my ancient mama

honestly you can convince parents that just about anything is necessary for their kids’ well-being except, like, respecting their boundaries/identities/basic human rights.

like, people will spend hundreds of dollars on classical music brain training kits for literal newborn infants because someone on good morning america said it might make them 0.3% smarter but god forbid you tell them to stop reading their kids’ fuckin diaries or use their correct pronouns.

i was a kid asking questions like "when you say to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10 do you mean relative to what i have experienced before or what i could theoretically experience in the future because what if i say 8 and then later i get twenty billion papercuts and i realise relative to that this pain is a 1" and they would reply "just focus on what you know, you literally had your foot ran over by a ford focus" and id say "well exactly but it could have been both feet which i know would surely be worse" and it still took years to diagnose me as autistic

"Is a 1 to 10 pain scale intuitive?" needs to be evaluated as an autism diagnosis question.

( https://xkcd.com/883 )

I got a wee suspicious after i heard dispatch’s tone change after the Jackie chase. But as soon as this mother fucker said “go get em tiger” or some shit like that I basically said oh no yeah that’s definitely the mimic

I wrote down "hand unit already an AI???" in my notes during the opening cutscene because dispatch didn't seem perfectly responsive to what Arnold was actually saying. But him being the Mimic completely blindsided me. If I even noticed the glitching after the Jackie chase I must have just dismissed it as a side effect of the ceiling coming down

The SOTM Murray family can be happy again,,

Who knows if this is at all canon, it's canon in my mind.

i cannot do another round of "is shaving feminist?" discourse again, i simply cannot do it. is shaving feminist? no! do feminists shave their bodies? yes! is this a deep betrayal of principles? not really! do some women actually shave for the mythical "sensory reasons"? well, considering that my number one reason for shaving my legs in the summer is because my ceiling fan blows on the hair and i'm constantly having mini freakouts that i've got a bug crawling on me, i'd imagine some do! is it okay for a woman to say to herself "i realize i'm mostly doing this because i don't want to be treated worse by people in the world who find my unshaven legs disgusting, but i'm still going to do it because i don't think suffering for no reason is virtuous" and shave? yes! will yelling at her to "think critically about her choices" until she agrees with you actually work? no! does any of this make it any easier to get an abortion in this country? nope! have we replaced the "is this pop star a feminist?" discourse of the 2010s with "are your personal choices antithetical to the tenets of feminism?" discourse in the 2020s, none of which is conveniently focused on the actual loci of power?? hahahahahahaaaaa

The best fucking take on this I've seen is an article saying we should reframe the conversation as "is x action feminist". Shaving your legs isn't a feminist action, period end of sentence. But not having every single action in your life being feminist doesn't mean you're not a good feminist, whatever the hell that means.

I'd also put down Alphabet Squadron down and the Aftermath trilogy down for women respecting.

There are also individual novels I'd count as well and absolutely recommend to someone who wants more good female focused content in star wars. Just their leading ladies are movie characters, and thus inherit baggage and their arcs from the movies. Leia Princess of Alderaan, Bloodline, the Phasma novel, and Black Spire are the ones coming to mind right now.

you know it's good when both the star wars and tma fans are emphatically arguing that the winner should be their own fandom

I'm in both, and I'm honestly not sure what's all that annoying about tma, especially when you have star wars to compare it to.

Although maybe that's because I just said in my own circle on tumblr and rarely ventured into the tags, while the Fandom Menace loves to make their bullshit everyone else's problem

Let's write a C++ program together. I'll start us off.

int main() {

return 0;

}

my spouse and i disagree

oh my god

for people saying that context matters like whether it's hot or cold out, consider: my spouse's body temperature is at all times like the surface of the sun, they shower in molten hot water, and they lounge around the house with their shirt off, versus me shivering like a newborn baby lamb wrapped in blankets in the exact same room

I couldn’t even conceive of any possible ambiguity in this statement when I read it but the poll is evenly split so apparently people interpret this the other way more or less equally often???

(My interpretation was if you’re turning something down you are lowering whatever function it’s performing so in this case less cold air coming through the unit=temp increase)

Whereas I'm like "obviously to turn it down means to make it go lower, thus the temperature to go down." Heh.

And my brain immediately goes, "Turn it down? Do you mean the temperature or the fan?"

#turn it down just by itself no context #would mean reduce the function it is currently performing #if it's on cool then make it less cool #if it's on heat #then make it less hot

all love to you but in what world does an air conditioner have a heat setting? that's a furnace.

In all the houses I've lived in, they've both been controlled by the same thermostat system. So based on context, both are the AC. Which is where I also get the same context dependent reading of "turn it down". When you say "turn it down" you want either the actual AC or the heater to be working less, depending on what is currently operating.

It really fucking is all misogyny isn't it

Every fucking thread of transphobia goes back to a fundamental need to cement completely immutable sex categories so cis men can assert themselves as superior on some level

Trans women are seen as perverse degradations of the male ideal, people who "chose" womanhood, who are read as women for persecution but not for protection, who are sexualized and assaulted the same as any woman. "Choosing" womanhood is so unthinkable in our misogynist society that brains scramble to think of why anyone would do it, and every trans woman is living proof that womanhood is empowering

Trans men aren't allowed in the club, because if masculinity can be "earned" instead of granted, it implies that men aren't intrinsically superior but made and maintained, and that someone who could have been a good little baby maker housewife realizes that that's not the fate they want

It's so fucking like. Basic shit. 101. How is it difficult. I'm sorry but I just. Fuck. How is this hard.

Someone was asking in a thread what kind of people could work for ICE right now.

I think it's a good time to remember that the image above are the people who put children into gas chambers.

When I was little, I asked what kind of person could work at a concentration camp.

The answer to both questions I think is "normal people who have accepted the dehumanization of another group of people."

The photo in this post was taken at the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, some time between 1940-1944 . The full photo shows an accordion player:

There are approximately thirteen people in this photo. Three officers from the Wehrmacht, the German military of Nazi Germany. Ten women in uniform. Skirts to their knees, with matching blazers, stockings, and practical black shoes. Their hair is done in styles that were fashionable in the 1940s.

Do you know how they did those hairstyles? They were actually fairly difficult. Most women got their hair done at a salon or by a woman in the neighborhood, or a sister, a friend. You had to set it to get that volume, to get those curls to stay in place while still staying smooth and neat.

These women set their hair the night before this picture was taken. Maybe they went to a salon. Maybe they ran a little one out of their housing in Auschwitz. They took this picture, laughing. Please again notice there is a German soldier on the right, holding an accordion. Do you think he was any good? Remember, this was a time where you needed a record player [expensive] or a radio/wireless to hear recorded music. People liked having a musician play, even if they weren't great. It was fun.

They're not monsters. There is nothing about any of these people that make them fundamentally different from you or me.

What I want people to realize is that the smiling women in this photo had their hair done that week. The laughing soldier holding the accordion probably played for them on the day this was taken. The women probably danced with one another, took turns with the available men. They probably sang while he tried to play a popular song.

And while they were doing this, there were infants in the buildings, being held by their siblings, or strangers, children under the age of ten, all of them, starving to death, after the smiling people in this photo herded their mothers and grandmothers into gas chambers, after which their fathers and uncles and cousins had to pull the bodies out and remove the gold fillings from the mouths of the corpses.

And at the end of 1944, when it was becoming a reality that the Allies were probably going to take back Poland, that Auschwitz would be found, the ten women in this photo were probably still working there. And they were making sure that the children who had somehow, against all odds, survived up to that point, were transferred to other camps to be murdered. Transfers, big or small, require paperwork. That these women typed up on typewriters.

This is a picture of a female ICE agent, from their website. I think those are French tips she has, to go with that blow-out. Pandora bracelet? I can't tell.

There is nothing in our biology that separates me from her. Or you. She is very much a person. You probably have things in common with her. So do I. So do the people she's arresting and shoving into a van to be detained, or worse.

"What kind of people could work for ICE right now?"

Just like in every other genocide, chances are, it's one of your neighbors. Someone you grew up with. Someone you had a class with. Someone who knows you. There's no monsters. It's just us. It has always just been us, the whole time. Don't ever forget it. Don't look at ICE agents as a monolith. Don't look at politicians as a monolith. They are a person. They are a person actively making a choice. They are choosing to get their nails done, before they go to work, and fill out the paperwork to transfer people to places they might not ever come back from.

chica designed by a woman vs chica designed by 2 men

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.