The Unbearable Humptiness of Being

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Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

Sure, it’s taking me longer to do my work but in that time my brain is actually processing the information and storing it to be remembered later. I will be able to talk about my project (not just recite lines about it) and even remember it years from now. Everything in this world is interconnected, so the things you learn will, inevitably, matter. Please, try to care. 

if i steal $150,000 i get arrested and go to jail and likely can't afford my fucking bail/bond. what do you think is going to happen to QTS, owned by Blackstone? Blackstone is worth $1.2 trillion

hint: when PSSI, a meatpacking facility owned by Blackstone, was found guilty of hiring over 100 children to work there Blackstone was fined 1.5 million dollars. they were fined 19.6 million for turning over hotel registry lists to ICE in 2019/2020

so yeah nothing will happen

so i'm taking an ancient history course right? its pretty cool and i quite enjoy it, the instructor is clearly passionate about the topic too. there's just a tiiiiiiiiiiny itty bitty (translation: kinda huge) problem.

we're looking at persian warfare atm, which is cool because i know jackshit about ancient persia, as oppose to the typical ancient grecoroman study topics which i know heaps about. the instructor threw on a little video while they sorted out our papers to hand back our marks from the latest assessment. i, of course, was interested to see how the ancient persian army functioned.

however.

the WHOLE video was completely ai. like airbrushed to hell, horrible anatomy, nonsense logistics, clunky as all hell writing, robot voice. people had full bronze helmets that covered their whole heads, horses limbs doubled as the limbs of their riders, every. single. person looked exactly the same (which i can safely assume is genai bias to eurocentric skin tones/characters). real 2020 early genai quality stuff. i'll bet money not a single human was involved in that video.

and the instructor just. let it happen. the video was in the course, like it was attached to the page we use to access study materials for the class.

and i'll be so fr right now, this is not the first time this has happened in this class. far from it. a good 50-70% of the videos we watch are either partially or entirely ai generated. for a little "experiment" when someone in the class argued with me over ai's use in history, i asked chatgpt a history question. i asked it to identify the ancient writer of a quote and where the quote could be found.

“For a man can win nothing better than a good wife, and nothing more painful than a bad one.”

(the answer, by the way, is hesiod's works & days.)

and the answer i was given was socrates. and no source was given. i corrected it and now, if you ask about this quote, it'll give you the correct answer. but my god. you can go on theoi.com or find a pdf of works & days literally all over the internet and find the source of that quote. literally just go on google. that'll get you the right answer, with a reliable source to back it up. (fun fact: the ai overview could not identify the quote either)

so what point am i even making here? yeah, genai is awful and we're all kinda fucked. i'm an original fiction writer, i love reading fanfics, indie games and shows own my heart, i'm starting a game design and animation course next week, i've been studying music for 5 years now, so i'm up-to-date and constantly aware of ai's affect on film and tv, music, animation, games, etc. so i'm well aware of the threat it holds over the creative industry.

what gets me here is that this is literal history. this is the backbone of what our society is made up of today. you know the quote. they who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. and you just can't fucking trust any form of generative ai to give you reliable answers about history. it can't identify writers. it can't understand how historical events have affected other parts of history. it mistranslates things. it misquotes. it can't balance sources, it just gives one answer and that's it. it's all just total bullshit.

history is so fucking important to society today. censoring, misleading, and relying on blatantly incorrect and unreliable evidence provided by generative ai could very well fuck over many, many generations to come.

beyond people reading percy jackson and wanting to know more about ancient greek mythology, beyond the most passionate historians collecting and explaining seldom-reported sources and events, beyond tired teachers trying to get their students psyched about learning about the world wars, we do this shit for a reason.

it's not just the love of the game. by knowing history, we know ourselves. we know the world. we know how to govern, protect, understand ourselves.

how would you feel if your family tree was commodified, mass produced? if you looked up where you came from and all that came back was static? there are faces there, but they are not human. they are not your family. they are not your history. i think of my family's old scottish heritage. i know avise la fin thanks to history.

generative ai cannot teach us. it does and will warp the facts in on itself, and doesn't and never will be able to draw genuine meaning from the history it's parroting.

idk how many of yall are already aware but it looks like tumblr shadow-added a setting that, when turned on, prevents your blog from being used to train AI models used by the companies tumblr is partnered with. However, this setting is off by default, so make sure you turn it on under blog settings -> visibility

YOU HEARD THEM