Good news! It gets worse!
I think it's the galactic orbit thing that really did me in
WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHARKS HAVE BEEN AROUND THE GALAXY TWICE
It’s a very good design

@theartofmadeline

shark vs the universe
Cosimo Galluzzi
Xuebing Du

JVL
cherry valley forever
KIROKAZE

pixel skylines
Jules of Nature
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
todays bird
Sade Olutola
Acquired Stardust
wallacepolsom

Product Placement

titsay

izzy's playlists!
Three Goblin Art
Misplaced Lens Cap

#extradirty
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Taiwan
seen from Türkiye
seen from Brazil

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from France

seen from France
seen from United States

seen from Canada

seen from Iraq

seen from United States
@internettrawler
Good news! It gets worse!
I think it's the galactic orbit thing that really did me in
WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHARKS HAVE BEEN AROUND THE GALAXY TWICE
It’s a very good design

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 • No registration required • HD streaming
"Heh, and he says he doesn't care..."
Sequel to this scene:
https://www.tumblr.com/lithuiwen2016/815446054499647488/dont-die-on-me-mecha-bitch-i-fell-down-the
Side note, the engagement I have been receiving the last few days is...insane to say the least. Thank you all so much! <3
I'm always looking for art ideas so if you guys wanna see more Dispatch fanart, feel free to drop a comment or send me an ask!
Note, these are NOT commissions, I am literally doing this for fun and as an outlet for everyday stresses XD
"Don't die on me, Mecha-Bitch!"
I fell down the Dispatch Rabbit hole, and Flambert is officially my favourite ship. If Dispatch ever gets a Season 2, Flambae better be a romance option.
Pose reference used: Leave No One [Couple Pose Reference] by Adorkastock on DeviantArt.
Link here: https://www.deviantart.com/adorkastock/art/Leave-No-One-Couple-Pose-Reference-677757107
Hello everyone Experiencing Winter right now, I would like to express a friendly holiday message on behalf of ER workers everywhere:
BE CAREFUL ON ICE
YES, EVEN IF YOU ARE ONLY WALKING. When a fresh wave of ice comes in, 90% of my mom's ER isn't car accidents, it's people w/trauma from falling on their way to the car.
LOOK FOR ICE. Mostly in the morning, but Be Looking. Ice manifests suddenly in strange places.
You cannot get friction on an unbroken icy slope. No power of will or special stance will change this. Either wear treads to dig into the ice, or find a non-icy path.
Never be afraid to drop on your butt and scooch across ice. If you aren't sure if you can safely cross an ice patch or get down off a icey hill, then get on your butt. It is 10000% safer to help you not slip, and also if you slip. Yes you might look silly, looking silly is better than head trauma.
Penguin shuffle if needed. Little baby steps keeping your center of gravity centered. This only works if you aren't on a slop. If you are on a slope, see the above.
Walk on the grass. I cannot stress this enough. If the sidewalks aren't cleared or you're unsure, any grassy section nearby will be a safe alternative. Even if it means walking on someone's lawn.
Handrails are your friends, use them please.
25 years of ads peeled away
The day has come. This is the only day of the year you can post this

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 • No registration required • HD streaming
I had a few requests to repost this as its own rebloggable post, so here you go. The original person I was responding to deactivated their reblogs, presumably because they got a lot of unpleasantness in the notes. This is practising healthy online boundaries, and I'd appreciate it if people don't give them any sh** for it.
---------------------------------
Hm, there are at least three major problems to consider, I think. This is going to be a bit long, so bear with me, but I promise that I will not at any point argue in favor of copyright, argue on the grounds of human ability, and I will not at any point appeal to concepts of "soul" or "spirit."
1: Environmental impact
It's fairly well documented at this point that the sheer power requirements to run AI data centers and computation have caused the major tech companies betting the farm on this technology to invest in a huge expansion of data centers, which in turn both require huge amounts of additional power (which tends to be drawn from fossil fuel sources) and huge amounts of water for cooling.
For reasons unrelated to AI as a technology as such, but related to the capitalist mode of production which produces "AI" as a product and service, the burdens and costs of creating this new infrastructure falls disproportionately on the poor, the marginalized and upon the global south, as it always does. It is of course to be noted that these tech companies are likely to also be using generative AI as an excuse to backslide on their environmental commitments and massively expand their infrastructure with government and venture capital money, but generative AI is a not-insignificant part of the problem.
2: Economic impact
The primary stated purpose of generative AI as a business is to replace workers. It is a form of automation, and generative AI specifically targets jobs requiring language and visual media skills - whether that be translation, copywriting, creative writing, coding, drawing, painting or graphic design, or any of a thousand other related skills.
The express purpose of adopting the technology widely is to replace hundreds of thousands of workers, who upon losing their jobs will be thrust into precarity, and the industries affected will experience an enormous downwards pressure on wages and an enormous negative impact on processes of unionization and collective bargaining.
One might argue that this is a problem of capitalism more than a problem of generative AI as a technology, which, okay, sure, but capitalism is the system we live under and the value and ethical status of any technology is always evaluated in the context of the system that deploys it. If we lived under Luxury Gay Space Communism, I am sure I would feel different about generative AI; but we don't, so I judge it accordingly. Under the capitalist economic mode of production, generative AI is a fundamental threat to the economic and social well-being of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of workers in hundreds of fields of labor.
3: Freedom of expression
Generative AI as a tool imposes harsh restrictions on freedom of expression, and in a worst-case scenario (i.e. the exact scenario that the developers of these AI tools are trying to make happen), will put huge swaths of artistic expression under the control and economic exploitation of enormous corporations unaccountable to any democratic power.
No generative AI tool can generate any output except that which is allowed for
by its programming as defined by its owners and creators
by its dataset, which must be built and maintained by an organized group
With every single major generative model currently firmly under the control of corporate or national interests, those groups have the ability to exert profound control over which outputs are or are not possible from the most powerful and most capable AI models. The Chinese DeepSeek model, for example, will refuse to answer questions about Tianamen Square, and similar censorship can and will be implemented by other state actors when it suits their purposes.
No generative model can output a picture of a motorcycle unless the database for the model is trained on pictures of motorcycles, and even if it IS trained on pictures of motorcycles, it can and will only ever output motorcycles identical to whatever necessarily limited set of motorcycles are represented in its data. And if a corporation (or government) decides that a model is not allowed to output images of motorcycles, they can implement profound censorship of the concept of motorcycles in their models.
Replace "motorcycle" with "sexual education material," "political literature" or "information about or depictions of queer people or minorities" and you start to see the problem.
One might argue that "users would simply circumvent that restriction," but to say so is to miss the point entirely: savvy power users with an agenda would circumvent the system. Your grandma using the system casually would not, especially if (or when) circumventing the system is made illegal.
Similarly, one might argue that a band of dedicated, democratically minded individuals could simply band together to train and create their own independent models, free of all censorship - but again, the ability to access the infrastructure necessary to build such a project would be contingent on the assent of either corporations or national governments, and both of those groups would inevitably see a completely unbound, democratically governed AI infrastructure as a direct competitor or a political threat, and act accordingly.
Generative AI, logistically and structurally, is a tool of expression which is privileges power. Whoever holds power in a given society has undue ability to influence what it is possible to express via generative AI and who has access to the ability to express it.
Generative AI has been magnanimously made available for "free" thus far, by speculative corporations backed by oceans of venture capital, but they are all expected to turn a profit at some point, and once those screws come down, not only will they silo and closed-source their technology, they will aggressively pursue hostile action towards competitors, and limit access to their Revolutionaryâ„¢ technology to whoever is most able to either pay or coerce access through force.
In short, whoever has the most money or political power will have access to the greatest degree of freedom of expression from generative AI.
3b: Freedom of expression on the purely aesthetic level
This is a less important objection than point 3 above, but it also needs to be noted that generative AI as a technology is fundamentally based upon and limited by probability.
That is to say, when you prompt a generative AI model to generate a given output, the fundamental nature of the math it uses is a probabilistic attempt to approximate an acceptable answer.
In oversimplified terms, if you ask it for a picture of a motorcycle, it will attempt to output a semi-randomized mixture of all its data which is tagged with "motorcycle," weighted against training data and a history of user feedback, in order to probabilistically arrive at whatever output it calculates the end user is most likely to accept and validate as a "correct" output.
This has some consequences, specifically that generative AI is fundamentally bound as a technology to always and forever regress to the mean. It will always and forever default to and privilege lowest common denominators.
Thus, one of the things generative AI tends to have a lot of trouble with is ugliness. It struggles to generate images which do not conform to dominant standards of beauty and desirability. And I mean this not just in terms of human beauty and desirability, but beauty and desirability across all forms of expression. Generative AI severely struggles to output an ugly landscape image, for example. It struggles to output pictures of kittens that are not cute, it struggles to output pictures of Ferraris that don't look gorgeous or swords that don't look cool. It also struggles to output images of people along the same lines.
The first part of the problem is that the vast, overwhelming amount of input of images bias towards the aesthetically pleasing (because most images that get preserved and uploaded of anything bias towards the aesthetically pleasing). The second part is that, the vast, overwhelming amount of desired and validated outputs also bias towards the aesthetically pleasing, because that is what most users most of the time will inevitably and statistically want and prefer.
Because the vast, overwhelming majority of the model's feedback from users will validate and confirm the correctness of outputs that bias beauty and appeal, models will always be statistically required to generate outputs towards that standard.
The result is that generative AI is, technologically and irrevocably, bound to bias towards and reproduce the lowest common denominator, and it uncritically inherits every single cultural bias of the dominant culture that produces and uses it. Usually this means biases in favor of beauty and appeal, and biases against whatever is considered ugly or undesirable in a culture.
Even if you are the sort of profoundly shallow and unimaginative person who believes that "nobody would ever WANT images that aren't beautiful and appealing," you have to concede that any tool which does not allow you full and equal freedom to depict the ugly and the unconventional is imposing a severe restriction of the freedom of expression of its users.
In conclusion: generative AI is defined by mounting and catastrophic social, economic and environmental costs, and fundamentally and structurally biased in favor of power and capital. Even in the very best-case possible scenario in which all economic and political problems with the technology are solved, its fundamental nature is to regress to the mean and privilege the lowest common denominator, imposing inherent restrictions on freedom of expression. None of these problems are shared by a pencil, or by a typewriter.
Where's the African mythology?
The Kickstarter is live now!
I know I have close to zero Tumblr fame, which I normally appreciate, but I would love it if this made it into the world and got fully backed. You can even pledge to get the digital content and send a real copy to a school in Africa or to a HBCU or community library of your choosing!
one of the most annoying feelings in ADHD is the can't-get-started-with-anything feeling. like, your ADHD is screaming you have to do something. you can't just rest, resting isn't a thing. even if you are resting, it's by doing something.
but nothing works. you try to watch something, it's not right. you can't. read? can't read right now play? nah none of these games seem fun make something? ehh, you're not feeling any of these projects right now social media? it's boring or worse right now, so... find something else it's like you're not moving but it's because you're too tense to do anything, just vibrating in place
its like being the protagonist of an adventure game and everything the player tells you to combine or look at or use or do youre just like "hmm....that wont work" "i cant do this right now" "its locked" "i dont think so" "i cant do that yet"

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 • No registration required • HD streaming
The bacteria causing one of the largest marine species die-offs ever recorded was recently discovered at USGS Western Fisheries Research Cen
This is an amazing discovery and I'm so excited. So, in 2013 people noticed that sea stars were tearing themselves apart on the west coast. This disease decimated the sea star population, which was responsible for a 300% increase in the sea urchin population and a 30% decrease in kelp beds in Washington state. Sea stars are the original keystone species. Researchers tried to get funding, but it's hard to get people to pay attention to sea stars, much less fund research on their mass deaths. After years of trying and failing, an elementary school in Arkansas learned about the sea star wasting disease in class and decided to do a fundraiser. They only raised $200, but their dedication inspired other private donors to step up where other attempts at getting funding failed. There's so much more to do, but knowing why this is happening will enable researchers to find a solution that can save these beautiful creatures and the pacific coast's delicate kelp forests.
my page for memento mori volume ii - @strahdzine
try to count how many skulls i crammed in here (click for full res!)
Curse of Strahd: Is No Fun, Is No Blinsky
I love chain lightening what a classic spell. fuck you and you and you and you and you and
finally watched cooldown and two thoughts:
Smart of Matt to be like "no, we will have a satisfying denouement for other major figures involved" after the collective C2 ending freakouts; like, it feels like we are pretty obviously deep in the endgame but yeah I expect there will be check-ins after the last battle with Vox Machina, the Mighty Nein, and the Crown Keepers, plus probably the Calloways; obviously Liliana will be present. Might need two post BBEG combat episodes instead of the traditional one!
Other people have noted this but yeah it's actually...fucking weird how Liam is the only person who seems to in real life accept that Vax is permanently gone and you can't like, cheat this. And it's frustrating because he is no less dead than Zuala or Will or Molly or FCG. Like, sending the ravens and popping back in does mean it's harder for Keyleth to get over it, but like. idk maybe stop trying to go on random dates and just spend time with people who aren't technically under your (benevolent) rule or also people who never really accepted Vax's death (ie, the rest of Vox Machina). I mean I enjoyed the scene with Verin, and I think there's an intriguing case to be made there anyway (high expectations in childhood, leadership at a very young age, grew up without one of their parents) but just generally...she will never forget Vax, it will always be a scar, but she can move forward if she accepts his choice even if she disagrees with it. At this point...if she can't move on, that is because she won't. And a little bit because seven years later the cast won't.
About the Vax thing, I think it's maybe because on some level, it's admitting Vax killed myself. Vax chose death. (Well, chose to *work* for death, technically, but maybe splitting hairs)
That can be a very hard thing to accept, because the alternative of "Vax got stuck with a terrible deal and was forced into the Raven Queens service" is sooooo much more easy to parse than to accept that this character wanted to die, wanted to leave everything behind, despite having a good life, good love, good friends. He accepted the opportunity to leave when it came.
I think that's tough to come to come to terms with. The other deaths in the series were deaths that were forced upon the characters situationally, and the grieving process there is really just accepting the situation. But Vax saw the path of death that was coming ahead of him for a long time and accepted it, wanted it, arguably.
I actually think this is fundamentally the problem - even people who (like yourself) have moved past the initial "the Raven Queen MADE HIM DO IT" incorrect assumption are still treating it as a choice to die, rather than a choice to keep an oath. I don't think it is splitting hairs to say he chose to work for death, rather than choosing death; that's actually the entire deal. Even in this latest episode he makes it extremely clear: he doesn't want to die or leave, but if he did, he would be a person who forsakes his promises - promises he made to ensure his sister would live. This wasn't an acceptance of an opportunity; it was an acceptance that this was the conditions to which he agreed. At no point do I feel he wanted to die. I think THAT is what tripped people up, because then it turns into "why would he leave us? why would he choose death over us?" instead of "he has made a promise, and he will not break it."
I have never, to be honest, understood the idea in fandom that Vax had a death wish. Vax, in the end, was killed by Vecna. The only reason that wasn't a permanent death was because the party was so incredibly powerful by then that they could with ease cast true resurrection. Had Vax not failed the save against disintegrate, or had more HP? He would be alive and he'd be happy to be alive. He did not seek death (though he was, of course, initially willing to trade his life for Vex's and it was a kindness that this was taken to mean service; I'd argue that Vax lost any signs of a death wish after his oath to the Raven Queen was made, actually), but he accepted it as a possibility.
I think that's what really fucks people up. I don't think a happy ending is available. One of my favorite books has a character offered something he dearly wants, but at the cost of selling out a friend and potentially endangering his home, and the way he describes his choice not to is "the only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart"; he later describes it as that he'd live, but he wouldn't be someone he liked anymore. Vax could go back to Exandria and live out his life, sure, but he would be someone who betrayed the god he believes in and pledged his life to. He would be glad to be with Keyleth and Vex and his family; and he would loathe himself as a person.

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 • No registration required • HD streaming
Okay so this is a big deal
Sir Terry Pratchett's iconic Discworld novel Night Watch, featuring Commander Sam Vimes, to be published as a Penguin Classic.
To me, and to a significant subset of Sir Terry's fans (including most of you who've found this by the tags), his writing is serious commentary on the human condition - politics, prejudice, self-control, revenge vs. justice, religion, idealism, faith in people vs. cynicism, and more - dressed up with fantasy settings and a hefty leavening of humor to make it fun to read. And it is WILDLY fun to read, actual laugh-out-loud or at least a snicker averaging about every page.
But there's this common idea among the "important literature" people that fun and funny books are not also worthwhile or important in the same way.
This is a Discworld book being released WITH ACADEMIC COMMENTARY and AS A PENGUIN CLASSIC. That's a HUGE amount of recognition.
@thebibliosphere
Oh, I’m about to tear up. I had to fight so hard to do my thesis on Pratchett because the university didn't like what they considered pop culture being studied as literature and this is just... Existing. 🥹
Let's be honest here...
Scanlan Shorthalt decided to transform himself into a centaur not because it was an easier way to get around. No. He did this because... he likes to be the centaur of attention.