Information Wall (with Hat)

a wasp made this post

If you’re worried about mosquitos and other pests, save the money and get a hardy herb that repels bugs. Lavender, Mosquito Bush, Russian Sage, and especially Catmint will last longer than bug spray and actually improve pollination.

imagine if your twink boyfriend had a horrible little hairless pet who could talk but it called you fat all the time and tried to break you up out of sheer malice but your bf is just sooooo sweet and has just been through so much so you want to kill that hateful creature with a stick but that would make him sooo sad so you have to be nice about it. that's what samwise gamgee went thru

to lovely humans who were excluded from invitations, left behind when they tied their shoes, forced to walk in the grass when the sidewalk was full, spoken over when you tried to contribute, whispered about or laughed at, given the side eye when you tried to fit in... you are so worthy of love and I’m sorry people have convinced you otherwise. I promise that your people are out there - people who will see the side of you others ignore, people who share weird inside jokes with you, give you affectionate nicknames and go to museums or roadtrips with you and fulfil whatever idea of friendship you’ve always fantasized about. even if you feel like an empty shell of your former self because you’ve hidden yourself away due to shame, this exterior will melt when you accept yourself or let people in and you’ll realize there was nothing wrong with you all along. you have interesting things to say, you deserve new chances and beginnings, your heart is probably made of gold because you know what it’s like to be left out in the cold, and you have so much to give. you are so worthy and someone’s idea of a friend too, and I hope you receive lots of hugs in the future from yourself and others because you’re so lovable.

BOW DOWN TO THE ANCIENT ONE

people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”

i KNOW most of y’all are lying about being in the gifted program as children because none of you could pass the basic reading comprehension assessment they give third graders today

this post is mean and I never read divergent or whatever the fuck but 1984 sucks and is rape apologism so if somebody wanted to write about divergent or whatever good for them

this reply is like literally exactly what op is talking about lol. like firstly ops point isn’t “1984 is good”, ops point is that analysing complex stories teaches you how to form opinions and think for yourself. and like secondly in 1984 you’re supposed to think damn it’s fucked up that he’s thinking that way about her, i wonder if this ties in with the central theme of “a society like this will fuck you in the head”? (this is the thinking for yourself part). like do you think orwell just put that in for fun? do you think that just because winston is the protagonist you’re supposed to agree with everything he does?

You know I feel like this post just gave me an epiphany for what is wrong with how Tumblr Fandom/Internet Fandom responds to media-or not *wrong* but makes it very hard to respond to anything but a morally correct, and heroic protagonist. 

When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective. 

No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream. 

A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’ 

You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions. 

I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior. 

I think if internet culture could learn to view stories as small insights into other lives or single takes of one perspective instead of purposeful moral inspirations we’d be a lot less worried about how toxic or not toxic they are. 

About… I want to say 20, 25-ish years ago?… the Big Fashion in writing advice became that you had to make your characters “relateable”, which many writers took to mean “as identical as possible to the target audience in terms of personality, morality and reason”. So making characters who the audience could agree with or at the very least sympathise with became practically mandatory in mainstream writing. I think a lot of people who started reading those sorts of stories exclusively started to assume that that particular choice is like, a mandatory part of writing, and if the main character isn’t Like You (or different for excusable and sympathetic reasons) then either they are badly written, or the author is trying to convince you of something. Humbert is a pedophile, and of course he’s supposed to be Relateable, so that must mean his morals are supposed to be your morals and the authors morals, so the author is a pedophile and the book “promotes pedophilia”! If you like the character, you find him Relateable (just like you), so you’re a pedophile, or at the very least sympathise/apologise for pedophilia. So we have this weird perspective that all stories must be direct morality tales where something being depicted means it’s being glorified/normalised (why else would you put it in, if you don’t want your audience to enjoy it and therefore think it’s a good thing?), and the protagonist must be Morally Pure or become that way over the story so that the audience can properly Relate to them and not become morally confused (because books are magical devices where the wrong fictional depiction in one of them can brainwash the audience into bigotry, and All Readers Except Me Are Stupid).

This isn’t *new*. When novels became popular among women in England, there was a lot of concern that they would corrupt their poor feeble minds and confuse them with their daring tales and illegal and improper acts. Humbert got this flak for Lolita, which was published in 1955. There have always been a crowd out there terrified that somebody might see something bad depicted and that means that the depiction itself is evil and the only way to stay Pure And Good is to avoid such literature and decry its very existence. Book burners aren’t new, and nor are moral crusade book haters. But I think this weird “all main characters are clearly intended to be Just Like Me, so if we disagree then their existence is morally wrong because why else would they be like that” perspective contributes a lot to the current trend.

Glass pumpkin 🎃

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of AI images and deepfakes.

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

Transcript: It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographic “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “Black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc… id. the Black and [Latine] and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” - I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on. So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards… it’s just being poor- but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.“ -comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food and Privilege: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class) (via meggannn). END TS

the same thing when you look at the ~tiny house movement~ versus, say, people living in trailers, or even just renting in apartments or sublet housing

This this this this

Do not disturb

See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.

Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.

It is important to note that this action was not an "oh, Nazis ALSO targetted other prople". They directly linked Hirschfeld's institute and research to claims of a Jewish plot to destroy German society.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.

Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.

May I intruduce my new family member: Squeak Lord Shang Qieckhua of An-Squeak-Peak-Cage

(Shang Qinghuas real form 😂)

His waking up face is already legendary;

I love my new baby!

And this is his TOTALLY NOT TOO BIG An-Squeak-Peak-Cage:

i have no regrets - he looks so happy ❤️😭❤️

Look at his tittle but-wiggle!!!

And his EARS.. look at his big EARS and his lil glass-dance!