odd, but harmless

I love these things: tennis, Jedi, philosophy. So you will find here: tennis, fandom stuff (Star Wars among others), politics, cats, & birds.

[unsteadyunsubtle]

Hello there.

Autumn, 30s, she/they.

- lurker, not very talkative, awkward, bad at emojis, terrible social anxiety (debilitating, even)

- random (fandom + politics/other + tennis) posting (up to 50 queued reblogs/day) (subject to change)

- everything is tagged with who/what it is (ask if you need me to tag something a different way) (sometimes i don’t tag critical posts though)

- asks are open

- i’ve got asks that need answering (i swear i don’t forget about them)

- i delete DMs from blogs i don’t recognise

[carlicos]

@rolandgarros: History made 🍁

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[bviralmedia]

Curious Tiger Chews on Cardboard Tube in His Outdoor Enclosure

[albva]

[tanicappack]

Audio description: many sniffs and grunts and growl/purrs

[philosophybits]

“When the mind is inflated or derisive, full of arrogance and vanity, exceedingly jocose, evasive, or deceiving, when, seeming to advance oneself, it is only deprecating others, contemptuous and scornful, one should remain like a block of wood.”

— Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Crosby & Skilton tr. (5:49-50)

[murkyburakh]

sparkles my eyes at you

[tienbytien]

it's just a sport! it's just some random guys i don't even know playing tennis! is what i would tell myself if it doesn't feel like my heart is getting ripped out at this loss. unfortunately it does

[jasminepaolini]

i'm going to believe casper ruud will pull a late-bloomer stan wawrinka first slam at 29 until the day he turns 30. and then i'm going to believe he'll wild card his way into winning his dream slam goran ivanišević-style until the second he retires. and even then. i will never lose hope, i will never surrender.

[unsteadyunsubtle]

My bank sent a Happy Birthday update to me, in its app. Gross. Gross. Gross.

[carlicos]

[wingkink]

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

[hunnydeuce]

Roland Garros 2026 Round 1: Casper Ruud

[burgundyflowers]

One of the biggest matches yesterday. 💥

Congrats again Casper ! This kind of matches always reminds you why tennis is such a difficult sport. Several match points yesterday but it's at this moment that he didn’t feel good. He explained it in an interview.

He even admitted that he was close to go home because of the heat. The conditions were suffocating... I feel him. Onto the next round !

[itskubra]

Attrition is a very well loved part of this sport and sports in general - it’s a big part of the reason matches like the Roland Garros Final are celebrated so heavily. But when it becomes all about attrition, when matches and seasons are just about who can survive the longest, it’s clear that something is wrong.

When everyone and their mother is injured or collapsing or pulling out of tournaments to avoid that all together, that should be a clue that something in the system is broken.

[challengersdvd]

holy fuck okay i’m so angry right now this probably is going to be very incoherent so please forgive me but oh my god. fuck every single tournament director and scheduler for serious. it is clear time and time again that they are more focused on making a profit than player safety and wellbeing. we’ve seen it at ao this year, we’ve seen it here, we saw it last summer during the american hc swing. injury upon injury, retirements galore, and for what? tournament after tournament players are forced to incentivized to play through injury, play in grueling conditions, to play as much as they can because they literally have no other fucking options because they have no protection against these things happening. if they decide to take care of their bodies by not playing, they’re docked points if they don’t meet a certain requirement of tournaments played, or they face their ranking dropping, not to mention certain types of fans calling them spoiled or whiny meanwhile the tour doesn’t seem to actually give a shit if their players are suffering. they implement things like heat rules and closing the roof not to prevent injury/sickness, but as a reaction to it. and players shouldn’t have to be the ones advocating for themselves in order for their health and their wishes about scheduling and safety concerns to be granted. they should already be met. but instead we have slams like rg not compensating their players fairly, players having to negotiate in order to receive a pension, and their scheduling concerns getting ignored. i’m aware that getting injured is a part of the life of an athlete. but i’m tired of fucking acting like it’s normal for countless players to be constantly injured and/or sick while on tour, having to retire from their matches due to tournaments not implementing the heat rule soon enough/not implementing it as a precaution so players actually don’t hurt themselves. how many more players have to suffer for things to change? how bad does it have to get?

[depsidase]

[barkingbarghest]

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.  Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.  Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.   Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”  “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

[the-crying-bitch]

[cythraul]

This is you reminder that, even in Google's own Chrome, you can set the default search to DuckDuckGo.

[macsen-y-ceffyl]

Time to change search engine I guess.

I noticed yesterday when I was looking up the etymology of a word it gave me an ai answer instead of the usual word derivation and synonyms list (that has been present pre-ai). Useless. Beyond useless now.

[challengersdvd]

Hailey Baptiste photographed by during her first match at Roland Garros against Barbora Krejčíková on May 24, 2026 | ph. KJ Carter