SEMI HIATUS
Trans men are men, trans women are women.
Free Palestine.
Feminist, socialist, anti-fascist, she/her. I once asked Chuck Tingle if he might write a kids book. AO3. Multifandom blog, fuck off if you are an exclusionist.
Click here for 'about me' . Follow my 'wholesome' tag for just the cute stuff. 50ish age
Guys if you want queer shit written by queers on our own terms you're going to have to start seeking out weird independent media. I'm sorry that's the only place you can regularly find it idk what to tell you, we can't keep acting like there's nothing if we're not getting blockbusters and triple A titles or whatever it is we're waiting around for. The thing you keep saying you want is already being offered for free by one person making a passion project on the internet and you would both benefit enormously if you interacted with it instead of lamenting that the only options we have for representation are pandering afterthoughts from corporate shit
I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.
You are allowed to feel uncomfortable about it. But don't ask for queers to self censor for your comfort.
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for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
"You can say that [orangutans] are not dependent on social support and approval, and if you admire this in them, that an orang is irredeemably his own person, 'the most poetic of the apes', researcher Lynn Miles told me once in an unguarded moments. What she had in mind was the difference between orangs and chimps in the way they carry on their discourse with the world.
Chimps are much admired for their tool use and for their problem-solving relationship with things as they find them...the orang is, let us say, not so replete with enterprise. Give an orangutan the hexagonal peg and the several shapes of hole, and then hide behind the two-way mirror and watch how he engages with the problem.
And watch and watch and watch--because he does not engage with the problem. He uses the peg to scratch his back, has a look-see at his right wrist, makes a half-hearted and soon abandoned attempt to use his fur as a macramé project, stares dreamily out the window if there is one and at nothing in particular if not, and the sun begins to set. (The sun will also set if you are observing a chimp, but the chimp is more amusing, so you are less likely to mark the moment in your notes. An orang observer has plenty of time to be a student of the vanities of sunset.)
You watch, and the orang dreams...when casually and as if thinking of something else, the orang slips the hexagonal peg into the hexagonal hole. And continues staring off dreamily."
Vicki Hearne, "The Case of the Disobedient Orangutans"
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
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They like spending time with one another. When she first started making her rounds it was to get to know her crew, and then it turned into realizing she genuinely enjoyed talking to these people. Maybe Garrus is, well, not quite abrasive, but he did need a few edges smoothed out a little. And he took to it—really took what she said to heart, and then she started asking questions. Got to know him. Asked how he got started with C-Sec, how long he'd been a detective for. Some are things she could have easily found by consulting files, but there was something so impersonal in that. It had thrown him at first, but he’d answered her questions with ease.
Then they started getting a little more personal and less work related, both of them. He asked what she was humming once, and she asked for any suggestions for dumb vids to watch for a distraction. I could join you, he said, and then immediately tried to walk it back. Too forward, and then she'd tilted her head and told him to meet her at shift change. And then suddenly that found the two of them hunkered down beside the Mako with a vid she’s never heard of and one he’s started to overthink. They sit side by side, legs stretched across the floor, and she comments damn, she didn't realize how long they were compared to hers and it pulls a laugh from him.
There’s a shift to friendship, and maybe that’s the starting point, and then they reach Virmire, then Ilos. Then there’s a moment of fear when they think she’s been crushed after that fight with Saren, only for her to come crawling out of the wreckage. They celebrate after, because of course they do, and maybe he’s just this shade of having a few too many and she might regret that last shot, but she leans against him, pressed into his space that makes their shuttle bay watch party pale in comparison. He has to lean down to hear her ask Do you have any more vids? That last one was terrible. He glances at her and says You asked for something bad, you can’t complain about that and she laughs, head back and he almost reaches out to keep her steady, even if she doesn’t need him for that.
They part ways after, for him to go back to C-Sec and her to trail across the galaxy, and he spends more time than he wants thinking he should have gone too. Movie night when I swing by the Citadel again? she sends him, and he says, Drinks are on me.
He spends two years with the three titles he had picked out for her collecting proverbial dust. He doesn’t watch them. He finds himself missing her presence and the budding ease to the friendship—the Commander too, yes, but he misses Shepard. Her memorial is nice in the way state ones are, but it misses all the nuances of who Shepard was as a person, he thinks. There’s a pack of levo beer in his fridge, and it stays there as he leaves for Omega. When he sees her again, somewhere between the haze of adrenaline and stims and preparing himself for death, a smart quip dies, choked back by the blood in his throat. He’s never seen fear on her before, and that’s what he remembers before he comes to again with Chakwas telling him to take it easy.
Shepard is different, there but not. The line of her spine is altered, same with the slant of her shoulders. She glances to him like she’s surprised to see he’s still there, and he watches the way she flits across the Normandy, relearning a ship that’s hers but isn’t. She makes her rounds but something feels just slightly off about it—like the time he moved his kitchen table a few inches to make room for a new couch and it changed the feel of his entire apartment.
He waits, until he knows this ship, until he’s certain she’s not leaving again, and then as Shepard makes her rounds toward the tail end of her shift, he says, Shepard, fingers hovering over his console. He hears her pause, the muted thud of the toe of her boot hitting the floor. She’s close enough to him still she hasn’t set off the door mechanism. He turns to find her looking back at him, twisted at the waist, and he moves to face her fully. What do you... he starts and shakes his head. She moves, both feet planted on the floor. It’s been a while since I’ve found the time to watch a bad vid and could use the company. Only if you’re free, of course. She looks at him, scars an angry and violent reminder of her being dragged back into existence, and for the first time he finds himself wanting to reach for them, to cup to the ones on her cheek and press against them until they scald his palm, too. They flex when she smiles, the first real one he's seen since Omega. Drinks are on me.
i love making friends in fandom, i love playing with our toys together, i love coming up with increasingly niche aus, i love lifting strangers up, i love motivating people to create, i love watching someone get excited over an idea and immediately running with it, i love yelling in tags together, i love seeing someone gain confidence in their writing/art because people were kind to them <33
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Ryland Grace and his popularity as a character feels like such an important step in repairing the cultural tsunami left by the long running trope of every genius character needing to be an insufferable asshole to everyone in a ten mile radios about it.
Conversely, Eva Stratt is doing wonders for repairing and inspiring a appreciation for commanding women with dubious moral convictions who are fully willing to bend laws for the greater good without hesitation.
Quick shout out to the Down syndrome kid from my after-school program back when I was in grade school. Like yea he had the usual issues but he was a sweetheart and quite funny; and one day both his parents showed up at the same time to pick him up and I had the experience of meeting a family of genetically disabled people that had jobs and a home and a kid in school and it was a profoundly normalizing experience for me like I couldn’t take eugenicists seriously after that because like “no they totally can have whole entire meaningful lives with marriage and children and work and hobbies have you not met Dennis??” Anyway quick shout out to Dennis you were a real one
Idaho banned Pride flags. Boise’s mayor wrapped the flagpoles in rainbow instead.
Idaho Governor Brad Little signed HB 561 into law last week, prohibiting government buildings from flying non-official flags, with fines of $2,000 a day for non-compliance. Boise had been flying a Pride flag for over a decade.
Within a week, Boise Mayor Lauren McLean had the city’s flagpoles wrapped in Pride colours. The rainbow wrapping sits on the pole itself, not as a flag. The city is also displaying a large “Creating a city for everyone” sign on City Hall and rainbow lighting around the building at night.
The city’s response was precise: “The city of Boise remains in compliance with the law and is not flying any city official Pride flags on our properties.”
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Ted Hill, has openly stated his bill was specifically designed to target Boise for flying the Pride flag. The mayor’s response: comply with the letter of the law, and ignore its spirit entirely.
“To our LGBTQ family, friends and neighbours, you are an essential part of Boise,” McLean said. “You are welcome here. You are valued here. And no law can or will change that.”
I live in Dallas, TX. It’s a sleek and corporate-looking city, way less yee-haw than you might imagine (that’s Fort Worth’s job, for all that they’re fake-ass city-slickers). We have a gayborhood, and our gayborhood used to have a rainbow crosswalk. You may have seen, recently, that Texas outlawed ‘political’ crosswalks such as these. Thank god, right? Texas is saved. Glad we’re focused on the real problems.
I went to “the club” for the first time recently—the gay kind, in the gayborhood, because I have no business going to “the club” anywhere else. Coincidentally, this was a few days before they painted the crosswalk over. I remember staring down, sad, thinking, “damn, they’ll be painting that over soon.” Sure enough, it was gone before the end of the weekend.
A week or so later, I happened to drive down that street while eking out my sad little delivery driver shift. I looked at the crosswalk. As much as someone got themselves arrested trying to fix it (based, btw), the rainbow was gone. Alas.
Then I looked up.
Every building on the street was decked out like a pride parade had fucking exploded. A lot of the people were decked out as well. It was even gayer than it had been before. I looked into the window of one of the bars and their TV was playing a series of graphics that basically said “they took our fucking crosswalk away, the bastards,” in a sea of what I can only imagine was every fucking rainbow flag they could find. I almost cried laughing.
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part of being an adult is figuring out what eveyone else's definition of "going crazy" is. to you it is not sleeping for 60 hours, writing 80k words in one sitting and expiriencing enough anxiety to kill a horse. to beth from accounting its buying a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. and to your friend its consuming so much ketamine you lose all of your posessions and wake up with five broken bones in a ditch somewhere and then proceeding to do it again the next day. to your other friend its writing a letter to their favourite actress about how much they appreciate her work. to your neighbour its laughing loudly in a grocery store whilst in pajamas. maya from uni hears the voice of her dead father making jokes with no punchlines and she considers that to be quite normal - to her going crazy would be hearing her husband instead. your downstairs neighbour will take night walks naked sometimes and claim there is nothing weird about him. there are literally no rules to life and all meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
