je suis tired

the fact that SOME trans women and fems are enbyphobic and transmisandrist doesn't give ANYONE the right to misgender them, deadname them, or be otherwise transphobic/transmisogynistic.

i saw someone call a trans woman a "shemab" for holding those opinions, and that's not something we do here, folks!!! i won't tolerate that!!!

A few days ago, I saw on my feed that BTS won’t be submitting their music for the 2027 Grammy Awards. I was wondering what happened and decided to dig around a little. While I’m not a die-hard fan of BTS (though I do enjoy their music), I have to stand by the group on this one.

So, what happened?

The Recording Academy added five new categories for the 2027 Grammy Awards:

Best Asian Pop Music Performance: Honours K-pop, J-pop, C-pop, and other Asian pop tracks with significant use of Asian languages.

Best Latin Song: Recognises songwriters and artists behind top Latin tracks.

Best Traditional Folk Album: Splits from the wider folk field (now renamed Best Contemporary Folk Album).

Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance: Supplements the R&B field, alongside renaming Best R&B Performance to Best R&B Solo Performance.

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance: Expands traditional pop recognition.

I completely get why BTS decided to ditch the award show next year; it’s clearly and very obviously pigeonholing the largest continent on Earth into a single category.

I know the CEO of the Recording Academy clarified that artists can still submit in general fields even if they enter their work in the Asian Pop category, framing it as a way to be more inclusive and diverse. But putting “Asian Pop” into one catch-all bucket is not inclusive, in my honest opinion.

Asian Pop is not a music genre like Latin, Folk, R&B, Rock, Alternative, or Country. Within music coming out of Asia, we have R&B, Rock, and dare I say, even Latin (shout out to Back For More by TXT and Anitta).

If the powers-that-be truly wanted to honour the impact of K-pop in the industry, they should acknowledge the distinct cultural movement on its own merits - much like how the Korean Music Awards created a dedicated K-Pop category to recognize the genre beyond just the audio track, honouring the concept-driven eras, synchronised choreography, and hybrid music styles built into the song’s structural DNA.

Lumping an entire continent - which includes Thai pop, Malay pop, Indonesian pop, Indian pop, and more - under one category isn’t cultural appreciation; it’s a geographical boundary.

If the Grammys are creating an Asian pop category, why not create American pop, European pop, or Oceanic pop? Does that sound ridiculous? Yes - and so does Asian pop.

I love music. Music transcends age, gender, time, and certainly geographical boundaries. No music should be pigeonholed based on where it’s from.

So, BTS, hats off to you guys for not conforming. Keep creating good music and pushing boundaries.

Until next time, stay curious and stay wide awake, Siti

And/or federation.

This is fascinating, and it's not cheap. Paid monthly and charges depend on the kind of telescope you have.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

link :]

real as fuck. everyone could use more whimsy

Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.

While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.

On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:

On some of her work in Star Wars:

On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:

On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:

On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:

On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ: