It's that time of year again

pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Stranger Things

Kaledo Art
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor
tumblr dot com
Today's Document

oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.

#extradirty

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi

JVL

if i look back, i am lost
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@viqueen
It's that time of year again
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
why are dudes in fanfic always getting hit with freight train orgasms. why not an orient express orgasm, classy and romantic. where are the shinkansen train orgasms? his orgasm hit him like the TGV atlantique breaking the passenger rail speed record. like the shanghai maglev, his orgasm was a feat of engineering but something of a commercial disappointment.
Don’t tell me delayed orgasms aren’t a thing
learning new things about the german rail system today
meanwhile in magaland
it actually is insane to me that it's a cultural norm for men to suck ass at getting their wives/gfs gifts. especially when they whine about how they have no idea what women like.
man, you're not getting a gift for Female Domestic Partner. you're getting a gift for Natalie, a person whom you have been married to for 7 years, whom has lived in the same home with you for a decade, whom speaks to you every day about her thoughts and interests, whom you presumably love, and whom you can directly or indirectly ask what she wants. it's not that you don't know what half the human population wants, that's irrelevant. you don't know what Natalie wants and that is inexcusable.
This would have had me crucified on tumblr 10 years ago but maybe we are ready for this conversation now:
If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.
This is a PSA to about 3/4s of the Portland Youth populace
everyone who reblogs this and is like "I ordered my own tea this week" or "I only barfed once when I had to give a presentation'- you are doing amazing sweetie. Have patience with yourself, you are relearning a skill so difficult that people get 4 year degrees to do it professionally.
Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.
#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
XKCD: Degree Off
Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.
The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;
“Smallpox was.”
For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.
Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.
The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.
The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.
Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.
In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.
If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.
After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.
Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.
We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.
With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;
“Tuberculosis was.”
“Smallpox was.”
Fuck. That hit me hard.
death and the stars
I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
I absolutely love the casting for the AOS movies because yeah Chris Pine kinda looks like a yassified Jim Kirk, and Zachary Quinto does look like a younger Spock. But then they looked at big, tall, broad shouldered, muscular action man Karl Urban and went. Yeah, I think he can play scrawny bean pole shrimp postured, looks like a light gust of wind would blow him away, Leonard McCoy. And by god, were they correct because it was like the spirit of Deforest Kelley himself possessed him to play Bones.
Urbanization contributed to Deforestation.
#that may legitimately be the worst pun i've ever read with my own two eyes
i think when i started drawing i accepted that i never cared or needed to be a 'good' artist and that my two priorities were to be a happy artist and a better artist than i was before and because of that now people will ask me how to be a good artist and its like. well first step is you dont
everything i draw ever exists on a two point axis. will it make me happy or will it help me learn something/practice a skill. and ive never done anything else and thats working out
I talked with someone who works in book publishing, and they mentioned they get a lot of AI slop these days. I asked how they know what's human-written, and they said that there's one thing that will reveal AI slop without error, and that's the author not knowing their own creation.
A real author can talk about their story for hours. They love to elaborate every character, every twist, every detail. Because those existed in their head long before they ever made it to the paper. They were loved before they were written.
AI slop wasn't. It was just vomited into existence.
Someone who generates their story with AI will never bond with their story the way real writers do. That's why they may not know what to say when they're asked why did the character do this, or even remember the scene in the first place. It's something they read, not something they wrote. And to a writer, those are not the same.
There's a unique bond between the creator and the creation. If your writing doesn't come of you, you'll always lack that.
I keep hearing soon we won't be able to tell. And perhaps, in a superficial sense, that's true. But there is a difference. It's not em dashes or repeated words. It's whether the story was made by someone who loves it and cares about it.
If the writer's eyes light up when asked why did the character do that? and they start their very own Ted Talk about that specific scene...
then it's real.