Things I Think are Awesome

Almost every piece from Dems calls their GOP opponents 'extreme' 'dangerous' or 'a threat'

Comparatively few pieces from Republicans do that. It definitely happens, don't get me wrong, but it's probably not even half as often.

Republicans do not understand the value of negative (unused) space

Seriously the walls of text covering every inch of these mail pieces makes it really hard to look at them

Dem data really sucks if they think any member of my family should be getting these mailers

Admittedly, I am not usually able to pick up stuff from low budget Dem campaigns but even so, they send out a crazy number of unnecessarily expensive full size or fold out mail pieces

If I were to strip out all the identifying images and messaging so all that was left was the design itself, you'd still be able to take one look at these pieces and know exactly which party made them

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

The listed price is not the price you will pay, that is actually 5% more.

I’d read the articles that young people have no privacy and have become so accustomed to it that they enact on themselves. Abstractly I knew this and had accepted it, but it’s only now that I’m seeing it become a major issues.

Obviously part of the problem is I need to become a trusted member of my new fandom. But fandom in general is becoming far more hostile to privacy than even just 5 years ago.

I’ve had to leave 3 servers that want to do age verification. And this is new. Not even 5 years ago when I started zines ppl just turning 18-20 were far more receptive to the ideas espoused by us older folks about not being surveilled. But now it almost feels like they *want* to be surveilled.

They’ve become so used to it from tiktok and their government that they crave it. I’d write a dystopia about it but unfortunately what even is there to say that hasn’t already been said?

If you’re 18-22 now and you’re reading this and willing to listen without immediately calling me suspicious: this is not normal. Age verification will not keep you safe and will not keep minors safe either. It will only lead to the normalization of further surveillance and erosion of your privacy.

I know it can be an unwieldy text especially if you’re not used to reading academic sources, but go read The Panopticon. Watch V for Vendetta or read the comic, read 1984. Watch The Lives of Others and understand the ways this modern era is not so different from the Stasi in the film.

Please.

Monte: "I want to switch!"

The Edwardians: I gotchu fam

(or how I learned about Pools of Light and became Obsessed)

Look at them! They're so pretty!!

They're polished rock quartz usually wrapped in sterling silver, and there's a whole art to polishing them and setting them without drilling holes and spoiling the Orb

They really do look like they're glowing

They even come in colours!

Now this was in 2017. AI was still science fiction at the time to the average person, although the LLMs that are common today were in development already. Like I said I can't remember who wrote this paper and it all seemed very irrelevant to the real world for me, but something that came up in it stuck with me --

An AI model, trained on the internet, is going to absorb and repeat all of the biases that currently exist on the internet. Data is neutral, but the way in which data is presented never is, and an AI that scrapes the internet for information is then going to absorb and repeat the bias that came with that information. A human can often detect bias and filter things that are likely to be facts through it, but an AI won't be able to and then a human who gets their information from the AI won't have the benefit of seeing the bias in action to let them make informed choices about what to believe.