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sanstropfremir · 1 year

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This is going to be such a weird and long ask, but what do you think of Michael Jackson as a dancer? I knew he was a great performer, but I was really surprised that he was crowned as one of the best dancers by Fred Astaire, despite the fact that Jackson was not a professionally trained dancer. For context, before stumbling on your blog (which I'm very grateful for between) I always thought that, usually, main dancers in a kpop group were on the same level as professional dancers, so when you explained the real gap, it made me think of how we view performers like Beyonce and Michael Jackson as some of the best dancers, but I don't know whether these comparisons are made with only other singers in mind, or if they really are considered among the best dancer, including professional dancers. Your thoughts?

oh no michael jackson was the real fucking deal. his body control was insane he is legit one of the greatest dancers of all time. it's also important to remember that michael jackson was a street dancer, which was a form that was quite literally growing with him. of course he wasn't professionally trained as a dancer; at what school?? nowadays we have dancers who are professionally trained in hiphop, popping, locking, and other types of street dance, but as a form, these genres are probably only about 50-60ish years old; tony gogo (who worked WITH mj) is still alive and occasionally working. michael jackson was a HUGE part of the reason why schools for street dance even exist at all, bc he was the one who made the form popular. he's the blueprint for the pop star, the reason why we even HAVE kpop in the first place. the thing about the performing arts is that because there are so many aspects of it, you're almost always going to find someone who has better technique in some way; yes there are better dancers than michael jackson now, just as there are better singers, better musicians, etc etc etc. but art isn't about technique, it's about what you DO with that technique, what you make with it, and how influential you become. when someone is recognized as being the 'best', it's always a combination of skill, artistic ability, and influence, and that's something that other artists will always acknowledge.

#especially when you get into the field of pop performance influence is a HUGE part of legacy #i feel like ppl are only familiar with mj's music videos and like.....his dance breaks during live performances are soooo #like go watch the dangerous live at wetten dass 1995 perf that shit is wild (and i think you will find looks very familiar *cough taemin*)#non kpop questions #like mj was for sure an actually talented dancer but there's always going to be a difference between him and like. idk.#someone who only dances a specific genre and does nothing else.#like probably most popping dancers that compete/battle are ''better'' than mj. but that's a flawed metric to judge on #bc theyre not doing the same thing #its like boa. is she a very talented dancer? absolutely. is she the best? no of course not. but professionals will still cite her influence #text #answers #and rain. and taemin. all talented all considered the best in their fields all cited influences #but you will ALWAYS find someone who is better #there's def like a preoccupation with technique that happens in arts fields bc ppl try to make the comparison with other non arts fields #like in a science-based field having perfect technique IS how you are the best #like the best surgeon is the one who does things textbook perfect right? you wouldnt want a surgeon who plays fast and loose with rules #but you can't carry that same logic into art. it doesnt work like that #and its not really something that i blame people for assuming bc not everyone is an artist #but it is an important thing that more ppl should be aware of

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angelsaxis · 2 years

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Idk i think some people miss the point of someone who's around my age lamenting that they've never dated or done anything or been in love, but really want to be. I saw someone who was 24 ask whether there was still hope for them (which I know is kinda dramatic), and the person who responded was like "do you have friends and family who love you and whom you love? Have you ever read a good book or eaten fruit or sat in the sunlight. Love is everyhwere 🥺❤️🥺❤️" and like yeah yeah I get that little love and platonic love is just as important as romantic and sexual love but really none of that changes the fact that that person and many others like them are desiring a specific kind of love under very specific circumstances and conditions. Loving your parents isn't the same as loving a significant other lol. And idk it feels patronizing or infantilizing I think, to see someone who's never been in a relationship and would like to experience that kind of bond with someone only to tell them "no actually you should love your friends and family and eat some good food ❤️" idk idk I understand the intentions but. People desire to be desired in specific ways. People want to feel desired sexually and Romantically and to know that they're wanted in those capacities. Yes it's not the only metric by which to measure one's value, but we're not being unrealistic or naive by desiring this. Yes all the other stuff is important but you would not tell someone who doesn't have friends not to worry about platonic love bc maybe they have an SO already and also the sun is shining and their parents love them and people are being kind for no reason. it's starting to get annoying

#angel posts #its a bit messy but #why are people almost against the idea of someone wanting to date and fall in love #like what

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jacobtheloofah · 10 months

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out of curiosity i wanted to compare this metric to david zaslav's salary, so lets specifically compare it to his earnings last year which was $39 million. if the studios referred to in this article continue to lose this amount consistently week to week, over the course of a whole year it STILL wouldn't total up to $39 million. it would take just shy of another 3 months for them to lose as much as this one man made in one year. that's how grotesquely overinflated his paycheck is and that is precisely why this strike needs to happen.

#jacob's ramblings #wga strike #sag strike

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superhumanfoods · 4 months

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We need to talk about Sending Rocks.

You probably don't understand what that means. That's fine. It's a weird little example I made up, and I'll explain.

I'm the creator of the near-future cyberpunk podcast SINKHOLE. SINKHOLE is weird, short-form, nearly impossible to explain to people, and utterly unmonetizable. It's also got a very healthy listenership for something so esoteric. (I promise season three is coming; life just keeps happening, constantly.)

Because of that, I have a reputation as a weird little indie creator. And if I were to run a crowdfund, I could set up a donation tier that was literally just

"I will go outside, find a rock on the ground, and mail it to you."

and most people would find that funny and charming. I think, at worst, people might find it puzzling, but they'd still opt in out of curiosity.

A lot of you would let me send you rocks.

Now we need to talk about the re: Dracula crowdfund- about the zines. A handful of people got very upset about the perceived lack of quality present in the zines.

That caught me off-guard. To me, a zine should always be kind of janky. You should be able to tell exactly how far down the pile your specific zine was based purely on how committed to hitting the fold lines the person folding it was. Zines are handmade and should feel handmade.

So it seemed like people were complaining about the zines being zines, and I didn't get it.

And then I realized something: it's not about the zines. It's about the fact that they were coming from Tal Minear.

If Tal Minear ran a crowdfund and set up a donation tier that was just

"I will go outside, find a rock on the ground, and mail it to you."

I would give it about a day before someone found a way to turn that specifically into a talking point about how Tal doesn't respect the audio drama community.

Tal Minear cannot send rocks. The zine was never the problem. The way people think about Tal is the problem.

We need to talk about how this community keeps trying to reinvent classism based on nothing but vibes and follower numbers.

I'm going to tell you something you already know but probably don't want to admit: the independent audio drama scene is to the independent film scene what a fish tank in a dentist's office is to the ocean.

The biggest names in this community are just a step up from being nobodies.

If you went outside right now and spoke to the first person you saw on the street, the only non-BBC fiction podcasts you would have any realistic hope of them knowing are Welcome to Night Vale or Archive 81- and the latter only because it got turned into a Netflix show, which means that they might not even realize it was a podcast first. There's also a chance they'll have heard of The Magnus Archives, but it's not a guarantee by any means.

Now, this last one I've mentioned to a few people, and was surprised to get a lot of pushback. There seems to be this thought that no, of course everyone has heard of The Magnus Archives.

No. No, man.

You're doing the Homestuck thing. I hate to hurt you like this, but you're doing that thing people did where they assumed everyone had at least heard of Homestuck.

There are people in your life that have never heard of Homestuck.

The Magnus Archives was a mini-zeitgeist in which the fandom engaged in wild speculating, plentiful shipping, and lots and lots of aligning yourself with a specific Fear.

And it was never as big as Homestuck.

I'm sorry. Jonny Sims is not a household name. That's simply the truth.

He is also in this fish tank with us. As far as I am aware, he has not escaped to begin acting in feature films or begun voicing characters in massive video game franchises. Slay the Princess was pretty cool. It's not exactly fucking Assassin's Creed, though.

He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

And notice how my metric for breakout success involved going to other, better-known mediums? That's because a breakout success in this community involves getting a blurb on Buzzfeed or in Cosmo. There is no audio fiction podcasting elite. The idea is hilarious.

Even Markiplier doesn't count, because he's YouTube royalty. He's not famous because of The Edge of Sleep. The same is true of any celebrity. They're visitors. They didn't get their break here.

Tal Minear is not your landlord. They're a slightly bigger fish in the same tank as you that likes to poke around in the muck a bit more than you personally enjoy. And, well, you cannot argue that Tal's position as showrunner of re: Dracula justifies framing them that way.

Because the thing is, I'm not just the creator of SINKHOLE. I'm also the showrunner and head writer of Mayfair Watchers Society as of season two. Showrunning and writing is most of my income these days. Tal and I are very comparable in terms of the material power we wield. This isn't a secret.

And yet, a lot of you would still let me send you rocks.

Now the actually important thing.

We need to talk about how this exact illusion, this fanciful idea that there are real industry goliaths in this fishbowl, has already been used to justify the mistreatment of marginalized people.

When Tonia Ransom brought up the issues she had with how the AnonymousAD tumblr had characterized her crowdfunding campaign, this is the reason why people felt they could dismiss and ignore her. Because yes, she's a black woman speaking out about having been wronged, but she's also a "Big Creator," and therefore it evens out.

It doesn't even out.

A lot of the most successful creators you know in this space still have day jobs. I spent yesterday and today doing inventory at my retail job. I spent hours poring over shitty little badly printed tags and biting back swear words because our owner will not let us close, so there were still customers in the store, actively buying the things we were trying to count.

This Us vs Them shit has got to stop. It's nothing. It's a parody and a sham. If you tried to explain it to your grandmother, she'd give you the exact same reaction as if you had tried to tell her about drama in the Homestuck fandom.

Because it's the same.

And you don't get to use it to justify being shitty to someone who you know perfectly well would deserve your humility and understanding if you weren't pretending they were your boss.

Who can send rocks is not and has never been a reflection of real power or privilege. Deciding someone cannot send rocks is just a convenient excuse to disregard their perspective when it makes you angry or uncomfortable.

At best, it's tilting at windmills. At worst, it is punishing your peers for daring to defend themselves or speak out against injustice while being marginally more successful than you.

#audio drama #enough of this #it's been going on for a while and getting progressively worse #none of this Big Name Fan shit #this is fandom toxicity #and we're not even a goddamn fandom

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cospinol · 2 years

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Genuinely can’t get over warau arsnotoria having the most premium Big Group of ikemen characters I’ve seen in ages, airing in this incredible dry spell Era we’ve been in lately where it’s just been season after season of ikemen shows with designs so bad/boring they can’t hold my interest at all, and then the group of characters is just… not in the show lol. The incredible nerve of it. No I will not be downloading your gatcha game to learn more thank you very much

it’s like an intentional version of the self-own bucchigire also performed this season where one character was so much better than the rest of the cast that he accidentally tanked the entire show. But at least that wasn’t on purpose

#kind of have to respect arsnotoria for doing this On Purpose even though it actually sucked to watch in practice #the girls side slice of life really did work in its own right but why would you intentionally make me not pay any attn to it T_T #txt #also I still haven’t finished bucchigire so I guess that show could have an incredible comeback of some flavour #hard to see it happening though when it seems so deeply committed to its style of character drama that Largely works but #always seems to just miss the mark by a few inches for me. idk I think that’s it’s literally just #hard for me to care abt anything else when todou-kun’s absurd melodrama is sitting right there at all times and no one around him cares!!!#which is in and of itself kind of the best part of the show & I love the aspect of the rest of the group being Paired Off w each other #as a metric of Leaving Him Out Narratively and like.. if it was on purpose this would be anime of the season #like he is so cute there’s nothing I want to see more than him being generally mistreated #if I could believe the writing was leaving him out On Purpose it would be an excellent meal #but as is i have no idea what it’s going for at all .. smth boring in the evil otouto plot I guess. we’ll see #actually nvm I would probably hate it if it was doing the Neglect dynamic on purpose #since I despised that in bokuhaka (posterchild show for shooting yourself in the foot with One Good Character)#but in my mind it’s good..#WAIT AND ALSO SINCE I’M HERE I have a petty axe to grind abt katsura being disappointing. obviously.#I’m not a shinsengumi girl in general and usually watch bakumatsu era shows for the joui characters #and obviously he was the one I was most excited to see here and his design is adorable but like ToT what the hell is that lol #lamest romance I’ve seen in anime in a hot minute and it’s where ALL his screentime goes & totally subsumes all of akira’s other development #would call it an unforced error but it’s clearly the main thing that both of these characters were conceived specifically in service of #so them both appearing interesting/appealing before it kicked off was actually the accident. I guess. yeesh

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catboybiologist · 4 months

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Hi! I'm Sierra. Time for a pinned post refresh.

Otherwise known as CatboyBiologist, or @hi-sierra (my SFW blog [this one is SFW too, but less so]). This page is remaining active, but if you want to find me somewhere else, I use the same username on reddit, Instagram, co-host, and tech.lgbt. This is me:

Trans woman, PhD student in molecular biology, boymoder, shitposter, freediver, hot girl on your phone, hiker, rambler (this post included), tgirl tummy tuesday supplier and enjoyer, former femboy, bane of bioessentialist fuckwads who try to use biology to validate biogotry, flaming bisexual, 196 nanocelebrity… whatever was the first thing that brought you to my blog, I hope it’s enough to get you to stay! I post selfies, hornyposts (minors and people who are averse to that be warned), stuff about the ocean, posts about my growing sense of wanderlust, my adorable lil tortoise, tutorials for transfemmes and GNC people, rambles about science, documentation of my own transition, rambles about transness, rambles about the eroticism of programming a machine to feel arousal, rambles about nature, and random shitposts. Please send me pictures of cute animals in your life!

If you wanna support my science career and my transition, consider dropping a tip here! PhD salaries are notorious for being negotiated to be exactly the cost of living…. And then forgotten about for years as inflation drops that below minimum wage. So I’m always a little strapped for cash. Anything helps!

Links to some of my tutorials and relevant resources under the cut:

I'm tracking my transition, and some people have said they found this helpful! This spreadsheet is generally updated monthly:

Usually, I write a little journal to go with it when it updates- you can find that under the #trans journal on my blog.

If you're interested in checking out some of the things I'm trying to write, here's a post with links to individual stories I'm making:

https://www.tumblr.com/catboybiologist/741010247774306304/writing-consolidation-post?source=share

My femboy guide, written well before I started HRT, but still has relevant info:

A "boyboob" tutorial, aka how to make it look like you have cleavage in an outfit that looks better with it:

A quick and dirty guide to taking better selfies, with a specific emphasis on people who may have stopped hating their body recently due to transition:

And here's a few of my personal favorite little rambles and posts about my transness, in no particular order:

CW for transphobia on this one:

A massive shoutout to @foldingfittedsheets for this amazing art of the lil borgir holding a trans flag:

I adore this so much <3 if you want to support their art, her commissions are open and really sweet!!!!

And of course, a massive shoutout to @whalesharkcat for this lovely pixel art of my tortoise:

I still love this so much, and will continue to into the future <3

For preHRT selfies, search the femboy tag. For post HRT selfies, use the "trans selfie" tag. I've been on HRT since August of 2023, so I'm still very early in the process! Day to day, I present male, but I plan to change that around the 1 year mark.

I guess that's about it! One final note is that I've been alluding to video/podcast style things for a while now. With my aderrall prescription, I've actually put in a lot of research work that might lead to 1-4 of those, so that might actually happen in the near future! No promises of course, life always catches up to you.

And if you liked my previous pinned post better, here it is:

Anyways, if you read this far, thanks for sticking around and bbyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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flimsy-roost · 7 months

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I realized the other day that the reason I didn't watch much TV as a teenager (and why I'm only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn't understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn't know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I'm curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.

#actually autistic #autistic #audhd #neurodivergent #nd #long post #actuallyautistic

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thechekhov · 2 months

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Hello Checkov! On the subject of AI ruining google search results: Wolfram Alpha is a special search engine that should be a little more immune to AI generated content. It doesn’t link to webpages and instead uses a built-in AI that is way older than ChatGPT and specifically designed to be as accurate as possible. It doesn’t always give you images, and it’s been out for 20 years but is still actively under development (so sometimes it just won’t have an answer) but if you just want pure objective facts it’s pretty good.

Also, I really like your comics :)

I used to use wolfram a long time ago for math stuff! I didn't realize they'd expanded into other areas.

This is certainly cool and good to know. For example, for very simple searches this presentation of information is straightforward.

Unfortunately, it's not as flexible when it comes to more complex searches that don't relate to metric information. For example:

this search for "foods toxic to dogs" brings up a very simplified diet of canines. Which is... not really helpful in this case. Other searches of rephrasing provided even less sufficient results. One option for "dogs can't eat" resulted in a ping of a man's name.

So while it's certainly a good tool for some things, it's unfortunately not a full on replacement for modern search engines. And I'm afraid all search engines so far fall prey to AI slog due it.... existing on the internet in greater and greater numbers, essentially.

It's still good to know about alternatives, especially since it's being developed! Maybe someday it'll be even more flexible in terms of input!

#chekhov answers

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centrally-unplanned · 5 months

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In my list of orphaned projects is a big damn essay on the fertility transition , which I never wrote. I had this in the docket for almost a decade, back when worrying about fertility rates was still a hot take. But alas the ship has sailed, everyone is talking about it now and has written it all out already, and I have mountains of projects, so I will just outline it quickly, sans graphs and footnotes. Maybe doing that will incentivize me to write up a full one someday, and it also gets my cohesive viewpoint out there.

The Future Is Exowombs & the Global Fertility Transition

The Trendline

The fertility transition has long roots - going back to 19th century France, originating in metropoles like Paris and culturally exporting itself to the countryside.

It seems broadly linked to material prosperity in ways that are load-bearing, one implies the other.

It is a 'sticky' cultural transition - once a country begins to move towards lowered TFR it never recovers outside of temporary blips.

It is not related to "western" cultural norms or specific contingencies of religion or ethnicity - those can matter at the margins, but rarely make a huge difference.

Starting in the 1990's, following sharp increases in A: global economic growth and B: global cultural diffusion/global monoculture, a trendline that used to be reserved for wealthy countries has rapidly accelerated, affecting countries at almost every income level. The fertility transition is now fully global.

The Cause

The primary driver of this phenomenon is the positive realization of desires - and by that I mean it is not something forced on people due to a lack in their lives.

It is not primarily caused by growing singleness; the number of people having any kids at all today is lower but overall pretty similar to the number of people who did a hundred years ago. It makes a marginal difference but not a huge one.

It is not linked to money, or housing prices, or other economic issues - fertility rates do not notably change with income levels or other price factors. At the margins, sure, but not at relevant ones.

It is not linked to specific technologies like contraception. People have understood how to prevent pregnancy for centuries - though like many things they do contribute at the margins. Additionally, you can’t uninvent them.

It is by a large majority linked to the death of large families. It was previously common for there to be families with 5 or more children, sometimes way more. 10+ children was not that rare in the past.

These families were disproportionately engaged in agricultural production; cities have always been fertility sinks.

In a world of manual household labor, rural living, low rights for women, low economic opportunities for women, and high death rates for children, these large families made sense. The 'opportunity cost' of the endless pregnancies & sicknesses was low (economically, not gonna handwave the immense personal toll)

All of these reasons have vanished. People want to have families, and love their children. But enduring multiple painful pregnancies, putting your career on hold, and spending huge chunks of your lifespan on child raising no longer tracks. The experience of having ~2 children is superior, along almost every metric, than the experience of having ~5 children for most people. This is what I mean by positive desires - the family structures of the past were built on misery and necessity, and will not return willingly.

The Problem

Many will point to the economic & social consequences of the Fertility Transition. They are very real, particularly at sub-1.0 fertility rates. If you are South Korea today, you have no plan for how your economy will truly support itself 50 years from now - you will vanish as a country in a few generations.

The focus on nearish-term crises also misses the opportunities lost - economic growth is premised on specialization, and specialization is premised on scale. A smaller world is a poorer world per capita, and a less innovative world, problems which have compounding effects. The difference in the long term is orders of magnitude.

But, far more importantly than any of that, is that we are nowhere close to the capacity of the earth to support humans. Supporting double or even triple the current population of the earth is trivial; a 10-fold increase would be quite easy, particularly once innovation is factored in. Being alive is a good of worth incomparable to anything else - the 'future' is literally defined by it. Time only meaningfully passes through the eye of one who can behold it.

The Failed Solutions

Money cannot buy lifespan or reclaim lost time - all attempts to throw money at the problem of fertility can help at the margins, but won't change the fundamentals. Some people want to have 2 kids, but can only afford 1. Or are prioritizing a career, but will work part time to have 3 kids. But the current policy crop of tax benefits or subsidized child care has not found a way to make someone truly want a larger family size, just mitigate gaps between desire and ability - and only barely.

Could radically larger amounts of money solve this problem? A professional career track in giving birth, 100k+ salaries for full-time mothers? I am open to the idea - but society isn't. The fiscal transfers needed are too radical for the current political environment, no one is proposing this.

Immigration was frequently proposed as a stop-gap, but its a 90's idea, premised on the idea that the Fertility Transition was a western problem that other countries did not face. It is not and never was; as every country's fertility declines, immigration becomes a zero-sum solution.

Turning back the clock on cultural change is A: impossible, the material logic of modern industrial production broke the need for it, and culture is downstream of material constraints. And B: its barbaric - if your answer to humanity's obstacles to greater flourishing is to condemn half of it to misery, we are better off dead.

So population levels will either stagnate or decline - unless something intervenes.

The "Future" Aka Getting Rationalist On Main

Exowombs, aka artificial wombs, allow you to grow a human child outside of the need for a person to incubate it. The baby (hah) step they let you do is strongly lower the cost of having a child; this is time & health given back to a mother, it will make having larger families easier.

But that won't fundamentally, shift the reality - that most people only want 1-2 kids, they don't want to raise more than that. However, with exowombs, you don't need to; you can make children outside of a family's desire for one. You can do that pretty trivially, actually. A society, if committed to solving its fertility issues, could mass-produce people with exowombs. Which would be very good to do ethically, because living is good and I personally don't think kids at orphanages should be euthanized to end their suffering, they are fine.

If some society, somewhere, did this, they would rule the world in a few generations. No one else is solving this problem, and meanwhile the human capacity to live on Earth is being woefully underutilized. Before natural human growth would solve this eventually - now it seems that will never happen, so anyone who actively tackles the problem wins. They literally win the future, by being the future.

Now, no one is going to do this soon - proposing this idea is not my point. Exowomb research is harshly regulated or illegal everywhere, modern society hates the idea of this kind of experimentation. We are, in so many ways, allergic to the idea of solving this problem. It doesn't even have to be exowombs, maybe we do the salaried mothers idea. My point is just the illustration - the future where there is 100 billion people dwarfs any current trendline future. That hypothetical dominates the worldline space, because arriving there organically seems to have faded away. The fact that we are not going to take that future, that it is probably gone now, is really, really sad.

But of course there is the other solution, the reactionary specter - instead of the technological solution, we choose the social one, of cultural regression and expanded reproductive control. I am not so worried about this, personally? Because I think it would unsustainable and result in a lot of bleed to liberal societies. It should not be taken lightly though - in a world where everyone has 1.0 fertility, and the social and economic consequences are becoming dire, I wouldn’t discount the willingness for radical solutions. I myself prefer the technologist side. But I think odds are we don't get either, just the long decline.

TL;DR - don’t let the Mormons win. Build exowomb factories.

#the fertility transition #essay

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twistedwonderlandimaginesblog · 2 months

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Hello, I hope you two are doing well! May I request “Orange Rose - experiencing constant as well as distracting thoughts of the other person” for Riddle? tysm I’ve been realizing how wonderful he is recently🥰🥰

Riddle Rosehearts:

Orange Rose - experiencing constant as well as distracting thoughts of the other person.

Riddle had never been more mortified in his life.

He felt like the blood had completely drained from his face, the red mark on his paper almost dashing his hopes of having a good day. To achieve a perfect score on his tests was everything; he didn’t believe himself to be the exact perfect being but he had studied for this, countless hours of memorizing to the point he knew the material like the back of his hand. This was a subject he excelled in (most were, but he enjoyed this one the most) and yet he was confronted with cold hard failure, the likes of which he had never seen.

Not just one point from perfection, but two entire points, a whole question with two parts answered incorrectly. He looked over his test countless times, reading through his text books to find where he might’ve strayed, before finally approaching his professor.

“Is everything okay, Riddle? You aren’t pushing yourself, are you?” He always pushed himself, but that wasn’t the point! He could handle pressure, he could handle a metric ton of work being thrown his way as well as countless responsibilities pushed on his shoulders, but this grade – it was a negative mark on his record, his future.

When he saw that question he knew exactly what had distracted him, the reason he had gotten the answer incorrect. You had been his partner for that particular project, spending hours of alone time as you did your research together. You were diligent but you had asked Riddle for guidance, knowing he was a person who was very specific about the way his ideas were presented, and he had been happy to help you figure out the best way to present your own ideas in your project. It hadn’t been all work, with some talk of desserts and his equestrian club mixed in, but Riddle had found himself enjoying that time spent together.

In fact he missed it, since the project had ended and there was no excuse to ask you to spend time with him any longer.

He knew he had gotten caught up in those thoughts, fumbling through the question quickly as he realized the ‘you’ in his head was distracting him. He wrote as fast as he could and in doing so had missed a specific word choice used in the question which entirely changed the meaning of it. He was used to dealing with tricks and being wary of language, his mother had taught him about the little details of linguistics, so he never would’ve missed it if he was in his right mind.

Riddle can’t hide his sour mood but thankfully, most of Heartslabyul stayed out of his way when they sensed something was wrong. He had never been more grateful to have an unapproachable resting face, wanting to simply lock himself away (though he could not, as there were still duties to attend and other students to look out for). When he finally had time to settle himself down he took out the test one last time, working himself up again about the less than perfect grade.

“Whoa!” Cater, who had innocently peered over Riddle’s shoulder to see what he was glaring at, was just as shocked as Riddle had been earlier than evening. “S-Sorry, I was just coming to let you know Trey is looking for you…”

“Hey, Riddle. Trein was asking me about you earlier—” Trey, the third musketeer and the straw that finally broke the camels back, came into the room a few seconds later, pausing when he saw Riddle’s clenched fist. He and Cater locked eyes, with Cater holding his hands up to signal he certainly wasn’t the reason Riddle was upset.

Neither third year knows what to say when they see the grade, and Riddle sighed, wishing to just be done with it. He moved the paper toward Trey who scrutinized it, reading the question, Riddle’s answer, before his eyes slowly drifted back to Riddle himself.

“This question… is quite simple for someone like you.” Cater felt like his lungs had collapsed, wondering how Trey had continued to exist if he was always so honest with Riddle. “Is there something on your mind?”

“I’m…not sure.” The fact he hadn’t exploded in that moment left Cater even more shocked, and he had to lean on a chair to keep his legs from folding underneath him. “I don’t believe I want to talk about it.”

“Maybe you should!” Cater tried to offer up helpfully, “You never know, maybe having a different angle can help clear your thoughts!”

“Exactly.” Trey agreed, pleased that Cater had backed him up. “Talk to us, and we’ll see if we can help.”

Riddle muttered your name once and it took the willpower of a thousand card soldiers to stop both Trey and Cater from laughing in shock at the admission. Trey had really thought Riddle would never spit it out but it seemed his own honest reaction had rubbed off on him, while Cater was still struggling to imagine Riddle with a crush.

Trey had never seen Riddle struggle to find words like he was now, his eyes downcast as he spoke quietly about the time you had spent together. Riddle had fun when you were together, fun, a word that he didn’t often use nor did he generally have the same definition as everyone else. To think that you evoked this kind of reaction from him, to the point he was dwelling on the time spent together and lamenting on how it had ceased was nothing short of a miracle in Trey’s eyes. He doesn’t voice it but he does believe this is the first crush Riddle has ever had, not remembering a single moment from their childhood where Riddle expressed interest like that in anyone.

“There doesn’t have to be a reason to hang, you know, but here we have unbirthday parties all the time! Why not try inviting them to one of those?” Riddle seemed to contemplate this, as it was something within his power. He would have to double check that none of the students had a birthday the following day, but if he played his cards right…

“Understood. Thank you for your advice.” Riddle stood without another word, exiting the room with his test in hand while Trey and Cater shared a look.

“Hopefully everything goes smoothly…”

“We should warn the first years. I have a feeling if anything goes wrong, the punishment might be worse than usual.”

#Twisted Wonderland #TWST #Twisted Wonderland Imagines #Twisted Wonderland x Reader #TWST Imagines #TWST x Reader #Riddle Rosehearts #Riddle Rosehearts x Reader #Scenario #Flower Prompts

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queerly-autistic · 2 months

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I've seen some concern about the fact that the BBC has double-billed the last four episodes of Our Flag Means Death and bumped it up later in the schedule - concerns that this means it's not doing well for the BBC - and so I'd just like to allay some of those fears, if possible? To start with, it's important to recognise that the BBC does this all the time. I was in EastEnders fandom for many years, and nonsense schedule changes were a regular annoyance. When I shared OFMD's schedule change with my little group of friends from that fandom, everyone rolled their eyes and went 'oh yeah, typical BBC shenanigans'. As an example: the BBC was really pushing EastEnders last year, they'd been hard-marketing towards the big iconic Christmas episode since February, and then, around comes Christmas, and the BBC inexplicably sticks it on at 10pm (when it's usually broadcast at 7.30pm).

So this isn't unusual. This is extremely common. There's often very little rhyme or reason to the BBC live broadcast scheduling. To try and accurately read between the lines of this is like trying to analyse the written output of a cat walking across a keyboard.

But another big thing to remember is that Our Flag Means Death is a streaming show. The BBC dropped all of the episodes in one go because they know that it's the streaming audience where the show is successful. It's the same with What We Do In The Shadows - we know that the show does well for them, because they keep renewing their contract to show it, but because it does well specifically with a streaming audience the live episode broadcasts are perpetually bumped to a weird time (sometimes one in the morning!!).

The BBC is under contract to do a live broadcast of these shows, but that's not where the audience is. And that's why the episodes get shuffled around or bumped to a late timeslot or double-billed together. Them not necessarily getting spectacular overnight live broadcast ratings is not a big barrier to potential pick-up - streaming numbers is the important metric. And, just yesterday, the BBC dropped a card for the show over the credits of House of Games, a very popular (and mainstream!) afternoon gameshow, asking people to go stream it on iPlayer. if you haven't seen it, I managed to screen-record and post it on Twitter here (subtitles included): https://x.com/QueerlyAutistic/status/1762913455051325888?s=20. This is a really, really good ad to get - a very mainstream slot that potentially brings attention to the show from new audience demographics. The fact that they put an ad-read for the show in this particular slot is more indicative to me of the fact that the show is doing well for the BBC than any predictable shenanigans around live broadcast times. They advertised the 'niche' queer pirate comedy to a very mainstream middle-of-the-day audience! That's not nothing! And the fact that they were specifically advertising it as being on iPlayer - not the live broadcast - indicates to me that that's where it's doing well: that's where they know their audience is, and they don't care about the live broadcast, because the streams are where it's at. The live broadcast is probably just a contractual obligation at this point.

Our Flag Means Death is still regularly listed under 'trending' on the iPlayer website, and the Parrot Analytics for the show in the UK are excellent. And that's what we want. That's what we need to convince streamers. Remember: the YouGov survey about the show specifically asked questions about it in the context of streaming services. Overnight figures are lovely to have, too (so keep tuning in!) but this is a show made to stream. It was all dropped on iPlayer first for a reason; they're specifically pushing it on iPlayer for a reason. And, at the end of the day, it's streamers we're currently trying to convince to pick up the show, not broadcast television networks.

So, don't read too much into it. We're still doing good, UK crew!

#ofmd #our flag means death #our flag bbc #save ofmd #save our flag means death #renew ofmd #renew our flag means death #adopt our crew #erin waffles

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Tabs give me superpowers

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

"Lifehacking" is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.

But I was there when lifehacking was born, and I'm here to tell you, it wasn't always thus. Lifehacking attained liftoff exactly 19 years and 348 days ago, on Feb 11, 2004, when Danny O'Brien presented "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" at the 0'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETCON). I was there, and I took notes:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

O'Brien's inspiration was his social circle, in which people he knew to be no smarter or better or motivated than anyone else in that group were somehow able to do much more than their peers, in some specific domain. O'Brien delved deeply into these peoples' lives and discovered that each of them had merely ("merely!") gotten very good at using one or two tools to automate things that would otherwise take up a lot of their time.

These "hacks" freed up their practitioners to focus on things that mattered more to them. They accomplished the goal set out in David Allen's Getting Things Done: to make a conscious choice about which things you are going to fail to do today, rather than defaulting to doing the things that are easy and trivial, at the expense of the things that matter, but are more complicated:

https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

One trait all those lifehacks shared: everyone who created a little hack was faintly embarrassed by it, and assumed that others who learned about their tricks would find them trivial or foolish. O'Brien changed the world by showing that other people were, in fact, delighted and excited to learn about their peers' cool little tricks.

(Unfortunately, this eventually opened the floodgates of overheated posts about some miraculous hack that turned out to indeed be silly and trivial or even actively bad, but that wasn't O'Brien's fault!)

I'm one of those people whom others perceive as very "productive." There are some objective metrics on which this is true: I wrote nine books during lockdown, for example. Like the lifehackers O'Brien documented in 2004, I have lots of little hacks that aren't merely a way of getting more done – they're a way to make sure that I get the stuff that matters to me (taking care of my family and my health, and writing books) done.

A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and our e-waste still ends up in the right place).

There's other ways I use habits to make my life easier: after many years, I learned how to write every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/22/walking-the-plank/

For longer-form works like novels, I "leave myself a rough edge," finishing the day's work in the middle of a sentence. That way I get a few words for free the next day, meaning I never start the day's work wondering which words I'll type:

https://locusmag.com/2014/01/cory-doctorow-cheap-writing-tricks/

One of the most powerful habits I've cultivated is to have a group of daily tabs that I open in a new browser every morning. The meat of this tab group is websites I want to check in with every day, either because they don't have RSS feeds, or because I want to make sure I never miss an update.

This tab-group habit started before RSS was widespread, when most of the websites I wanted to check in on every day didn't have feeds yet, and for many years, this group was just a set of daily reads. But over the years, I started throwing things in the tab-group that I needed to stay on top of.

My daily tabs are in a folder called "unfucked rota" (they were originally in a folder called "rota," which got corrupted and had to be reconstructed in a folder I called "fucked rota," until I finally took a couple hours off and got it in good running order, hence "unfucked rota"). As I type this, "unfucked rota" contains more than a hundred websites I visit every morning, but it also contains:

The edit-history pages for four Wikipedia entries I'm watching;

Chronological feeds of my books on Amazon and Audible, to catch counterfeits as they are posted;

The parent notification portal for my kid's school;

The mileage history for the airline I flew on yesterday (I'll delete this once the flight is posted);

The credit card history for a card I reported a fraudulent charge on (I'll delete this once the refund is posted);

The sell-pages for three products that are out of stock (I'll delete these once the products are in stock and ordered);

A bookmarked newest-first Ebay search for a shirt I like that has been discontinued by the manufacturer;

The new-survey-completed pages for my last two Kickstarters;

The courier tracking page for an item being shipped sea-freight to me from Asia.

The tail end of this unfucked rota changes all the time, but as you can tell, it's got a lot of stuff that would be time-consuming to build a whole new system to track, but which has a web-page that can be easily added to a daily, habitual check-in and then removed when it's not relevant anymore.

Some of these things have email notifiers or RSS feeds, but those are too easy to lose in the noise. I generally delete email from ecommerce sites unread, since 99.99% of the messages they send me are unsolicited marketing nonsense, not the "notify me when this is back in stock" message I do want to see (same goes for my kid's school, which sends me fifty unimportant messages for every message that I must reply to).

Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I'm staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the "unfucked rota" item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.

It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it's changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T "unclose" shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there's anything useful and new in one of those tabs).

Tabs, like lifehacks, are also in bad odor. Everyone stresses about how many tabs they have open. It's even inspired Rusty Foster's excellent newsletter, Today In Tabs:

https://www.todayintabs.com/

But this is a very different way to think about tabs. Rather than opening a window full of tabs that need your detailed, once-off attention later, this method is about using groups of tabs so that you can pay cursory, frequent attention to them.

In a world full of administrative burdens, where firms and institutions play the "sure, we'll do that, but you're going to have to track our progress" game to get out of living up to their obligations, this method is a powerful countermeasure:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

My little tab habit is so incredibly useful, such a powerful way to seize back time and power from powerful actors who impose burdens on me, that I sometimes forget how, for other people, tabs are a symptom of a life that's spiraling out of control. For me, a couple hundred tabs are a symbol of a couple hundred tasks that I'm totally on top of, a symbol of control wrestled back from others who are hostile to my interests.

This isn't how tabs were "meant" to be used, of course. It's an example of the kind of "innovation" that comes from users repurposing things in ways their designers didn't necessarily anticipate or intend.

This is what Jonathan Zittrain meant by "generative" technology back in 2008, when he published his incredibly prescient The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It:

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/07/22/zittrains-the-future-of-the-internet-how-to-save-the-internet-from-the-internet/

For Zittrain, "generativity" was the property of some technologies that let its users generate new, useful tools and solutions for themselves (this is very different from "generative AI!")

Zittrain described how "curated" computing systems, like mobile devices that relied on apps that couldn't be adapted by their users, were dead ends for generativity. 15 years later, the dismal world of apps has proven him right:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

To the extent that "lifehacking" is about doing more, rather than being more deliberate about what you accomplish, it can be harmful. I am not immune to the failure modes of lifehacking:

https://locusmag.com/2017/11/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

But overall, using tabs as something I close, rather than something I open, is a source of comfort and calm for me. For one thing, ripping through a group of tabs every morning means that I don't have to worry about missing something if I go too fast. I'll get another chance tomorrow:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Decades ago, Dori Smith dubbed her pioneering blog her "#Backup Brain":

https://web.archive.org/web/20020120231027/http://www.backupbrain.com/

At their best, our systems – be they physical, like a spot on the counter where the e-waste goes, or digital, like a tab-group – are "congitive prostheses." They allow us to move important things from the highly contested, busy and precious space between our ears and out there into the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Like those lifehackers that O'Brien studied for his presentation in 2004, I confess to feeling a little silly about telling you all about this. For me, this habit of decades is so ingrained that it feels trivial and obvious. And yet, when I look at people in my life struggling to stay on top of a million nagging administrative tasks that could be easily watched through a morning's flick through a tab-group, I can't help but think that maybe some of you will find a useful idea or two in my unfucked rota.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

#pluralistic #productivity #life hacks #mozilla #firefox #open web #systems #getting things done #externalized memory #outboard brain #generativitiy

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