No title available

Discoholic 🪩

pixel skylines
Cosmic Funnies
cherry valley forever
Misplaced Lens Cap
hello vonnie

if i look back, i am lost

roma★
trying on a metaphor
i don't do bad sauce passes
Three Goblin Art

blake kathryn
taylor price
AnasAbdin
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
ojovivo
YOU ARE THE REASON
Game of Thrones Daily
Keni
seen from United States
seen from New Zealand
seen from United States
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia
@veleda-k
yeah i like to give my blessing to the most pathetic looking weak little knight at the tournament. she can’t even look me in the eye when i give her my flower and she stutters out that she’ll do her best or something of the like. i think its funny when she has to cry and beg my forgiveness and i get to say “such a shame, i suppose my hand in marriage will have to go to someone else…” and then i get to hear her whimper like a dog. ive done this like 6 times alrea-
did she just win.
I shall prepare a stew for the wedding! Extra salt!
wait wait wait stew goblin wait
get ready for the wedding
I hate ethics because what the hell is this.
Real slide in my real college level ethics class
I- what the fuck
How is this even a question. This is not troles problem level shit, this is just "will you save a child for 0 consequences or are you an asshole"
Because I see enough people saying this and being confused: that is, in fact, the point.
This slide is meant to be an extreme example to demonstrate where act utilitarianism falls apart. Act utilitarianism is ultimately measuring how much a given single act increases happiness/reduces suffering, and saying that the most ethical choice you can make for that action is the one where that increase/reduction is the highest. It's often used as a "man ethics is easy I got this shit solved, we don't have to talk about this"
So if, to assign an arbitrary number for the sake of example, saving a drowning child is a +100,000 Happiness Units, but giving a bunny a slight feeling of happiness is only +1, then of course you save the child. But if you're giving slight happiness to 100,001 bunnies, that brings more happiness than saving the child, and act utilitarianism says you should let the kid drown. Any evil can be the ethical choice given sufficient numbers of mildly pleased bunnies. This is, obviously, kinda insane. It's an example to show that while this kind of utilitarianism can work in most scenarios (the typical trolley problem, for example), there are times where it doesn't work, so it cannot function as a universal system of ethics.
oh I get it
Maybe I just really like rabbits.
Mei and Scars relationship is something that can be so personal….
why is it always the fancylad boy-king type whos the bottom. maybe his tough loyal knight who uses his body to protect and defend him and lives to serve him wants to get railed
maybe i just like it when masc dudes with scars and calluses and a devotion complex bigger than the moon get topped by troubled prettyboys with hands thatve never worked a day in their life. who said that
im going to post old cat images now
ceiling cat
monorail cat
long cat
the OG can i haz cheezburger cat
the lesser known graphix cat
invisible bike cat
my planet needs me cat
cat with the gat
Good lord we need MOAR of the original LOLCATS (or cat macros, as they were originally known)
the OG memes
Ah, the ancient texts.
i truly think that this recent trend of “if you relate to a post about a different identity than your own you are ~derailing~ and taking over the conversation” is incredibly harmful.
i recently experienced some pretty severe transphobic abuse in my workplace (children’s home) that included having food thrown at me, being called slurs, being told i was a pervert because i am trans. one of the managers talked with me afterwards and shared that he had had a similar experience as an Asian man. this wasn’t him derailing my experience, or talking over me, or making things about himself. he was communicating “hey, i know how it feels and how much it sucks. you’re not alone.”
THAT is what solidarity IS. i don’t know what it’s like to be Asian, he doesnt know what it’s like to be trans, but we both had a similar experience and we were able to turn a horrible experience into an opportunity for bonding and comfort.
stop looking at people’s attempts as solidarity as an attack. and hey, you never know - you could find an opportunity to grow closer to other people.
if you were a weapon, (and you are one now. i’ve made you into one just by reading this) what kind of weapon would you be?
i am no longer asking i need answers people. tell me what weapon your soul is forged into.
I'm gonna answer but, uh, "(and you are one now. i’ve made you into one just by reading this)" had made me feel a thing. @splinteredstar
"I love you but you're doing wrong in a way I cannot condone" and "I hate you but you're being wronged in a way I cannot stomach" are top tier and I need more of them.
Oh boy i wonder what day it is
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
Tags quoted from Previous:
#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma
Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of "A.I. slop" in the comments?
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Thank you.
Signal boosting for the Truth.
As I said in the tags previous to this, A.I. is damaging to our culture not only for producing slop, but also for spreading mistrust of the truth.
Buffy + Her Scar From Angel's Bite
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It's a trend I've seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.
I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."
There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you
And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.
Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum
The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.
And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."
Anyway sorry I've rambled here, not sure how coherent I'm being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.
Doug Sneyd for Playboy
AW YEAH ITS TIME FOR
Texts From Superheroes
Facebook | Threads | Patreon | Instagram | BlueSky