Crafting Tomorrow from the Inside Out

Genuinely go fuck yourself,

Salem did nothing besides be a beacon of love, Black positivity, and support for his transfem friends. He made beautiful art to express his Blackness, the experience of being trans, and his desire to make people with beautiful bodies be seen, and I guess we just can't have that positivity here, or were you tired of banning trannies you decided to be racist as well?

After everything he went through, this is how you treat him?

Between this, and the previous terming of Yaybunnies, it must one again be reiterated that Black people being loud and positive about their Blackness is not allowed on this racist site.

And, because the userbase is also just as racist, it can be even harder to drum up as much awareness and positivity for is drummed up for even white transfems.

Don't let them get away with this. Reinstate @wolfertinger66

Again, fuck you @staff @humans @photomatt

This right here

If some of yall wonder why I've started taking a more hardline stance in the past few weeks, this is why.

Matt is trying to make Tumblr profitable and he thinks the way to do that is by running trans people off the site

Matt is a wimpy little bitch sucking farts from the ass of advertisers

Matt wants there to be nothing but nazis on this site that he can scam with adult oriented ads and white supremacists that are too stupid to realize they're being lied to and abused.

Leftists are smart. If you want to make money from a leftist you have to actually work. You have to calmly and reasonably do real work to make your product or service do what people want it to do. You have to create clean and moderated spaces with working search and functional blocking and strong user safety practices

If all you're hosting is nazis you just need a place for them to scream and you can fill the screen with a seizure inducing amount of ads and they won't care because dogshit quality is what they LIKE. You can run a website for a nickel and charge them a billion dollars for it and they'll thank you but the price is you have to give them your soul. You have to give them every bit of dignity you have. You have to make the world hate you, and then they'll hand you a billion dollars.

But what are you then? Rich? Oh wait. I know what you get for that. I know why someone like Matt wants that billion dollar paycheck

i’m like “you can totally go downstairs, but just so you know, right now the only thing down there is the genealogy department. that’s like the history of this area and the people who lived here a long time ago.”

i’m expecting them to lose interest, but to my surprise, they go “we want to see the genealogy department!!!!!!”

so i’m like “alright let’s do it!!!!” and lead this group of maybe six elementary school kids across the library make way for ducklings style and downstairs to our extremely not kid friendly genealogy room. our genealogy librarian is super cool, though, and he pulls out a few interesting things for them to look at & they ask a lot of questions and try to find where they live on maps from the 1800s

after about fifteen minutes, their curiosity has been sated, so we go back upstairs and over to the children’s department in that same duckling parade style

My aunt is over sixty, never married, and never, so far as I am aware, ever even had a great romance.  She dated a lot, but never clicked and now seems to have given up.  My mentor is over seventy, divorced her asshole husband more than half her life ago and has never found anyone since.

We all know women (and men) like these.  And because we know them, we know that “one day you will find someone,” is just … hogwash.  Because sometimes you just … don’t.  Or sometimes you do, but he turns out to be a cad.  Or you do and the universe rips you apart in the most unfair way possible.  And because society has us so fixated on finding “our other half” or whatever, we view these women as cautionary tales.

But … 

My aunt trains dogs.  Her schipperke is the national champion for his breed.  She spent so much of her life as a librarian, nurturing the love of books in kids, myself among them.  I ride horses because of her, and it’s one of the very few things I do that makes my soul feel at peace.

My mentor is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in her state.  She has devoted her life to fighting to ensure that everyone gets a vigorous defense.  Because of her countless people have had the opportunity to turn their lives around.  Because of her, they’ve had a life to turn around.  Because of her, the prosecution and the police in her jurisdiction are forced to behave ethically and adhere to the rule of law.  She’s still, even now fighting to abolish the death penalty.  It’s because of her that I am pursuing the life I am.

These women’s lives are not nothing.  In fact they are a whole lot of something, and it makes my heart hurt that I ever, in my dark 3 am’s, thought of their lives as something to be avoided at all costs.

So love your family, your friends, your pets, your gardens.  Love your job or your hobby or your raison d’ etre, whatever it is.  Love sunsets and the smell of rain and yourself, and don’t love these as something to do as a placeholder until the buzzing, romantic love comes, but love these as things worth loving all in themselves.

The first time he cheated death, Sisyphus had just angered Zeus by revealing the location of the Asopid Aegina whom Zeus abducted. Which is super valid, fuck Zeus.

Sisyphus knew that Zeus would send the god of death Thanatos after him, so he prepared a trap and trapped Thanatos in the chains meant for him.

After that, nothing on Earth was able to die so long as Thanatos was in chains. Which meant no animals could be sacrificed to the gods. This angered the gods, who made Sisyphus' life so miserable with pain and illness that he would beg for death. And so he released Thanatos.

But then came the second time Sisyphus cheated death. As he was dying, he asked his wife to dump his naked corpse in the middle of the public square. Denied a proper burial, his soul ended up on the far side of the river Styx, unable to cross.

He complained to Hades and Persephone about how his wife disrespected him, and begged them to let him return briefly to the world of the living to scold her and make her bury him properly. They agreed, and Sisyphus returned to life. He then embraced his wife, and refused to return to the Underworld.

It's only when he finally died of old age that he was sent to Tartarus and punished with the boulder.

I don't remember where I've seen it, but I like the interpretation that Sisyphus doesn't have to push the boulder. He can choose to stay in Tartarus and rest. But he was promised that if he managed to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, he'll ascend to Elysium.

And Sisyphus, in his stubbornness and cleverness, refuses to give up on a challenge.

This person, I believe is referring to the use of plants in the genus Anadenanthera, which do indeed contain dmt (dimenthyltryptamine), in addition to other psychedelic chemicals. The earliest evidence of the use of this plant is its seeds being found with pipes in Argentina which date back to around 4000 years ago. Evidence has also been found that several other methods of ingestion or use of the drug.

Regarding the earliest known use of psychedelic substances, there is below a table from “The oldest archeological data evidencing the relationship of Homo sapiens with psychoactive plants: A worldwide overview” by Giorgio Samorini. Based on this paper, the oldest known evidence is nearly 9000 years predating the (known) use of Anadenanthera.

Sources:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332081250_The_oldest_archeological_data_evidencing_the_relationship_of_Homo_sapiens_with_psychoactive_plants_A_worldwide_overview

(The oldest archeological data evidencing the relationship of Homo sapiens with psychoactive plants: A worldwide overview - Samorini)

https://www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/13/17/2398

No-kill shelters TURN AWAY animals. When they’re full - and they often are because most of these no-kill shelters are small - they stop taking them in. While they are “taking their time to find the right homes for every single animal”, many other animals never get in the door. Somehow they don’t count those animals, or track what happens to them. A success for them doesn’t include the ones they turned away. They’re taking their time because they can. 

The No-Kills who brag about 100% adoption rates are the worst, because they tend to reject the most. The animals who will be difficult to adopt out? They just don’t take those. Special needs? Too old? If they’re going to be hard to adopt out, they can claim to be full, even if they’re not. 

They are telling owners they absolutely cannot take their fifteen year old cat because they are full of litters of kittens. Adorable kittens that will turn over quickly, and boost their adoption numbers. So what happens to the fifteen year old cat? After days of being rejected at the shelters they get dumped on the side of the road somewhere, or worse. 

You cannot imagine the VOLUME of animals that a city shelter deals with. The kill shelters are not allowed to turn anyone away. The difficult cases, the special needs, the elderly, the feral. The dog that bites, the cat that pees everywhere. Every animal is going to be taken in and treated with kindness. They are going to be assessed and treated for their fleas and conditions and behavioral problems. They will get their time on the adoption floor. They will get the best chance possible to find a new home. And if it’s not possible, they will be humanely euthanized, and that cage space will go to the next animal who is already waiting for it. It never stops. While you were working on the paperwork to adopt out 1 cat, three people brought in 4 more. It’s a numbers game that you cannot win if you aren’t turning people away.

A lot of times kill shelters get the animals that the no-kill shelters refused to take. Maybe their owners bring them. Or maybe they got literally thrown in the garbage, abandoned, or put in a bag and tossed in the river, when the no-kill shelter said they were full. The police and rescuers will bring these poor injured animals to the city shelter where they will be cared for. The volunteers will spend days and weeks trying to wash the tar out of their fur, or treat their broken bones, or whatever other horrible thing has happened to them. They will feed and house them. They will put most of them in new homes. They will save many many more animals, by orders of magnitude, than a no-kill shelter ever will. A no-kill shelter will brag about dozens or maybe hundreds of  adoptions. Kill shelters are dealing in thousands of successful adoptions, and they still have to euthanize because it just isn’t enough. There are just so many animals to take in.

The researchers attended Dashcon "to access younger, Internet-active fandom communities." While the paper claims they had IRB approval from Indiana University Bloomington, there is no information about their study number, nor did any of Dashcon's organizers give them permission to be there, which is required to conduct research during a private event.

According to the study, their survey "obtained 106 valid responses" from Dashcon attendees.

Regardless, I could not find it published in a peer-reviewed journal (which would typically require authors to include the IRB number and/or more specifics regarding data collection).

It was presented at a conference "TPRC47" (Telecommunications Policy Research Conference) in 2019. https://www.tprcweb.com/program-overview-1

The paper is dated 2019, which is some helpful context: between Dashcon (2014) and the presentation prev identified, we had the Ebola outbreak, the killer clown epidemic, Trump I, and the discovery of liquid water on Mars. Minecraft was still big but starting to change. A lot of us were in high school. In mid-2013, a year before Dashcon, the Snowden leaks revealed unprecedented depths of US digital surveillance capabilities. The idea that Big Brother is watching us began to take its place in the public mind.

The intent of this study is to better understand how the public perceives internet security, with a goal of improving Internet of Things (IoT) security. There were three aspects to the research: a survey of non-technical users (this includes Dashcon along with some other sources), a workshop of technical experts from various fields, and interviews with experts from some of those fields (politicians and cryptographers). Basically, they wanted to talk with a bunch of people who don't know how computers work, and they figured Tumblr users were a great example of that. (Welp.) Also, Dashcon took place in Illinois, which sits next to Indiana, where the credited university is.

The stated purpose of the research is indeed noble: "to chart a path from the current state of IoT to a secure state." [III(B)] It's a good thing that needs to be done, and research (like this) must happen to achieve it. The acknowledged supporters [VII], including the National Science Foundation (NSF, a federal agency) and Cisco Systems (a major networking vendor, a private company with large government contracts and a handful of large competitors) have reasonable cause to pursue this goal, but not without plausible conflicts of interest. Importantly, it is very unlikely that either of these organizations was involved in actually collecting the data: there were not CIA spies at Dashcon covertly asking people about their browsing habits (probably). If anything, they would be slightly-overdressed nerds in their 20s-40s, probably carrying clipboards or tablets.

The federal government has equal-but-opposite interests in securing consumer devices against foreign attacks, and compromising consumer devices to enable domestic attacks. Cisco has an interest in creating an appearance of security, to make money, but also in doing whatever the government asks, also to make money.

The findings in the paper are of general interest to security researchers, and not terribly surprising: the average user doesn't really understand how TLS certificates work, politicians and businesses want you to throw stuff away and buy new ones, and mathematicians actually use their brains. The most impactful application of this information is to build better educational materials for the general public about how to browse safely. There are no particularly technical or strategic findings in this paper. Due to the scope of the document, I would say that the sources of funding are essentially a non-issue here: on other types of research, they may be more suspicious, but this paper was largely...uninteresting.

The major concern here pertains to the methodology of collecting data at Dashcon. If the event organizers were unaware of the study being conducted, that's a problem. If they interviewed children, that's probably a problem. The fact that no one seemed to know about this at all, that this is news to the Dashcon fandom in 2026, is the concern here.

Yes, they were definitely not CIA agents. This was not some scary thing, but it was shady and unethical, especially considering that they were apparently deceiving people. Which, from my own experience, requires a LOT of justification to the IRB. That is why I’m always so so clear that when I’m researching raccoons in my bathing suit, I’m not undercover. I say who I am and the institution I’m with and what I’m doing. I’m just wearing an outfit to make sure everyone feels more comfortable because they are also feeling inherently vulnerable. It would be like if these folks dressed up as homestuck trolls to go to Dashcon. But they weren’t doing that, they were deceiving people.

As far as the funding source being a non-issue, that’s…mmm…I don’t know. It’s. Complicated.

So for everyone’s reference, so much of science is funded by evil people and evil corporations. And we, as scientists, know this, and we have to weigh the pros and cons.

For example: Let’s say that the National Trappers Association will offer funding to biologists to study how eating garbage impacts the coat density and texture of critically endangered pygmy raccoons. They would not doing this because they have a vested interest in conserving the critically endangered pygmy raccoons, they would be doing this because they are seeing that the raccoons they are trapping have had shit coats lately and that’s costing them money. But, by funding research on the pygmy raccoons, they get to figure out if trash is or is not impacting the raccoons’ coats, and also they get to look good because they are helping save an endangered species, giving them more social capital amongst people who hate trappers.

Now, is this kind of evil? Yes. Would I be potentially contributing to the death of more raccoons? Yes. Would I also have a lot of really great information to increase the welfare of pygmy raccoons and common raccoons a like? Yes.

This is the kind of ethical issue that researches frequently face.

As the person above says, CISCO Systems has a vested interest in getting people, companies, and governments on board with smart home/surveillance shit (which plays a big role in the IOT) so they can get those big bucks.

It’s just that the research in this case wasn’t really all that interesting, it was likely just proving something people already knew and needed confirmation for financial/R&D reasons.

But I still think there’s a baseline level of insidiousness. Which there probably is with most major corporations, it’s just frustrating now to see how heavily CISCO has pushed their IOT bullshit recently and in a way that is hurting real people. Below is from a booklet about choosing CISCO for US defense IT.

Additionally, we do know with 100% certainty that the leader of the lab who produced the study that went to Dashcon, L Jean Camp, does directly partner with the military who funds a whole lot of the research.

So it’s like, is it evil? Yeah. But it’s maybe just a little above the baseline level of evil for most science.

Which brings us back to what the above poster said:

It’s the methodology that is really the gross part. They didn’t collect anything super important, they didn’t give any harmful people any info they didn’t already know, but they did act in a way that is unethical.

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

So I wouldn't even answer this ask EXCEPT it's a fantastic example of someone who hates you and wants you to undermine your cause pretending to be on your side, so let's go through the points.

1.) Makes the assertion that you've already failed eight months in advance. Wants you to give up and give in because you think the cause is already lost.

2.) Implies that everyone else is secretly gonna do it, so you may as well too. Wants to chip away at your resolve.

3.) Claims to be on your side and therefore a trustworthy source.

4.) "Boycotts don't work." Demonstrably they do, as long as people are organized and persistent. Look at how Target and Starbucks are sweating and begging people to come back. Boycotts work.

HBO, the dragon-fucking, mobster murdering, gang cussword network does not have a lot of play with parents, or the general public. At best, they're third fiddle to Disney and Netflix, and HP is an obvious play for them to steal market share and shed their historical perception (see also: Sesame Street)

Production is clocking in around $100 million per episode. This thing is primed to be a failure. If it does anything less than the absolute best numbers of any TV show in the last decade, it is a failure.

A huge portion of their built in audience has less than zero interest in supporting this project, and will actively shit talk it to whomever wants to hear.

Again, Harry Potter is so uncool right now. I know it's been 30 years almost since the first film, but it's been less than 20 since the last one, not counting the Fantastic Beasts. It's only been four years since a Harry Potter was released! We've had, on average, one film every two and a half years.

In the spirit of "my uncle who works at Ninetendo", I have a ... let's say friend of a friend? ... who used to work at WB. And oh, honey. The TEA.

So a number of years ago, this friend was on the team tasked with figuring out whether a new HP series was financially viable. They had the ACTUAL streaming numbers, the subscriber data, the parks stuff, all the shit companies don't release. Their job was to gauge the popularity of HP, break it down by what does and doesn't make money, and determine whether new HP was worth the investment (because it would NOT be cheap).

The numbers, my loves, were catastrophic.

Yes, HP makes WB a lot of money. But it is NOSTALGIA money. MILLENNIAL nostalgia money. The people buying house scarves and theme park tickets are reliving their own childhoods, and we're not making any more 80s/90s babies, are we? No, we are not. And millennials' kids want nothing to do with this shit, and most millennials don't have as much money as you'd expect to spend on nostalgia in the first place. The only people engaging with this shit are the hardcore fans (a shrinking population due to JKR's shit parade) and people who might buy a Harry Potter chocolate bar on clearance because it's cheap chocolate. The hardcore fans already have their streaming subscriptions, and the cheap-chocolate crowd aren't going to get them for HP. There is also the very real chance that a shitty remake will tarnish memories of the original films, thereby reducing THEIR value. It was concluded that the best strategy was to shut up and keep profiting off the old stuff.

So why, I asked friend-of-friend, is a new series coming out now?

Now, FOF no longer works there. They are not privy to the inside scoop on this series. They told me so. And so I asked them to speculate, on the basis of zero inside knowledge: why now?

They started snickering.

And they told me that anyone who's worked anywhere near David Zaslav is convinced that this series only exists because he wants his name on an HP thing. That's it. This is a vanity project for DAVID FUCKING ZASLAV. It's going to fail, but it'll fail with his name on it, and that's all that matters. Its whole purpose is to buff Zaslav's ego.