#ant rant

gen ai usage is bad. i do not like gen ai in any form, and will absolutely pull my support from people or companies who use it.

AND

if you look at people (like regular, ordinary people) and see their using generative ai as an excuse to harass, threaten, or hurt them, i do not want anything to do with you either. people fuck up and make mistakes and sometimes they double down on those mistakes and are really stupid. that does not give you the right to harass them or tell them to kill themselves.

When I was a little girl everything was "he" --but, bugs especially were "he" until proven otherwise. This is why I always push back when I suspect someone is defaulting to male pronouns or gender for hymenopterans.

When it comes to bees and ants every single one is better described as "she" (until proven otherwise.)

In bees and ants:

All worker ants/bees are female. This is 99.5 percent of all ants and bees you'll see. Easy.

The queen is female.

Males are produced for mating flights only and in ants males often have wings. In bees males are large and round with big eyes, though not as big as queens.

Since most ants and bees you will see in the wild tend to be workers they are all generally female. So, if an ant took some of your cupcake. "She's trying to take my cupcake." makes more sense than "He's trying to take my cupcake." (Let her have it. She deserved it.) Male bees and ants do not forage or help build nests, they fly, they mate, then they die.

But, it's not always so cut and dry. Sometimes an ant will be born as gynandromorph... which means they are literally split down the middle half male/ half female. Nature is complex. It's more fun when don't just paste human patterns and expectations on to nature without thinking about I think.

This isn't *that* important as ants don't even have a concept of gender like the human concept of gender, but naturally if you are dealing with fictional eg. "ant people" you have some thinking to do.

Most popular children's books and movies choose to make the worker ants a mix of male and female. Sometimes even all male. In some books they insist all the solider ants are male and the females only work in the nursery. BORING. And then they *always* make a male ant the protagonist. Who would want to watch a movie about bugs where every character is female? Only little boys like bugs. Duh.

This same media will choose to make the queen their "ruler" ... because that's how human queens work, some will even add a king ant... which is just... I don't even know what to say. The queen mated with like ten or fifteen males years ago and they are all dead. That's more interesting!

i cannot list all i have already listened to, but count on that i know the classics like wolf359, unwell, bright sessions, hallowoods, greater boston, nightvale, alice isnt dead, tma etc. All genres (EXCEPT ANTHOLOGIES) are welcome!

(please dont rec your own, rather one you have listened to and liked!)

Even Your Emotions Have an Echo

Henry sighed. “Look, Doug… I know what the other guys say about you.”

Doug stared warily at his coworker.

“I know you’ve had some issues in the past. I know you’ve gotten help and you have it under control now,” he continued. “But they don’t know that. They think you’re nothing more than a schizophrenic nutcase.”

“I am a schizophrenic nutcase, Henry,” Doug said matter-of-factly.

Henry sighed. “But you’re also a scientist. You don’t need to go Columbo over this. Trust me, if you were to look into it, you’ll find that a lot of people around here have files just as mysterious as Chell’s. But if you obsess over it, you won’t be doing your reputation any favors.”

Read from the beginning here.