make the world a stranger place

when a pelican bites you there's no malice in their eyes. they aren't upset at you. they are just hungry and want to see if you fit in their mouths. and if you don't then it's no problem and everything is fine. and if you do then well i guess your fate is sealed but that's ok it's a beautiful animal

Okay, see, I knew about the capybara gif:

But I didn’t know that they really are That Dense, All The Time. The same way sharks will bite anything that might be a seal, just in case, these birdbrains will apparently test just about anything for beak size. 

Behold a short list of bad ideas:

Human foot is not food, bird.

That is clearly bigger than your entire body.

...You do know what a bear cub is, right? Right??

That is a BICYCLE SEAT.

That’s it; arrested for bird crimes.

Because reasons.

so sad to see without westerns for tumbleweeds to blow through during a duel in the middle of town, theyve grown overpopulated.

I think a lot of like discourse of what to focus on with this or that thing gets the end goal and things to ease newcomers into your ideas confused with each other.

Like yes perhaps the end goal is to get UBI going but if your Uncle Jerry is currently struggling with the concept of taxes maybe get him to understand the cost of road maintenance first before you start trying to get him onboard with free preschool.

Also just because someone is explaining the concept of taxes to Uncle Jerry doesn’t mean they don’t believe in free childcare.

Yes those ramps are for people with mobility aids. Able bodied moms with strollers can manage. But if you hear your neighbor Jessica complaining about how hard it is to get on the sidewalk with a stroller that can be an opening to be like ugh right and my sister can’t even get her walker up there either

Like yeah there’s other things more important to focus on but now you’ve got Jessica thinking about accessibility and she’s very good at writing angry letters to the city council.

Also I got my family to be politically anti-car by showing them cool technology like Dutch pedestrian-centric crossing lights and trolley busses because they’re people that are into neat technology and motors and things like that. The angry politics came later. Now they even take the bus once in a while in the car-centric city they live in.

Obviously neat little fun facts about crossing lights aren’t the end all be all of being politically anti-car but it’s a fun icebreaker for the right kind of person. And you shouldn’t assume that better crossing lights are my end goal just because I open with that.

come into my cargo hold, i totally believe you’re a free robot trying to return home. i could melt your brain btw. you’re lucky to be alive. can i watch your tv

Detective, each of us has our part to play in the world 🪩

anyway i will always remember my freshman year world history teacher who spent a whole day teaching us about the development of hinduism and its cultural impact and the next day came into class and (basically) said “alright so who guessed that everything i said yesterday was bullshit?”

the thing i took away from this was

american non academics have been and will continue to butcher greek mythology and sell it to you like the bible. please. PLEASE. remember those things can be fun but your bullshit detectors should be on.

Okay but he wasn't just some rando on the internet. He was a teacher who's job it was to actually teach you this topic. It's like your doctor telling you the warning signs for covid and then going 'psych! I made all that up!'

bitch you're the voice of authority here. You're just taking advantage of people's trust to be a dickhead.

No he wasn't being a dickhead. Because automatically trusting authority figures to be correct is also a mistake

The teacher did exactly what he was supposed to do. He taught a lesson. A lesson saying question facts. Look for sources. Don't trust me just because I am being paid to teach you. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm bigoted? What if I'm just stupid?

And as someone who is the last year of a history degree that's something that's been pushed very hard on my degree.

I will be given like 5 different academic takes on a historical subject who all contradict and oppose each other and then I'm asked "what does the evidence tell YOU? Who do you agree with? Why? What evidence supports that view from the actual event?"

OPs teacher did a stand up job

especially because we were all like 14 years old and not exactly developed with critical thinking skills or anything. he showed us that if someone said something earnestly enough you could convince like the 100 kids in our grade complete lies about someone else’s religion. the lesson went harder seeing as it was a catholic school. he was trying to teach us something and i’ll be damned if i didnt get smth out of it, not just lie to us for the hell of it

It's interesting and disheartening that people are assuming his attitude was "smug asshole" about that

A teacher who is wanting you to question authority, whose entire point was "don't trust me just because I'm in a position of authority" is not coming in with a smug shitty attitude

I saw someone comment something like "oh I would be super contradictory everything he said with sources and he would hate me"

Are you kidding?

That you would make you this teachers favourite student!

Look I have had authority figures lie to me because they think it's funny or to one up a literal child. They sprinkle in lies and wait for you to repeat them so they can laugh at you. They don't spend an entire lesson on it and they don't ask "how many of you caught that I was talking bullshit?"

That's not a gotcha it was informing the class that he lied for a reason and encouraging anyone who did notice to speak up and talk about how they noticed. It's not a gotcha it's an opening dialogue

"but I couldn't trust him after that"

GOOD

He doesn't want you too! He wants you to do your own research and double check his facts!

OP I'm so sorry that people are assuming the worse of this teacher who literally was teaching you how to actually do research and not assume something is true just because someone with power over you says it is

adding on to this, I had an English teacher pull a similar stunt.

We were all doing some classwork, writing an essay or whatever the fuck. Suddenly she looks over at a guy and says "Why are you looking at your friends paper? You trying to cheat?"

The guy kinda froze. This guy was a standup guy. Super friendly and super honest, like, the last person you'd think was cheating. So he says "no i wasn't looking"

Teacher: *pissed* You calling me a liar??

At this point the guy sitting next the "cheater" tentatively says "he wasn't looking at my paper"

Teacher: *points to him* You stay out of this. *Points to "cheater" You. See me outside.

At this point the rest of us are like "wtf that came out of nowhere. I'd better be careful she seems like shes in a bad mood."

They come back in, "cheater" looking real down on himself, and the teacher says to everyone "who thinks he cheated? No one right? Cause you know him and you know he'd never cheat. And yet not one of you said a thing. That instinct you all had to keep your heads down stopped you from standing up to injustice when it was staring you in the face! So stop it. If you speak out against injustice and get in trouble it'll always be worth it"

^^^

Halimede from Heaven Will Be Mine is a Chaser!

it's so funny seeing people in the notes who didn't know halimede was from something. I don't know about other hwbm fans but when I saw that there was an account role playing the One cis girl in the game, a character who has a pretty minor role in a game about trans girls settling their personal beef with each other by having homoerotic mecha battles, as a desperate chaser I laughed my ass off

I have never heard of that game. I just thought, a halimede reference in a game is kind of cool until I saw the addition

art is about spending an embarrassing amount of time trying to get something to look right giving up and then moving on to do it slightly better next time. at some point if you're an exhibitionist you then post it for internet strangers to look at.

unfortunately no matter where you are at in your craft the version in your head is what you're capable of after 2~5 years of steady practice. This maintains steady no matter how much you improve. not being driven mad by this too much is the second Barrier of art.

people often use the term "ethical AI" to describe AI that avoids training on any copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder

given that this idea is based around protecting existing investments and would primarily serve to benefit large companies that own massive media libraries, I propose instead describing it as "capitalist AI"

But wouldn't that imply that AI trained on data without consent is not capitalistic?

indeed! or more precisely, it has the potential to not be capitalistic. a model trained without regard for copyright is not trained in a capitalist way, but it can still be implemented in a capitalist way. on the other hand, a model that's trained without regard for copyright and is open-source, like stable diffusion, is as socialist as it gets!

Sometimes it feels like y’all just make up nonbinary people to get mad at . “Super misogynistic nonbinary theyfab person named Sock who doesnt understand the REAL trans experience bc they look like a cis women” like okay yeah your words mean nothing to me

who gives a shit what Sock does and doesn't know about the trans experience? Leave Sock alone they haven't done anything wrong

yes i have i hate women

a head empty thought that spiraled ;;