Bird's Nest

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

this isnt universal and nobody needs to think like this but personally i dont mind if people tag my posts about women with their male fandom blorbos so long as they do actually fully commit to the transgenderism of it. if she's like a woman to you then i hope you mean it. congratuions on your awesome trans headcanon btw. im so proud.

(smoking a cigarette) the average american is afraid of what is new and what is foreign, and especially of what is adult. they are trapped forever in daycares of their own design, reading books and watching shows made for children. And while there are interesting things made for children, by and large, they tend to stick to inoffensive, intensely juvenile things that won't challenge them much. And worst of all, if you suggest to your Average American that they should try to step outside of their narrow box, especially if they're trying to become artists, animators, film makers, novelists, etc, everyone acts as if you've just bombed the daycare. Wow.

by the way this is medical. this could save somebody from a migraine all the way to a seizure. this has always been serious. treat this seriously.

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

I keep thinking about this excerpt, because I have learned over time that the vast majority of people—even many other neurodivergent people—only like me if I present them with this slightly lobotomised version of myself. And while that's ultimately better than constantly alienating people and being lonely, it's also exhausting, because the corrections and explanations I refrain from voicing don't actually go anywhere. They just get trapped in my head like a backlog of jobs stuck in a printer queue, and I either have to live with them pinging around and sucking up my energy, or eventually they all come out like 40 copies of the same document suddenly printing at once. I know from therapy that sometimes the only thing you can do to keep peace is let other people be wrong, but that comes with such an incredible mental toll, and I'm so, so tired.