Any/All pronouns but maybe that's bargaining, transfem-ish (its a whole thing), definitely a computer programmer, DnD/pathfinder/lancer player. Somewhere between 30 and 50. I like to sound deep about things. I'm probably not that deep, but I will discuss with you about things and stuff. Probably demi-sexual, who can say, certainly not me. I'll mostly be posting and reblogging funny stuff cause making people laugh is my coping mechanism and adding a little joy to the world makes me feel fulfilled. I primarily identify as a problem, and usually the problem I am is my own.
By show of hands- how many people know that the clanker bit started because Black people were making jokes about how the racism we experienced would be experienced by the AI?
Because it feels like the history around that keeps getting mythologized into something it wasn't, to excuse or explain the use, when it was always jokes about racism.... that became... Purposeful racism when white people got a hold of it 😅
So i watched the digital circus finale. And I think the soup that I jokingly call a brain is at the right temperature for a specific species of thought to flourish. But I think i need to rewind.
So i finished reading "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". Very short story. Very interesting. And I was talking with my mom, because she'd heard the name but had never read it. So I explained the general plot to her. And she couldnt wrap her head around it. Not the plot, she got that just fine. But why someone would write that type of story. She wasn't criticizing it, per se, but she couldnt fathom why someone would put those words on a page. She gets happy stories, heroic stories. And while shes not a fan, she can understand sad stories if they come from a true story. But she couldn't understand why someone would write about such awful things happening to people, and then the "bad guy" doesn't get punishment, and the "good guys" all die except for one thats tortured forever.
And it made me think about my English class in middle school. No shade to the teacher, but she sorta suffered under the same issue. See, we learned about an "Author's Purpose" which the teacher said was either to "entertain" or "inform". There are a lot of people who can't fathom that a written work falls outside those boundaries. And, in a vague way, i guess IHNMAIMS could be seen as falling into the "entertain" category. Not because we enjoy torture or body horror, but because its intended to speak to our emotions. But there are way more purposes and author may have and it feels very reductionist to stretch the categories to that degree.
So i watched TENET. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Its still buzzing around in my brain. But I know a lot of people didnt like it. I like to try to see other points of view, so I looked up several reviews. There were obviously a lot of people confused. There were some that felt the plot was weak. But there were a few who went past that. They had problems with the movie in a structural way. And it didnt seem to just be opinion either. (I mean, sorta, but they had reasoned arguments rather than "i didn't like it"). And that confused me. I know I have some bad tastes in movies. I like The Core for Pete's sake. Its like the junk food of cinema. But with how enraptured I felt about this movie, I didn't understand how it could be viewed so negatively. And then I saw a video discussing it. And the person agreed that the story had some narrative shortcomings and structural issues and pacing issues. And thats because, its not a story. Its a puzzle. Its a math equation.
So I've been watching a ton of videos about the mandlebrot set, and Julia sets. I'm fascinated by fractals. Infinite coastline, self similarity. Its all wonderful. For the uninitiated, the mandelbrot set has been around a while. Its basically a function. z' = z^2 + c. And you take every point in the complex plane and you iterate it through that function. And sometimes, it gets really big really fast. And sometimes it drops to nothing almost instantly. And sometimes, it fuddles around before deciding on one of those options. And if you color code each of those options, you get this beautiful explosion of patterns and swirls. Its incredible. And all that came from someone having a cool idea, and deciding to "see what happens".
That's TENET. Christopher Nolan got the idea for a Temporal Pincer Maneuver, and the movie is his mandelbrot set. Its him exploring this fun little equation that he came up with and seeing what cool things pop out.
And you can do this with anything. You have a question, "what happens when I do this", and you explore that. IHNMAIMS does this with morality. With humanity. It finds the limit of those concepts and asks what happens when you step beyond that limit. Some people claim that "math breaks when you divide by zero". This has always been such a weird thing to say, in my opinion. Nothing broke. You just get an unexpected answer. Math still works.
Which brings me back to the digital circus finale. I enjoyed it. And I've been trying to triangulate what it means to me. I know Goose has said some things about her intended meaning. And I largely agree those meanings are there. But I think theres more. It entertained. But that isnt all it did. It seems like the whole show was working to solve an equation. We couldn't see the equation, or the solution, just the steps everyone took to solve it. We have to interpolate from there. I think the question is, "what does it actually mean to do your best?". And thats a tricky question. Because everyone in the show is trying their best. But that means different things for each of them. And it leads them to think the others AREN'T trying. That it's not their best. Each of them held a piece of the answer. Understanding, Acceptance, Passion, Resolve, Caring, Vulnerability, and the willingness to change. It looks a bit like community and a bit like working on yourself and a bit like taking charge and a bit like letting go, and a bit grounded and a bit of having your head in the clouds.
Its about caring. Love, for people who use that word. The emotion itself doesnt mattter so much as the connection it brings with it.
the best kind of character writing i think doesn't confine its characters to having one or two specific narrative foils or parallels but instead writes every character as having traits that both contradict and mirror the others, like splitting a beam of light through a refracting prism
i identified as a butch for a bit! I changed my mind because in my case it was me trying to avoid wanting to be something I wasn't sure I COULD be! did you "lose" something when I, a trans woman, decided to present more femme?
if every cis butch woman in the world became a trans man right now, that would be an unambiguously, inarguably good and positive thing, because that would be people choosing to live the lives they wanted as the kinds of people they wanted to be, end of statement. personal autonomy isn't something to bitch over!
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
You ever think about how old people have no idea what “survivor bias” is, and take full credit for being excellent out of things where they lucked out?
“Back in my day we didn’t have any of these childhood protective things, we were smart enough not to do stupid shit on our own!”
Except your little neighbour, who got the funniest idea at the age of seven, and got his skull pierced when he slipped?
“Back in my day nobody got divorced, we stuck together and fixed our problems!”
What about your cousin, who was slowly killed by her husband because she had nowhere to escape him?
“Back in my day nobody had ‘mental problems’, we didn’t whine, we just toughed it out and endured life!”
Hey remember that guy you used to work with, who seemed really friendly and normal, and then suddenly hanged himself ‘for no reason’?
“Back in my day we didn’t have any of this ‘gay’ or ‘transgender’ thing.”
You did, but your family cut all ties with her before you were born.
You kinda start seeing it in everything they think, if you start looking for it.
So I remember reading about this study in grad school where they have a bunch of clinically depressed people and a bunch of non-clinically-depressed people a game that was partially chance and partially skill, and asked them to estimate how much control they had over the outcome.
The depressed people were far more accurate in estimating how much influence their actions had on the outcome of the game compared to their nondepressed counterparts, who consistently overestimated the effects of their own choices on their chances of winning.
Then I remember this other study (CW animal testing) where they put rats in a bucket of water that they couldn’t get out of, so they’d have to swim. There was a fairly consistent point at which the swimming rat would falter, and stop swimming, fated to drown.
Except that that’s when the researchers would pull the rat out of the bucket, give it a nice rest warmth and a meal.
When those SAME rats who had been rescued before were put in the same situation again, they swam much LONGER than they had before.
Why? The risk was the same either way- drowning. You’d have thought that the fear of drowning would keep them swimming to their maximum length no matter what.
The researchers conclusion was that the rescued rats had something they hadn’t had the first time- they had more hope. A miraculous rescue could come, and that let them swim for longer, just in case.
I think we do microdose delusion because sometimes that little overestimation of our chances, of our luck, keeps us swimming that little bit longer, just in case something good happens. And sometimes, that little margin really does make the difference.
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
It's June, motherfuckers, and you know what that means! Apart from firing a few rent-lowering shots to filter out the chuds from my following, it's probably also a good time to post a reminder that there are many strange ways to be queer, and this is one of them.
video transcript below the cut, may be slightly inaccurate, I tend to ad-lib when reading my scripts into voiceover
It's Pride Month, so if you'll forgive me I'm taking a two minute break from the One Piece, League of Legends, Marvel Rivals, Final Fantasy and Pokémon shorts to tell you… Sylveon is trans, Taliyah is trans, everyone on the Straw Hats is queer, there are no words to describe how queer superheroes are as a concept let alone how queer they all are individually, and here's a fun fact for you: Cloud Strife's story gets ten times better when you understand it as an allegory for a trans coming out experience.
As for me, well, I'm not trans, but I do occupy my own little space in the rainbow flags which looks like this. I am aromantic.
We are generally not as visible as many of our queer siblings, probably at least partly because it's kind of a difficult identity to even discover in yourself, you basically have to prove a negative.
But what is this thing, "aromantic"? Well… okay, let's say you're a straight guy, right. You know the way you feel romantically about other men? I feel exactly the same way, and then I also feel that way about women, and then also the same way about all of the other genders.
Now, aromantic often goes along with asexual, there's a lot of co-occurrence of the two, but not always, and that is my situation. Yes to sex, no to romance, which being a man, yes, I know, that just makes me the same as 90% of the men you match on Hinge. "Ha ha ha didn't realize "fuccboi" was an orientation now," I know. I get it. I understand. I have had all the same thoughts myself, especially when I was questioning.
Which is the difficulty with being aromantic, because in order to figure out that that's what you are, you have to prove a negative. I have never been in love, and I have no reason to think I ever will be… but what if someday I meet The One??? What if there's a special divinely designated perfect soulmate out there, just waiting for me, and one day our eyes will meet across the room and it will be love at first sight forever?
And like. I can't prove that won't happen, anymore than I can prove that there isn't a flowery pink teapot currently hiding somewhere in the orbit of Saturn. And frankly, if it did happen, I wouldn't be mad. Why would I be? I would have a soulmate! That's a pretty big W, I think.
But… I've had over thirty years to encounter someone—anyone—who can spark my romantic interest, and thus far, every challenger of every gender has failed. So either I am aromantic, or else you people have a skill issue.
Anyway, like anything to do with queerness, aromantic is a sprawling and diverse spectrum. You got your aroaces, aroallos, aroflux, arospikes, demiromantics, frayromantics, grayromantics, cupioromantics, there's a whole world of different experiences present under this umbrella. For me, though, just "aromantic" is fine. That's the broad label, that's the one I fall under, that's the identity I take pride in. Happy June!
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
from HuffPost article The Sugarcoated Language Of White Fragility by Anna Kegler, directly translating Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s article White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism into a table format
Some quick research suggests that only Scots English still uses "gat" as the simple past tense of "to get", with the form surviving in other English dialects only in the archaic "begat" (i.e., the simple past tense of the likewise archaic "to beget"), and I feel like we need to fix that.
Local Man after opening Pandora's Box of Non-Standard English Verb Forms:
"He choosed his path, clomb this hill to die on, torned off the chains of prescriptive grammar and drunked from this newfound power; but later he had understanden that he had letten himself grow mad with power, he had shutten the voice of reason advising him against this foolery, he had putten himself on this path of chaos and destruction, setten himself on this one way street, standen on top of a mountain of hubris, forgetten wisdom, and for his trouble had getten only the means of his own downfall"
[all of those are attested by the way, this isn't just me making stuff up at random]
"The beast screamed inside Vimes. It screamed that no one would blame him for doing the hangman out of ten dollars and a free breakfast. Yeah, and you could say a swift stab now was the merciful solution, because every hangman knew you could go the easy way or the hard way and there wasn't one in the country that'd let something like Carcer go the easy way. The gods knew the man deserved it…
…but young Sam was watching him, across thirty years.
When we break down, it all breaks down. That's just how it works. You can bend it, and if you make it hot enough you can bend it in a circle, but you can't break it. When you break it, it all breaks down until there's nothing unbroken. It starts here and now.
He lowered the sword."
(C) Terry Pratchett "Night Watch"
Mildly Confused, Majorly Dazed @zenarcticfox - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
germansingergirl
gummygunk
vaporwave
annaxmalina
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
