Local Primarina

EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.

When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”

I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”

So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”

The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.

So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:

Turn it off.

Walk away.

Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

Your movement is less strategically capable. Sometimes the best tactic to achieve a goal isn’t ‘hurt someone for shits and giggles’. I would go so far as to say this is usually not a good tactic, and is often an actively terrible one. I want to achieve things. Therefore, I’m not going to work with communities full of people who just want to hurt people for shits and giggles, because they’re useless as allies whenever that doesn’t happen to be the best way to accomplish things and they won’t shut up and get out of the way when other tactics are needed. if they never cared about our cause except as an excuse to hurt people, they’ll keep hurting people for kicks no matter how badly it harms our cause.

If you have created your community in a way where it is now full of people who are there to hurt people for shits and giggles, and are only hurting neo-Nazis instead of gay people because it’s more convenient, then your community is incredibly unstable - it’s full of people who want to harm anyone they can get away with harming! I can’t put my safety and wellbeing in the hands of people who will hurt whoever they can get away with, even if right now they can’t get away with hurting me. I don’t want to have to make sure they can never get away with hurting me; I want to build communities out of people who don’t want to hurt me.

So communities can either have people who are looking for the most convenient excuse to hurt someone they can find, or they can have people who want allies who care about them and care about not hurting them. I think the second kind of people are more worth having than the first, and so I think it’s a mistake when a community chooses to attract the first and abandon the second. 

And it gets worse, because I think once you’ve attracted the people who want to hurt people, they’ll do that even if there aren’t any neo-Nazis around. You’ve built this coalition of people who just want to harm others and don’t care who, and you don’t have acceptable targets for them, so then what? I think the definition of acceptable targets expands, so instead of just hurting neo-Nazis they start hurting anyone who disagrees with them about being nasty to neo-Nazis, and they start hurting anyone who disagrees with them about that…leftist communities are often absolutely vicious to one another and to their own members, and I think it’s because if you attract lots of petty sadists then you can’t actually keep them all trained on the enemy. 

I also don’t think there are a fixed number of people who just want to hurt others, such that we have to choose between ‘point them at whoever society says they should hate’ and ‘point them at neo-Nazis’. I think that it is actually possible to make there be way, way fewer people like this, by treating that behavior as bad behavior and correcting it instead of rewarding it and encouraging it as long as the targets are good. People can learn and grow. We can enforce norms that help them do that, or we can enforce norms that reward cruelty and indifference about who is the targets of that cruelty, as long as we’re personally benefitting from it. 

Like you promote this in your group you kill intersectionality entirely. I am at this point comfortable in basically no spaces supposedly meant for me because there is too many attacks on people for things I also am with only the comfort of “oh we don’t mean you” when you can still see at least some of the time, yes it means you. People move the goalposts too. I think it took maybe a couple months for “if you ship this you are evil unless it’s to cope” discourse to drop the exception of coping and green lit harassment of abuse survivors? These ‘safe spaces’ are not actually safe.

Saying ‘all men are trash’ isn’t bad because it includes gay/trans/black/disabled men. It’s bad because you are making a blanket statement about a group with the only goal being to attack a group you see fit of your wrath. You’re just being a bully, no matter the percieved inequalities you face and priviledge your proclaimed enemy faces.

Simply put, endosymbiosis is a biological concept involving two symbiotic organisms who, over millions of years, become so interdependent that they evolve into one organism. 

It’s theorized that this how cells got their chloroplasts and mitochondria. It’s why, to this day, mitochondria have DNA unique to themselves, separate from the DNA of the rest of the organism. 

And without this primordial partnership, life on Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist. 

Nature may be arms race. But it’s equally a cooperation. And we lose so much perspective if we try to strip away that nuance, and apply that misconception to our own society. 

It wasn't a brain bleed. The muscles on the entire right side of my neck "just" tore (Spoiler there is nothing "just" about that kind of traumatic injury. I am still in physical rehab for it), and I couldn't hold my head up, see straight, walk or do any of the things I'd previously taken for granted until several weeks later when the area finally started to heal.

This was before I knew I had Ehlers Danlos, btw. But this is true even for people who don't have a connective tissue disorder: Don't let chiropractors touch your neck.

There are a lot of vital nerves and blood vessels there, and even gentle adjustments of the area can have life-threatening consequences.

I know chiropractic care can be pain relieving--I still get it for my lower back and hips because I work with a chiropractor who knows about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and sometimes my hips need to be popped back in at short notice, and it's easier to hop walk in and see her than wait for physical therapy--but it is a short-term relief that doesn't actually correct why something is happening.

If you can afford it, physical therapy will likely help more in the long term. I know not everyone can afford it, and that's why chiropractors have such a booming trade in the US, but please, I'm begging you, don't get your neck adjusted.

The spinal cord specialist I saw after my injury told me the number one reason he used to see people for traumatic brain injuries was car wrecks, followed by other major roadside injuries. He said those numbers were still the highest, but after that, the majority of his patients were survivors of chiropractic injury.

Do Not Get Your Neck Adjusted.

It's been over 5 years, and I still can't move my neck properly on my right side. I still struggle to eat and drink because my muscles will randomly seize up. It feels like my skull no longer fits on top of my spine because of the scar tissue. Please. I just want people to be safe.

They keep eating the same freaking food and it frustrates me so much! We can't have the "big scary light" on just lamps everywhere! Even when I try to find peace by doing stuff with them they just ignore me and do whatever they want. They can't even do the simplest of things like go with me to the grocery store every week! How do people expect them to survive in society??

Autistics living together:

I didn't censor anything, what -

oh. Oh, no. That's meant to be a line to show where the tail begins. Oh no, now I look like some weird prude.