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We’ve all seen them by now and we have heard of them. If you haven’t, look at this link before reading my take on this huge change.The question I want to ask is: When did people start to think that literature should be “safe”?

With these new guidelines on Wattpad I’m convinced they want everything to be baby smooth, without a wrinkle, and free of any lesson, consequence, action, freedom of speech, and genuine story.

I want to be very clear and say that Wattpad isn’t trying to ban JUST SMUT. No, this isn’t about them banning smut at all. They are trying to ban anything on the website that isn’t meticulously chosen by them.

It’s a form of big censorship they are trying to mask as saying it’s “safe” when in reality they want to filter anything they don’t like.

So you could be asking- what does that mean? It means they can censor whatever they like and they don’t have to play by the rules. They are basically giving themself a whole open world where they don’t have to give a reason to nuke stories or their authors from their platform.

Why is this so serious? Because it shows other websites and also big groups, companies, or even big people in power that you can call something censorship for “safety” when it reality it’s not safe, it’s just control. Suddenly you can’t write about a touching story losing her child because it’s too “mentally stressful”. Suddenly you can’t mention politics in a book because it’s “promoting violence or hate speech”. Suddenly writing about the everyday struggles of a black woman is considered too “taboo” because it might not be “safe”.

There will never be anything in this world known as a “safe” book.

Books are meant for lessons, entertainment, consequences, fun, hatred, sadness, etc. BOOKS ARE VOICES. Sometimes it’s just a silly crack fic, sometimes it’s a deep story about a mother who lost her kid and who wants revenge. And Wattpad, as cringe as it is, is a way for MANY people to have a voice. Just like AO3, Tumblr, Quotev, etc. Writers are valid on every platform.

It’s because of platforms like this that people get a chance to share wonderful stories but monitoring anything that’s graphic, whether it be a smidge of blood or violence, or lessons on hate speech or war.

So, back in october I was at a monthly trans meetup just chatting with the other women there. We were talking about how all the best games are made by transfems, and I made the joke that someone from team cherry needs to transition. One of the other women cackled at my joke. At the time I didn't think anything of it.

Fast forward one month. The person who cackled at my joke brought a friend with her this time. I was chatting with this new girl for a while, getting to know her, as you do.

After like an hour of chatting, the conversation turns to silksong and team cherry. I casually say "My impression of team cherry is that they're all really chill dudes," and I swear to fucking god the girl next to me says, "Yeah, we are."

Cue me being absolutely dumbfounded. I actually couldn't believe that my offhand joke from a month ago was real.

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.

There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.

You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.

I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.

This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.

This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."

The building collapsed only five years after completion.

There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.

502 people died.

This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.

This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.

Something something Cybertruck....

Something something data center....

Something something AI.

An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

To the annoying vegans though, believe it or not I’m generally on your side and think people should eat less red meat if they can. When it’s my choice what I’m eating, I’m vegetarian like six days out of the week.

If you want to make an impact in my opinion, the way to convince people to reduce their meat consumption is to point out how cheap and tasty vegetarian and vegan food can be. Convince people with their stomachs and their wallets. Don’t die on your “honey is evil” hill.

I know it's a pain to find good photo-refs, but study-vice, morpho is always a good starting point! Also pay attention to people around you, observation is part of studying too. Use your body as a guide. As a friend.

adorkastock.com — has models of all kinds of body shapes and has filtering options

“Did they try distracting you by throwing a rock?”

“Yeah, they did.”