Girl help the fibercrafters who live in my phone are calling out to me like the sirens of legend, entreating me to dash myself upon the rocks of Having A Yarn Stash
fibe Crafts perfec t hobby for give tumblr user s\omething to do! yarn and fabric very Soft and Comfort tumblr user touch tumblr user do Fibre Craft. Tumblr User Do Fibre Craft. no problems ever with fibre ccraft because very Entertaining and Practical for tumblr user weak of things to do. Afibre Craft yes a place for tumblr user do fibre craft can trust fibre craft for pleasantly occupying tumblr user. friend fibre
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if you told diogenes the cynic about being trans he'd be like "lol that's a sick troll you're epic" and you'd be like "diogenes no i'm serious" and he'd be like "lol that's even better lmao those guys are so mad about it" and then he'd start going by new original neopronouns every single day specifically to piss off the whole symposium
I just had an idea for a really dumb comedy sketch where a transphobe starts ranting about what really makes a women a woman, and diogenes returns each time with a different cis woman or outwardly femme intersex person that doesn't meet the criteria saying "behold, a man!"
"a woman has XX chromosomes"
*Diogenes with an androgen insensitive XY cis woman*: behold, a man!
"Nono, a woman can bear children!"
*Diogenes with someone who has medical complications associated with pregnancy*: "behold, a man!"
"nono, a woman produces the large gamete"
*Diogenes with a postmenopausal cis woman* "behold, a man!"
This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.
At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.
The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.
It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.
The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.
This map required:
North and South Vietnam in it
All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated
Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)
Has Laos and Cambodia in it
Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it
So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'
I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.
Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.
The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.
The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc
At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"
My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond
good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map
My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.
We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.
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if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.
there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)
this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before
this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".
anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.
specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)
What does it weigh? Only about ten pounds. It’s like carrying around a cat. In fact, a cat may have turned inside out on itself to make it. Or maybe it was a small dog or a raccoon, I’m not sure.
It would not blow up because the event horizon of a black hole that weighs as much as a cat would be miniscule. No idea how you suspended it in the jar though.
just wrote 10 paragraphs to my MP asking him to push back against the EHRC's updated guidance, aka the trans bathroom bill.
Durham pride happened today. the Reform UK led council cut the funding, with the deputy leader, a gay man himself, citing "gender ideology, kids on puberty blockers, and men in women's spaces" as the reason he disapproved of pride. it went ahead thanks to group such as Durham Miner's Association fundraising (solidarity forever!) but the fact still stands that this attack on trans people hurt the entire queer community.
this new guidance hurts queer people in many ways (another example: gay and lesbian couples where one person is trans will no longer be protected as same sex couples under the Equalities Act) and of course, hurts our trans siblings the most (feeling unsure or unsafe about using public bathrooms will lead to trans people going out less. trans men are expected to either break the law or simply not go. trans people will be excluded from pools, gyms and spas that don't have mixed sex changing rooms.)
i wrote about all that, but you may have your own thoughts or relevant experiences about how this guidance has or will impact you or your loved ones. so write it. call on your MP to do the following:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate and a free vote on this Code.
Support any motion tabled in Parliament objecting to it.
Write to the Minister for Women and Equalities and the Prime Minister.
or, if you don't have it in you to write ten paragraphs (which is very understandable), you should still fill out this email template with your own personal touches and sign this petition, if you're british. and if you're not british, you should reblog this so your british followers can see it.
40 days. One email. Your name on the right side of history.
Launch a review into strengthening legal protections and clearer enforcement against discrimination, harassment and exclusion of trans women
don't save this for later. don't put a pin in it, planning to come back to it later. later may never come. we only have 31 days. do it now while it's on your mind. it really doesn't take long.
This is a really excellent deep dive into AI water use and how a lot of discourse around it is at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately misleading.
A great example of how it's misleading is the NYT story about an AI datacenter causing local wells to dry up for residents, but the story is actually about the construction causing water issues - the datacenter wasn't active, hadn't been finished, and the construction could easily have been for a shipping hub or housing development. Framing "construction company did not do appropriate groundwater surveys and fucked up the water table" as "data centers guzzling up water" is extremely disingenuous.
The substack article I linked is quite long and quite technical, and if you're not interested in reading it Hank Green has made a video discussing the fact that there is a lot more nuance in the discourse around AI water use than the most vocal Pro-AI or Anti-AI people are interested in examining.
There are a lot of people who say that all AI use is theft. I think that's uncomplicatedly wrong, that if you're using "theft" the way that the DMCA uses "theft" you're wrong. For more on that, I'd recommend reading the "Expanding Copyright is not the Answer" section of @mostlysignssomeportents's adapted speech on AI criticism or the EFF's comments to the copyright office RE generative AI. (You should actually read both, and you should read Doctorow's article in full because it is a criticism of AI that moves beyond thought terminating cliches to really explore why the AI industry as it stands is bullshit).
I do not, generally speaking, like AI. I think that most AI products create shit results. I think most AI art looks like shit and most AI writing is awful bordering on unreadable. I think that there's a massive bubble built up around AI and I think AI is absolutely fucking the personal computing market.
And, all that said, it is deeply annoying to dislike AI as much as I do and still feel the need to point out that the way that a lot of people criticize AI is shortsighted, reactionary, and just flat-out incorrect. There are real things wrong with how we are approaching AI as a society and how AI is being sold to users and forced into our environments, and "art theft" is not one of those things.
(And this is everyone's reminder that fair use is the best, I love it, and you are allowed to copy, distribute, remix, sell, and do whatever you want with my art and writing whenever you want to. Every time I write something like this people come into my inbox to say "I hope your art gets stolen" and I'm like "Bitch, me too, the fuck?")
Its one of those "ughhh I don't even like this thing, quit putting me in a position where I feel obliged to defend it on a technicality"
but like it does *matter* when you make incorrect vs correct arguments against a bad thing (because the incorrect arguments can get wielded against other stuff that is not bad)
And it does *matter* when you erase nuance from an issue (because again, good things and people can get caught in the collateral fallout)
also one issue I've seen frequently with people that both dont engage with ai and also argue against ai is talking points that go like "ai is so stupid because it's like xyz. why don't they make something actually useful that does abc?" and sometimes I have to speak up and be like... 'uh, they do already have ai that does abc. that is already a thing that ai does". bc, like, the cherry-picked examples of ai fuckups that go around the web are only ever gonna convey part of the thing. which is gonna make it harder to create cogent arguments about it's problems.
(as part of my job i have to interact with ai at least enough to know what things other people can/are doing with it so I can problem solve for that in advance; it's a whole annoying thing)
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Magical girl who had wanted to be one so badly but never had that magical mascot/mentor encounter so she summoned a demon to contract with instead.
It's not a dark story or anything, the magical girl is just as cute and cheery and friendly as factory standard and never loses that faith and optimism, she's just
Pact-bound to a frightening demon from the underworld instead of a cute teddy bear mouse.
Demon being viewed as weird for making a pact with a cute, cheery schoolgirl.
At every demon party where they show off their pacted there's evil, terrible, and frighteningly beautiful and then there's this teenager in a cute magical girl dress.
"I don't get you Goragog." "Listen, it's nice. Just nice! Can't things be nice? Is it a sin for things to be nice?" "No and that's part of the problem..." "You're just jealous Samantha created a "bffs forever" blingee with me. When was the last time one of your warlocks did something like that for you?" "*on the verge of tears* it's been DECADES!"
Er'trian, Harbinger of Eternal Night, Defender of the Shrieking Chasm, and Lord of Eight Furies stared at eir favorite rival in confusion.
"But it's a pact," ey said. "A deal. An exchange is built in! You can't just Bestow Magical Powers for nothing in return. So what are you getting out of this, Goragog???"
Goragog's dark eyes wept their endless ichor. A halo of eldritch nightmares flickered around his head. With deliberate slowness he turned to meet Er'trian's accursed gaze.
Goragog gets invited to the annual "Magical Mascot" convention and after the initial trepidation is a Big Hit.
The smaller and non flying Mascots especially love him because he is willing to carry them or sit on his shoulders so they have an unobstructed view.
The Ancient Guardians vote unanimously to make him an honorary Mascot including Membership in the Union with all privileges therin including his own personal chibi form to use when his normal visage would be problematic.
Where we explore the underbelly of renfaire life. This may end up being a series.
---
They Will Take It With Them
The thing about working faire full time is that the general public thinks it’s whimsical.
They see ribbons. They see turkey legs. They see a man in tights calling himself Lord Bumblefuck of the Dandelion Court and assume the whole operation runs on mead, bells, and the power of everyone having read one book about elves in 1998.
It does not.
It runs on vendor contracts, electrical hookups that look like a raccoon installed them during a divorce, managers who say “we’re a family here” right before inventing a new way to charge you for dirt, and booth owners who have sunk the GDP of a small, spiteful duchy into making a temporary plywood rectangle look like a medieval shopping experience.
So when my boss told me about the sword vendor, I did not gasp.
I was counting stock behind the counter, because someone had decided the correct place to put seven decorative daggers was in a pile, point-out, at child height. This is the kind of decision that tells you a lot about humanity. The morning rush had passed. The lane outside was doing its normal midday thing: dust, bells, roasted meat smoke, and parents negotiating with children in princess crowns like tiny unionized terrorists.
My boss leaned on the back table and said, “You ever hear about the guy who packed up during the middle of a show day?”
I looked up.
There are levels to “packed up.” At faire, “packed up” can mean a vendor quietly pulls a few bins after closing because their weekend was bad. It can mean somebody folds emotionally behind a tapestry and has to be revived with lemonade and a joint. It can mean an artist decides Sunday at two-thirty that commerce is a disease and starts giving away ceramic frogs to anyone who makes eye contact.
So I said, “Define packed up.”
He smiled, which was never a good sign. Smiles from my boss are either followed by a funny story, a lawsuit, or the phrase “technically, we’re allowed to.”
“Middle of Sunday,” he said. “Patrons everywhere. Management pissed him off so bad he drove his truck right in.”
I stopped counting.
“Into the faire.”
“Yep.”
“With patrons around.”
“Yep.”
“And management did not enjoy the consequences of their management?”
“They did not.”
This is why I respect vendors, in the same way you respect weather systems and large animals with opinions. A vendor will smile at a patron asking whether the handmade leather bracer comes in “vegan” and then, three hours later, decide that a contract dispute has entered the load-bearing phase.
My boss kept going. “He pulls up right to the booth. Gets out. Starts tearing the whole tent down.”
The image arrived fully assembled - the sword racks, the canvas, the dumb little pennants flapping like they were about to be subpoenaed. Patrons standing there with half-eaten steak on sticks, watching a grown man dismantle his business in real time while probably still wearing period boots because nobody in this industry ever changes footwear before making a life decision.
“Did anybody stop him?” I asked.
My boss gave me a look.
Right. Of course not.
Because faire management, despite being able to appear instantly when your sign is two inches too tall, becomes an endangered vapor when the problem has torque, wheels, and a vendor who has crossed over into religious clarity.
“He just took it down?” I said.
“Completely.”
“Beautiful.”
“It was not beautiful.”
“No, it was. Not for them. For them it was infrastructure failure with witnesses. But spiritually? Gorgeous.”
Outside, someone asked if the swords were real.
I told them they were real enough to be expensive and fake enough to keep everyone out of court, which satisfied them because patrons love answers that sound like a policy even when they are mostly fatigue.
They wandered off. My boss waited until they were out of earshot.
“I knew one guy who pulled a two story both down after hours, salted the earth, and never looked back.
I looked at him again.
He held up one hand. “Not here. Not recently.”
“Of course. Folklore.”
“Yeah.”
Faire has normal folklore, in theory. Ghosts in the old lanes. A queen who cursed a stage. Somebody’s cousin who met their spouse behind the pickle barrel and now they have six children named after herbs.
Then there is vendor folklore, which is less about magic and more about what happens when a person spends ten thousand dollars on carved trim, hand-painted signage, imported fabric, custom counters, fairy lights, display risers, roofing, locks, mats, curtains, and vibes, and then realizes the faire owner may get to profit off that pretty little money-pit after the vendor is gone.
That kind of folklore comes with accelerant.
My boss tapped the counter. “Some people would rather destroy it than let the owners keep it.”
I nodded.
That is the part civilians miss. They think faire people are whimsical because we own mugs with antlers and say “good morrow” to strangers for money. They do not see the spreadsheet behind the whimsy. They do not see the booth rent, the build-out, the weather damage, the permit nonsense, the owner politics, the seasonal gamble, the forty-seven conversations about where a tent stake may morally be placed.
They see a booth.
The vendor sees a hostage situation made of pine.
A group of patrons drifted in then, loud and sunburned, carrying the exhausted optimism of people who had already spent too much money but wanted one more object to justify the parking fee. One of them pointed at a sword and said, “Could you actually fight with that?”
I looked at the sword. I looked at him. I thought about trucks in pedestrian lanes, burning booths, management consequences, and the ancient faire law that every object is only decorative until someone becomes sufficiently wronged.
“Depends,” I said. “How mad are you at the lease agreement?”
My boss coughed behind me.
The patron laughed because he thought I was joking.
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So a couple Christmases ago, I got an emergency whistle in my stocking. It was supposed to be deafeningly loud, so obviously not the sort of thing you blow on Christmas morning just to see what it sounds like. And let me tell you, pretty much that whole morning, I was dying to blow that whistle. Out of curiosity, and because I wasn't supposed to. The next time I had the house to myself, it was one of the first things I did.
All of this to say, when Susan rode around with her horn strapped to her saddle, I wonder how often she was intrusively tempted to just pick it up and blow it? Was is hard to run around Narnia with a horn she was only supposed to blow when she was definitely, seriously, for-real in danger?
And more to the point, what about Caspian? Did he ride away from Dr. Cornelius with a little voice in the back of his head going blow the horn dude c'mon just blow it find out what it sounds like c'mon dude?
hey I'm sorry to fandom-pivot on your post but i really believe this lotr excerpt is relevant to your point because it features a grown man blowing his very loud war-horn for no apparent reason
Boromir had a long sword, in fashion like Anduril but of less lineage and he bore also a shield and his war-horn.
'Loud and clear it sounds in the valleys of the hills,' he said, and then let all the foes of Gondor flee!' Putting it to his lips he blew a blast, and the echoes leapt from rock to rock, and all that heard that voice in Rivendell sprang to their feet.
'Slow should you be to wind that horn again, Boromir, said Elrond. 'until you stand once more on the borders of your land, and dire need is on you.'
'Maybe,' said Boromir
