Okay yeah. I might have a long term obsession manifesting here.
Maybe.
Sade Olutola
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Monterey Bay Aquarium
KIROKAZE
NASA

ellievsbear

titsay
occasionally subtle

Doug Jones
sheepfilms
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

Product Placement
Show & Tell
Cosmic Funnies

gracie abrams
Misplaced Lens Cap

cherry valley forever

seen from United States
seen from Kazakhstan
seen from Ukraine

seen from United Kingdom
seen from France

seen from Malaysia
seen from Thailand

seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from Australia

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from Jamaica
seen from United States

seen from Kuwait
seen from United States

seen from United States
@hawthornsword
Okay yeah. I might have a long term obsession manifesting here.
Maybe.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
"But AI can't do your job. It canΒ helpΒ you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the humanΒ radiologist'sΒ fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding β and thus deflating β the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI thatΒ can'tΒ do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaurβs Guide to Criticizing AI
Friend in an alleyway | my wife sent me this photo the other day and said "you HAVE to draw this." and I agreed completely <:
the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like 'wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains'
seriously i'm not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you've got systematized data to back it up, like
what do they even think a fortification is for???
what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????
make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army' scale?
and like i said in the first post, it's not just that it's Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.
if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!
but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.
it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.
when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.
or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.
even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!
no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.
kind of a tangent but this is also how I feel when the good guys mow their way through dozens of faceless grunts and then suddenly the big bad in charge is the life they face a moral quandary over
the random foot soldiers and henchmen's lives matter too! tbh
#tbh they should matter MORE #they are way less culpable than whoever's in charge #it's just plot convenient to dehumanize the work force
I think itβs worth noting that history is littered with examples of wasteful tactics. A common element is that often times technology advances while tactics do not.
For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.
The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.
There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.
I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, itβs very clear that even if there are βgood guysβ and βbad guysβ in war, thereβs also just a lot of waste. That doesnβt make for a very sexy narrative, but itβs the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But thatβs also excepted as the way things are done.
At the end of the day, Iβm just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.
I think the more interesting question is, should there be?
i mean maybe, but that's not what the post is about, it's about fiction that places warfare centrally, but then engages with it only on an aesthetic level.
thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.
this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.
i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.
the problem is a general failure to care enough about the battle as an event within a narrative to make the pieces go together according to an internal logic. people being dumb is fine as long as they're dumb on purpose. people not doing The Most Winning Thing is fine as long as the priorities they're supposed to have are the priorities they're actually displaying.
There's nothing more frustrating as an audience than being told "this person is a Good Person who Cares about their men and is also a Genius Tactician" and being shown a clown that never thinks before getting most of their people needlessly killed.
Let the historical record show that Mr. Beast was entirely ignorable if you were just like doing literally anything else. I've been on youtube as long as it's been around and I've never been recommended a video by him. I see him in passing as a meme. I thought he was a made up joke, a caricature of bad youtuber content miners until someone I trust confirmed his existence to me in late 2025.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
When you finally get out of your flow state just to realize your oneshot wip got ahead of you and now you're plotting a trilogy with at least one sequel, two spinoff, a prequel duology and one unrelated story in the same universe at 4am on a weekday (the alarm is set to ring in 2 hours):
Astrology is very popular β both GallupΒ and YouGovΒ report that about 25% of Americans believe that the position of the stars and planets can
Astrology doesn't seem to work.
Some highlights:
Astrologers helped design the study
No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance
They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They werenβt even coming up with the chart themselves!
After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it
Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (βworld class expertsβ) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance
This is hilarious
That's got to be the funniest graph ever published in a paper
Luke & Leia | illustrated by Mark McHaley
shipping fictional characters together as an adult is actually very fun and i encourage it. it is also one of the worst things you can do to yourself and should not be attempted. it's very simple really.
pros of shipping fictional characters as an adult: having a more mature and experienced outlook on people and relationships actually opens up a lot of new funny, interesting, and even thoughtful ways of engaging with the concept of fictional people kissing. also, it's fun.
cons of shipping as an adult: you will inevitably form an extremely niche and personal interpretation of the relationship between your favorite fictional people who you want to smash together like barbie dolls or possibly on-fire waste disposal trucks, and become extremely annoyed by the popular fan interpretations that are bland and formulaic by comparison. but since you are also involved in the deeply cringe activity of getting emotionally invested in a fictional relationship you have no chance of being taken seriously if you complain about it, and therefore no choice but to try to ignore it and make your own content that is liked by 3 of your friends who are the only like-minded people you respect and that one account that likes everything you post anyway
if you're sitting on a fanfic idea because you think it's "too weird" or "too niche" I need you to understand something: the internet is VAST and FULL of people with your exact brand of weird. that crackship that makes sense only to you? there are at least 50 people who will read it and go "oh my god FINALLY." but even if there were ZERO? you still deserve to write the thing that makes your brain light up.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
cats are so naturally skilled at Writhing In Sunbeam. i wish i had even a fraction of this talent but instead i just have all these bones
Sorry Iβm late I was touching soft moss on a stone wall
Thinking about a duct tape wizard
no offense but you guys need to learn the difference between someone implying their experience is universal and a post simply just not being about you

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
βRemember, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels πβ
me, adding a new tag to my block list: Iβm so glad my beloved mutual has discovered a new source of joy