly rated option in the area or whatever aligns most closely to what you requested (If it's even doing that now) and instead only recommends restaurants that have paid the company for that privilege.

Restaurants that won't pay Google to recommend them to AI users are going to become functionally invisible, whereas those who are willing to purchase what amounts to targeted advertisements laundered through an AI "friend" will get new customers regardless of their quality.

Basic rule: If you aren't paying for something, that means you're the product.

[lailah-tov]

Google Maps already does this, preferring more distant sponsored results over closer non-sponsored ones. All the claims that these algorithms make the same choices you would make if you just had the time and energy to research them are totally false. They make the choices that lead to profitable results for the companies that program them, with a user interface that gaslights you into thinking it was your idea all along.

[aqueerkettleofish]

You can see this at work already in Google Play store-- you search for an app, and the only time the app you're looking for is the top result is when the company behind the app has paid for the privilege-- in which case you'll see it twice.

You can also see this at work on Amazon, when searching by exact product name can sometimes put your result on the second or third page, while you scroll through alternatives that Amazon wants to sell you.

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[thatgiraffebutt]

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

[literallyaflame]

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

[madd-catter]

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

[gen-is-gone]

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

[anarchistmemedistro]

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

[deathcomes4u]

worst part is! IT’S STILL HAPPENING! SCHOOLS AND WORKPLACES ARE STILL LIKE THIS!!! THEY LEARNED NOTHING!!!!!!!

[mod2amaryllis]

[thotsoflore]

Literally looking like the kind of note you find in a post apocalyptic horror game jesus

[sunnywalnut]

If only we as a society learned from our mistakes

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

if they're gonna remake The Princess Bride, it should open with a kid sick in bed scrolling on his phone. his grandpa arrives with a gift--it's a DVD player with a disc already inside. grandpa hooks it up to the TV and presses play. and we all just watch the original 1987 film again.

[mina-logan]

“Shane, how does it feel to be back on Montreal ice?”

[superchat]

there was a great study a few years that went into the whole "ppl online are bigger jerks than irl cuz theres a virtual wall and no repercussions" and the researchers were expecting to see that be the case but it turns out that people who were really angry or argumentative online were also found to just be assholes in person and people who were pretty patient and nice online were found to be patient and nice in real person as well

and it just debunked that whole cynical idea that people will naturally be mean if theres no punishment for it

[superchat]

source another source

the researchers found that being online didnt make people more hostile, but that being online allowed already hostile people to dominate forum conversations, and the less aggressive people were much less likely to reply or engage, ending in just the aggressive people bickering at eachother

[quasi-normalcy]

Thereby disproving Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

[cannibalcaprine]

i feel like we don't appreciate these days how much the twin towers sucked, like, design-wise

they were contemporarily hated for just being these giant grey monoliths

like there probably could've been an easier way to get rid of them, but they probably needed to go either way

[tgirl-subway-the-dark-ages]

crying at this. the curb is brutalist. the sidewalk is brutalist. house made of concrete bricks is brutalist. lmao??

[cue-jay]

[miamaimania]

“Through Beaded Veils” by Marcin Górski

[cutecipher]

i really thought the point of "being lgbt+ doesn't absolve you of racism as a white person" was that white people arent absolved of racism by being marginalized but it really seems like people think other marginalizations make it okay. no being disabled doesn't do it. no being poor doesnt do it. we need to fight against racism actively no matter what.

[nevver]

Stray light, Clarissa M Bonet

[sawed-on-shotgun]

unfortunate truth of reality is that oftentimes 15 year olds will say/do/believe some stupid bullshit because they are 15 but telling them that they believe that because they are 15 is probably the most counterproductive thing in the entire universe

[allwhiterain-deactivated2025061]

Matthew Lillard and Angelina Jolie as “Cereal Killer” and “Acid Burn” in Hackers (1995)

[zagreus]

previously unseen genders in human history