My Musings

OK I have been waiting to talk about this for a while and now here it so. ..

THIS PISSES ME OFF TO THE CORE!!!!

I think we need to stop letting men in general to design costumes for women.

That's it.

And even if u do let men to be your costume designer. Do it with proper research.....

Because stuff like this happens.

Like what is the point of those costumes in justice league???

They don't serve any purpose except maybe make a fashion statement and demean Amazonian warriors by making them look incompetent.

Amazonian were great warriors and this....

speaks VOLUMES.....VOLUMES!!!!

That despite so many waves of Feminism emphasizing on female autonomy there are still cases of blatant female sexualization even in Hollywood and they are responsible for the American society as a whole...since what they show influences millions.

And they are demeaning history.

AND DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON HARLEY QUINN.

This resonated with me most because I myself realized this when I first watched birds of prey.

When I saw Harley in birds of prey I immediately began to compare her to suicide squad's harley and concluded that this one is ugly when in fact in contrast to the squad's Harley she is much more comfortable in her costume. This in turn made me realize that Beauvoir was right that we live so closely connected to our oppressors that we don't realize we are being oppressed.

I was seeing Harley from a male gaze rather than a female gaze.

This shocking realization made me look deep into myself and surprise....surprise

So many things were wrong with my perception.

I was so accustomed to looking at the world from a man's pov that I forgot that I have my own perspective.

I have sought to build my perspective since then and it's going well.

Honestly speaking I think some women may also agree with me.

Men or straight men in general should not be allowed to design costumes because they focus more on what pleases their eye rather look into project practically. These are some examples that I know.

I dont know how many are there that I am unaware of.

But dad told me he had been at the oven with papa and they had stoked the fire, they poured wine and sacrifices bread and oil and meats to the flame, and begged the goddess to let them have family together to gather in this home, a family to gather around a hearth and to love.

And listen to their prayers she did, sculpting me from embers and ash and blowing life into me with a spark from her flames, kissing my forehead once before she left, leaving me forever with her mark on my face.

That’s what dad told me, and now it all makes much more sense.

I never ran out of s'more stuff, ya know? Even if I had definitely just used up my last chocolate for a cake, there’d be a new perfectly preserved package of it in my cupboard. Marshmallows empty cause of my hot chocolate? No silly, there is still some left in the box somehow.

I also play the guitar, at the campfires I always played and lead the chorus, but never do my fingers turn to blisters, and I never need to rest my voice.

It also explains why I have always been at home anywhere and with anyone, I could sit down, and I was home where I was and the people with me would be my family.

Other demigods mocked me, I am the child of the goddess of the home, of the hearth, a cooking deity they’d call her.

It was…rude, but it was fine, I could deal with it. I didn’t have a cabin full of siblings, but whoever stopped by was family, right?

And it was totally fine to leave me behind when they went into battle, I am no good with weaponry, but I could still follow them, grab some food for them, they’d be hungry after all the fighting.

And they seemed almost concerned when I ran onto the battlefield barefooted and in my hoodie and sweatpants and apron, rushing towards a dragon and a son of Thanatos.

Their screams were scared when the useless child of a goddess ran onto the battlefield, and this boy actually tried to hold me back, even if his arms were shattered and his skin was scorched.

They were shocked when the battle ended with me.

They would’ve known I can’t get burned from all the times I’d stumbled into the campfire or spilled tea.

They should’ve known I can make anyone and anything calm down quickly enough.

They should’ve known I can protect anyone behind me by raising my hand.

A hearth does not burn, it warms and nutures. A family calms and cares, not aggravates. A home does not abandon, it protects.

I am the son of Hestia, and my mother gave me the ability to be a hearth anywhere I went. It is safe with me, for anyone.

But dad told me he had been at the oven with papa and they had stoked the fire, they poured wine and sacrifices bread and oil and meats to the flame, and begged the goddess to let them have family together to gather in this home, a family to gather around a hearth and to love.

And listen to their prayers she did, sculpting me from embers and ash and blowing life into me with a spark from her flames, kissing my forehead once before she left, leaving me forever with her mark on my face.

That’s what dad told me, and now it all makes much more sense.

I never ran out of s'more stuff, ya know? Even if I had definitely just used up my last chocolate for a cake, there’d be a new perfectly preserved package of it in my cupboard. Marshmallows empty cause of my hot chocolate? No silly, there is still some left in the box somehow.

I also play the guitar, at the campfires I always played and lead the chorus, but never do my fingers turn to blisters, and I never need to rest my voice.

It also explains why I have always been at home anywhere and with anyone, I could sit down, and I was home where I was and the people with me would be my family.

Other demigods mocked me, I am the child of the goddess of the home, of the hearth, a cooking deity they’d call her.

It was…rude, but it was fine, I could deal with it. I didn’t have a cabin full of siblings, but whoever stopped by was family, right?

And it was totally fine to leave me behind when they went into battle, I am no good with weaponry, but I could still follow them, grab some food for them, they’d be hungry after all the fighting.

And they seemed almost concerned when I ran onto the battlefield barefooted and in my hoodie and sweatpants and apron, rushing towards a dragon and a son of Thanatos.

Their screams were scared when the useless child of a goddess ran onto the battlefield, and this boy actually tried to hold me back, even if his arms were shattered and his skin was scorched.

They were shocked when the battle ended with me.

They would’ve known I can’t get burned from all the times I’d stumbled into the campfire or spilled tea.

They should’ve known I can make anyone and anything calm down quickly enough.

They should’ve known I can protect anyone behind me by raising my hand.

A hearth does not burn, it warms and nutures. A family calms and cares, not aggravates. A home does not abandon, it protects.

I am the son of Hestia, and my mother gave me the ability to be a hearth anywhere I went. It is safe with me, for anyone.

Occasionally my loud and near violent commentary on my hatred of programming will prompt someone in a back office client’s crew to ask me if want their help vibe coding a solution

Which is

Amusing

To their boss

who then watches me

Explain my thoughts on the matter.

Is AI a useful tool for programming?

I am honestly not professionally qualified to say.

I left the "I am the designer/business connection person with a programmer on the crew" a long time ago, and the "I am myself your web dev" even longer ago.

Why do I feel qualified to have this opinion then?

A lot of the bricks I am using to build the art studio were fired in the kiln of clients whom, themselves or previous crews, would just grab plugins and shared libraries to do basic web functions to things.

Now.

To be clear. To be explicit.

Plugins and shared libraries are an objective massive benefit to the digital ecosystem. It cannot be overstated how much functionality can be brought STAGGERINGLY cheaply -- and often for free.

Things that would normally take hundreds, thousands, more, far more sometimes, of human programming hours packaged up and sold to you for maybe $100.

It's great and I love(d) it.

And.

It is not without risk.

Things break for reasons you can't figure out.

Things have conflicts you could not have anticipated because technology changes, your business changes, your staff changes, your customer base changes, your suppliers change, your--

Your hardware changes (or more likely, the box that you are mostly invisibly renting via a host changes).

Just. Something weird. Happens.

Something malicious happens to your site.

Your whatever-bot stops being supported by the the literal one person on the planet whom built it and supports it because they got tired of it, bored of it, and/or died.

via XKCD

This is -- and I am being completely serious -- one of the most accurate-to-real-life comics you will ever see.

Now.

To be clear and fair and honest.

When your whatever plugin breaks, stops being supported, conflicts -- whatever -- you can almost always pay some weird fucker with inexpertly applied makeup and a cute haircut, a programmer whom you'll never meet that lives in the middle of the desert, and a producer whom will ensure your project runs on time, on schedule --

-- but it will cost you.

"Is AI a useful tool for programming?"

The real question is

How much time, energy, and other resourcess do you want to spend making sure your vibe coded bot...

Does what you think it will do.

Does not do anything you do not want it to do.

Does not create a pathway for someone else to come in and do things they want to do that you don't want them to do... that you eventually catch.

...that you never catch because they are better at this than you and/or are more resourced than you.

...forever?

I am impatient to get Netherworld Post to full strength.

I am frustrated that building a relatively simple company is taking a large pile of years versus just saying "ahh hell I'll just whip up a whatever!"

I can deal with it.

I am not uncomfortable.

I can process these feelings.

I would rather put in this work and have something purpose-built that will run idly in the background with regular but acceptable levels of maintenance so I can focus on figuring out the lines of eroticism I am comfortable with writing and drawing my monsters with.

While focusing on the daily adventures of a goblin grocery store.

While focusing on the haunted diner.

The mermaid eating at every pavillion on the boardwalk with her sea witch girlfriend.

The vampire sneaking up and pouncing on her unsuspecting wife.

anyway

this has been a reaction to a few days ago "Hey I can show you how to prompt!"

i do not want to prompt

i want to paint

and at some point in the acceptable timeline-of-future

that is all i will be doing

painting

writing

drawing

card making

mail making

zine making

So unlike Mario, who continues to be essentially a void with no internality, I actually act with thoughts and intent and already did do that when writing this post.

I went “It’s concerning how something so small triggers such a strong reaction from you. Stranger is a kitten, and we’ve only had her for a few days. Maybe you should calm down before threatening violence to a fucking kitten.” 

This escalated his anger, and he started texting back how he won’t really hurt her, but he doesn’t want her to track litter everywhere. My sister responded “Maybe you can keep your door closed while she stays with her so it’s a safe space away from cat hair and kitty litter.”

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.

You're right that the internet is smaller than it used to be, but there's still some cool stuff left in the corners. I'd recommend checking checking out Neocities if you haven't--it's an independent web hosting platform like Geocities of the old web, and there are hundreds of interesting and active pages discoverable both through their search function and through web buttons (links attached to small pictures with the title of a website) within the websites themselves. Here are three examples of web buttons you may find in link pages:

Most Neocities websites have link pages or button collections with anywhere from tens to hundreds of these. Don't be afraid to explore!

If you're looking for something more like a search engine, I can point you towards Marginalia. It's not a particularly smart engine, but it's perfectly usable if you've ever been taught to use search engines back when they were mostly run through keywords instead of full sentence comprehension. There's also an "about" and "tips" section on the front page with more information. The algorithm of Marginalia can be filtered by the user to allow, disallow, or require JavaScript depending on your needs, plus there are filters designed specifically to prioritize web 1.0 sites or mostly text-based ones. It is possible to search for modern websites with it, but it can return websites from just about any decade (since the invention of the web, obviously) so long as they contain the information you're looking for. For example, here are some random interesting sites I've found using Marginalia:

Native Languages of the Americas: Native American Cultures

BASIC HTML COMPETENCY IS THE NEW PUNK FOLK EXPLOSION!

Earthbound Text Labs by Bill Eager

The possibilities for discovery are truly endless.

Now you might want to know about directories. These make browsing for websites easier, but require you to read through and judge which ones to visit, as there aren't algorithms ranking the sites besides the whim of whoever coded the directory. Some of them have themes, others don't. Here are two that I've used:

Yesterlinks Directory

Ichigo Directory

Directories can be harder to come by just by surfing the net, but they aren't impossible to find. Many personal websites have their own directories of interesting sites hidden within them.

Webrings are similar to directories, but are actually more community-based. You have to register your website to be a part of a webring, usually by sending an email to whoever runs it and meeting some kind of entry criteria. For example, my personal website used to be a part of a webring called Sweet Dreams, which was for websites that heavily utilize color palettes and images of cute things, particularly sweets. Webrings will give you access to a widget upon entry that allow visitors and other members to browse between the registered websites in a massive ring, ergo, where the term gets its name. Webrings can have any theme or criteria for entry. If you can make a website about it, you can find a webring for it.

Now, you might be wondering about social media alternatives. I can't offer much, but I can nudge you towards the idea of forums. Here's one I found that could really use some traffic. I also browse a bit on MelonLand forum, which is actually closed right now--it's currently closed on Mondays--but on any other day of the week, you can find a fun community there dedicated to web revival. You can find it through MelonLand's main page. I'd also recommend checking out SpaceHey, which is a MySpace clone that's customizable and easy to use.

Are you a word nerd like me, and my father before me?

Then may I introduce you to...

New edit! Ik edits don’t do as well on here as on Tik Tok but I worked so hard on it so I thought I’d post it here anyways lol.

Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!” 

Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.

Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)

You know what’s older than racism?

You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?

fucking rabies

You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.

Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.

Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.

Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.

Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.

Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.

After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?

I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.

Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.

healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.

That borderline (if not blatant) social darwinism of you have to be incredibly fit and ruthless to survive

But show how it works, show people working together to survive, and it feels intuitively right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Each of my neighbors has different supplies and tools and knowledge, so if we work together we will survive better.

Which I think is really sad, because it means there are whole genres of zombie lit that never get explored. If you live long enough, zombies are an inherently manageable problem, but they’re gonna change how you run a society, and that’s interesting. And the collapse and regrowth of society is also gonna change a lot of stuff and *that’s even MORE interesting.*

Like, hey, instead of a 6 years in everything is exactly the same, what about scattered, fortified communities that cooperate and exchange resources. You can still do suspenseful zombie action based around them having to run supplies through zombie-infested territory, and what happens if the armored trucks break down midway and the urgent medical delivery still needs made. Now you’ve got Balto, but zombies.

(Wait, I wasn’t implying you’d capture and harness a bunch of dangerous zombies to pull your sled of medical supplies, but NOW I am.)

this place is not a place of honor

no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here

nothing valued is here

what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us

the danger is in a particular location

so in 1993 a report was developed by two panels of materials science experts, linguists, anthropologists, architects, geologists and astronomers to create a marking system for the site. they proposed different levels of messages to be placed in the area. and the language part of the report is amazing because they’re really trying to cover everything. my favorite parts:

should we just design the whole structure to look ominous and scary and not put any messages on it? no, because when has that ever stopped humans from doing anything.

but also some facial expressions are universal and have been basically since we’ve been around, so there should be pictographs of faces conveying horror and sickness, as well as ‘what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.’

we have to explain what we buried here and what would happen if they went looking, because if we don’t they’ll absolutely go looking. so the expert panel suggested including both a detailed message where we explain in scientific terms what radioactivity is, and one that says: ‘the danger is to the body, and it can kill. the form of the danger is an emanation of energy.’

star maps will be used to convey the passage of time, and we’re including instructions on what they mean and how to use them.

we have to explain that this fancy structure isn’t actually hiding anything interesting. i.e. the tomb of some great leader that’s filled with treasure. hence the part of the message that says: 'this place is not a place of honor. no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. nothing valued is here.‘ 

but also we shouldn’t make it not interesting because there’s a lot of potential in designing the site so it develops deep cultural significance for future humans:

‘a monumental, intellectually stimulating system would enhance performance with higher probability than would a less energetic design based on minimal investment, thought at creativity. an oral tradition tethered to the marker system would emphasize (1) that it was designed to be the world’s longest lasting human artifact, (2) that it was intended as a gift to guard the health of future generations, and (3) that it is the world’s largest celestial ‘clock’ marking the millennia. hyperbole and altruism are strong themes in the world’s folk tales, songs and myths.’