currently an Astarion Baldursgate blog

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

My art refs be like: "rabbits are plantigrade, never stand on their toes and move by hopping"

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

You can always tell when somebody hasn't actually read Moby-Dick because they'll be all "haha you see it's actually funny because the whale doesn't even give a shit, it's not evil it's just a whale, which renders the whole story about wanting revenge against it completely unserious!" when this is in fact actually addressed in the book. Moby-Dick is not a story about revenge against an animal! It is a story about, amongst other things, feeling helpless and angry after experiencing a traumatic event, and lashing out at anyone and anything you feel you're able to lash out at! Ahab has a whole monologue about how he knows the whale is just a whale but "kill the damn whale" is the only thing he can do! He's just been through a whole series of deeply traumatizing experiences, society shows zero sympathy and dismisses him as insane, his employers need him back at work anyway, he can't fight God, he can't bring his leg back, but he can at least seek revenge against the thing that ripped it off!

it is actually fascinating to me to see the exact same people who vitriolically hate ai for copyright infringement defending the internet archive.

As an author? There's a huge difference between 'This work has been put into an archive so that people can access it now and in perpetuity' and 'This work has been stolen and put into a data set so that it can be used to generate AI slop for profit'

there's definitely downsides to having a rabbit that free-roams the apartment 24/7:

Like he's generally very good about using his litter-boxes, but he does seem to think it's good and proper to leave a few poos around the general hay-and-litter-areas as a territorial thing.