big heart energy

TIM CURRY JUST DIED TOO WRONG 80 YEAR OLDS WRONG 80 YEAR OLDS!!!!

i know this sounds like an exaggeration, but as a queer southern kid, dolly parton would have been the only reason i could be convinced to believe in jesus again. she was our princess diana. she was the best of us. if you don't know east tennessee like i do, it's hard to fathom how we failed and continue to fail our own. large swaths of the population left to rot in illiteracy and addiction with a lack of access to hospitals and infrastructure and education and jobs and a way to get out. to say 'dolly parton is from a small town' is an under-exaggeration to the extreme. but dolly parton didn't just get out in the way that so many of us dream of doing-- leaving behind the worst places, watching the dust settle in the rear view. instead, she took the place that built her into her arms. she gave millions of free books to children who hungered to learn. she funded a cancer centre in a region without one. she built a foundation that gave monthly stipends to people in the smokies affected by unprecedented wildfires in 2016 which effectively rebuilt the region. she basically built pigeon forge, gave the city an economic stability it never had prior. and i could enumerate everything she's done elsewhere and otherwise, because it is a list that deserves enumeration, but i need to sit with what she did for the south in a minute and i need everyone here to do the same with me. so many of us were given up on and continue to be given up on. i see people all the time write off the south as this hellscape wherein every person is an illiterate bigot monster incapable of change, growth, or compassion. it is easy to then justify the mistreatment of these people, these grotesque representations of everything wrong with our society-- it is easy to abandon them. dolly parton refused to. she could have taken the money, the fame, the luxury and run-- she never did.

I'm finding it immensely helpful to read books about AI, because my past grumblings of "it's bad for the environment" really pale in comparison to what I'm learning.

It's been important for me to learn about AI companies more deeply because I see a lot of AI critics ask questions that reveal that they don't really understand what's going on in basic ways, and that makes me nervous about whether we're all going to be able to organize against it.