blazingdarkness

[blazingdarkness]

Ranking lyrics in "Nobody's Side" by how much they actually apply to Florence's situation

Everybody's playing the game: This is the premise of the show.

Recognize you're out on your own: Freddie isn't giving her shit, so she is, in fact, out on her own.

Never leave a moment too soon: This is so relevant they wrote another song just to hammer this point home.

Never stay a minute too long: See above.

Take a little love where you can: See above.

Better learn to go it alone: This is a good idea for Florence, the only issue is she does not learn to do this and immediately rebounds on the worst possible choice.

Never lose your heart, use your head: Florence is really bad at taking her own advice but this is also a good idea.

Don't forget the best will go wrong: This is accurate, but again, Florence, you could've kept this in mind for the rest of the show.

Never make a promise or plan: They put this into the new song too.

Never let a friend fool you twice: Florence let him fool her far more than twice.

Never take a stranger's advice: Who is the stranger here??

But nobody's rules are the same: The rules of chess are always the same and this is a key feature of the game.

Never stay too long in your bed: I don't think this is a problem for Florence. She seems like a morning person.

Never waste a hot afternoon: It's Italy in the springtime. Or Bangkok, where I'm sure you'd be willing to waste an afternoon when it's so humid you can't move. Also what does this even mean???

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in many ways conservatives are right that women's rights, modern ideas of radical self-determination, transgenderism, gay rights, divorce, the rights of children, atheism, and a comprehensive social safety net are tearing apart the fabric that makes up society. they're just wrong about it being bad!

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this iteration of the endgame 3 ending my beloved... i still prefer chess in concert's overall story but the tragedy of the ending really works very well with the writing of 'where i want to be' and anatoly's character as a whole.

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Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

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I’m well and settled on the opinion that Steven Universe had to seriously stack the deck in its own favor to prevent the narrative from ending with anyone getting guillotined. I mean, Steven conveniently having a foot in the door with the diamonds because he turned out to be related, sure, but it goes into the characterization and worldbuilding, too.

Rather than cackling dictators, first off, The Diamonds had to be emotionally-arrested overgrown children; the dynamic between them and Pink was always, with context, less of a parent-child thing and more like three twelve-year-olds lecturing an eight-year-old on adult responsibility, they’re fundamentally aping a notion of the right way to be and I think it’s a mistake to view them as fully-realized people at the point where Steven finds them. Gem society, too, is less of a society, with all its messy moving parts, and more of a sanitized dollhouse representation of a society that’s only just starting to morph into the real deal via the rebellion. There’s no genuinely complicated politics to untangle; just gems meaninglessly play-acting at politics. And, crucially, nobody is getting anything out of any of it- gems are a needless society, they expand endlessly because they…. don’t not do that, there’s no material incentive to behave the way they do, no economic reality Steven has to counter in order to make the horror stop. All he has to do is convince three emotional runts to stop being awful.

Now, where I differ in my thinking, I think, is that in contorting the worldbuilding to make sure that the diamond redemption wasn’t something patently insane, they really hit upon an incredibly compelling science-fiction set-up. Three Elder Gods playing “It’s A Good Life” with a tea-party sham of a civilization full of individuals who nonetheless feel real pain, Three Elder Gods who cause harm, and lots of it, but mainly through their lack of moral context and lack of understanding of what even constitutes harm, Three Elder Gods whom you, a puny human, actually have some pretty potent emotional leverage over but no way to overpower if it comes to a fight? A set-up where part of the horror is how easy it would be to pinpoint the source of the horror and make it stop? That’s fucking dynamite! I’d watch five whole seasons of just that! Hell, even in canon it doesn’t even stop- two years later and Steven is still kinda trying to deal with the fact that the Diamond’s good behavior is kinda-sorta dependent on his willingness to keep dealing with them and he has no real way to be sure any of it is sticking! There’s no actual end in sight! There’s no clean resolution! It’s messy and it’s harrowing and it’s specifically because culpability and morality and ethics and all of that is so goddamn sticky when you’re a consequentialist trying to play ball with super-advanced childlike Von Neuman Machines!

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[blazingdarkness]

Sound designing a vampire being hit in the face with a shovel is... challenging. Who would've guessed.

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When I (M29) was a young boy (M7) my father (M35) took me into the city (X167) to see a marching band (M23, M21, M22, F22, M24, M25, F21, M

[blazingdarkness]

other assorted thoughts: to be entirely honest i don't think you need a kink specific safeword if youre not doing cnc. the point of a safeword is that its a replacement for "no" in a context where "no" and "stop" do not mean no. there's a little bit of a trend of assigning safewords as a standard kink practice and it gets a little amusing and confuzzling to me when its at the point of like. safewords at a play party where all cnc is explicitly banned. hey fam? if all cnc is off the table then your safeword should be "no." like. hey. what are we implying here.

furthermore if the kink youre doing would be unsafe without a safeword you should recognize that means its cnc. which i think is the real sticking point here. a lot of people who do cnc seem to have this incredibly distressing reluctance to recognize their kink as cnc because they feel like cnc is dirty or violent or immoral or smthing. but look if you saying "stop" wouldn't make them actually stop, that's cnc, factually, even if its "soft" or mild cnc. ig a lot of my thoughts here are like if you're gonna ban cnc then you need to actually ban cnc and understand the full scope of what cnc entails.

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Man, the AI conversation is so fucking weird.

Tech companies have shoved LLMs and image generators into every nook and cranny they can find, not to mention the fact that there are freeware ones as well.

Anybody reading this can play with AI themselves to find out what it can and can't do, it's right at your fingertips.

And pretty much the entire public conversation about the technology is just totally divorced from the product as it exists.

Instead, various interest groups are waging intense battles over what to do with products that exist entirely in their imagination.

Another review youtuber I otherwise like is doing the "AI is disgusting! Can you imagine somebody whose business model involved using copyrighted content to produce derivative works without permission and then distributing that work through massive data centers?" with just... seemingly no sense of irony whatsoever. Meanwhile, self-same youtuber directed me to Etsy's frankly bizarre AI rules:

While we allow the use of AI tools in the creative process, we prohibit the sale of AI prompt bundles on our platform. We believe that the prompts used to generate AI artwork are an integral part of the creative process and should not be sold separately from the final artwork. Selling prompt bundles without the accompanying finished artwork undermines the value of the artist's creative input and curation, which are essential to the creation of the unique, creative items that Etsy is known for.

Which, like... Okay...

Look, I'm no PR expert, but what was stopping them from saying,

"Given the incredibly widespread use of AI and the proliferation of models which all respond differently, prompt bundles are likely to have extremely limited value, and help with prompting can be found for free at numerous places."

I mean here's the thing: Prompt bundles only have value if AI technology doesn't improve. Like I don't think they ought to be cluttering up Etsy, there's enough garbage on there as it is and there are plenty of other places to find or purchase that stuff if you want it.

Hell you can ask an AI to come up with some prompts for you on a given subject.

I don't know, it's so disorienting that the entire conversation around something so directly accessible is so entirely divorced from the actual, tangible thing, and instead waged around what it might be in five years or what it was two years ago.

It's right here! We have it now! Why has that had so little effect on how we think about it?

[blazingdarkness]

taskmaster series 7 absolute goat. rhod bringing in a naked picture of greg for every prize task except the fez one, where he brings in a picure of greg's mum in the bath. james acaster circle task. greg brawls in dog jail, think bail, failing ol'dog death. A LIME! alex not knowing a single thing about greg's personal life, and rhod packing out the story of how greg shot him. actually, all of rhod's personal anecdotes about greg. someone mentioning phil's genitals at least once an episode. rhod rubbing mustard in his eyes. rhod duckttaping his eyes open. with these tasks, you just panic, it's blind panic! it didn't look like panic to me, it looked like fairly structured torture! i think we learnt a lot more about you than we did about me. well, we did learn a bit about you. pants on a stick. you couldn't hold me upside down. phil establishing in the first episode that he's got an engineering degree, and immediately fucking over the tower building task. you're measuring the juice as a part of the bean? greg, i don't think even you believe this. look at your face! james having a breakdown over the garage being available. first episode, what did you bring in, james? mc hammer. rhod dropping a pile of dogshit on his friend of fifteen years. james acaster gta sequence. jess having a better impression of an airhorn than of her fellow contestant. funny who you're prepared to bend over for, isn't it? aw oh but oneofthem's my fwiend!!!!! greg taking james to the side after he called him a pussy.

[blazingdarkness]

Speaking as a survivor of child sex abuse: the world would be a lot better if yall spent less time talking about the ways in which pedophiles should be punished and more time supporting survivors and preventing abuse

I get it, punishment can feel cathartic. I’ve certainly spent time imagining all the ways in which my own abuser might be punished. But ultimately, him dying, or being jailed, or publicly shamed, isn’t actually going to help me nor will it stop more kids from getting hurt in the future.

I don’t want more prisoners. I want free therapy with trauma informed counselors. I want better sex education for young children that teaches them about consent and body autonomy. And I want a society in which I can openly discuss my trauma, or at least as openly as yall discuss the evils of pedophiles

[blazingdarkness]

Really is interesting to me how Steven Universe remains hands down the most consistently and deliberately non-evil cartoon in terms of it's depiction of fat people. You don't notice how consistently it's putting it's money where its mouth is on that point until you watch like literally any other cartoon

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Q: There was a question where the character dresses everyone according to their taste, now let your hero be dressed by their loved ones.

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༺｡° .ᘛ𓆩♡𓆪ᘚ. °｡༻

The whole idea of the comic was that each Winx would give their own vision of Tecna + each fairy's wishes for her style. It had to be a mix of their own tastes, their vision of Tecna in their heads, and how they envision Tecna's mindset. In all of this, they had to come up with something new.

I really put my heart into this comic, I will be very grateful for the rebloggs.

❀ Please do not repost without linking to my resources