The wallpaper did tell you, but did you listen?

"You are beautiful when you do beautiful things."

"The present tense of regret is indecision."

"We understand so much, but the sky behind those lights-- mostly void, partially stars-- that sky reminds us we don't understand even more."

"Be proud of your place in the Cosmos. It is small and yet it is."

"Believe in yourself. You are an ancient, absent god, discussed only rarely by literary scholars. So if you don't believe, no one will."

"Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you."

“Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. That’s what love is.”

"Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?"

"When we talk about teenagers, we adults often talk with an air of scorn, of expectation for disappointment. And this can make people who are presently teenagers feel very defensive. But what everyone should understand is that none of us are talking to the teenagers that exist now, but talking back to the teenager we ourselves once were – all stupid mistakes and lack of fear, and bodies that hadn’t yet begun to slump into a lasting nothing. Any teenager who exists now is incidental to the potent mix of nostalgia and shame with which we speak to our younger selves."

"We are not history yet. We are happening now. How miraculous is that?"

"Wednesday has been cancelled due to a scheduling error."

"We have nothing to fear except ourselves. We are unholy, awful people."

"A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A basilisk."

"There's nothing under your bed. There's nothing in your closet. Nothing waits in every darkness. Nothing is the most terrifying thing of all."

"The night sky is ten miles wide, eight miles deep, and floats three miles up. Its favourite food is grape jelly. It wants to be a drummer."

"Look to the sky. You will not find answers there, but you will certainly see what everyone is screaming about."

"Ignorance might not actually be bliss, but it is certainly less work."

"And now, a special report. Crocodiles: Can they eat your children? *YES.*"

"Lie down and look up at the ceiling and breathe with those curiously fragile lungs of yours and remind yourself: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and fleeting. Don’t worry."

"As long as I’m reminding myself things, I’m a good person, worthy of love – both from myself and others."

"Guns don't kill people! It's impossible to be killed by a gun. We are all invincible to bullets and it's a miracle!"

"Everything is exciting! Particularly existence. Existence is the most thrilling fact of all."

"There is a monster under your bed. A monster at your window. A monster any place you imagine one. You project your monsters on the world."

"You miss 100% of the bank robberies you don't commit."

"I like my coffee like I like my nights. Dark, endless, and impossible to sleep through. "

"A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale."

"And now, the weather."

I discovered this podcast at the beginning of high school, and let me tell you, it rewired my synapses.

Not only was it my first experience with positive LGBT representation, it was the show I clung to when everything else went to shit. Whatever was going on in my life, I knew I had this show in my corner, making me laugh, making me cry, making me feel okay about my place in the universe.

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.

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

My friend is in a physically abusive marriage. Photos of red marks on their body are saved in my phone. I've thought they were going to be murdered before. The thought has crossed their mind. Their wife constantly accuses them of cheating, among other things, because that's her idea of what a man does. She has stabbed their mattress when she was angry to "see what it feels like." They showed me a tiktok she sent them. It's a woman out in the woods captioned something like "burying him here so nobody will ever find him ♥️♥️". This kind of memetic mean-girl feminist stuff has, as a part of the overall erosion of effective and principled feminist discourse, devolved into truly abusive personalities joking about harming men at its edges. This is rewarded and celebrated. My abusive ex did a lot of the same stuff. Would dig around these quasi-rad or outright radical feminist spaces to essentially find rhetorical ammunition to abuse me over. Then would fall back onto the plucky mean-girl feminist memes when I tried talking to her about the emotional and sexual abuse. I support mens rights to shut the fuck up. Same thing happens to my friend. Doesn't have anything to do with the actual person being hurt. It's just an expression of these gendered resentments. Spending time in communities literally listing off reasons for a woman to be angry at a man, and then taking that out on their partner. Happened to me. Happens to lots of people placed in the social role of "men." It makes a war-like philosophy out of gender. Turns it into an order of violence. Justifies violence.

I recently saw a post going around here about how men suffer abuse so rarely that there's no reason to adjust language about intimate partner abuse to include men. That the suggestion is simply men being big babies and trying to reframe every conversation to be about them. That my experience -- that my abuse on the basis of my perceived manhood, no less -- is literally a marginal experience, an outlier that shouldn't be incorporated in the conversation about other people going through the same things I did. That it just isn't deserving of discussion or concern. And it was being shared by mutuals, long time mutuals, people I respect and enjoy. People who are better than that. This isn't something that makes people irredeemable monsters. I don't want their heads on spikes. But this kind of cruelty is horrifyingly common.

In the end, this is the cost of harshly reifying gender. Resenting men as a class grows into a social infrastructure to justify and even gamify abuse. It becomes fun. It becomes jokes. It becomes blood for blood. There's a perceived justice to the suffering being doled out to the supposed abuser class. And, in doing so, patriarchal masculine standards are recreated and maintained. The abuse is perpetual. Men are belittled for having feelings about the way they're treated, for trying to talk about their emotions, and they are continually expected to simply bear the burden of abuse and not complain. The masculinized body and spirit is a vessel of abuse. This is its purpose.

God:  Where’s the Sheepkeeper?

Cain:

This is the world capitalists want to return to.

Thriving: "I got this"

Calm and steady with minor mood fluctuations

Able to take things in stride

Consistent performance

Able to take feedback and to adjust to changes or plans

Able to focus

Able to communicate effectively

Normal sleep patterns and appetite

Surviving: "Something isn't right"

Nervousness, sadness, increased mood fluctuations

Inconsistent performance

More easily overwhelmed or irritated

Increased need for control and difficulty adjusting to changes

Trouble sleeping or eating

Activities and relationships you used to enjoy seem less interesting or even stressful

Muscle tension, low energy, headaches

Struggling: "I can't keep this up"

Persistent fear, panic, anxiety, anger, pervasive sadness, hopelessness

Exhaustion

Poor performance and difficulty making decisions or concentrating

Avoiding interaction with coworkers, family and friends

Fatigue, aches and pains

Restless, disturbed sleep

Self-medicating with substances, food, or other numbing activities

In Crisis: "I can't survive this"

Disabling distress and loss of function

Panic attacks

Nightmares or flashbacks

Unable to fall or stay asleep

Intrusive thoughts

Thoughts of self-harm or suicide

Easily enraged or aggressive

Careless mistakes and inability to focus

Feeling numb, lost, or out of control

Withdrawal from relationships

Dependence on substances, food, or other numbing activities to cope