In the Book Version I Died Already

ceiling cat

monorail cat

long cat

the OG can i haz cheezburger cat

the lesser known graphix cat

invisible bike cat

my planet needs me cat

cat with the gat

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

They want to build this in the zoo parking lot and act like its no big deal

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

And at some point it was just a lot to keep track of and frustrating that so much was out of continuity. For example, recall that Ion Storm and Nova Storm were suddenly named in 2015 after decades of fans (like me) making up names for them.

And I tried switching to writing for IDW 2005 continuity, but the Combiner Wars portion such as it was went way different than I thought and another fic went way out of continuity.

So, that's why I write "Continuity Soup" now. I can just be like, "Nope, not this version, mine is different, and I was clear about that."

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.