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guys I figured out whos committing the voter fraud

#gravity falls #stanley pines #stan pines #grunkle stan #raina

That liminal space where an artist you follow has switched their social media avatar from a trending anime girl to a female OC, the he/him pronouns have quietly vanished from their bio, and their drawings of cartoon ladies with big boobs have taken on a distinctly aspirational cast, but they haven't publicly said anything, so you've gotta keep your damn mouth shut.

zoe-bee-it

ay-que-si

Nah, fuck the egg directive

prokopetz

This ain't about the "egg directive". By the time somebody gets to the point of yanking the pronouns out of their bio, it's vanishingly unlikely that they haven't figured out a thing or two on their own. When a person conspicuously changes up their gender presentation without acknowledging that this is what they're doing, there's often a good reason for that; maybe they simply lack confidence and need a final push to come out, or maybe they were trying to go stealth and now I'm the asshole who put their gender situation on blast in a public forum for no good reason – and, critically, since I don't know them, I have no way of judging which of these is likely to be the case. Some things are best left to those who actually know what's going on, y'know?

just-sg

You also can't assume their situation. Maybe they're questioning, exploring options to see how it feels, but in the end he'll come back as a more feminine but confidently gender non-conforming man. Maybe she's realized she's a girl, and she knows a lot of her followers will get the vibe, but she doesn't feel safe because of family or coworkers or others who also follow those accounts; maybe she's pretty sure she's safe but needs to talk to some people in person first. Maybe they aren't a man anymore but also aren't a woman and you would be both outing them to people they don't want to know anything and still misgendering them by suddenly using she/her and referring to them as a girl.

It's not an arbitrary rule people made up for fun or a bit. It's a matter of basic safety and respect. You let people come out on their own.

empiresprince

I teach hs. I was in charge of the musical.

I was literally walking around backstage saying “Id make more sense as a gay man “

The adults who watched this just mutely nodded.

The students who saw me bought me a children’s picture book called Red about a crayon that had the wrong label.

It still took until lockdown for me to get it. These are far from the only embarrassing moments in my adult life were people made a safe space for me and just let me figure it out in my own time. I don’t think anyone could have or should have forced the issue.

We have to give each other space to figure things out and revel ourselves in our time.

prokopetz

zoe-bee-it

humanbeanisnotamused

Image ID: the "not yet, ferb" meme, where instead of holding a weapon poised to strike, ferb is holding a transgender flag. end ID

reallyreallyreallytrying

people say dolphins are smart but there not smart enough to not be Shity grey rubber tubes flappin about in the gotdamn ocean

mystic-bullshit

*they’re

reallyreallyreallytrying

congratulations! you are the piss lord of shit mountain. thank u for hefting turds down the mountainside so that we, the proles, may feast on your bounteous craps

cryptonature

Turn to the right, it's clockwise.

Turn to the left, it's counterclockwise.

Help Mr. Frodo get to Mordor, it's...

beggars-opera

Boston 1721

psychotic-gerard

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

orchidvioletindigo

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

trials-era-sam

novelconcepts

Man, we have got to stop treating art like it has an expiration date. That show stopped airing? Doesn’t mean it can’t haunt your every waking thought. Everybody’s into this album, but you don’t have the energy for new music right now? It’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready. That movie’s fifty years old and indie as shit? Incredible, you have the chance to share it with folks who might never otherwise feel that particular punch of delight. Books don’t go bad. Shows inspire fandoms decades after they’ve wrapped up. We’re still looking at cave paintings and statue work from ancient times and letting the joy of creation bring tears to our eyes. That’s the point of art. It’s as close to immortality as we ever get. Why try to give that magic a shelf life?

tami-taylors-hair

Shoutout to Canada for those election results. Must feel great knowing conservatives don’t get to run the country and y’all can maintain your well earned right to being smug that “at least we aren’t Americans.”

rapeculturerealities

People in states with abortion bans are twice as likely to die during pregnancy

The risk is greatest among Black women in states with abortion bans, according to a new report.

The Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonprofit research and policy organization that put out the report, found that since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, pregnancy-related death rates have declined in states that protect abortion access and increased in Texas, the largest state to ban the procedure. The report found that pregnant Black women, White women and Latinas are all at greater risk of death in states with abortion bans than they would be if they lived in states that protect abortion rights.

batbetbitbotbut

This absurd yarn is 45% cashmere, 55% silk. I have never worked with anything even remotely like it - no cashmere, no silk, and definitely nothing so thin as 92 wraps per inch. Ninety fucking two.

New, it originally cost £200/kg. A very, very kind weaver in Scotland was de-stashing and sent me 5 kilos for £50 total (plus shipping).

I have many dreams for it but right now I mostly have screams. I have no real idea how it will behave in weaving, so I've wound a small warp for some sampling and a scarf. This is 3.5km of yarn (a bit over 2 miles) and it weighs 119 grams (a bit over 4 ounces?). For those of you playing along at home, each 1kg cone is thus 30 kilometres of yarn (nearly 20 miles). It does not feel like any other yarn I have ever touched.

Because it's so thin (difficult to handle or even see) and so valuable, I am using it with a "dummy warp" - I have left the remains of the baby blanket warp on the loom and then I tie the new warp to it, thread by thread by single fucking thread. This means I don't have to set up the loom all over again and almost none of the fancy yarn will become "loom waste", the unweaveable section of warp at the end of a project. But it also means tying every knot, perfectly in order for each end of both the old and new warps, without the cat getting too interested.

24 knots down, a mere 1000 to go...

batbetbitbotbut

A mild amount of back pain and an estimated 5.5 to 6 hours of knot tying later...

By the end I was up to 204 knots per hour, or 235 miles per hour². (This is a nautical units joke.) (It's not funny though.) Every tutorial warns you that it will look like a bird's nest at this stage but it's very hard to have faith.

But it straightened out! The knots flowed through the reed beautifully, and through the heddles only slightly less beautifully!

The new problem is the knots which spontaneously appear between the reed and heddles while winding on. Everywhere. All the time. I can wind on like two inches before needing to detangle 50% of the warp again, which really kills any sense of progress. Slow and unsteady may at least finish the race, perhaps by sometime next week...

batbetbitbotbut

WELL. Thank you for your good thoughts, everyone. That went badly.

After an estimated 20hrs of work - tying onto the dummy warp, trying to warp through all the tangles, then trying to unwarp and turn the threads on the loom back into a warp chain again, then trying to warp with that new chain, then cutting off the dummy warp section (sorry to my 1024 knots) and trying to wind on just the remainder, this is what I had to show for it:

Dummy warp braided/spun into a set of climbing ropes for my partner's pet mice, final warp attempt one enormous snarl (but at that stage I hadn't really expected it to work, this was a quick last effort before the bin). First warp I've had to give up on since my very very first project, where I had no idea how to put it on the loom and the cat got caught up in it.

But it's okay! I learnt a lot and I'm glad I tried it. It was slow but not usually frustrating, even when it didn't work. Someday I will try the new-to-me methods again, but in the meantime I will stick to familiar methods, which take a little more yarn in theory but will make up for it by not having to discard entire projects.

Today I measured out WARP 2: EVEN WARPIER and it wound onto the loom perfectly. I have threaded 140 of 800 warp ends so far. We'll get there.

batbetbitbotbut

Finished threading, sleyed the reed at 40 warp ends per inch. Tied on, started weaving, oh no it's massively off being balanced - in plain weave, 48 weft picks per inch compared to those 40 ends. I had thought the slight fuzzy halo on the yarn would fill out the gaps, but it was too fine.

Gentle sigh. Cut it off. Sleyed again at 50 warp ends per inch, still possibly a little low for the twill I had planned (twill requires higher epi than plain weave) but very easy maths. Much closer to square. Left some room for a fringe and then started a scarf for real.

I just--

It was worth it.

batbetbitbotbut

The weaving itself, once I got going, took barely a day - probably 4ish hours total. Tying and twisting the fringes was another few hours.

Next my partner asked around and found people happy to give me tiny quantities of delicate detergent for me to hand wash it, and then I excavated the iron from the attic for the first time in years, and now at last it is done. And I am so, so, so happy with it. There are mistakes but they don't matter, it's perfect.

batboyblog

I'm not totally sure how historians will explain that America ruined its own economy for no good reason by electing the "let me ruin the economy" man

I hope to live long enough to find out.

mugasofer

America is, in fairness, hardly the first country to choose a leader with terrible economic policies that immediately destroyed the economy

discoursedrome

Yeah it feels to me like this is meat-and-potatoes stuff for history? Historians are super comfortable with "political inertia and backlash contributed to installing a bad leader, who fucked everything up". Now if America went another century or two without fucking up its own economy or suffering a collapse of its own power, all through a long chain of random presidents, that's the part that would be hard for historians. This, though, this is what history is! The only missing ingredients are a more distant hindsight and a political ideology on the part of the historian, which will arrive in the fullness of time.

That being said: this will permanently weaken America, but while it's a meaningful turning point, it will probably still be a slow decline, which remains unfun for historians. Just going by base rates, the thing that actually takes the US off the field as a great power will probably be some big war that they start or enter voluntarily, overspend runiously on, and then lose due to their long-degraded state capacity, and the historians will focus on that because it's more fun and more definitive.

discoursedrome

You know what I'm really interested in here is, what literary works from modern America (including films, etc) will still be relevant in a few centuries, and how will those be understood in terms of its political climate? Western European literature had its heyday in a period of such immense upheaval that understanding where works fall in their shifting political context is important, and yet it would have been hard to predict from within that context which would endure. The US industrialized "culture" to an unprecedented extent, which widened the already-existing gulf between "popular" and "artistic" works. Something needs a critical mass of popularity to survive to posterity, so most of the "prestige" stuff will just vanish without a trace, but at the same time, most of the mass-market media is too commodified to be appealing. I think it takes a special mix of particularist introspection and universality to last; people want a work to somehow speak to its cultural context, but still to speak to them.

And I guess, if we imagine a context where these things have passed into "world posterity" and survived the end of their cultural context, we need to look like 300-500 years ahead, and that's getting into the timeframe where ephemerality of media itself is an issue. There will almost certainly have been a major nuclear war by then, or something different but worse, so a generalized civilizational collapse is not particularly implausible, and even in the absence of one, there may be more than a century where we lack the institutional capacity needed to preserve digital media. If that bears out, accident and format bias could play a big role, as could individual decisions about what to preserve or destroy. We talk so much about the idea of posterity that it feels like we should be able to answer this, but it's just not possible, is it? All you can really say is that things that have been around for a long time already will probably be around for a long time to come.

strawhatsufi

I can tell you rn it'll be Homestuck.

discoursedrome

ok I'm sorry but homestuck is the funniest possible example of this, it's already practically lost because it was built around flash at a time when flash was already old. high-fidelity reproductions require clientside flash emulation! long homestuck animations have desynced video and audio to get around defective synchronization in flash itself! on top of that, homestuck was one of those "ARG-like" media products where the experience that made it popular was linked to the serial format and huge contemporary fandom, and that can't be reconstructed in retrospect.

honestly homestuck is an interesting case in that it even now, it mainly survives in the minds of those who participated in its fandom at the time; it's been archived, but not in a sense anyone else would care about. What will obviously happen is that in the post-apocalyptic renaissance, scholars will develop a renewed interest in classical masters like Toby Fox, and will be able to deduce from surviving texts about these artists that many of them trace their influence to a lost and undocumented work called "Homestuck", which will fuel rumours about the nature of that mythic precursor. Eventually people will find a few pesterlog fragments that don't explain much but have fun dialogue, and everyone will obsess over them, incorporate their aphorisms into learned culture, build pop culture and hermeneutics on top of them, and publish speculative reconstructions of the rest of the work, like with the Enuma Elish.

strawhatsufi

I mean, I think you're exaggerating it just a bit, it's not "practically lost", it is very much alive. and it intends to stay that way :)

there is not some shortage of people who understand what a historically significant work it is and there are many backups in multiple formats. these backups themselves can very easily become a subject of study all on their own because that in itself also started happening during the link rot era when everyone was hyperaware that online archival requires ongoing and collective labour.

it's not lost. entire archival disciplines are evolving around it. i actually think it's in less danger than anything on steam, for example -- homestuck can't be copyrighted and that's the biggest threat to archival that there is. steam can basically decide that there's no undertale anymore. but that can't happen to homestuck

discoursedrome

I have Undertale binaries lying around here! Of course, they still need to run, but "64-bit windows" is a more popular emulation target than Flash. It's actually legal to make archival copies even of copyrighted works here, though you can't really do anything with them.

Be that as it may, the issue is that this is all driven by Homestuck fans right now. It did not actually have a highly visible cultural impact, because although it was hugely popular, its influence was mostly limited to "surface-level" interpersonal ephemera and to the fandom itself. And the window for this to happen has mostly closed, because it's ludicrously long, much less appealing without the participatory element, and famous for ending poorly.

Like I don't think Homestuck is even significant to this decade in a world-historic way. If you asked me what its continuing cultural impact was I'd say it's that a lot of people were in the fandom when they were younger and have memories of that; the efforts to archive it owe more to this than to its importance as a work, and since the most important part, the participatory experience of the fandom, can't be archived, I don't expect generational transfer. The work is not climbing toward prestige or being picked up in significant numbers by younger people; the low cultural awareness and the fact that most of the fandom seems embarrassed about it means that it's unlikely to ever achieve the iconic status of other "you had to be there" events like Beatlemania or Woodstock, so it's difficult to imagine it outliving the people who were reading it at the time.

It's genuinely a very interesting and ambitious multimedia work! I expect it will live on for some time as a curiosity for those interested in fan culture or digital multimedia art. But if we're talking about a context where it's unclear whether stuff like North by Northwest or Taxi Driver will survive, forget about it. Sorry!

femmenietzsche

One thing that's interesting about the main attempt to preserve Homestuck is that it does attempt to capture a bit of the culture around it. It doesn't just preserve the comic itself, it also preserves ancillary stuff like Hussie's Formspring answers, and even lets you progress through the whole thing so that the ancillary stuff unlocks as you read along in the comic. It doesn't give you the experience of trying to wash off grey bodypaint in a hotel bathroom, but there was a conscious attempt to preserve a time series of the fandom.

Anyway I would rank Homestuck's odds of long-term survival quite high relative to most other digital ephemera, though that might not be saying much. It's a sui generis thing and most of the archiving has already been done. The whole thing is already packaged in two zip files totaling 4gb that will likely get embedded in various internet archives. All of which could and perhaps will be lost of course.

skipppppy

Watching Star Wars was a mistake. For years I’ve derived so much pleasure from seeing discourse on my timeline that’s like “it’s actually a pretty good writing choice that Glimbo Knutts manipulated the imbledimbians in the force to make Darth Freeble his personal jedi froogler. It gives the original trilogy more depth” and not knowing what the fuck anybody is talking about. But now I do and it’s ruined. I understand what you freak ass dorks are saying and it isn’t fun anymore. Glimbo Knutts making Darth Freeble his jedi froogler DOES give the original trilogy more depth. This sucks man

#raina

daughterofsarenrae

hey, don't cry. marbled polecat, ok?

#raina

etchif

You know that post that was going around like a year ago. That said something like 'hey you don't need to wear any makeup' and people kept commenting shit like 'yeah just a little eyeliner is enough'. This is how this post feels to me

eruhamster

kaban-bang

capesandshapes

The ultimate dream of any CEO is for people to become dependent on their product to the point where they can't picture living without it.

Amazon and its competitors rose to prominence via creating products that were so cheap and convenient that people gave in, they gave us a store where everything could be gotten in one place and with free two day shipping that was surely worth the then low subscription cost.

Now we're seeing brick and mortar stores as well as smaller online distributors shutter. We're also seeing Amazon hike up the prices of items and subscriptions because they know they're the only option for a lot of people now-- they've cut out the competition. This is how a lot of the big tech CEOs post dot com boom ensured their power.

Sam Altman and his peers are the next generation of that, and in the tradition of American innovation, their goal has always been to take what came before them and build it to new extremes.

So if Amazon's goal is to create a service that is cheap and easy to the point you stop going to the store (and then monetizing off your dependence once said store is gone), and Chatgpt is selling you intelligence...

I'm not saying this to be mean, but one of the major things Amazon did was put all the items you could want in one place, which also had the side effects of making it so a lot more people were further disconnected from the realities of the supply chain and just flat out didn't know where in real life they could get many of the specialty items they were looking for at their fair market prices.

Chatgpt similar disconnects you from the sources information is gathered from and robs you of the chance to approach their answers with a critical eye-- the consequences of which will extend past these AI engines because when you don't go to the websites you get answers from, you lose crucial opportunities to take in the information surrounding what you're looking for and begin to consider what you think a reputable source looks like and what your definition of normal looks like.

It essentially sets you up to fail, and hinders your skills in whatever areas you use it for because Sam Altman and his associates want you to become reliant on these ais and choose them over the alternatives so that you will be willing to pay more for them and see them as essential.

It's in their best interest for you to think less and seek instant gratification more for their ultimate bottom line, and as this post exemplifies, it's working.

The questions we ask AI are growing larger and larger to the point where essential life skills have been ceded to this soulless grasp for our wallets.

When Amazon first began to receive criticism for their practices and was accused of undercutting the competition, Jeff Bezos tried to say that they weren't focused on the competition but the customers and focused on what Amazon was doing that the competition wasn't capable of doing-- this is because Amazon wasn't focused on outdoing competitors but rather whole industries and changing consumer behavior. As a result, a sizeable portion of Americans will now learn that shopping online for things like fabric and books should be the new normal and, you know, there's only one place to go for that now if you're a casual consumer who doesn't live and breathe those communities.

Similarly, ais aren't so much competing against each other right now. That's not their competition. eBay was never a true threat to Amazon, the ease of going to a store and leaving with an item in your hands in an hour or less was.

Ai's largest competitor is your mind and what it's capable of doing.

The fact that tech is inserting it everywhere and constantly expanding the capabilities to target even the tiny, inconsequential decisions you make should make you terrified.

lisaveeee

use your own brain, please

ceasarslegion

if you guys dont know anything about canadian politics, i dont think you realize how insane this liberal victory is.

just months ago, the conservatives had an almost guaranteed win. Trudeau was insanely unpopular even among his own party, the progressive vote was split between them and the NDP, and the conservatives had gained so much more ground with the up-and-comer poilievre who came in with a canadian trump campaign strategy. We were resigned to losing, canadian minorities were making backup plans for their livelihoods in the likely event that we would be targeted by poilievre and his goons. His victory seemed like a sad inevitability that we could only stand up for so long against

And then trump was elected. and then canadians woke the fuck up from their conservative pipe dreams as we were hit with tariffs and annexation threats. and then trudeau resigned, leaving his bad blood behind. and then the NDP nuked themselves by publicly betraying the minorities they claimed to serve with their "we dont care who you vote for as long as they arent liberal" strategy, ending the split progressive vote as they were left behind. and then Mark Carney, the best possible liberal leader for this moment in time to win as many people over as possible, was elected liberal leader. Not all of these things are good, many are terrible, many are complicated, but politics is incredibly complicated, and it's the system we work on, so it's the hand we have to play.

And it was close tonight. It was uncomfortably, nauseatingly close, even with all these factors at play, even with ridings in the prariries of all regions going red, because that's how guaranteed a conservative win seemed not too long ago.

But they didn't win. We won.

I want us all to take this moment in time and think back on it when it all seems hopeless and like it'll never be right again. An anti-doomerism moment if you will. Because he was going to win, that wasn't a question, he WAS going to win. And then he didn't.

NEVER. KILL. YOURSELF.

gemsandjunk

my take on the miss piggy/morticia addams sexywoman poll is that while morticia would lose gracefully, miss piggy would 1000% attempt murder over the label and morticia would respect her for it. then theyd go out for tea and gossip together

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