My new favorite phrase, I've been putting it on t-shirt, crop-tops, temporary tattoos, etc. It's been very useful in conveying the message and getting other kinky queer people to help solve that condition.
I personally enjoy it in the open-use font Trade Winds for a nice flare, with #ffade5 pink on black
If you want a more-broken font look at crackhouse
or for a more curved font check out Timberline
Snell Roundhand has more of a sweeping style,
while Nelson Engraved has almost an Old West flare
No matter which font you like, wear this one to telegraph your intentions, and who knows, maybe you'll get a lucky nip or two!
So this one time I was in a hospital recovering from an emergency surgery on my leg, and had to be there long enough that they had to change my bedding, so, doped up on three kinds of pain meds and antibiotics my dad wheels me into the hallway while the nurses work.
"dad" I say, my eyes barely open "it's Colonel Sanders" while pointing down the hallway. He looks, and at the end of the hallway, there's a portrait of an old man, the donor who paid for the wing of the hospital I'm recovering in.
My dad explains as much to me, and goes "I mean the guy *kinda* looks like him, but why would Colonel Sanders pay for a hospital wing Mississauga Ontario? I think those drugs might me messing with you"
Then the nurse comes out of the room. I go "hey, who is that picture of?"
She looks at the portrait. She looks at me. She looks at my dad. She looks at the painting. She looks at me again.
If you EVER think Anthony Head is anything less than an angel then you’d best remember that I have always been a huge fan of his and we’ve always had a little contact over the years and he heard I’d come out as Trans and was having a hard time and that I was kind of sad that the photos I had from conventions with him were of me with long hair and no binder and they were all signed to “Sarah” and so he invited me to spend the day with him at his farm and he picked me up from the station and we just hung out and had lunch and he insisted on paying and took loads of photos and had them printed on photo paper the same day so he could sign them to Jay, along with other photos of him as Giles and Uther and he literally spent five hours chatting with me and got all of the pronoun stuff right every time and then he dropped me off at the station, gave me a final massive hug, waved me through the ticket barrier and insisted I message him when I got home so he knew I got back safe. (More HERE)
If you EVER think Anthony Head is anything less than an angel then you’d best remember that I have always been a huge fan of his and we’ve always had a little contact over the years and he heard I’d come out as Trans and was having a hard time and that I was kind of sad that the photos I had from conventions with him were of me with long hair and no binder and they were all signed to “Sarah” and so he invited me to spend the day with him at his farm and he picked me up from the station and we just hung out and had lunch and he insisted on paying and took loads of photos and had them printed on photo paper the same day so he could sign them to Jay, along with other photos of him as Giles and Uther and he literally spent five hours chatting with me and got all of the pronoun stuff right every time and then he dropped me off at the station, gave me a final massive hug, waved me through the ticket barrier and insisted I message him when I got home so he knew I got back safe. (More HERE)
I work in tech, and any time I see a precipitous and incorrect decision like this — ESPECIALLY if it’s made by a technology company — the explanation that seems most plausible to me us that the management of that company has decided to implement an “Agentic” AI — i.e. a large-language model, attached to a program whose instructions are “Do whatever the large language model spits out”.
The problem is that large language models only care about spitting out an answer that sounds syntactically plausible. They’re designed to provide a response that is a reasonable simulacrum of human language, within a reasonably short timeout, but there is absolutely zero actual understanding behind it. It is basically a bullshit machine. There is no evaluation of veracity or reasonableness happening — that’s not a thing it’s capable of. It’s just trying to spit out a plausible answer before you get impatient and give up interacting with it.
Without doxxing myself, I’ve recently seen a case exactly like this in telecom.
A third -party project manager (not me, I was just a witness) put in a request like “Placeholder - port date to be determined for this toll-free number, belonging to Customer XYZ. I will update this ticket when the date is determine, and provide the required paperwork. For now, please just assign to the correct porting coordinator and hold.”
Instead of doing that, Carrier A’s customer support department immediately sent a port order to Carrier B, with the authorizer listed as [random person in customer’s call centre who wasn’t a manager and wouldn’t be listed as a signing authority on Carrier B’s billing record].
And then Carrier B, rather than being like “Who the fuck is Tragedeigh Molyneux? Our billing record clearly says that for Customer XYZ, the signing authority is Humperdink Snufflebugger” , instead just went ahead and released the toll-free number to Carrier A.
This was a couple months ago, and I can’t remember if callers were getting a busy signal, or just an infinite gentle-music hold loop, but it was a fucking shitshow, and the customer was furious.
We hurriedly implemented a workaround (a weird hairpin-routing-loopback to get callers to agents whose phones were still connected to Carrier B’s system), but the customer was absolutely furious about the outage; like “How TF could this have happened??? We never set a port date, and in any case, Ms. Molyneux never had signing authority to authorize changes with either Carrier A or Carrier B???”
And the poor project manager is getting absolutely excoriated, even though she never asked for this number to be ported immediately. She was just trying to give Carrier A lots of notice, because they are usually very behind on their port requests. And she’s just like “I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Carrier A and Carrier B to investigate how that decision was made within their support organizations.”
And like… to me, the technician watching this unfold, it seems that either:
A) Both Carrier A and Carrier B suddenly have customer support staff who are extremely eager to help, and also extremely lacking in critical thinking, or else
B) One (or both) of these carriers (one of whom is a large, publicly-traded company) has recently offloaded their first-pass ticket handling to an “agentic AI” (i.e. an LLM / syntactically-plausible bullshit machine, hooked directlyinto a system that just blindly implements any instructions the LLM sends to it).
I strongly suspect it’s Option B, because I’ve worked in this industry for over a decade, and I’ve never encountered a human person whose impulse to help wasn’t thoroughly outweighed by their fear of making a mistake that brings down an entire call centre.
going into the forest to play experimental industrial music at the lyrebirds so they learn how to make those sorts of noises and then showing the lyrebird noises to experimental industrial musicians so they learn how to mimic lyrebird mimicking them and then showing that to the lyrebirds and so on because well basically why not
Was driving with my grandmother and in broken English she says “no eyes… no nose… no face. Don’t trust.” To which I looked around wildly in search of this omen of ill portend.
Easily the most annoying kind of vampire in the world are the ones where you finally corner the fuckers and when you're going in with the stake they start spouting off sociology 101 bullshit to try and weasel out of it. "Oh, no ethical consumption under capitalism," "oh, the rich are the real vampires if you think about it-" yeah, yeah, you ate like fifty homeless people, asshole. Hold still
all the “peer pressure is bad” education we give kids is practically useless because all it cares about is telling them that Drugs Are Evil rather than the much more useful lesson of ‘the person who responds to you saying you don’t drink by telling you they’ll find a way to get you to is also going to be shitty about all your other boundaries’.
When the topic becomes about racism between children you very quickly realise children of colour aren't seen as children but as some other thing that should just take the abuse and then forgive the Real White Children because they didn't know better. They don't understand it but children of colour can and will very early in their youth.
if you want to read more but have trouble finishing things, i really recommend short story collections (ESPECIALLY anthologies by multiple authors) and literary magazines. if one story sucks you can just skip to the next one, and anthologies and magazines will have work by multiple authors so you get a wide variety of styles, and if you find a story you really really like, you can look to see if that author's published anything else.
i'm not as well-versed in literary magazines as i should be (trying to fix that), but here are short story collections i suggest:
lesser known monsters of the 21st century by kim fu (speculative fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "pre-simulation consultation xf007867"
the paper menagerie and other stories by ken liu (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "the litigation master and the monkey king"
slasher girls and monster boys by various (horror). personal favorite story: "the birds of azalea street"
what we fed to the manticore by talia lakshmi kolluri (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the hunted, the haunted, the hungry, the tame"
africa risen by various (afrofuturism, speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "a dream of electric mothers"
a small apocalypse by laura chow reeve (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "real bodies"
the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "dear sister"
a phoenix first must burn by various (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "wherein abigail fields recalls her first death and, subsequently, her best life"
woman hollering creek and other stories by sandra cisneros (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "woman hollering creek"
bliss montage by ling ma (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "yeti lovemaking"
how to love a jamaican by alexia arthurs (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the ghost of jia yi"
radicalized by cory doctorow (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "radicalized"
life ceremony by sayaka murata (literary fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "life ceremony"
shit cassandra saw by gwen e. kirby (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "here preached his last"
through the woods by e.m. carroll (horror). personal favorite story: "his face all red"
I'm crying, in the new Avatar fighting game they really put Rangi seemingly almost kissing Kyoshi after she wins the fight only to kick her into Horse Stance instead lmao, these people really did their research
It’s a shame The Gaslight District and Knights of Guinevere aren’t as popular as their Glitch contemporaries but I can see why.
TGD is self-explanatory, it’s a proudly grody art style that isn’t as widely appealing. As for KoG…
Something that stood out to me is how it definitely comes across as a more adult, mature story. It’s definitely a slower-paced pilot with a quieter tone, but that also gives it time to breathe and gives us time to really set up Frankie and Andi and let their motivations speak for themselves. I think most pilots would’ve had Guinevere speak, but by saving her active role in the story as a cliffhanger, it lets the show build up this mystique to Guinevere and who she is from the lens of multiple characters, and like a Rorschach test, how they feel reflects something about them.
There’s also the fact that the show feels less… marketable if I’m being honest. Guinevere is the only design really conducive to that and even then she’s more a pastiche of marketability. Otherwise we have Frankie and Andi who are humans drawn with physical imperfections, conventionally unattractive but that also means they garner a niche yet dedicated fanbase.
It’s also definitely a pilot with more of a setup to like, themes and character arcs I feel. We start off by establishing that our main protagonists are morally mediocre people who ultimately mean well, and there’s more of an emphasis on mundane human situations like with Andi’s introductory rant.
Speaking of, that’s the kind of thing that’s less for kids. Other pilots like TADC and Gameoverse are definitely not difficult for younger kids to keep up with, sure there might be a more adult edge to them sometimes but in the end it’s not infeasible and you can see it reflected in the fanbase at times. Whereas KoG, Andi’s establishing character moment about misapplying class solidarity to avoid being the target of a boycott is definitely something more for teenagers and upwards to comprehend, not younger kids.
Even the heart of the story feels aimed at a certain type of “Disney Adult” and I don’t mean just literally but also any kind of adult who infantilizes themselves by not expanding their tastes. Obviously the creators don’t think there’s anything wrong in engaging with kids cartoons, part of the reason people watched is because their veteran viewers know that fact about the writers well.
But it’s kinda like what I’ve said about how fandoms neglect PoC; It’s not that it’s illegal to watch kid cartoons, it’s that sometimes people act as if it’s illegal to watch anything else. And so on top of the Disney Bad takeaway being kinda reductive, some of it comes across as a bit Hit Dogs Holler, not just in terms of people who openly like Disney but also. This discomfort on how the pilot comes from a place of understanding in nevertheless speaking about the retreat to childhood nostalgia and how it has its potential dangers.
But you can’t speak to a child of nostalgia for an era they’re currently still exploring; Again, this is a story for adults, for older people. We get an F-bomb. But it’s not just swearing, KoG does feel like more adult and somber story. It’s got a bit of a heavier weight to it in terms of its politics, how it quickly starts off with the question of your place in the world, what can you do to excuse it, how are you trying to find joy in a somber existence and it’s much more close to home and hard hitting about its setting; In the end this really is just our world but with higher technology.
And so while KoG isn’t the most difficult thing to watch or understand, it’s not as easy of a story compared to its contemporaries; The gore is probably the least discomforting thing for viewers in that sense. So between its target audience based on its message but also a heavier, serious tone and slower, grounded storytelling that feels more what you’d read in a novel than a typical cartoon, KoG is definitely less of a Fandom type of show. But I also find that quality makes refreshing amidst its contemporaries and I appreciate it.
End of the first update!! hope you enjoy it so far! as i've mentioned before for the time being, pareidolia will update every friday.
as you can see tbh this is less of a traditional webcomic format and more of a graphic novel situation. the prose is written the way it is kind of intentionally, you'll see how things proceed, hehe.
Make a Move for the Right Reasons @zarohk - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
