Faux Talks

Though, honestly, usually I just glance over and catch them. My elementary school had a patch of clovers without markings, and I'd spend my childhood picking four-leafs, so I think I trained myself to see them as a kid.

Still isn’t a clover!! Will never be a clover!

Sincerely love posts like this, where people aren't recognizing that they naturally have a specific and rare way of seeing the world. There's no unhealthy pride on display here, just an excitement to share a skill and allow others to have fun with you! But, maybe you're missing the fact that most people CAN NOT SEE PATTERNS WHEN THERE'S TOO MUCH NOISE.

For the majority of people, the amount of detail in a field of clover is overwhelming, and their brains will stop processing it. Some may need to look at each clover individually in order to see it's shape. A few people, like my husband, would need to pick each clover up, to isolate it from the other green, in order to see any details.

This kind of skill is probably on a spectrum with synesthesia. Not diagnosable, just distantly related. Shapes jumping out for you, obvious and clear. It's a cool skill! I'm sure you worked at refining it - I'm not trying to diminish that in any way! I'm just even more sure that most people would not get your results with similar amounts of effort, because their brains do not naturally DO that.

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

Traditional mirror mazes are dark and creepy. This one is brightly lit, and colorful.

The triangular grid makes it that much more disorienting.

The pillars help to obscure the difference between the mirrors and the openings -- so it doesn't NEED to be dark.

He was wrongfully raided by police in 2022

He used footage and names of the specific cops in posts, videos and songs making fun of them

The cops sued for defamation and cried in court about the songs ruining their lives

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't mean "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

I meant to get this done in March and of course it didn’t happen. But, Dick’s got so many birthdays, I figured I could post it whenever.

But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.

If you haven’t seen the meme, it’s three photos of me showing my flapjacks to the judges and then a quote, I don’t remember saying this but apparently it’s how I talk, says “Started making it, had a breakdown, bon appétit”

On 23 October last year (2024) the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji who worked on organising and gathering data for OpenAI until 2022 when he begun thinking about the morality of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that what OpenAI is doing blatantly violates copyright law and decided to leave the company altogether in August 2024.

After he came out with this accusation he was set to appear in court to testify against OpenAI’s data-gathering practices, something which had the potential of being a complete disaster for the company and the generative AI industry as a whole.

That was until 26 November, just days before he was due to appear in court, when he suddenly and mysteriously was found dead inside his own apartment. Investigators concluded that the death was self-inflicted, something which his family has disputed.

There was also “sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood spots”, and his apartment showed signs of having been ransacked for evidence: “The pin drive is missing. His computer was messed up.”.

Overall it feels pretty clear-cut what happened, that is to say that OpenAI had him killed because he was a legitimate threat to their business, indicating that they are fully aware that the way they’re gathering data is completely illegal.

Sources:

Alys Davies, 14.12.2024, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment. BBC News

Barney Davis, 16.1.2025, Suchir Balaji’s family demand outside investigation into OpenAI whistleblower’s death. The Independent

Your clock will only tick if you ring up orders.

Your clock will only tick if you flip burgers.

Etc., etc.

The first lion is asking for comfort because she was given a big spook!!! and she needs mommy to tell her it’s safe and ok!!!! (What’s cuter is that mommy clearly reassures her, and goes on to take the parent role of ‘deal with the scream rat in order to protect my large and easily frightened daughter’)

Three apex predators

OR