my rage is born of love

We all know the “jokes” about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they’re not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don’t understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a “legitimate” position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We’ve had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn’t going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN’T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a “fake” sexuality and “pretending to be oppressed” and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of “pedophilia” in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes “child porn”, and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don’t Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to “sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn’t even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed”,

We’ve seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance “it’s us vs. them so anything they don’t like is Good”,

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I’ve seen in recent years hasn’t come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren’t exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they’re the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn’t resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We’ve seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don’t know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

Recipient of a third-degree burn in front of witnesses. IE, "I won't take that shit from a man dressed like a ghostbuster"= "Gostbuster" or "Buster"

A distinctive personal feature or quirk. IE, "Have you noticed how that new guy is always eating bell peppers?" = "Peppers", or "That chick has a massive forehead" = "Forehead".

An embarrassing thing you said or did. IE, "Did you seriously call Dale "Dad"?" = "Junior", "Baby boy", "Sport"

A game of name-mutation telephone. IE, "Donny Clyde" = "Bonnie 'n' Clyde" = "Bonnie" = "Bon-bon".

Irony. IE, calling a tall person "short stack" or a particularly dour person "sunshine".

A 'wrong place wrong time' one-off incident. IE, "He spilled oil on his pants and had to borrow a pair that were way too big and Jim saw him with the waistband pulled up to his nipples and called him 'Parachute'"

A batman-style origin story but not in a cool way: "One time she hit a deer with the company car and when she called the boss to tell her she was crying so hard we thought she was dying" = "Bambi"

The incredibly rare 'admiration' nickname, bourne only once a millennia under the light of the blood moon: "We saw him lift a truck once so now we call him 'iron man'"

+ How Nicknames Stick:

Your fate is determined by The Counsel

You hate it

Dealing with complex thoughts and emotions I can't work through in therapy, like grief, despair, a complicated relationship with pain and addiction

The thing that people really need to understand is that the "product" that chatGPT and other "AI" chatbots create is "more interactions with chatGPT." Everything it does is engineered with that one end in mind. Think about how it's billed, and you'll see that's true, and why it's true. What do "pro" subscriptions give you? More inquiries, faster answers, etc. So its entire thing is "getting you to ask it more things, more often."

Will it say "I don't know?" No. You won't ask it things if it answers that. This is why hallucinations are built in, and cannot ever be eliminated.

These programs are machines meant to generate more inquiries, which means they will generate dependence in order to generate them.

It really does not matter how well-educated you are, because this kind of endless flattery and dependence-creation isn't the kind of thing that "being educated" protects against. The idea that "kids these days" are specially vulnerable to ChatGPT due to a failure of general education is insultingly wrong, skips over the fact that a lot of highly-educated people from my generation and older have been sucked in to dependence and even psychosis by LLMs, and frankly makes it more likely that people will look at this "kids these days" thing and say, "Ahh, but I'm [older/better educated/built different], I'm not like Those Kids, AI's tricks won't work on me, or at the very least, I will be less susceptible to them!"

And that's just wrong.

ChatGPT is Wormtongue, in a very real, not metaphorical or exaggerated sense. The only way to truly avoid the way in which it rots your fucking brain is not to use it at all.

There is no amount or type of education which will protect you from the automated evil vizier whispering flattery and lies into your ear. Telling yourself or others otherwise is simply incorrect.

Trying to reframe it as "Kids These Days are more susceptible because they're 'functionally broken' by our education system" doesn't change the basic thesis statement.

Even my 120lb moose didn't make the cats look that small.

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

MOULIN ROUGE costume appreciation: ✦ SATINE'S WARDROBE ✦ Costume design by Catherine Martin & Angus Strathie

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

and it’s not because I have the same name as her or anything (even tho it’s definitely a factor - because how cool is that?!? - and I kinda used - and sometimes still use, let’s be real here - that as an excuse to call myself a queen because reASONS and shut up you would do the same)

but because that shit is like the stuff of legends and there is a whole myth surrounding their love story and the supposed place where she was killed - on the king’s orders near a fountain in the farm where she secretly lived with prince Pedro - because there’s a red stain there and it’s said that when she was stabbed she cried for the king’s men to spare her children (if memory serves me right) and her tears landed on the fountain and turned red because she was terribly devastated and in pain thinking only of her children and how she was going to leave them without a mother when in the last moments of her life…

and also, you know that prince? before he did that thing when he exhumed her just to make her ~officially~ his queen - and have everyone who ever opposed to them and their love kiss her clothes to pay her homage and the respect she did not have in life?? like that shit savage bro - he did another thing, even more savage than that

he searched the whole country for the two dudes who stabbed her (there was a third but I think he died or smth), even went to spain because one of them fled the country after the king died, and he fucking RIPPED their hearts out (one from the front and one from the back, because Inês was stabbed from both sides too) and tortured them in public, y'know, as you do

and that, my dear friends, is why the story of Pedro and Inês is considered one of the best love stories on our country (and I would say the world too because that shit better than anything Shakespeare or Nicholas Sparks ever wrote and it was fucking real)

my boy Pedro didn’t fuck around when you fucked with his lady, and you lyin’ if you say you don’t want you a freak like this - this Extra™, this ride or die, this savage - when it comes to love.

listen up, girls and boys, take note: follow their example and get yourselves a freak who would crown you queen after you were killed