The Super Squirrel

i do disagree with the notion that there is a sort of inherent truest true self that exists within the self. a real you that you merely need to welcome out. sort of like the idea that a finished statue exists within the slab of marble, when in reality the statue is itself merely a slab of marble in another shape. the "real me" is an ever-fluctuating negotiation of societal conditions, interpersonal conditions, and neurological status

Microsoft windows is always like oh yeah, we closed all your programs and restarted your computer while you were asleep. but don't fret ☝️we installed some spyware as a gift 😃

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

If you want to write in the classic high fantasy mould, you don't have to be hung up on food specifically, but there must be some very mundane thing you're prepared to cultivate a sincere interest in and describe in excruciating detail every single time it comes up. Clothing. Furniture. Architecture. It doesn't work without it.

(The trick is, it needs to be something you can touch or hold. If you're infodumping about trade routes, you've crossed the line into the venerable "worldbuilding bible with a fantasy story stapled to the side of it" genre, which often overlaps with classic high fantasy but is not identical with it!)

Companies deleting media you've literally purchased is 1000x more realistically "stealing" than digital piracy, you cannot change my mind

i really im absolutely astounded at the phenomenal job that MIB did not to be racist against aliens, despite being a movie about secret agents chasing evil aliens. that scene where jay helps an alien mother to give birth is probably one of the most humanizing moments for an Other ive seen in a movie ever.

like it grabs the body snatcher trope from the cold war "aliens are all around you, hidden in diguzise, they could be any one of us!" and then it says "and theyre just people, theyre literally just people trying to live their lives and thats fine"

you literally have a whooe scene where a cop stands out because he says "i dont care how menacibg or threatning someone looks im not going to shoot them if there is a reasonable explination for what theyre doing, one is sneezing and one is just doing excercise", and that is the guy that gets aproved to join MIB.

The movie has a real love for NYC and immigrant culture as a part of that. The opening scene where K welcomes the undocumented immigrants to the United States. One alien greets another and says he's ordered him pierogi. A lot of them are refugees from their home worlds who just want to survive.

I'm not even nearly as anti-LLM as most other leftists but part of approaching new technology is "hey let's think real critically about the application and scope of this so we can use it in ways that are worth it and don't cause mass scale societal damage" but the fact that it's being injected into fucking EVERYTHING makes any stance more cautious than "USE LLMS FOR EVERYTHING NOW AND FOREVER" so much more anti than the status quo that I don't even fucking want to add nuance

Like most of the problems people have with LLMs are the natural conclusion of decades of tech companies gaining monopolies, environmental regulations struggling to keep up with new technologies, and a growing semi-privatized surveillance state, as opposed to issues with LLMs themselves. There's a theoretical reality where LLMs are implemented in useful, responsible, and sustainable ways but that reality is so far removed from our current one that none of those points actually matters