Eyes of a Devil

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

is a sourdough boule

Teenagers are rarely taught the reason why they can't consent to sex with adults.

And that's because teaching them that would completely unravel our coercion-based society.

It can be difficult to explain in detail the exact reason and all the specifics in a way that they will understand. But the simplest way to phrase it is that in some cases, even when someone agrees to something and even when they appear enthusiastic about it, there's too much of a power imbalance that it's no different than forcing them. Also, having power and being abusive doesn't require a conscious expectation to be obeyed.

Imagine a world in which every teenager understood that and was easily able to call out anyone who tried to convince them otherwise.

They'd know that there's no such thing as an employee consenting to working for a poverty wage, working in unsafe conditions, working long hours, or working without taking breaks. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to paying a bank overdraft fee. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to student loan debt. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to medical bills. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to generating profit for banks or landlords in order to have a place to live and being evicted or foreclosed when you lose your source of income. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to a police search. They'd know that there's no such thing as a child who's okay with their parents spanking them. They'd know that being dependent on someone does not mean that you can never criticize them. They'd know that if it's considered abusive to simply play along when someone obeys, then it has to be much more abusive to actively expect to be obeyed, which many adults do to them.

And people who benefit from a society based on coercion masquerading as freedom wouldn't like that.

The alternative isn't to police teens. It's to educate, and teach, and then give them choice! (Like OP mentions).

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

I'm thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don't need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you'd think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.

NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?

Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?

Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn't be safe for anyone.

Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn't introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.

if your most authentic self is goth, and the way you sourced the clothes is more faithful to goth values, then it's going to be a super comfy goth outfit.

Quickest and easiest way to make a pair of sweatpants look goth is to bleach them. You could either dilute it and spray it on the pants or put a bit of bleach in a container, take a brush and just splash it on the pants. Leave them outside in the sun for a bit and wash them (do not put them with other clothes just to be sure you are not ruining anything). I'll say one hour and you have your personal pair of goth sweatpants.

Another thing you could do is to put holes in them. Take a pair of scissor, cut a small hole and then bush a razor on it to give it a more ripped look.

If you have more time, a bit of money and you want to try something more complicated, you can sew patches, paint them, add some metal eyelets (idk if that's how they are called in english. The metal things in the shoe where you put your laces in), chains, etc.

As for the top, band shirts!! Black shirts!! Black tank tops!! Halloween themed stuff!! You can also find them already goth enough or add patches, pins, laces, etc etc. Same goes for sweatshirts! Be creative! And also accessories!! Spike bracelets, necklaces, etc can change the look and make it more goth even if you are just wearing a pajamas.

When I said "I don't want to look like I'm wearing sweatpants", I did not mean "if only there was a way for me to wear sweatpants", I meant "I do not want to be a person who wears sweatpants in public".

You said there's no way to make something comfy and look good, but people don't innately know "what looking good" to you means, and it can't be sweatpants at all and you would not want to even be seen in public in them. If you want to find tips to feel comfortable in dressy clothing you have to say that from the beginning as well.

It's like you're setting invisible tripwires for people by assuming there's more meaning to your words than you're actually communicating with them. Of course people are gonna trip.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Progress.

You know, queries about this come in every now and then. So—because this response from last year is pretty detailed, and I think will answer all your questions—I'm just gonna paste it in here. 🙂

...About my work on Transformers G1: Developmentally speaking it’s kind of a complicated story, so bear with me here while I set the scene.

In 1985 I was a pretty busy gal. The Door Into Shadow had just published. Deep Wizardry had gone to press for publication in Delacorte’s fall-‘85 schedule. My first computer game, Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative, launched (in the Rainbow Room on top of 30 Rock…) in the summer of '85. I was then scripting my first comics work for DC (the “Double Blind” two-parter and “The Last Word”). And after taking a brief breathing space from four or five years’ worth of animation work across a number of shows (scroll down here for details), I’d just turned in an episode of My Little Pony.

In memory all this work tends to get tangled together somewhat (which is probably no surprise). One thread that shows persistently through the tangle, though, is how much time I was spending in New York at a time when I was living in Philadelphia.

A surprising amount of that has to do with the research surrounding Deep Wizardry, which required specialized materials not readily available anywhere else. Because I had a contract for that book, in early 1984 I applied for (and was granted) access to the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the main branch of the New York Public Library. As a result, for the guts of a year I was “up in town” at least every other week or so, sometimes for two or three days at a time—taking notes from the Woods Hole oceanographic resources there, drawing copies of them (like this one) when xerography wasn’t available or when otherwise necessary, and—when there was time—writing.

But on those stay-overs my evenings were my own, and fortunately there were some really nice people to meet up with, every so often. Back when 666 5th Avenue (now 660) was DC Comics’ home, a lot of the writing and editorial talent had a habit of heading down to street level and around the corner on Friday nights, to meet up and relax at the bar in a local steakhouse on the W. 52nd Street side (long gone now, alas). That’s almost certainly where I first met Len Wein—most likely introduced to him by my editor on the Trek comics at DC, Bob Greenberger—and we quickly got to be friends. Each of us was interested in the writing (and kinds of writing) the other was doing, so we had lots to chat about.

Now during this period I’d recently finished work on that My Little Pony script. A production company called Sunbow was then handling the screen side of the property, along with shows based on various other IPs. To this day I can’t remember who it was over there who said to me, “So listen, now that you’re done with that, we’ve got some slots unfilled on another show—would you be interested in doing a Transformers?” My answer was naturally “Sure, why not?”*

So shortly I was talking story, in a general way, with my new story editor over there, Steve Gerber. The thought of doing something a bit personal, and getting into some of the characters’ heads a bit, was as usual on my mind. The idea of getting Galvatron some psychiatric care had already crossed my mind at that point… though I had on first impulse pushed that (for the time being) onto the back burner due to possibly being a little too “on the nose.”

At some point pretty early on in this process, though, a different idea hit me. Len was plainly perfectly cut out for animation storytelling (as other comics writers have also been: but the fit had rarely seemed quite so perfect, to me at least). And he’d have a party with this, I thought. Why not invite him along for the ride and let him get a feel for how it’s done?

So I said to him (as Tom Swale had once said to me years back), "Hey, you wanna write a cartoon?" And to my great pleasure Len promptly said “Yes!” And having cleared this team-up with Steve Gerber, we dove in as co-writers.

Collaboration can sometimes be a rocky road, but I’ve always been lucky in mine, and that lucky streak held true with Len. I have rarely had a co-writer who right out of the starting gate was more willing to stretch hard to get things right, and one who was more effortlessly funny… even when the humor turned dark (as it repeatedly did in this episode). He unquestionably brought things to that script that I wouldn’t have thought to try, or would have been nervous about my ability to pull off, solo.

…So after a couple/few weeks we turned “Webworld” in, the checks cleared, and we both went on to other things... while remaining good friends all the while: and it was @petermorwood's and my great pleasure to have Len as a houseguest here. The two of them got along famously, another case of senses of humor meshing perfectly. ...But that episode keeps coming up as many people’s favorite… and I can’t say that I mind a bit. 😊 (If you want to look at it, the whole episode’s online: just follow the link.)

BTW, because people do ask “Why does Len’s name appear first on the credits screen?”, the answer’s simple: Because I insisted. He was the newbie here, after all. I thought it only right that the junior partner in this medium should be put in pride of place on that credit, his very first time out (and if you scroll right down to the bottom of his IMDb page, you'll find it there, the very first entry). ...Noting here that I've routinely done the same with Peter, for anyone who’s been watching. Collaborator of thirty-plus years he may have been, but he’s still always been newer at this than I am. 😏

In any case, I wear the joint credit with Len with great pride. It’s an honor to be associated with someone who went on to become—entirely separate from his already-stellar career in comics—one of the strongest and most prolific animation writers of the last few decades.

…So that’s how it happened. (And as for the story, which pops up here and there, of how Bob G. and I dragged Len out of that restaurant one night and made him buy his first computer [an early Macintosh]: that’s true too.) 😅

It's so good

For those who haven't watched it...go watch it....Tubi has the whole show for free and you don't even have to sign up if you don't want to, you can just go on their site and watch and enjoy it....

But for those who want a plot synopsis, it's literally a story where the Decepticons are getting more and more frustrated with the fact that Galvatron is whacked out of his gourd and frequently attacks them as often as he does the Autobots....and insist that Cyclonus take him to Space Therapy

But also... "prev", as we say around here:

#what the fuck #diane duane is on tumblr?! #diane duane whom i knew also wrote star trek books #?! #her?!!! #HERE?! #diane duane #diane duane?!

Yeah, here. Been here since 2008.

And have done some things besides Star Trek. Like these...

...and these...

...and assorted other stuff.

...The novels are here. You can also view the shorter fiction, the comics, and the other film and TV media separately.

...I try to stay busy. 😏

When I realized (partly from reader feedback) that I had been working from bad data on this book, I rewrote much of it.

This may be the best of the links that will assist you in assessing what I did: