My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."
He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."
He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"
I did.
"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."
It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.
So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.
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I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it
Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?
Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.
Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!
Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.
Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.
Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.
Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.
Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?
Elf: Oh, he was definitely ignoring her, too. He was super racist.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.
so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:
pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)
extras in comedy sketch shows
esports players
real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks
70s baseball players
athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type
ska, jazz, and blues musicians
firefighters
improv troupes
for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date
state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)
people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)
and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design
Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.
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ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
Ive been following this since the start and its so, so beautiful. Seeing all your progress and grumblings about feathers and light and why were you even doing this but kept on goin really struck home too.
Its making me want to paint birds again, I think the last one I painted was over a decade ago and I loved it, but you get 2/3 the way into detailed feather work and the existential crisis starts setting in 😅
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves
back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore
if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??
don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM
so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!
this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together
and then in the end you put it together like this!!
and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy
EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!
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I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
A selection of animals from various 17th and 18th century calligraphy copybooks which were drawn with single lines to practice (and show off) penmanship strokes.
I have received an unholy number of requests for my recipe. So here it is, at long last.
Disseminate at your own discretion!
Preparation and baking time: 3-5 hours
Feeds: One really hungry person; two moderately hungry people; three or four normal-hungry people; or maybe five peckish people.
Warning: Dangerously delicious.
1. Ingredients
1.1 Dough:
500g/1lb flour
100g+20g (3.5oz+1oz) sugar (or more, to taste. I occasionally pig out and add ALL of the sugar)
250ml/½ pint milk (I use semi-skimmed, but recipe calls for full. This is up to you)
21g/0.75oz yeast
1 egg
½ tsp salt (this is not necessary)
80g/3oz butter (salted, preferably)
Optional ingredients:
Cinnamon sugar (cinnamon + sugar + shaking; quantities are flexible and mostly up to you. Warning: this makes your hefekranz taste a lot like magic. Add in step 14)
Vanilla (vanilla sugar or pod seeds; add early for maximum effect)
Raisins (add when the moment feels right)
1.2 Glaze:
1 egg
1.3 Frosting
milk and powder sugar (amounts depend on dough size… it’s complicated. See step 21).
Optional:
Thinly sliced almonds to sprinkle over the top.
2. Preparation: (it’s really not as complicated as it looks, I promise!)
1. Prepare ingredient quantities as outlined above. It’s good to have the butter quite warm, but will work with cold butter too.
2. In a large mixing bowl, mix together 100g/3.5oz sugar and the flour.
3. Warm your milk to lukewarm. DO NOT OVERHEAT; the yeast will die a horrible death and instead of bread you will wind up making a rock. A delicious rock, but a rock nonetheless.
4. Add 20g/1oz sugar to the milk. Stir well to dissolve. Then add yeast. Leave this mixture to activate for at least five minutes.
5. While you wait, heat your butter in a microwave until it is basically delicious yellow liquid.
6. After activation of yeast, the container with the milk should be frothing like a rabid dog. Add butter, yeast mixture, and an egg to your flour.
7. Knead into a dough. Add flour as necessary (I usually have to add about 150g/5oz of flour at this stage, but it depends on your flour). Continue to knead for 8-10 minutes. Work those muscles.
8. When your dough is smooth and relatively dry to the touch, but still malleable, flour the base of your bowl, put in the dough, and put it aside to let it rise (N.B. if you do this in the open, cover with a clean dishcloth to avoid nasty things landing in your delicious dough). I recommend putting it in an oven at 40-60°C/100-140°F, if you can, to rise. Rising can take anywhere from 1-3 hours, depending on temperature.
9. When dough has become enormous, remove from the bowl, and knead for another minute or two.
10. Set your oven to 160°C/320°F (or thereabouts).
11. Test your dough. You know you want to. MMMMmmmmm. Yeah, that’s right.
12. Divide dough into three or four equally sized balls (four is easier because… halves).
13. Take each of these balls and rub it between your hands (hoho, saucy) to elongate it into a noodle shape (let’s be honest, this is the phallic part). Best results come from fairly thick and short strands (this is not getting any better, sorry).
14. OPTIONAL: Roll these strands out flat (lengthways), sprinkle with magic powder (cinnamon sugar) and then roll them up again to make a cinnamon core to each strand.
15. Braid your strands together. The easiest way to do this is to treat it like a weaving project and start in the middle and work towards each end. But you can also start at the ends and braid from there. Cover your strands in flour if they are getting hard to braid – but don’t overdo it, or your bread will be quite floury.
16. Cover this beautiful creation with a dishcloth, and let it rise for 30 minutes. This seals the gaps in your crappy braids.
17. While you wait, prepare your glaze: Get a cup, and beat an egg in it.
18. After your 30 minutes has passed, with either a paper towel (if you are a poor student) or a basting brush (if you are a swanky monkey), gently glaze your ENTIRE loaf (except the underside, obviously). Make sure to get the egg in the cracks. The whole thing should be shiny by this stage.
19. Throw your bread in the oven!
20. Cook for 25 minutes at 160°C/320°F, or until the outside of the bread is about the colour of Chewbacca. Lower the temperature to 140°C/280°F, and continue to cook for a further 15 minutes or so. Make sure it doesn’t get too dark; some ovens cool down slower than others.
21. While you wait to cook, prepare your frosting: Take about half a cup of powder sugar, and add a dribble of milk to it. Stir with a fork or spoon. Bear in mind that this will become VERY thin VERY quickly. Add sugar or milk as required to make a frosting that is just thin enough that your silverware no longer stands up in it. You want it to flow out of the cup when you frost.
22. Once your bread is done, remove, frost, and let cool for five to twenty minutes, or as long as you can keep your hungry claws off of it.
For maximum pleasure, cut thick slices (nearly 2cm thick or so), and make some hot chocolate. Dip the bread IN the hot chocolate. Let it soak for a bit. Transfer to mouth. Smile and look wistfully out the window.
tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"
this guy started out poking fun at australian politicians and ended up investigating the firebombing of his own home, during which he uncovered connections between the same politician he was making fun of + major organized crime
JasperDasper started out just curious why everything had suddenly become about trans people and questioning some of the sources used in a book. He came out of it, 4 years later, with a 5 hour long video that connects all transphobia to less than 60 people. (I'm not joking. literally every single transphobic rhetoric and bill passed is because of these 50 or so people.)
If you wanna watch it I cannot recommend it enough; I just warn that it covers a LOT.
Everyone's talking about Artemis II, the first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years
Historic, right? BUT nobody's talking about the Deaf people who made it possible.
In the late 1950's, NASA had a problem.
They needed to understand what weightlessness did to the human body but every test subject kept getting violently motion sick
NASA needed to figure out FAST during the space race!
So, they went to Gallaudet University. They recruited 11 Deaf people.
Because a number of Deaf people had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children which also damaged their vestibular system.
Their inner ears couldn't be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.
NASA put them in centrifuges. Put them on zero gravity flights. A room for 12 straight days.
(All caps) It rotated the entire time.
One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters, the researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.
Their bodies gave NASA the data and research it needed to send humans into space.
No Gallaudet Eleven? No Mercury. No Apollo. No Artemis II.
They stood on the shoulders of 11 Deaf people most people have never heard of.
[Video description: a white person wearing a shirt with tennis rackets on it signing in American Sign Language as the above trasncribed text appears as subtitles. Photos related to what is being talked about appear, including photos of the Gallaudet 11, a centrifuge, the project mercury crew, the moon landing, and the Artemis II crew /End VD]
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First, I would like to congratulate and thank @tumblr for their decision to roll back the most recent @changes in light of the backlash. This was clearly a massive change that had been in the works for some time, and was/is part of a much larger plan to attempt to modernize the site and make it more accessible to users from other platforms, and, I think this is very important, keep it financially stable.
We had it confirmed last year that Tumblr is in sustainment mode. That means, in tech world terms, that they aren't trying to grow massively or make fancy new updates or features for the hell of it. They're trying to make enough money to justify keeping the lights on so the entire service isn't shut down like Vine.
In the last month this site has been flooded with love, adoration, and support for the AO3 volunteers working around the clock to keep that site stable and functioning during outages and major updates, fending off bots, updating crucial infrastructure, adding minor new feature changes, search improvements, all of the things that Tumblr has been doing too, with what we hear now is only half a dozen or so paid employees.
But AO3 hosts text pages only. HD gifsets, a dozen sideblogs, uploading videos directly to your blog even if it takes forever to process? Those server costs have to be insane. And with AI those costs are skyrocketing and only about to get worse.
I have seen a dozen posts float around yelling that if you pay for Tumblr you're a sucker. Very rarely have I seen an equivalent for those posts like the ones that defend AO3 donation campaigns. So here goes mine.
I like paying for Tumblr premium.
The main reason is that I don't have to see ads, and I do everything I can in my life to avoid seeing ads. The second reason is I want this site to not crumble into the aether with no warning.
I rarely ever use the monthly free Blaze feature, but I really appreciate that I can when I need to, on my own posts across any sideblog, or someone else's post I want to highlight.
I definitely use this hellsite enough to want to support it for $0.19 a day.
I know people are upset that the cost raised, and that not everyone can afford the annual discount, but $70 instead of $7 a month is a whole two months off, which isn't just a good deal, but also say to me that Tumblr is prioritizing longer term funds over month-to-month.
The fact the cost raised means that the program was moderately successful, but that they are still struggling to keep the lights on.
My suggestion to Staff is to read your loyal, vocal, and dedicated audience. If you are in maintenance mode, we understand, and we will support you.
To @tumblr Management, as a simple and cheap monetization model based on other sites, I would sincerely suggest there is proof Tumblr users would respond well to a transparency campaign modeled after non-profit entities like AO3 & Wikipedia, with rough estimates of server costs and staff salaries, and an ability to pay/donate more flexibly than a monthly subscription.
Note: There are all kinds of ways to set something like this up, maybe rewards like a system for prioritization on bug fixes and new feature implementation like free users having five votes, premium users ten, and either having the ability to buy more, all filling the collective annual/quarterly budget. While Tumblr is not a non-profit, a sustainment SaaS could work well in the Kickstarter stretch-goal model right now.
So because we're going to be cranky in the coming days, because there's not great communication on what the long term roadmap is yet, and we're all stressed and anxious about one safe-ish spot we have in the world getting threatened, because this shit happens when there's only half a dozen people left to run a site that's fifteen years of chaos on every level and we forget while we're in our little bubbles, let me say it now:
We know we're not always the easiest cats to herd, and working here is somewhat of a thankless job these days. So Thank You @staff, for all you do, and thank you for keeping the lights on.
#1 thing you can do to be a better driver is to be at peace with going the wrong direction for a little while.
like it is not the end of the world if you miss your turn. all the roads are connected to all the other roads. you will find your way very quickly.
unless you're experiencing a genuine emergency, dont even think about making a sudden movement, ESPECIALLY across one or more lanes, just to avoid missing a turn
just relax. be at peace with the way the universe has led you. who knows you might discover something you never would have seen, like a nice restaraunt or a park you didn't know about. just. fucking relax
The best driving advice I ever got was "you get there when you get there."
Miss a turn? It's okay. You get there when you get there.
Left the house late? Nothing you can do about it now. You get there when you get there.
Stopped by a train, or an accident on the highway? It's out of your hands. You get there when you get there.
I know all of these things can be anxiety-inducing. But by the time you're in the car experiencing them, no crazy maneuver will make a meaningful difference in the time it takes to get where you're going, and that maneuver will be at the cost of your safety and others.
