@angeloftheeasterngate / angeloftheeasterngate.tumblr.com
Cecil Gershwin Palmer, Welcome to Night Vale, episode 220: A Radio Jupiter Holiday Special
I had an upsetting dream last night.
Oh you did it WRONG wrong
would you rather be waterboarded by blizzard game ads or disney movie ads
this image is making me realize fandom wikis are so impenetrable and smothered in ads that I have never actually seen any of the attempts at branding that fandom tries to make with its logo or choice of colors or whatever because I literally don’t have the opportunity to do so on their own goddamn website
this seems like a good opportunity to remind everyone that the Indie Wiki Buddy extension exists, and works on both Chrome and Firefox!
it makes it so that whenever you click on a link to a Fandom wiki, it helps you redirect either to an independent wiki (if there is one), or to a site like BreezeWiki that removes ads, suggestions, etc from Fandom pages so you can actually read them without all the clutter!
reblog to save a life
In 2016, years before long COVID was a thing, the US National Institutes of Health, the largest single public funder of medical research in the world, launched a study into a long-neglected and puzzling condition: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS. Eight years later, the results of that study are finally out. In one of the most thorough investigations to date, researchers took a deep dive into a small group of 17 people who developed ME/CFS after an infection and found distinct biological differences compared to 21 healthy controls. "Overall, what we show is that ME/CFS is unambiguously biological, with multiple organ systems affected," neurologist Avindra Nath, lead researcher of the study and clinical director of NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), said in an interview with JAMA. For decades, many doctors had dismissed ME/CFS as a psychosomatic condition that was 'all in patients' heads'. Now there is little doubt: a host of biological changes underpin ME/CFS.
xkcd fans are the only fandom I've had direct experience with where people do the stereotypical nerdy fan thing of referring to installments of the thing they like by their release order numbers instead of their titles
like I've never heard anyone just say "the simpsons season 7 episode 21" without also saying the episode title but I have heard people say "xkcd 2501" without also saying the title of the xkcd
Yeah, we shouldn't expect everyone to know every comic by heart. The average internet user probably only knows 1053 and 936.
and 2501, of course.
Of course!
sigh
hold on
xkcd 1053:
xkcd 936:
and of course, xkcd 2501:
[ Link to survey ]
The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.
It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.
After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.
Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com
The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.
Thank you so much!
[ Link to survey ]
Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.
Explaining the Kendrick Drake feud to my New England Old Money friend
this man is 27
I apologize if you’ve been asked this question before I’m sure you have, but how do you feel about AI in writing? One of my teachers was “writing” stories using ChatGPT then was bragging about how good they were (they were not good) and said he was going to sell them. To put aside any legal concerns in that, I’m just trying to talk him down from that because, personally, I would not enjoy dream job being taken by AI.
The poor man.
Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.
For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.
With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.
hey! you shouldnt make jokes calling cis people eggs, especially when they are real living breathing human beings with intelligent thought and critical thinking. if you do, you're weird and i think you should consider the effect your words more often, because as someone who was a very public facing cis person who had a lot of Egg jokes made about me before transitioning, it still makes me fucking sick to think about. it fucked me up so bad that i refused to transition until i quit my job and wasnt under the eyes of people making bets on my psychology. how dare you fucking speak down to me regarding my own identity. how dare you fucking claim to know me better than i know myself.
it is not the privilege of trans people to have their stated gender identity believed, nor is it a sin of cis people to acknowledge their option to transition and still remain cis. make egg jokes about fictional characters, fine. but accusing a stranger of not being the gender they claim to be is not something you get to reclaim when you're trans.
and no, i don't feel better about these jokes now that im out. you dont get to say "i knew it". that is the same exact thing, just played out retroactively.
WAIT I JUST FIGURED OUT WHY A FEW PEOPLE GOT SO MAD
you heard me say "don't make egg jokes to people who arent out" (a very specific direct action) and decided i meant "don't ever try to help your friends who might be struggling with their gender identity" (a very broad passive action).
damn. damn it is really sad that you want me to be wrong that bad. that you decided that's what i said.
screenshotting because this person is correct and having fun so I don't want to harsh their mellow, but to me it Does Not Count if it's new guys playing them. I'm so sorry. if you make a high budget star trek where kirk and spock are played by dudes who are 2020s handsome then they simply will not be in love the same way. I don't think jim can literally glow at spock if he's not played by a 60s pulp novel cover looking guy who is perpetually sweaty, on actual film and under soft yet dramatic lighting. doesn't matter if he's a good actor. bill shatner isn't a good actor. that's not the point because he can do one thing, and that thing is look twitterpated and say shit like "why, mr. Spock! 😍😳🥰" And Yes You Can Hear The Emojis even though they hadn't been invented yet. no one is ever going to get spock right other than leonard nimoy. no one has his weird little stance and precise combination of warmth and creaturely vibes. no one else is going to wear basic purple eyeshadow with the unaffected confidence of a no-nonsense 70 year old woman who's been wearing her red lipstick and tasteful dash of mascara since she was 16 and just considers it part of getting dressed. where am I going with this. Oh yeah basically I don't care what 21st century reboots do with them because I Do Not Know Those Men
My last post on this didn’t get a ton of traction so I’m trying again. The latest budget proposal for NYC includes a $58.3 million cut to public libraries.
Previous cuts forced NYC public libraries to close on Sundays, and this further round of cuts would likely force libraries to end weekend service entirely. Additionally, it would mean further cuts to programming and the indefinite delay of reopening libraries that have been closed for renovation, which would leave entire neighborhoods without a library.
There is a preliminary budget hearing on May 21, and until then libraries are asking people to sign a letter here to urge the mayor’s office and city council to reverse the cuts.
I know things are terrible in a lot of ways right now and people probably feel overwhelmed and burnt out, but signing this letter (or reblogging this post) is a small, quick, concrete way to make a difference.
I realized I mentioned this in the last post but not in this one: this budget proposal exists as of May 10, 2024. If you signed a letter a few months or years ago (thank you!!) , that was a different letter-writing campaign about a different budget cut. Please sign again!!
"hey, bobby, ginger's kid came out to her as non-binerary! can you believe it?"
"non-binary."
"huh? wha? what'd i say?"
"you said 'non-binerary.' the word is non-binary."
"right. non-byrony."
"oh my god"
"ginger's gonna march with her kid in the parade next year! she's so excited!"
"she'll get to make signs... chant slogans..."
"you sound kind of jealous, lin."
"well, maybe i *am* jealous. maybe *i* wanna be a PFLAG mom."
"pee flag!!"
"gene."
"...kids, are any of you non-binary?"
"i respond to both 'attaboy' and 'you go, girl!'"
"i'm whatever gender gets the coolest happy meal toys."
Scenario: somebody you know casually, but not, like, that well has cheaply obtained some rare article that happens to be related to a special interest of yours. However, they're not sure if it's genuine or a knockoff, and – being aware of your special interest – they reach out to you to confirm its authenticity. The results of examining photos being inconclusive, they insist on showing it to you in person; upon arrival, they point the way to a musty, ill-lit basement where item in question is ostensibly kept.
the duality of man
the problem with not voting in order to send the message that you hate all the candidates and the entire system and therefore refuse to participate is that it's completely indistinguishable, as a signal, from not bothering to vote because you think the system is great and all the candidates are great and you'd be fine with any of them. so you might want to rethink the strategy there
This, by the way, also implies the converse problem: that it's very easy to attribute to active and reflexive dissent what's only apathy and indifference.
i want to give this a shoutout for being one of a very few comments in over seven thousand notes to say something really interesting that's responding to the actual content of the post instead of what people imagine i'm saying here
The time to protest at the ballot box is during the primary.
The general election is time to vote against the bigger asshole.
I feel like the psyops are back…
Ok let’s go over this again, for those with short memories:
The psyops work by taking (screenshotting or paraphrasing) REAL leftist takes by REAL people, (very often American POC,) generally where they are upset or discouraged about the us government or democrats specifically.
Then, the psyop either adds to the post (or in a separate post) something to direct the conversation into “things will never change” “voting does nothing” “politicians are all the same” etc.
The POINT of the psyop is to make leftists who agree with the REAL person who made the original post ALSO agree with the psyop, by conflating the two as being the same person, or at least being on the same side.
