Names are hard

Homelessness effectively makes those who are homeless non-contributors to the market, as they cannot save money, purchase consumer goods, or do anything outside of the bare necessities for staying alive. All money given to them through charity by individual consumers is just spending offset from the consumer economy.

Those who have homes but are locked in poverty-conditions due to rent-slavery or debt-slavery (medical or otherwise) cannot diversify their spending habits outside of one or two bare necessity streams of spending. All it does is force the accumulation of spending to landlords and the medical-insurance-complex, which effectively leach from the economy and create a less healthy consumer market.

Punishment for these conditions do nothing. If anything, it only reinforces it. Amongst the elites of modern capitalism, perhaps that is the goal. But they are, at best, foolish for wanting to reinforce poverty.

Universal comprehensive housing and medical care would only allow for a healthier economy as those guarantees would see the money offset for them reinserted towards every other sector. It would create a healthier and happier population who are both less likely to be the victims of crimes (the poor and homeless are the demographic with the highest rate of crime committed against them) and less likely to commit crimes due to their baseline material conditions being satisfied.

I'm not gonna tell you to cut your mom slack because you obviously have your reasons to be very angry with her, but I believe her that she had no reason to suspect your neurodivergent tendencies pointed to a neurodivergency. We literally didn't know.

I mean, twenty years ago I was twenty-six. My younger brother was diagnosed with autism when he was three and I was eight. My brother had to be made an entirely separate dinner every night because he only ate one thing for dinner, so like, The Signs Were There. Even if that wasn't yet a strong signal, my parents were highly educated about his disability -- they were diligent, put him in special education classes, had a yearly IEP, kept up with the literature, so they were a little more aware of what might signal an issue than your average 80s parent.

Honestly, I wouldn't be so irritated by it if she didn't keep bringing it up and also mention that she found it a red enough flag to talk to a teacher about it. I have a feeling I know what teacher she talked to, which is part of the problem.

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And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

Pothos Cat - Botanimal Pet Portrait

(Source)

The formerly-Catholic Society of St Pius X triggered the schism by consecrating bishops without the Pope’s approval, a key part of the ceremony for Catholic believers.

The Pope has declared a far-right group of 200,000 Catholics in schism & has excommunicated them from the Church

on the other hand...

When I was a kid being “smart” was what I had going for me basically. It was the one good thing that everyone seemed to agree that I was, so I clung onto that.

But then I grew up a bit and realized that I’m kind of an idiot. There’s certain things I just learn slower than other people. Things my brain and body just won’t do. This realization kinda messed me up for a while. Surely being smart is something you’re supposed to be forever all the time.

No. Everyone is kind of an idiot, turns out. The human mind isn’t capable of calculating the best and most logical response to literally everything there is. If logic even applies to any given situation.

The flip side of that though is that pretty much everyone is smart if you take the time to get to know them. They’re good at different things than you are.

One of the things that made this really hit for me was when I was catching up with one of my cousins and I was like man you’ve got a career, you were in the marine band, you’ve got a partner and a house and here I am unemployed and going nowhere. But then my cousin was like what are you talking about you have a masters degree and I can’t stay in college for one semester without dropping out I’m an idiot compared to you I can’t commit to anything that long.

And that’s when it hit me. We’re both idiots failing to accomplish our goals and we’re both very smart and accomplished people. Our idiocy and accomplishments just fall into different places because we’re different people.

Yeah you’re an idiot. But you’re also so smart. Because you’re a human. You contain multitudes of shades of idiocy and brilliance. That’s what keeps the world going around. We can specialize. We can fill in each other’s shortfalls.

The FULL version of the book cover I painted over the course of 3-4 months.

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

I DID THIS IM VERY PROUD OF IT YOU KNOW WHY

BECAUSE

WAIT FOR IT

Gold ring, greybeard, trippin’ on the mushrooms

Blood-mad Nazgul trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care

We got to Rivendell across the stream

And everybody’s like

Mountains, dwarf mines, presents from the Elf Queen

Rowboats, rock paths, Gollum on a rope leash

We don’t care