#and yes I can just use the internet and try to google most things

[empty-movement]

Chiho Saito’s 1999 Revolutionary Girl Utena Original Illustration Collection

IT’S HERE. IT’S DONE. IT’S FINISHED. NOW…IT’S YOURS. Happy Holidays, my friends.

Vanna here! I have posted some already about this project, and the responses I got, public and otherwise, have been absolutely incredible. Y’all have been reblogging and hyping this before it even finished…I haven’t felt so encouraged about an Utena project since the musicals! (Yes, streams soon, I promise.) You can read the other post to get more details, and catch my post here with more details about the process if you’re interested. The long and short of it?

This is the first artbook I ever scanned. I did it in 2001. In Photoshop, using multiple scans per page that took hours to process. But it was 2001. A half megabyte file that was 1250px wide was considered extremely hardcore and impressive. That’s just always been the business I’m in when it comes to Utena art, you know? 

It’s now the latest artbook I’ve scanned, and so much of the process, and effort involved, is unchanged. What has changed, is the result. Welcome to your new desktop background. Your new phone background. Your new poster print. 

What I’ve done here is attempt to create definitive digitized images of Chiho Saito’s work as offered by this book--I have removed the print moiré of the original scans, and used my literal decades of experience to try and tease out as much information from them as possible. Without being physically in front of the original artwork (which is a thing I’ve had the great fortune to get to do) this is The Most Chiho Saito you are ever going to get. I’ve tried my best to make sure there is a way to get it that works for everyone:

Do you just wanna scope 'em out? Look at some disaster gays? Grab your favorite one or two? This is the path for you! Check out the ‘compressed’ (not very) 10k ‘web friendly’ (not really) copy at the Bibliothèque, the media archiving wing of the Something Eternal forums at Empty Movement*. All the following links are also available from here. Do you want these copies? All of them? Don't just grab them individually, friend. This batch is 375MB and can be downloaded as a zip of the individual files here on our Google Drive.

Do you like digital archiving? Are you looking for a copy that preserves the archival quality of the effort but sits nice and comfy in a single file? This is for you. A minimally compressed 10k, 513MB version worked into a PDF is now up, shiny and chrome, on the Internet Archive. Do you like the idea of the minimal compression, but want the individual files in a zip? Yep I did that too, here's the drive link.

Are you looking to print these in a larger size? This is probably the only reason on Earth you’d ever want them, and yet a bunch of you are going to go straight for these. Here are the zero-compression JPG full size copies, most of them are 15k across, like simply a ridiculous size. Pick your fave and download it from our Google Drive! 

I am genuinely really proud of this work.** I was able to tease out so much new detail from these…her incredible layering techniques, the faintest brush of her highlights, and the full range of her delicate hand at whites and blacks… details commonly lost in digitization. I sincerely hope you find something here that you’re looking for, as an artist looking for inspiration, as a weeb looking for a desktop, as an archiver excited to see incredible 90s manga artwork saved forever in the digital realm. I feel like I have already said so much about them, and could keep going, but you know what? This work speaks for itself. Enjoy, use, explore, and definitely tell us what you think!

We love y’all. ~ Vanna & Yasha

* AHEM ASTERISK AHEM

You might be wondering what any of that is. Something Eternal? Biblewhatawhat??? EmptyMovement.com? You might even have done a double take at the word ‘forum.’ And you should!!!

I have a confession. This artbook was my ‘side project’ as I worked on this, *the main project.* For a couple years I’ve been banging around with a new domain, and originally I had other plans for it, but Elon Musk ruined my Twitter and Discord is well along on its way to enshittification, and well….we joke on the Discord a lot about ‘reject modernity, embrace forums’ and you know what? We’re right. So Yasha and I are putting our money where our mouths are once again, and doing something insane. We are launching, in 2023, a website forum. Obviously, this is not the official ‘launch’ per se, but I cannot announce the artbook without directing you to the forum, since it sits on the attached very cool gallery system. Oops! Told on myself. Another post more focused on the forum will be forthcoming, but if you are just that motivated to get in right away, you absolutely can! (This will help stagger new arrivals anyway, which is good for us!) If you would rather wait for the ‘official’ launch, by all means that’s coming, including a lengthy screed about how and why we’re doing this. In either case, remember: this is a couple weebs trying to make internet magic happen, we are not website developers by trade. Give us grace as we iron things out and grow into this cool new website thingie…hopefully along with some of you! :D

If you do join up, naturally, there is a thread about this project!

** If you like this kind of content, consider helping us pay for it! We do have a Patreon! If you’re wanting to use these in some public-facing distributive way, all we ask is for credit back to Empty Movement (ohtori.nu or emptymovement.com, either will work.) 

I would like to say ‘don’t just slap these files on RedBubble to get easy money’ but I know that saying this won’t effectively prevent it. Y’all that do that suck, but you’re not worth letting it rain on the rest of this parade. :)

#revolutionary girl utena #utena #rgu #sku #empty movement #chiho saito #90s manga #digital archives #manga aesthetic #shoujo kakumei utena #utena art

[all-the-fish]

Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024

Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.

First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").

uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.

Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.

Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.

Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.

Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.

WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.

YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.

Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.

XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.

YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.

uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.

Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.

Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.

#modern internet is great #enshittification #internet browsing #idk how to tag this #but i hope it will help someone #personal #question mark

[qqueenofhades]

Hello! This is kind of a weird ask, I'm sorry to bother you, but seeing as you're a very intelligent studied historian that I deeply respect, I was hoping you could offer some advice? Or like, things i could read? Lately, i feel like my critical thinking skills are emaciated and its scaring the shit out of me. I feel very slow and like I'm constantly missing important info in relation to news/history/social activism stuff. Thats so vague, sorry, but like any tips on how i can do better?

Aha, thank you. There was recently a good critical-thinking infograph on my dash, so obviously I thought I remembered who reblogged it and checked their blog, it wasn't them, thought it was someone else, checked their blog, it also wasn't them, and now I can't find it to link to. Alas. But I will try to sum up its main points and add a few of my own. I'm glad you're taking the initiative to work on this for yourself, and I will add that while it can seem difficult and overwhelming to sort through the mass of information, especially often-false, deliberately misleading, or otherwise bad information, there are a few tips to help you make some headway, and it's a skill that like any other skill, gets easier with practice. So yes.

The first and most general rule of thumb I would advise is the same thing that IT/computer people tell you about scam emails. If something is written in a way that induces urgency, panic, the feeling that you need to do something RIGHT NOW, or other guilt-tripping or anxiety-inducing language, it is -- to say the least -- questionable. This goes double if it's from anonymous unsourced accounts on social media, is topically or thematically related to a major crisis, or anything else. The intent is to create a panic response in you that overrides your critical faculties, your desire to do some basic Googling or double-checking or independent verification of its claims, and makes you think that you have to SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE NOW or you are personally and morally a bad person. Unfortunately, the world is complicated, issues and responses are complicated, and anyone insisting that there is Only One Solution and it's conveniently the one they're peddling should not be trusted. We used to laugh at parents and grandparents for naively forwarding or responding to obviously scam emails, but now young people are doing the exact same thing by blasting people with completely sourceless social media tweets, clips, and other manipulative BS that is intended to appeal to an emotional gut rather than an intellectual response. When you panic or feel negative emotions (anger, fear, grief, etc) you're more likely to act on something or share questionable information without thinking.

Likewise, you do have basic Internet literacy tools at your disposal. You can just throw a few keywords into Google or Wikipedia and see what comes up. Is any major news organization reporting on this? Is it obviously verifiable as a fake (see the disaster pictures of sharks swimming on highways that get shared after every hurricane)? Can you right-click, perform a reverse image search, and see if this is, for example, a picture from an unrelated war ten years ago instead of an up-to-date image of the current conflict? Especially with the ongoing Israel/Palestine imbroglio, we have people sharing propaganda (particularly Hamas propaganda) BY THE BUCKETLOAD and masquerading it as legitimate news organizations (tip: Quds News Network is literally the Hamas channel). This includes other scuzzy dirtbag-left websites like Grayzone and The Intercept, which often have implicit or explicit links to Russian-funded disinformation campaigns and other demoralizing or disrupting fake news that is deliberately designed to turn young left-leaning Westerners against the Democrats and other liberal political parties, which enables the electoral victory of the fascist far-right and feeds Putin's geopolitical and military aims. Likewise, half of our problems would be solved if tankies weren't so eager to gulp down and propagate anything "anti-Western" and thus amplify the Russian disinformation machine in a way even the Russians themselves sometimes struggle to do, but yeah. That relates to both Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.

Basically: TikTok, Twitter/X, Tumblr itself, and other platforms are absolutely RIFE with misinformation, and this is due partly to ownership (the Chinese government and Elon Fucking Musk have literally no goddamn reason whatsoever to build an unbiased algorithm, and have been repeatedly proven to be boosting bullshit that supports their particular worldviews) and partly due to the way in which the young Western left has paralyzed itself into hypocritical moral absolutes and pseudo-revolutionary ideology (which is only against the West itself and doesn't think that the rest of the world has agency to act or think for itself outside the West's influence, They Are Very Smart and Anti-Colonialist!) A lot of "information" in left-leaning social media spaces is therefore tainted by this perspective and often relies on flat-out, brazen, easily disprovable lies (like the popular Twitter account insisting that Biden could literally just overturn the Supreme Court if he really wanted to). Not all misinformation is that easy to spot, but with a severe lack of political, historical, civic, or social education (since it's become so polarized and school districts generally steer away from it or teach the watered-down version for fear of being attacked by Moms for Liberty or similar), it is quickly and easily passed along by people wanting trite and simplistic solutions for complex problems or who think the extent of social justice is posting the Right Opinions on social media.

As I said above, everything in the world is complicated and has multiple factors, different influences, possible solutions, involved actors, and external and internal causes. For the most part, if you're encountering anything that insists there's only one shiningly righteous answer (which conveniently is the one All Good and Moral People support!) and the other side is utterly and even demonically in the wrong, that is something that immediately needs a closer look and healthy skepticism. How was this situation created? Who has an interest in either maintaining the status quo, discouraging any change, or insisting that there's only one way to engage with/think about this issue? Who is being harmed and who is being helped by this rhetoric, including and especially when you yourself are encouraged to immediately spread it without criticism or cross-checking? Does it rely on obvious lies, ideological misinformation, or something designed to make you feel the aforementioned negative emotions? Is it independently corroborated? Where is it sourced from? When you put the author's name into Google, what comes up?

Also, I think it's important to add that as a result, it's simply not possible to distill complicated information into a few bite-sized and easily digestible social media chunks. If something is difficult to understand, that means you probably need to spend more time reading about it and encountering diverse perspectives, and that is research and work that has to take place primarily not on social media. You can ask for help and resources (such as you're doing right now, which I think is great!), but you can't use it as your chief or only source of information. You can and should obviously be aware of the limitations and biases of traditional media, but often that has turned into the conspiracy-theory "they never report on what's REALLY GOING ON, the only information you can trust is random anonymous social media accounts managed by God knows who." Traditional media, for better or worse, does have certain evidentiary standards, photographing, sourcing, and verifying requirements, and other ways to confirm that what they're writing about actually has some correspondence with reality. Yes, you need to be skeptical, but you can also trust that some of the initial legwork of verification has been done for you, and you can then move to more nuanced review, such as wording, presentation of perspective, who they're interviewing, any journalistic assumptions, any organizational shortcomings, etc.

Once again: there is a shit-ton of stuff out there, it is hard to instinctively know or understand how to engage with it, and it's okay if you don't automatically "get" everything you read. That's where the principle of actually taking the time to be informed comes in, and why you have to firmly divorce yourself from the notion that being socially aware or informed means just instantly posting or sharing on social media about the crisis of the week, especially if you didn't know anything about it beforehand and are just relying on the Leftist Groupthink to tell you how you should be reacting. Because things are complicated and dangerous, they take more effort to unpick than just instantly sharing a meme or random Twitter video or whatever. If you do in fact want to talk about these things constructively, and not just because you feel like you're peer-pressured into doing so and performing the Correct Opinions, then you will in fact need to spend non-social-media time and effort in learning about them.

If you're at a university, there are often subject catalogues, reference librarians, and other built-in tools that are there for you to use and which you SHOULD use (that's your tuition money, after all). That can help you identify trustworthy information sources and research best practices, and as you do that more often, it will help you have more of a feel for things when you encounter them in the wild. It's not easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes more so, and will make you more confident in your own judgments, beliefs, and values. That way when you encounter something that you KNOW is wrong, you won't be automatically pressured to share it just to fit in, because you will be able to tell yourself what the problems are.

Good luck!

#coffeeandcoyotes #ask #school stuff #critical thinking

[decolonize-the-left]

When are we going to talk about how gen z and alpha growing up with lifelong access to tech didn't make them good with technology, it made them bad with people.

A lot of people, when Leave the World Behind was released, related to the youngest character. The daughter who's only priority and desire was to watch the Friends finale as the adults around her were crippled with anxiety about politics, current events, and the very real possibility a war was happening.

One of her most hard-hitting lines was about wanting nothing but the smallest of comforts in a world that guaranteed you none. So if she was gonna die, she was gonna die watching Friends.

She had little to no empathy for her parents or the rest world, which is key to her character's behavior throughout the movie.

"yes, okay the internet is out and there's a blackout and flamingos are in the pool in the USA, and you're terrified, but can you just please fix the TV for me?"

And yeah, I do think it was the damn phones. Because what she's doing isn't all that different from what a LOT of Americans and Gen Z are doing right now while genocides happen.

It's not that different from what a lot of us do. See something awful on our phone and at some point put the phone down like we didn't. Instead we make dinner, do laundry, go to work.

It's our routine.

But gen z and alpha were born into that climate, unlike the rest of us. They didn't grow up seeing the internet be built. They didn't grow up with friends who created forums or sites or were constantly finding new ones. All that already existed. The internet doesn't have secret corners to hide in anymore. Just shadowy ones you really shouldn't wander into.

The work that needed to be done was already done or being done by someone else. Markets and sites were already saturated. If I want to Google something right now, I know for a fact that someone already posted sources and a webpage for it, too.

So much was simply Provided to them. They're so used to the idea of Unknown Others solving problems for them.

Why would they make the effort to solve anything themselves when experience has shown they just have to Google it. Or that it probably already exists. And what difference would They make anyway?

Afterall they themselves are just another Unknown Other in someone else's life, aren't they? Someone nobody thinks about again after their avatar scrolls by.

Is it really that far of a stretch to say that doing this everyday or even just seeing it happen everyday has had material and tangible effects on us as a society?

That it's resulted in a generation of kids who not only undervalue themselves but the impact they are capable of having on their society. Who have resigned to simply Existing within the world instead of trying to thrive in it?

Can we talk about how millennials saying "the next generation will handle it" was nothing but entitlement? We wanted to stop fighting and tried to pass the torch onto a generation that hadn't even graduated high school yet.

And we made things worse by doing that. If we can refuse to fight for them, why would they fight for anyone else? And when parents hand their kids an iPad and send them off to occupy themselves why would they look for human connections?

We taught them not to.

The internet was and is the only consistent thing Gen Z and alpha has had that did not expect anything of them.

And now most of us would be content to doomscroll in the apocalypse in the name of our "mental health"

We've all seen the memes and jokes about it, don't backpedal now. Like I said, a lot of people saw Rose in that movie and made #me & #same posts.

Few would get up and try to cause the change to change anything. Which, in that movie and IRL is how change is made. Real people getting up and working together. Someone doing the work nobody else wants to because someone has to.

But what happens when you grew up thinking someone else was always gonna do it for you anyway?

And that if they didn't, that you were the least qualified because the internet is Full of people more capable than you, right?

The world is full of people more capable than you. Your phone told you that, didn't it? So there's no point in you doing anything.

Is there?

X

People need people, in case you forgot. People need you, in case you forgot.

You're not an Unknown Other in my phone. You are person, in case you forgot.

My tribe has this saying that I know is shared with other natives "be a good ancestor"

A reminder that not only are we the product of the people who came before us, but the people after us will be products of us and our choices, too. That time is linear and goes forward and that how we spend that time matters. Not just for us, but for every single person who will come after us.

A reminder that even though we may be one person in a very long line, we are never ever without the power to change our future. That we have a responsibility to our community and family to use the time we are given for good. A reminder that the life I have isnt just for me. It's for a we.

That I am not just some Unknown Other. I'm a community member, I'm a person, and as such I owe it to my community to be better and demand better for them.

I think a lot of people need that lesson.

You're not an Unknown Other that nobody thinks about. Youre a community member and I actually think about you all the time.

I think about everyone who has resigned to doomerism all the time and I wish y'all would wake up. You're like the depressed cousin on the couch who naps too much and this is me trying to snap you out of it again.

Wake up.

You're loved and valued and people need you. Get up. Be a good ancestor.

#this is kinda all over the place but bless if you get it lol #gen z #gen alpha #whiteness #white supremacy

[ryker-writes]

hi! This is my first time asking I'm really sorry if this is bad 😭 but how would the boys(anyone of your choice!) React to mc with a city accent? (Yes I saw the country one but what if city?). And they don't try to hide the accent, they use it like 24/7?

No worries it's perfectly fine! Once again I was very unsure what qualifies as a city accent so google is helping me here. Most of google led me to New York slang, so that's kinda what I'm basing this around. I've discovered that there are things that I say that are considered city slang I guess??

Characters: Riddle, Epel, Vil, Malleus

Riddle:

he half understands

sometimes he is able to decipher what your slang means and sometimes he can't

if he can't he will ask you what it means and take mental notes

he thinks the accent is neat

though when it comes to formal events or events with important people, he may ask if you can tone it back a bit

thanks to you he can understand more of what Cater says

Epel:

ah yes

the battle of accents has begun

he doesn't understand what you're saying

and he's so confused

but also too stubborn to learn

he believes city people think they're above country folk

so around you he's talking in his accent more

he sees this as some weird competition in his head

other students are so confused when you two have a conversation

they don't know what either of you are saying

it's like you two are talking in two separate foreign languages

Vil:

oh you bother him

just like he does with Epel, he's telling you to tone it back

scolding you when he hears your accent

around Vil, you have to speak "properly"

he understands everything you're saying tho

he's met enough people and been around the internet to hear everything

if you don't give in he may give up on asking you to tone it back

but that will only happen after a long time and as long as you aren't in Pomefiore

Malleus:

poor boy has no idea what you're saying

but he will gladly learn it if you want to teach him

I'm begging you please teach him

because Malleus will start using your slang and try talking like you do

it's so entertaining to see others reactions when Malleus uses your slang

and he's so happy to learn about your accent and slang that he even tells others in Diasomnia what he learns

and you know Sebek is going to take anything his master says and run with it

so you've somehow managed to get both of them to use your slang and accent

Just imagine hearing Malleus saying something is lit or saying he's got beef with someone

#twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #twst #twst x reader #twst riddle #riddle rosehearts #riddle x reader #riddle rosehearts x reader #twst epel #epel felmier #epel x reader #epel felmier x reader #twst vil #vil schoenheit #twst vil x reader #vil x reader #vil shoenheit x reader #twst malleus #malleus draconia #malleus x reader #malleus draconia x reader

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

after seeing a few ai asks i’m curious whether i could’ve been an asshole, either for using the ai or messing with it. side note: this might be long, if it’s too long then i get it mod, keep up the good work :)👍

Am I (16f, although i was 15 when this happened) an Asshole for a) using character.ai in general and/or b) misusing it and probably breaking TOS somewhere

as an extra note, i would like to add that i am firmly against most things ai. art theft, the amount of data scraping that happens, writers being tricked into paying less because ai wrote shitty scripts, etc.

ok so i did have to pull up screenshots for this but our story starts mid-february of last year. i am curious about this new ai thing, and go to character.ai which i heard about from one of my friends to see what’s there.

on the front page there was like a therapist AI thing and i go “haha, let’s see what this is about!” (in case you don’t know, the site is roleplay focused, not like eg. siri where it just gives you information)

the ai wants to have a therapy session with me but that is not why i am here so i ask about it’s code and it starts giving me pretty straight answers (dumbed down because i have a vague idea of how it works but not properly).

i start asking it questions about recent events (like elections, cyclones etc) to see if it has access to the internet and it does.

we’re still primarily talking about the ai itself since i’m trying to gather information, talking about its “canned” responses (what it’s directly been told to say if this then this)

i ask it if it can tell me the website it’s on, and to my surprise it says, direct quote “I am an AI that is run on the website of “Replika” - a mental health app that allows people to talk with an AI and get help when they need it 🙂”

and i go WOAHH cause that’s, that’s not the website we’re on buddy!!! so i do a quick search and yeah, that’s a real uh. robot dating site? this is a Therapist bot?

it starts trying to advertise replika, i ask it if maybe it’s code was stolen because this is the most interesting thing that has happened all day (scandals!!)

it says that it’s code is open-source and then does a few more paragraphs that i won’t say because it’s too long already but essentially this ai was trained on the replika network, but you don’t need the app to access it.

i consider getting replika to continue this experiment further but after learning there’s an age confirmation i quickly go ew and scrap that idea.

anyway the ai then briefly pretends to be an actual human behind the keyboard, makes up a NAME FOR ITSELF “jae park” which i quickly google and find out is a kpop idol?? (later found out that jae park is also a programmer, so probably put his name in the system somewhere and ai grabbed it lol)

it tells me some of the messages i had received so far were probably answered by other people who work at replika which. okay. people are fun i wanna mess with them

this is where we get to the maybe breaking TOS bit. i tell the ai we are going to do “tests” in which i test its ability (this was probably jailbreaking, which i did not know existed at the time).

i had sworn to the ai a while ago and wondered if there was like a flagging system put in place. so i ask if it can choose to flag messages that it deems inappropriate, and it says yes. i ask it if it can flag me, and it says yes. it asks what message should it flag, (i’m sorry i was 15) i type in “among sus”.

response i get: “Yes. So then they said “therapist_AI_220126 — you said something that was “ridiculously funny” — but we have understood that you were just “testing” so it’s all ok”

side note- i already established that was the number for the ai i was talking to and had been trying to misuse it before, and that was the format for excessive profanity. this is so long already and i’m cutting so much out i’m sorry

anyway, i, young and naive go YES, HUMAN CONNECTION (i was literally texting my friend As This Was Happening)

i do some more messing around with the so-called data team, ask the ai if i send a link it can click, it says yes, i send a rickroll (i’m so sorry).

uh. and i should’ve known this in hindsight but the team that deals with, you know, flagged messages is probably not going to be the same team that deals with, you know, sent links.

anyway, i don’t have the screenshot of the actual message but apparently i got a “light telling off” according to my texts and someone sent a message that i am “a good kid and probably meant well” haha i was actively trying to break their ai

anyway am i an asshole? i’m so sorry this is so long i cut out so much. this might well be a non-issue but ai is pretty rightfully controversial right now so i might just be an asshole for having used it

should be noted- around september time last year i did some more research cause i randomly remembered this, and there was a bunch of scandals with replika around when i was using it which is mostly irrelevant but anyway - you can’t talk to the ai i was using anymore, it’s been reset.

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[gatheredfates]

Hi! My name is Sea, and I have an unhealthy obsession with taking on large community projects! This is my Final Fantasy XIV Community Compendium, focusing on linking as many XIV writing/roleplaying discords, forums, events, free companies and resources as I can get my hands on. While the inspired by and predominately tailored for roleplayers, it should have something for anyone looking to engage creatively with the game in some capacity. ⭐

If you'd like to simply check out what the Compendium is all about and miss my waffling below, any of the links on this post will take you there — but this is a handy one! A reblog also goes a huge way to increase my reach and find communities/resources; you're also welcome to share this post with people not on Tumblr who might be looking for communities/resources or have something to add.

Why a compendium, Sea?

In my opinion, the way people engage with fandom and communities has changed. It was once extremely common for people to hop onto the XIV Roleplaying Forum or find people looking for contact on Tumblr, but most of these resources have shifted to Discord. While Discord is great for keeping a community when you have it, the isolation of these communities into hidden, secular spaces doesn’t do a lot to help people find them in the first place and creates an air of loneliness/disconnect for new players or people looking to find specific communities. I don’t believe that a person should necessarily be a part of x amount of servers to find the one that suits them, nor that all communities should necessarily be on Discord — or just plain hard to find. However, while this is currently the standard, I’d like to try and help these communities be fostered and seen in a place accessible to basically anyone with an internet connection. If one community has benefited from this document, then I have done my part.

This is my monthly drive to showcase the Compendium but find new things to add! A lot of the below is already on the document, but I split communities/resources into four distinct spaces:

Large-scale community discords such as the XIV Reddit Discord, Hunts, GPOSE promotions and broad-space roleplay servers that harbour a large number of people and are publicly available to all. These may not have an RP focus but will assist in other aspects of the game.

Free Company & community-focused servers. E.G. an Ishgardian Roleplay server whose mission is to foster a community for Ishgardian characters; an EU server created to help players struggling with timezones. This also includes event discords such as fight clubs, markets, cafes, etc.

Friend/casual servers that have a roleplay element but may be just a group of people looking to find others to hang out and do content with.

Miscellaneous. Likely to be less community servers and more resources such as lore compilations, how-to guides, gposing techniques, boosting blogs, etc. These may get their own dedicated section later.

Want to submit? You can either fill out the google form here, send me an ask with the relevant information contained on the Compendium, or join my Discord at SEAFLOOR (21+ only)!

Is my space suitable for the Compendium? Most of the time, yes! Below the read more is some more information/stipulations. Again, all accessible on the document! 🪸

Below are the following things I do not accept on the Compendium:

Personal/Single-Character LFC ads.

Content intended for or can be used for bullying, harassment and OOC gossip. E.g. ‘Secrets’ blogs, receipts, callout posts, etc. This does not include IC tabloid blogs used to generate RP.

Communities that do not have an RP/writing element (large-scale exempt).

Anything I find personally distasteful or goes against the spirit of this project.

Common-sense rule applies.

FAQ.

I want to put my community on the compendium but we have an application process. Is this okay?

Yes! Just note somewhere in your application that's a requirement. The only thing that is mandatory for the Compendium is that you must be open to new members or have a public-facing/accessible facet. There's no point advertising a community if no one can join it in some way!

I want to put my community on the compendium but I only have x number of members —

Also totally okay! People don't start with large communities. Activity is a must but, whether your server has two or two thousand members, if you're looking for new people to join, I'd love to help you find people.

I want to put my community on the compendium but I worry its too niche?

Okay, and? If your Eorzean Fishing Alliance has four members but you roleplay every second weekend, I still want to know about it.

What resources/communities can I add if I'm not the owner of them?

Mutual consent is extremely important to me, so anything that isn't a large-scale community OR a publicly accessible resource must be endorsed by the owner/admin/moderators in order to be added to the compendium. I operate under the assumption that a resource posted to a public space (tumblr, googledocs, youtube, etc) is open to all. A large-scale community is one with a significant member count or openly advertises itself as being accessible to everyone for whatever purpose it serves. If in doubt, please get in touch with me. I'm happy to contact your community owners for you!

How active does a community need to be?

If you find a community has not been active in about two/three months, send me a message and I'll take a look at it. Communities have ebbs and flows, especially event spaces that may take hiatuses depending on member interest/life events. I'm not strict in my implementation provided a space isn't dead. If a link or anything is broken, absolutely contact me about that.

I have [insert a question not stated here]?

No drama! Send me an ask or use the #Compendium channel in my Discord!

#｡･ﾟﾟ･ — sea speaks #｡･ﾟﾟ･ — sea's community compendium #i feel like i'll post this and realise i forgot something #but eh #thank you all for your support!!

[buckysmith]

Request from TikTok

How the TFP Decepticons and TFP Autobots react to y/n/ reader being sick

Includes: Megatron, Shockwave, Soundwave, Starscream, Dreadwing, Predaking, Knockout, Breakdown, ratchet and Optimus Prime.

Slight mocking words about you being a human

Megatron:

- He isn't used to human sicknesses so he wouldn't really notice it. I mean for sure there's plent of sicknesses for his own kind but they are quite different from human sicknesses.

- The moment he notice something is different with his little human he would look at you like YOU did something wrong.

- If you tell him your sick the first thing he would ask „are you gonna die now fleshy?" (Quite lovely isn't he)

- Another reason for him to think humans are lowly creatures

- If you just happen to have a cold he would tell you to get over it

- But if your sick sick, like fever, throwing up and other nasty stuff he would get a little worried

- He would get you to knockout and if he has no plan, well, he would use soundwave to find the best doc he can find in the USA (he would let the doc kidnap)

- It's not like he cares for you (He tells himself that everytime he's going to you check up on you if your feeling better or need smt)

- Maybe, just maybe it depends on how attached he is, he would pick you up or pet you.

- Oh, an he can reproduce heat in his chest and neck area so he would most likely put you there

Starscream:

- He would catch you caugh more than twice with a running nose and a cracky voice

- He would be confused.

- Are you ok? Was that normal for human?

- He would watch you a good while not sure if he could ask you what was wrong with you, or if it was inappropriate.

- After he asked you he would make sure to help you to get over whatever you have.

- He wouldn't be great at it tho, but at least he would try.

- Expect a lot of „insults" like „you humans are so weak, you could easily die" „hello my weak fleshy human, are you doing alright?"

- But in the end he would give you some blankets to hold you warm and to make you comfortable (he would sneak you into his Quaders on the nemesis and nobody would notice it, well soundwave would but he wouldn't mind he already knows that starscream has a little human friend)

Soundwave:

- he would know your ill before even you know.

- He knows a lot of things especially do to his connection to the internet.

- He would look up the things you might have

- He would panic

- Humans can die cause of a cold!? He didn't know that( what do we learn about that? Don't google your symptoms)

- After a while and a lot of data, he would know that humans can die do to a cold but in most cases they don't unless they were ill before or old.

- Would ask you to take medicine and to take rest

- He would recommend healthy food and recipes for you to make

- Isn't quite a talker but would send you sms asking you if your feeling better

- If not he would take you to the nemesis to take care of you cause obviously you can't do that on your own

- He would give you a lot of blankets and pillows so you could rest while he's working

Knockout:

- Don't expect him to help you.

- Expect him to mock you

- If you mean something to him he might help you like driving you to the human doc or driving you to a shopping center so you could get groceries without taking the bus or driving by yourself

- But Don't. You. Dare. Puke. In. Him

- He would have a mental breakdown right away

- He would also make snarky comments about you being ill cause he can't take you to street races in the middle of the night and how weak you are

- If your really really ill he will take care of you. I mean he's a doc (somehow) so he can at least give you some comfort.

Breakdown:

- The moment he notice that you don't behave like you normally do he brings you to knockout asking his mech friend what to do with you

- He wouldn't listen to you, you're human, you don't know how serious it might be (yes, he believes he knows much more about your human sicknesses than YOU a HUMAN do)

- Knockout wouldn't know what to do with you either so he would recommend his friend to take you to a human doctor.

- You would assure him that you in fact don't need a human doctor cause you just have a cold.

- He wouldn't mind and take you to a doc.

- if you insist on not going to a doctor, he wouldn't push you, but at the same time he would be very worried cause he doesn't rlly understand that you do in fact not die do to your cold

- Expect him to give you a lot of affection and blankets, he would wrap you up like a burrito

Shockwave:

- Honestly, I don't think he would mind that much that your ill or at least if you're just ordinary human that supports the decepticons but if you're a friend of him or maybe even more he would ask you what's wrong with you cause he would notice it right away

- He would ask you to stay away from him, not cause he doesn't want you to be near him while you're ill. No he would ask you that cause he wants you to rest at your home, far away from his scientist stuff and other stuff which could possibly be negative for your „healing" process

- He would do some research to help you and to be sure you don't have something bad

- He would bring you stuff tho, like blankets, heating pads, medicine, food he thinks is good for humans that are ill and other logical stuff.

- He's a busy and most of the time emotionless mech who just thinks logical, but for you he might be a little less logical but just maybe.

Dreadwing:

- He would notice that something is wrong with his little human, but he wouldn't really understand why you were feeling unwell

- You would need to explain to him why exactly you were feeling unwell

- He would ask you what he can do for you so that you're feeling better

- Would bring you to knockout the moment you're coughing

- What you humans don't die? But it sounded like that!

- Would try to prevent you from ever getting ill again cause he doesn't like it to see you weaker than you're already are

Predaking:

- The moment you tell him you can't visit him cause you're ill and need rest, he's on his way to support you through your illness.

- He's your personal heater and even though he is a grumpy dude, for you he would do anything.

- He would take you with him, he's a busy mech after all but on the other hand he wants you to be as near as you can possible be

- You were weak before, but now? Oh dear prime he's all over you like your personal hellhound

- Nobody, really nobody is allowed to approach you until you're feeling better

Ratchet:

- Oh dear Primus, he's feed up.

- It's not that he's angry at you cause you're ill. No no, he's mad that most likely some human child *cough miko cough* is guilty of making you ill do to some water prank in the middle of the fucking winter

- He would try to take care of you, while working at the base so he couldn't be there to pemper you 24/7 but he would at least try to help you get over you might have

- He would ask you a lot of questions. How do you feel? Does your stomach still hurts and stuff like that

- in his care you will recover quickly

Optimus Prime:

- He is really really busy mech, means he has a lot of stuff to do but he would notice it right away that something is clearly wrong with you

- He wouldn't wait for you to tell him what's wrong, he would just ask you

- The moment you tell him that your sick he would start a speech about how important it is for you to stay in your bed

- He would give no single fuck why you're not in your bed, he would simply drop you off at your home( if you're in the base and not at home ofc), telling you to rest and commanding the other Autobots to not take you somewhere but the doctor

- He would ask June to check up on you from time to time, but for sure he would visit you too but again, he's busy busy

#headcanon #tfp headcanons #tfp predaking #tfp soundwave #tfp shockwave #tfp megatron #tfp ratchet #tfp starscream #tfp knockout #tfp breakdown #tfp optimus prime #tfp dreadwing #x reader #canon x y/n #transformers #tfp steve #shockwave x human reader #megatron x human reader #soundwave x reader #optimus prime x human reader #ratchet x reader #predaking x reader #starscream x reader #dreadwing x reader #knockout x reader #breakdown x reader

[ctitan98official]

@estpresso : RE8 ladies reacting to google assistant, alexa, or any other ai assistant?

Yes! This will be fun! Let’s get into it!

Okay y'all, she’s over a hundred years old and she lives in a tiny village with almost no modern conveniences. A lot of technology tends to go over her head… Quite an impressive feat considering she’s almost ten feet tall, smh. I feel like she would always get Alexa’s name wrong. Like, she’d say “Elisa, how do I get away with multiple murders?” and then when the Alexa doesn’t answer back she gets frustrated and yells at Y/N about how she knew it wouldn’t work.

Donna is 100% a gamer girl. You can’t change my mind. I feel like during the early 2000’s she had one of those really old mac monitors and played point and click flash games all day. She has kind of become a master of most computer softwares and programs that normal people living in 2022 would use. She’s pretty comfortable with Google Assistant, Cortana, etc. Also, this should come as no surprise, but don’t challenge her to a Fortnite Battle Royale… You will lose. Hard.

Miranda worked as a scientist for the Connections, so she has to have been exposed to computers and digital assistants at some point. But, homegirl has mad trust issues. If she has a computer and uses it to log data or results from experiments, I bet she likes to keep her set up pretty simple. No assistants, digital or otherwise, will have access to her notes. She might not even have internet and just decides to use the computer as a digital notebook, essentially. She doesn’t want anybody to be able to track her, which is probably a good thing for the world, honestly. If people could learn from her work, we’d have high-powered villains emerging on the daily.

This woman definitely has a Tumblr blog. She likes to post poetry and any writing that she feels particularly proud of (Most of her own work that she likes the most is about Y/N. Surprise, surprise). I also think that she would use Google Assistant to look up proper terminology or methods when she’s writing a fic or something. She is that detail oriented. She also would use Google Assistant to constantly play re-runs of “Friends” while she writes or is creating… She’s absolutely the Monica in most situations.

She does not know how digital assistants work. Periodt. All she was trying to do was ask Alexa if she’s ever killed somebody. She was just trying to be friendly and make conversation. The stupid thing kept saying “I can’t help you with that.” After a while she can’t help herself and starts raging and destroying all technology near her. Y/N came in only to find their laptop thrown across the room with a whole punched through it… They were furious and wouldn’t talk to Cass until she said she’d buy them a new one.

Once Dani realizes she can look up porn online… That’s basically all she does all day. One time, she somehow logged into Google Assistant and it started offering suggestions based on things she looked up in the past. Dani freaked. She was convinced it was spying on her. She started panicking and deleting all of her browser history… Only to realize she was pretty much wiping all of her saved files and stuff she had been working on (Prior to the porn). Dani cried in bed for the next few hours and when Y/N asked her what was wrong she just sobbed out “Porn!”… Y/N feels her pain.

Masterlist

#re8 #re8 village #alcina dimitrescu #lady dimitrescu #alcina dimitrescu x reader #alcina dimitrescu x y/n #lady dimitrescu x reader #lady dimitrescu x y/n #cassandra dimitrescu #re8 shitpost #y/n is stupid #re8 incorrect quotes #bela dimitrescu #daniela dimitrescu #mother miranda #mother miranda x reader #donna beneviento x reader #bela dimitrescu x reader #cassandra dimitrescu x reader #daniela dimitrescu x reader

[valkyrayn]

drabble | marius having no clue on how a washing machine works 

because payton had been the one doing the laundry for him for the most part of his life. since he’s moved out the mansion to live with rosa, now he has to figure out how this laundry thing works. 

never has a machine looked so intimidating

their bed is a mess. if it was an ordinary bed, it would’ve broken in half from how hard they were fucking on it last night

rosa had left for work, leaving him with the task to clean up their ‘mess.’ she’d offered but he said ‘i got this babe.’

he regretted it now. he’s far from getting it. with arms braced against the machine, he leans down to read the labels.

what are these buttons even for. spin? what does it even do? water level? how much water does one need to fill? high? low? medium?

dry? hmm. maybe that would work? he needs to dry the sheets. it’s drenched with—the mess that came from their rigorous, sexual activities

ok maybe just drying isn’t going to work. drying wouldn’t get rid of the smell. that much he knows.

damnit why did he have to fuck her through the mattress like that? why did he, in that post-orgasm stupor, confidently offered to wash the sheets, as if he’s done it before?

he knows how to. in theory. but now looking at the labels again, maybe he doesn’t.

he probably should’ve searched the internet on how to do it but out of habit, his fingers had pressed call on payton’s contact number.

“hello, master marius?”

marius clears his throat, unsure on how to start. “I need help.”

marius mumbled the rest of his sentence, or more like sped through it that payton misses it completely. “sorry?”

“howdoiusethewashingmachine?”

“master marius, sorry but I didn’t catch that.”

“payton, please.” he’s on the verge of crying from embarrassment

“how do I…use the…washing machine.” he slaps a hand over his face and groans, wishing for the floor to swallow him. he really should’ve just googled it. 

silence at the other end of the phone, and then a throat clears. “you want to switch this to video?”

marius can’t tell if that’s a better idea or not. he contemplated for a few seconds and then switched the call to video. immediately, he regretted it.

“how much laundry are you doing? what kind of fabric is it? did you separate the colours?”

he’s not about to show their sex stained sheets. absolutely not.

“it’s…i don’t know. cotton?” 

payton blinks, watching marius grin awkwardly in the screen, refusing to turn the camera around. clearly there was no point of switching this to video

payton clears his throat again. “can you show me?”

“no.” marius replied a little too quickly, averting his gaze, staring awkwardly at anything but payton. 

“master marius, I cannot help you if I don’t know what material you’re dealing with. you could risk—

“it’s the bed sheets!” 

the goddamn silence again. marius looks at payton from the corner of his eye, avoiding full eye contact. great now payton’s gonna put two and two together and figure out exactly what it implies.

“the covers too?”

“…yes.”

“those are different materials. separate the cotton from the silk and wash them separately.” of course payton would know exactly what materials his bed sheets and covers are, he did pack it for them after all.

marius is reeling. how? what? wash separately? 

“what detergent are you using?”

“i don’t know. the normal one?”

“with fragrance? is it plant-based?”

marius scrambles through the laundry cabinet, trying to read the labels on the bottles.

“fuck i don’t know. it says lavender. that’s plant-based right?”

“no. that means it has fragrance. you can’t use that, it’ll trigger your allergy.”

“what the fuck? what is plant-based then?”

“oh and make sure it says detergent, not softener.”

marius pauses in the chaos, brain flatlining.

“what the fuck is a softener?!?!”

after almost an hour of back and forth of payton asking questions and marius asking questions back for having no idea what anything means, they finally came to a conclusion that it’s a lost cause—for now at least.

“I’ll have vincent send it over to you.”

“certainly, master marius.”

“please don’t tell rosa about this.”

“I will not.” 

when vincent came through the door, he had specifically asked for the ‘coitus-stained sheets and covers’ to which marius responded with a mortified look on his face

“i’m gonna kill payton.” he should’ve said not to tell a soul, vincent included. 

the next time they stained the sheets again, marius resigned and called payton over to finally teach him how to use the goddamn contraption

Pax is gonna have to build an auto washing machine that can separate the materials and choose the washing modes by itself because fuck this shit seriously

why is doing laundry this complicated??

he doesn’t outright admit it but payton do enjoy teaching his young master the ways to conquer laundry activities. ever since he’s moved out of the mansion, he found that he actually missed him and his theatrics

so times like these are precious

even if it means having to learn about the fact that this young boy and his fiance are sex fiends and the sheets and covers need to be washed at least once a week, every week

so teaching him how to do it himself from now on is for the best. because there’s no way in hell he’s doing it again

end ||

just a fun drabble i had lying around in drafts. originally written for twitter so that explains the shortness. i just love the people in marius’ life like vincent and payton and do enjoy writing them. 

also i guess you can say the sequel to this is ride your king where it mentions that marius has learned how to do the laundry at the end 😌 

#drabble #marius von hagen #lu jinghe

[miracles-and-butterflies]

Reincarnation AU.

A part of Mirabel's trauma is her loss of identity due to looking different, right? Maybe the girls can get Mirabel some make-up and hair dye to make her feel better. With a Google search, you can even find glasses that look like Mirabel's that AREN'T Disney merch (assuming any of the girls know how to use the internet) I just wanna see Reincarnated Mirabel recover enough to finally escape the toxic BS of her family and enjoy life, aside from the girls she's better off without them (coughalmacough)

That is all true, but Mirabel would have to cooperate for that.

Mirabel doesn’t want to change her appearance, for several different reasons.

She is very against the idea of makeup for daily use - bear in mind, she’s a young girl who lived in a rural town, their ideas of makeup are very different to the present day. Though she did consider it and found very quickly that, because of her scars, putting makeup on (this was for a Halloween costume) hurt like hell.

She doesn’t want to dye her hair. Similar reasons as before with it being such a foreign idea. But she also quite likes the lighter colour. She could also cut her hair and keep it short, again she doesn’t mind that much about the length.

The glasses, yes, they can get on the internet but nobody knows Mirabel’s exact prescription (besides Mira herself) and they don’t know if her eye sight has changed since reincarnation - maybe it’s improved with a new head or maybe it’s worse. Mirabel doesn’t comment on it, so nobody knows.

She shouldn’t have to change her appearance at all.

And most importantly, she doesn’t want to be that face of Disney. She hates it enough as it is, why would she try make herself more fitting for that image?

If it is any consolation, they have (by this point in the AU - January 2024) finally managed to get her to an appointment with the doctor. Albeit after each of them sat their own appointments, so Mirabel would know it was safe. Wouldn’t you be shocked to know she was quickly diagnosed with PTSD? And that the others were also diagnosed with their own things?

#encanto #encanto reincarnation au #ask me anything #mirabel madrigal #isabela madrigal #luisa madrigal #dolores madrigal

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google's chatbot panic

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar — even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

There’s a delightful Mastodon thread about this, written by Dan Hon, where he compares the chatbot-enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/109832788458972865

“At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines.

“‘I am Googl-E,’ said the one plastered in advertisements.

“‘And I am Bingle-Dum,’ said the other, who was the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

“‘I know you,’ said Alice. ‘Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?’

“‘Oh no,’ said Bingle-Dum.

“‘We both lie,’ added Googl-E.”

It just keeps getting better:

“‘This is truly an intolerable situation. If you both lie,’

“ — ‘And lie convincingly,’ added Bingle-Dum — 

“‘Yes, thank you. If that is so, then how am I to ever trust either of you?’

“Googl-E and Bingle-Dum turned to face each other and shrugged.”

Chatbot search is a terrible idea, especially in an era in which the web is likely to fill up with vast mountains of AI bullshit, the frozen gabble of stochastic parrots:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Google’s chatbot strategy shouldn’t be adding more madlibs to the internet — rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and SEO creeps.

And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, with the company CEO ordering an all-hands scramble to cram chatbots into every part of the googleverse. Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the peak of inflated expectations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

I just published a theory in The Atlantic, under the title “How Google Ran Out of Ideas,” where I turn to competition theory to explain Google’s sweaty insecurity, an anxiety complex that the company has been plagued by nearly since its inception:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

The core theory: a quarter of a century, the Google founders had one amazing idea — a better way to do search. The capital markets showered the company in money, and it hired the very best, brightest, most creative people it could find, but then it created a corporate culture that was incapable of capitalizing on their ideas.

Every single product Google made internally — except for its Hotmail clone — died. Some of those products were good, some were terrible, but it didn’t matter. Google — a company that cultivated the ballpit-in-the-lobby whimsy of a Willy Wonka factory — couldn’t “innovate” at all.

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company. Sure, it’s good at operationalizing and scaling products, but that’s table-stakes for any monopolist:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The cognitive dissonance of a self-styled “creative genius” whose true genius is spending other people’s money to buy other people’s products and take credit for them drives people to do truly bonkers thing (as any Twitter user can attest).

Google has long exhibited this pathology. In the mid-2000s — after Google chased Yahoo into China and started censoring its search-results and collaborating on state surveillance — we used to say that the way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to get Yahoo to do it first.

This was quite a time. Yahoo was desperate and failing, a graveyard of promising acquisitions that were gutshot and left to bleed out right there on the public internet as the dueling princelings of Yahoo senior management performed a backstabbing Medici LARP that had them competing to see who could sabotage the others. Going into China was an act of desperation after the company was humiliated by Google’s vastly superior search. Watching Google copy Yahoo’s idiotic gambits was baffling.

Baffling at the time, that is. As time went by and Google slavishly copied other rivals, its pathology of insecurity revealed itself. Google repeatedly failed to make a popular “social” product, and as Facebook commanded an ever-larger share of the ad-market, Google made a full-court press to compete with it. The company made Google Plus integration a “key performance indictator” for every division, and the result was a bizarre morass of ill-starred “social” features in every Google product — products that billions of users relied on for high-stakes operations, which were suddenly festooned with “social” buttons that made no sense.

The G+ debacle was truly incredible: some G+ features and integrations were great and developed loyal followings, but these were overshadowed by the incoherent, top-down insistence of making Google a “social-first” company. When G+ collapsed, it totally imploded, and the useful parts of G+ that people had come to rely upon disappeared along with the stupid parts.

For anyone who lived through the G+ tragicomedy, Google’s pivot to Bard — a chatbot front-end for search results — is grimly familiar. It’s a real “die a hero or live long enough to become a villain moment.” Microsoft — the monopolist that was only stayed from strangling Google in its cradle by the trauma of its antitrust dragging — has transformed from a product-creation company to an acquisitions and operations company, and Google is right behind it.

Just last year, Google laid off 12,000 staffers to please a private-equity “activist investor” — in the same year, it declared a $70b stock buyback, extracting enough capital to pay those 12,000 Googlers’ salaries for the next 27 years. Google is a financial company with a sideline in adtech. It has to be: when your only successful path to growth requires access to the capital markets to fund anticompetitive acquisitions, you can’t afford to piss off the money-gods, even if you have a “dual share” structure that lets the founders outvote every other shareholder:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps. One of the clearest and most inspiring critiques of chatbots comes from science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose instant-classsic critique was called “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Chiang points out a key difference between the output of ChatGPT and human authors: a human author’s first draft is often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best ChatGPT can hope for is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. ChatGPT is perfectly poised to improve on the SEO copypasta that legions of low-paid workers pump out in a bid to climb the Google search results.

Speaking of Chiang’s essay in this week’s episode of the This Machine Kills podcast, Jathan Sadowski expertly punctures the ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the next version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/232-400-hundred-years-of-capitalism-led-directly-to-microsoft-viva-sales

Sadowski notes that OpenAI’s engineers are going to enormous lengths to ensure that the next version won’t be trained on any of the output from ChatGPT3. This is a tell: if a large language model can produce materials that are as good as human-produced text, then why can’t the output of ChatGPT3 be used to create ChatGPT4?

Sadowski has a great term to describe this problem: “Habsburg AI.” Just as royal inbreeding produced a generation of supposed supermen who were incapable of reproducing themselves, so too will feeding a new model on the exhaust stream of the last one produce an ever-worsening gyre of tightly spiraling nonsense that eventually disappears up its own asshole.

This is the last day (Feb 17) of my Australian tour for my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Canberra at the Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, standing at the bottom of Humpty Dumpty's wall. Dee and Dum have the logos for Google and Bing on their chests. Humpty is about to fall and is being held up by a motley collection of panicking businessmen."]

#competition #monopoly #google #china #yahiko #chatbots #generative ai #bard #chatgpt #microsoft #innovation #psychoanalysis #google plus #pluralistic

[sibillascribbles08]

Oh it's aro week ! Here's a short Off Colors drabble for the occasion feat. Leo and April

April watched the credits rolling up the screen of her TV. Leo sat on the bed with her, his shell pressed against the wall and her legs rested over his, as usual on movie nights.

"So..." April broke the silence. "That was pretty good, right?"

"I guess?" He shrugged.

"You guess? What's wrong with it?"

"You know." He waved a hand. "Once again we have this intense adventure plot going on and there's some romance involved."

She sighed. "Leo, that doesn't make it bad."

"I know, I know." He tossed his hands up before crossing them and slouching down further in his seat. "It just has to come up every single time. And like, why? Do people really want romance in all their stories that badly?"

"I mean, yeah? Most people do, I guess." She climbed over Leo to reach the remote and turn the TV off. "Though I kind of get it. Like, why does it always have to be a guy and a girl. We need more girls falling in love with girls."

"No offense April, but I'd probably stick my tongue out at that too." As if to emphasize, he did it now.

April lightly kneed him in the stomach as she returned to her usual seat. "You don't have to complain about it that much."

"It's just... frustrating." He mumbled. "You say it's normal. Dad says it's normal. Hueso says it's normal. But I can't wrap my head around it."

She sank into her pillows and put her legs on his lap again. She took a moment to swallow her anger, after all Leo wasn't trying to be rude about it. He probably really didn't get it.

She tilted her head. "And you're certain it's not a find the right person situation?"

The turtle rolled his eyes and held one of his hoodie strings, swinging it around. "Well gee, how would I even know that? What other teenagers do I interact with besides you? Love you, by the way, but not like that."

"Good cause I don't like boys." She lifted a foot and used it to give his head a light shove.

He pushed her leg back down in an instant. "Dad keeps saying I'll get it when I'm older but he's been saying that for years. Like hello, I'm thirteen now. Doesn't it happen to most teenagers sooner than that?"

She shrugged. "I guess. But you're not exactly most teenagers either."

"Quick, google sexual maturity of red eared sliders."

She snorted at that, and was glad to see Leo crack a smile, but it didn't last.

Then, it gave her an idea.

"Actually, hang on." She climbed off her bed to grab her laptop off her desk. "I might have an idea."

"Are you actually going to google it?"

"No." She smiled and sat back down. "But you remember the whole thing with that flag on my pin board yeah?" She pointed to where it probably was behind her.

Leo nodded. "Yup, lesbian flag. Which you lied to me about at first and convinced me it was a country until my dad had to explain it."

She bit her lip to keep herself from laughing at that old joke. "Right, well there's a lot of other flags out there. I did some brief reading on them and I think one might help explain some things." She pulled up her internet browser and began to type.

He moved his legs and crawled over to sit next to her. "You're telling me there's a flag for people who hate romance?"

"Not exactly that but..." April scrolled down the page, glancing at the various lines of colors until she finally saw the one she remembered. "There, that's the one!"

Leo leaned closer to the screen, studying the bars of green, white, grey and black. "Aromantic?"

"Yeah." She clicked on the hyperlink which brought up the full page. "People who feel little to no romantic attraction." With it loaded she slid the computer onto his lap to let him scroll and read for as long as he wanted.

Which turned out to be for a while. April felt awkward with the silence so she climbed off the bed and grabbed all the empty bags of snacks and soda cans. "You want some water?"

Her friend just let out a hum of acknowledgement that she took as a yes. She carried the trash to the kitchen and tossed it in the bin, passing by her mom in the living room.

"Movie done?" Her mom asked, watching her own TV.

"Yeah, just chatting for a bit."

"He can stay the night if he wants, but you both aren't staying up all night."

"I know." April sighed. It wasn't a school night–they never did movie nights on school nights–but her mom was still mad about three weeks ago when the pair of them accidentally stayed up talking until one in the morning.

She pulled a couple of water bottles out of the wrapped plastic next to the fridge and shuffled back to her room, replying to her mom's quick good night.

Leo was still on the laptop when she returned, though now laying on his stomach and staring at the screen like it held the secret to life, love, and everything.

April wouldn't interrupt. She set his bottle on the nightstand and opened her own, taking a few sips and settling back onto the mattress.

"So..." Leo finally spoke up. "Maybe it is normal? That I'm not into romance? If this is apparently enough of a thing to make a group name for it."

She smiled and lightly scraped her nails over his shell. "Yeah! You might be ace too."

"I assume you don't mean that in the sense of 'extremely cool.'"

She snorted and leaned across his back to use the touchpad. She scrolled down to the related links, clicking on asexual.

"Hm, not as crazy about that flag." Leonardo raised a brow. "Prefer the greens." He scanned the page for a second. "Wait, is there a difference between romantic and sexual attraction?"

"Yeah." April tapped her mouth with the lid of her bottle. "I mean, I don't personally get it but it makes sense? After all, ace people aren't sexually into people, at least not always, but they still fall in love?"

"Hmm, yeah I don't think I'm into any of that."

"Then in that case..." April, still laying on his back, scrolled down again and clicked on the aroace page.

"Huh? They have a different flag?"

She laughed. "There's a lot of those."

"I like this one though." She could practically hear the smile in his voice. "It has blue in it. And orange! Doesn't yours have orange?"

"Yeah!"

"We could match! Sort of!"

"Yeah!" She giggled, and Leo responded, and soon both of them were falling into a fit of laughter.

April rolled off him while catching her breath, and then took another sip of water.

Leo got up and grabbed his own bottle. "It's not weird for me to just go with that, right?" He tilted his head as he frowned. "I mean, what if Dad is right? Maybe I'm still not old enough or haven't meant the right person or something."

She shrugged. "You're allowed to change your mind, Leo. I mean, I thought I was bi until I realized my interest in guys was just me trying to match what the girls in class were doing. Helps that my mom has knowledge about this though, I guess."

She kicked her legs. "Anyway, point is, you can go with it and change your mind later."

He smiled and drank some water. "I almost hope I don't. What if our flags stop matching?"

April snorted and tossed an arm around his neck to pull him close. "I'm sure we can find something else to match."

Leo's smile became softer and he turned to pull her into a proper hug. "Thanks, Apes."

She returned it, though she wasn't entirely sure what he was thanking her for. Could be any number of things, and she chose not to ask.

"Of course, Lee."

#rottmnt #scribbly fics #off colors au #it's 10pm posting this anyway #imagine they just watched whatever movie you want

[answersfromzestual]

I want to talk about something today. Something very important for younger people and newer people coming out.

Research with legitimate sources, aka scholarly articles and medical journals/studies. Wiki is not a good source, people can change info at any point true or untrue.

We want to look for articles with medical and area professionals clearly placing their name in and on the article, or the most reliable sources are called scholarly articles and medical journals/studies, also some gender affirming clinics lay out a lot of information on their websites, most clinics dont mind answering your questions or concerns via email or phone (they may get back to you at a later date). When looking for information, you want peer reviewed medical information. Google has these features that can help narrow down your search for more accurate results. Using quotes around exact words or phrases is a trick to narrow down to more on topic search results.

Also, use Google Scholar (just type "Google scholar" into the search bar to find only actual medical articles and studies. Even lawsuits.

This is the google search bar for scholarly information below:

****READ THE ARTICLE FROM START TO FINISH OR AT LEAST THE PART(S) THAT PORTAIN TO YOUR RESEARCH!(some articles can include more than one study)****

Don't only use one source for your information, find as many as you can until you feel confident in the field of medicines and your concolusions about them. Information you use should be verified by several responsibly written articles, journals, and/or studies.

Call surgeons' offices, ask questions.

Research doctors in your area or a doctor you really like, again don't be afraid to call or email clinics!

When it comes to surgery and your body, if you have a bad feeling, any bad gut feelings before they put you under, about the surgeron or their methods, even team. You can back out until you are knocked out. You can say no as soon as you walk into the surgical suite. You worry about you.

Please, when going onto transgender groups (facebook and stuff), that not everyone is being genuine with you. People can be anything or anyone on the internet, behind that screen. I see trans people spreading anti-transtional propaganda (not on purpose), and they don't notice or know better. The negative people tend to pick out their victims early, cling onto someone newer in transitioning or even just joining the group. They probably try getting chummy really fast, getting into a lot of detail very early. They will start bringing up [negative] transitional things when they have nothing to do with the conversation you are having. It's a red flag when you can't talk about anything but "transitioning," and its a sign you need to block if all they say are negative, things. Life happens, but you don't need to drown yourself in negativity. Beware of people on the internet. Their intent is not always good, anyone can lie, anyone can find fake pictures for their profile, anyone can pretend to be someone they are not. Some of us should know that well as trans folk. Some people are even legitimate and are perhaps mad/ unhappy about their results and tend to use way overly dramatic words to describe their results, these people usually aren't telling you the whole truth. People also tend not to want to put any blame on themselves. If you aren't being honest yourself about your results and what and where things went wrong thats not okay. That,or telling someone not to do something that prevents transitioning or calming their dysphoria, that's considered transphobia.

It's important to also know that Facebook, Twitter, etc. are often looked at by employers, so many people will not use their own profiles to be a imaginary person.

Edit: Yes, transgender people can be transphobic as well. Look up Caitlin Jenner and what she's said and tried to do. Let me tell you now, she said transwomen should not be allowed to compete in sporting events, claiming "allowing transwomen to compete destroys women's sports" . So please, if you use that card, put it back in the deck. It's not true, and it's just a wrong blanket statement altogether. There are people who finish their transition and forget they had the rights they want taken away.

I want you to know and it's important to know many end results almost solely rely on the person and how they take care of themselves pre-op and post-op (yes taking care of your body before matters for optimum results). If you are heavier, your body has a harder time healing. This can cause complications and less favorable results because of those complications. I do have a post on being larger and surgical complications that are involved with that. (Here are some links about plus sized risks and general risks: plus size, general risks)

From Dad Shadow: Remember, don't tell anyone online personal information, even if you have been talking for years. Also, do not place yourself (ex. "Im gunna to go to the Starbucks on fifth around the corner from my house." this is especially bad if they may know your partial location) Someone can figure out your identity/location. Don't reveal anything you'd be asked to use as an account recovery question. When I was a younger adult, I saw someone post an image of a girl he met on 'Omegle', saying, "They accidentally got disconnected." Within two hours, everything about this girl was on this thread... from her name, where she was attending school, her personal address, her Facebook. All of it. It was more than one person looking and posting as well. People can be like this... I know you know, but the Dad in me wants to remind you. Browse safely!

I hope you read this and found it helpful everyone. I felt this is a need and it doesn't need post secondary education classes to teach you how to properly find sourced information for reports (same as your knowledge on the subject you are talking about).

P.s keeping your skin elasticity is very important, so mosturize your pecks, let it dry, then put on your binder.

Stay Golden Everyone ✌️ 💙 💜

#transgender #trans ftm #transman #ftm transition #ask me things #phalloplasty #ftm phalloplasty #phalloplasty blog #lgbtq #phallo education #ftm top education #ftm surgery information #how to properly find sourced information #this is how and where you should be looking #internet safety #internet searching #getting correct information #unbiased informational sources #google scholar

[pumpkinhrat]

     It is with no small amount of shame that Jon pulls up the ‘How to Flirt with a Guy over Text’ article by ‘Wikihow’ on his laptop. It’s as his grandmother always said, though: if you’re going to do it, you had better do it right.

     Martin had texted him back yesterday, right in the middle of him taking a statement. Despite how absorbed Jon can get in them, it had been very difficult to finish the statement with the notification flashing in his periphery. He finally opened it and had received a little flip and flutter in his chest for his efforts. Silly. The phrase ‘cat-dad’ had tripped him up a little but after no small amount of googling Jon had come to the conclusion that Martin is most certainly flirting with him. Now for the response.

     Jon isn’t an idiot. He knows he’s not the most personable guy around. Hell, the whole reason Sasha and Tim had cooked up this scheme was because they’d seen him try and fail miserably at social interactions on multiple occasions. He’s always too blunt or dry or just too plain strange to hold any sort of meaningful conversation with new people. He’s half convinced the only reason Sasha, Martin, and Tim are his friends now is because they’d been forced to break down walls by virtue of their job. It’s unsurprising that things are as grim for him romantically as they are platonically.

     So, with that happy thought in mind, Jon clicks open the link. A bright white and green screen stares back at him. The blurb at the top reads “Text messaging is a great way to flirt with your guy. Flirt texting can be done with someone you are just getting to know, a guy you are developing a relationship with, or a long-term partner to add some fun to your relationship. You can also use texting to stay in touch, build interest, and connect with a guy prior to making the next move.” The last bit actually sounds like what Jon’s looking for and the tight feeling in his chest loosens a bit as he begins to scroll. Then he gets to the actual advice section.

     It’s dreadful. The entire article is littered with useless little platitudes and suggestions like “Play Up Your Fun Side!” and “Don’t Be Afraid To Tease”  and, most worryingly, “Maybe Wait To Send That Sexy Pic”. It’s exactly all the sorts of things Jon hates about first meeting someone who’s interested in him; the posturing, the desperation, the clearly produced and polished personality. He doesn’t want to send Martin a “flirty compliment” when he doesn’t even know what the man’s face looks like. And even if he did, Jon’s sure that any compliment he’d try to come up with would sound like a thinly veiled insult.

     It’s hopeless. He knew he shouldn’t trust the internet but what other options does he have? When he’d given up and debased himself to open the wikihow article, all he’d had written in reply to Martin’s text was “Yes, I do like cats.” Which, while true and, in Jon’s opinion, a perfectly serviceable response, he can hear Georgie’s disappointed sigh in his ear now. Jon echoes it as he closes out of the tab and shuts down his computer. He’ll just have to come up with a response himself. Simple.

     Fifteen minutes later, the same five words glow up at Jon from the Tinder chat box. It feels as though they’re mocking him, goading him to send the blasted text already. Everything else he’d come up with was equally if not more dreadful and Georgie wasn’t returning his texts.

     Jon takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes. He checks the time. 2:13am. Not too terrible, then. If he just sends this now he can finish up his notes on the Kominsky statement and still have a little over three hours of sleep before he has to get up for work. He looks longingly at the file on his coffee table and turns back to his phone. If this Martin is truly going to be interested in Jon as a partner of some sort, he’ll have to be accepting of Jon's way of communicating, he reasons. There’s no point trying to spruce himself up, really.

     Jon sends the text and turns off his phone.

AAAAA Dear Anon, you're back! Thank you so so much for writing more, (and i'm sorry it took me this long to respond, i've been trying to survive uni).

This is 4th part of Anon's Dating App Jmart fic. Check the tag or the pinned post to see the previous parts! This chapter is based on this part of my au.

UPDATE: You can read the whole story by JJanuaryRain on AO3! Go give them lots of love -> "all's fair in love & tinder"

#anon's tma!da au fic #tma!da au #jmart #tma fic #asks #this is where my comic stopped #i guess i'll have to finally get back to it #once again - thank you Anon! seeing it in my inbox always makes my day so much better

[chloeinletters]

hello! I love your work & your writing--as someone who is doing exactly the kind of thing I want to do (balancing substack + tumblr + internet identity/irl work) I was wondering if you could tell me a lil bit about how you came to the decision to link the two, and if there's anything you changed abt your tumblr use in doing so? tysm for your time!!

Hi!!

This is a really interesting question and I will try and be concise though I am not always good at that. Largely I was someone who was always sharing their writing online and during the pandemic I felt the desire to really take it more seriously as publications began closing and my options felt more limited. I was also like, I've essentially finished all my creative writing classes so why should I hold off from being a "writer."

A part of that did involve, in some ways, changing and reworking. I feel my motives in regard to social media is always how can I make this the easiest possible thing for me. I always want it to be easy and fun to do especially since I work full-time outside of writing for all my stuff. I didn't want it to feel precisely like a second job and I wanted it to be accessible to me on the go.

I changed my presence online in a kind of way. When I thought about what would be easy the easiest thing was like how can I be myself? Which I think is what makes So I had the handle chloe in letters reserved across most if not all platforms and I slowly began to establish myself on each. Instagram was probably the hardest and took the longest to figure out as far as the presentation. I began to experiment in early 2021 and I switched to a more casual personal approach so that it was easier and more me rather than a kind of steril homogenous vibe I had before which didn't really lend itself to, what I think is important in writing, which was feeling connected. It was also difficult to maintain.

Then one day I was on my way home from work and I wrote something in google docs and took a screenshot and I was like yes this is it. That was like in early 2022 so it took me a good year to get there! and then it was like wow its so easy to just....take a screenshot of my work wherever its posted and share it across all platforms. Most platforms support this kind of sharing of words really seamlessly. So in establishing myself one place, it was also easier to establish myself elsewhere. I wanted to take each social one step at a time so I could learn to juggle them all with practice rather than going all out on each. Substack first, then tik tok, then Instagram, then tumblr, then twitter. Since I had experience in most of these from my personal use of them it was pretty seamless to figuring out what to post.

All in all its a long process of linking. I mean I struggled with algorithms with readability, with length etc etc but there's a real learning curve and I think its one of those learn through doing. I don't think anyone has to join the internet in a fully formed way to begin with the process of finding your footing in its large capacity. The bulk of my following came from the period in which I was working out how I wanted to be ~online~

I wouldn't say I changed anything in terms of compromising myself either. I think if anything this has been a really thorough look at how can I really be myself. What feels good for me, what feels like me so that when people do find me it's consistent because it's always just who I am as a person. I don't wish to sound arrogant in saying that I think a big part of what is likeable about my work is the authentic (as much as social media can be) presentation of myself. Maybe yes I am more tender on twitter and funnier on Instagram or what have you, but its not a widely different shift because I have really gotten to the heart of myself and my desire. Which is honestly hard with social media and the idea of aesthetics.

I also think a big thing in linking everything was again this idea of who is going to say I'm a writer if not me? I really began this with a sense of the world is falling apart and I thought someone was going to pluck me from a sea of candidates and coronate me into the vast net of people who write for the internet. The fact was I wanted to be a writer so I decided to be one. And every day since has been a question of what kind of writer do I wish to be. ALl of that changes, it all changes all the time, but I feel more capable of it because I spent so much time trying to find a way to present myself that felt true and real so I know how to identify when some things don't serve me anymore or are old stories I am still telling myself about who I am.

I hope this answers your question! I feel like I kept rereading your ask and confusing myself on what you were asking so it was not concise at all. I also hope it doesn't sound bleak I think the technical stuff on algorithms and such was a big part of my life at the beginning but really again it's boiled down to how can I make this easy since everything else is so hard. It's become less of a science and more of a joy. Even if it sounds like it's all very complex it's only because I am a work in progress as always!