Trevor Rain's Main

this one isnt as ominous when you have context but i shant provide any

So, okay. I had this cousin. I say had, in that he was blood related to me, but this man died long, long ago. This story takes place around 1910-1920ish or so according to my great great Aunt Dolly. His name was Frank I believe.

Frank's next door neighbor was an old woman. The old woman had a green bean plant that wound around the fence between her and Frank's yard, and it was a wonderful bean plant. Produced just tons of green beans, enough so that the old woman said that whatever grew on Frank's side of the fence was his, simply because she couldn't pick and eat all these green beans. This was very amenable to Frank, and life went on quite nicely for a while.

Then one day, the old woman died. Her house was left empty. No one moved in. The bean plant was left to grow all on its own.

Well Frank determined that this was now his bean plant. She had died in late summer getting on towards fall, so care of the thing through the winter fell on him. He ensured it didn't die from the cold, pruned it back properly during the spring, mucked out horse stalls for free so he could take it as fertilizer. And he was very pleased with how much crop the plant produced.

One day, he goes out to pick the beans, and just about every single bean is already gone. The best specimens had disappeared, and whoever picked them was rough with the plant. Green leaves were all over the ground, and most of his hard work of a year was for naught.

He's pissed, and he pulls out a chair and sits by the beans every free moment he gets in case the perpetrator comes back. And comes back he does a few days later. It's Frank's other neighbor, who we're going to call Bill because I have forgotten his name. They aren't next door neighbors. Bill lived two doors down, on the other side of where the old woman used to live. And here he comes with a basket ready to take more beans.

Frank tells him to cut it out, that this is his bean plant now, given that he's the one who took care of it and ensured that it didn't die, and also upbraided Bill about destroying stems and leaves that would make it harder for the plant to produce more food. Bill retorts that he won't stop picking beans, because these beans are better than the ones in the stores and free to boot, and the stem of the plant is in the old lady's yard, which is abandoned property. This plant doesn't belong to Frank anymore than the lady's house does. It doesn't matter that the vines go through Frank's fence. The stem isn't his.

Well Frank isn't a very strong man, and is a country boy in the city, one of the first in my family to have moved out of rural farmland areas. He doesn't think calling the cops would do anything, besides which, he knows they would agree with Bill. The stem isn't technically on his property, no matter how much he took care of the thing. No, he determined he had to handle this himself.

So the very first thing he does is he wakes up at 2 in the morning, breaks into the old woman's abandoned house, and lights a candle in the window facing Bill's house. He lets it burn down and melt all over the candlestick. This is step one.

He does this a few more times, setting up oil lamps to burn behind closed curtains and walking in front of them here and there. Sometimes Frank would throw pebbles at Bill's windows late at night to get him up so he could see the house and the lights inside.

Frank does this for weeks on end.

Step two: the phone.

Now, this part of the story requires a bit of knowledge about the history of telephones. Early telephones, right as soon as they started getting put into homes, weren't private affairs. You would get on the phone, and anybody on the street could listen to your conversation and interrupt it. There is an example of this in the modern day. Remember when a house had several phones that all connected to the same landline? You could pick up the phone upstairs and listen to what the person downstairs was saying. It was like that. Everybody in an area was on the same line, because not enough people had phones for there to require privacy.

Another thing to know is that Frank was excellent at mimicking voices. His nickname in the family was Mockingbird because he could mimic just about any voice he had ever heard.

He gets on the phone, waits to hear Bill's voice, and says like that old lady, "Bill, what are you doing stealing my beans?" And then immediately gets off the phone.

He does this a few times, every time he hears Bill on the phone. The ghostly sentences get more and more intense, ranging from sadness about the state of her bean plant, to anger about how little it has produced since Bill stole the beans, to how it was her life's pride and joy and it's being desecrated now.

Frank in the meanwhile entirely stops taking care of the plant, letting it grow wilder and refusing to prune it back. Bill comes over one day demanding answers, and Frank puts on a terrific display of being scared, of hearing an old woman's voice telling him to leave the plant alone or else. He tells Bill that he knows it's not Christian like to believe in ghosts and such, but there's no other way around it. The plant is growing wild despite his best efforts (which are none, but Bill wasn't to know that), and the last time he tried to prune it, he got a terrifying call from someone who could only have been the old woman demanding that he leave it be. So he doesn't touch it anymore.

Bill at this point is getting genuinely scared. He's looking skittish during the day, staring for long periods of time at the house, losing sleep. And Frank knows it's time for the coup de grace.

One final call. The "old woman" has warned Bill thoroughly of terrible things to happen to him if he touched the stem of the plant. If the main vine suffered any damage, the mouth of hell would open wide upon Bill's head, and misfortune would send him following her to the grave.

The next night, Frank clips off part of the main vine and sets it on Bill's back porch, with sewing needles stolen from the old lady's house poking through it. He pounds on the door, and hides in a nearby bush. Bill comes out, tired, unable to sleep, scared. Sees the vine.

"It's over for you, Bill," says a woman who should have died over a year ago.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page... This is still a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling, and Google can appeal. But for publishers, brands, SEOs, and anyone watching AI search swallow the results page, the message is clear: if Google wants to be the answer engine, courts may start treating it like the publisher of those answers.

Aka talking about hallucinations using my own personal examples because I had an actual fucking THERAPIST tell me I was the ONLY person in the world who experienced hallucinations that were not solely visual or auditory. Warning for…hallucinations obviously.

Visual hallucinations - These are hallucinations you see. I usually experience these by way of inanimate objects moving (like dolls or mannequins moving on their own, before you ask yes I do hate clothing stores). Sometimes these can be scary and sometimes they’re mundane! I’ve hallucinated monsters and I’ve hallucinated pretty birds. Hallucinations don’t always have to be scary.

Auditory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you hear. I commonly hear crying, talking, music, and video game noises. If I play a video game for too long and it has a repetitive sound in it, I WILL be hearing that sound for minimum three hours. You think the sound that plays in LoZ when you’re low on hearts is annoying? Try having to listen to it on loop when you’re not even playing the game. Like with visual hallucinations, they’re not always scary! Contrary to popular belief, they can be totally mundane. Hearing voices is not always scary either. Sometimes they just say random stuff, sometimes they give me little pep talks, most of the time they just all talk over each other at once and I’m like GUYS ONE AT A TIME PLEASE jeezy cheez-it’s.

Tactile hallucinations - These are hallucinations you feel. I hear common tactile hallucinations are feelings of bugs on you and fur but I don’t usually have these, I mostly have tactile hallucinations of being choked which is…not fun.

Olfactory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you smell. Yeah I thought of farts first too. So far I haven’t heard of that being a common hallucination though. I hear a common olfactory hallucination is burning? But I just smell wet metal. I…don’t know why.

Gustatory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you taste. I don’t know how to pronounce gustatory either. I often taste blood or metal. I hear those are pretty common gustatory hallucinations.

None of these hallucinations are inherently scary! As a child, I thought hallucinations were a super power. After living with them for over ten years, they just don’t phase me that much. Remember: you don’t have to be schizophrenic to experience hallucinations! There are many things that cause hallucinations including and not limited to trauma, PTSD, psychotic depression, etc. (sometimes even stress!)

But please please please be kind to people who hallucinate. I’ve lived with it for over ten years and (rarely) it can still be terrifying to me sometimes. People say “But there’s nothing there and you know that-“ yes I know that! But it’s still very very real to me and very terrifying! Minimizing what people experience with their hallucinations is not helpful and will only make them feel worse.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

"I know the Canvas ransomware attack is terribly inconvenient for many people, and sorry if that means you. I, however, am finding it farcically amusing.

For years and years faculty have been pushed to use Canvas. All courses get a homogenized and flattened interface and everything is presented as an easy consumer experience in a one-stop shop and it doesn’t matter if you object to any of that or don’t want to spend 50 hours dealing with an annoying tech product that doesn’t fit your pedagogy. Even communicating with students has been shunted through Canvas. And if you resist any of this, woe betide you. In fact you can’t print syllabi any more even if you wanted to—unless you pay for your own paper, ink, and printer (which I do).

Now Canvas has been taken down by ransomware, tomorrow is the last day of finals week, and YOU are supposed to scramble and solve this problem, using magic. That includes adjuncts who are not even paid a livable wage and faculty who might have hundreds of students.

This is a failure of a tech platform that was forced on us, and the university administrations nationwide who expect you to move heaven and earth are the same ones who are actively undermining their own institutions’ degrees by leaping into bed with AI companies before they even get their pants all the way off. These administrations (and this includes almost all of them) are not *ignoring* the destruction of education and academic integrity by AI—they are actively participating in it by forcibly inserting AI into student life, university email systems, etc. They are literally giving students software designed for cheating and cognitive dependency for free and applauding its use. And they think you are supposed to materialize a magical solution to this Canvas mess to ensure grades are in? Like between dinner and breakfast you are supposed to recreate everything you had to put in Camvas for an entire semester in some nonexistent other platform?

We just got an email telling us to “communicate directly with your students via email or other available tools for any immediate course needs.” How? Also, we should “Consider alternate methods of submitting assignments digitally or completing assignments in person on Friday” LOL what? So, individual faculty member, grab some No-Doz from the truck stop because in the next 12 hours or so, you must materialize a way for your students to take an online exam! Hope you own a server! Oh also you will have to rewrite the exam because you wrote it in Canvas and you don’t even have the questions anymore! Or just tell the students show up on campus tomorrow for an in-person exam—I hope you brought your personal printer!—and I hope nobody else scheduled anything at the same time, with no coordination! Then sit back and listen to the students tell you they already went home to Wyoming or Guam two days ago.

This is ludicrous. It is a problem created by overpaid administrators who have never had an idea that wasn’t sold to them by a software company and who now expect you to abracadabra a solution even as they are pushing chatbot accounts onto the same students so they can learn as little as possible through the degree.

I'm going to try it.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

It's not saying "never use these words again." It's saying "give this a try, a really hardcore try, just for a little while (it says six months but obviously you can adjust that), and see what happens." Which is so much more useful, because it's framing it as a learning experience.

If you do this, for six months or two months or one full story or whatever, at the end of that time you'll have a better understanding of when these words are and aren't necessary and when and how to use them to get the specific effect you want - because like defilerwyrm says, they create distance, and maybe sometimes you want that!

“The widely circulated timeline created by @Zerflin does a great job in showing how recently slavery & segregation occurred & that they lasted longer than the modern era. 

“I'd like to offer this timeline as another way of viewing the same period of history to show the constancy of both Black resistance in US & efforts of the white power structure to maintain racial caste since 1619.”

okay