pizzawizard420

[pizzawizard420]

me and the boys about to look upon the heart

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i slowed down the audio of this vine and it now seems like the dog turned of the lights and freaked out the camera man

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infodumping isnt enough. you have to actually learn and remember and understand what im telling you about or i will just do it again later

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watching my coworker wrestle with the AI powered auto complete in visual studio code convinced me never to touch that shit forever. none of the suggestions were close to what we needed, and it kept making it hard to tell what he had typed and what was suggested (admittedly that's probably his formatting settings but i digress)

then he bragged that it removed all the whitespace from a file we were working on in seconds. I just used a 10 character long regex. And the nice thing was that that let me practice my regex skills (yeah, i hate regex as much as anyone but it's a useful skill to have!) and think about the document's structure as i did, and i came up with some minor improvements in the process. NONE of that would have happened if i had just made copilot do it.

I do think LLMs have valuable uses for parsing large swaths of structured data, assisting people with disabilities, etc. But it really isn't a universal tool, it's pretty bad at a lot of things.

Casual use of generative AI really feels like the logical next step of the fast food/fast fashion/disposable goods culture we've built. Most of the people i talk to that use it seem to have this attitude of "who cares that the product it produces is universally lower quality than anything i could have made, it's cheap [to me] and fast". But i really think it's something where overuse will quickly take it from being a handy timesaver to being something you rely on to do all of your critical thinking for you. Critical thinking, creativity, etc are all muscles that will atrophy with disuse!

"I know chatgpt is bad but you just don't really have any choice" you literally do. Don't use it. Have some moral backbone.

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What if we took some tasteful nudis together...

(these guys were hanging out only a few feet down at the breakwater)

Call me a tidepool anemone the way I

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"everyone suddenly seems really stupid and aggressive" its brain damage from covid

"im sick all the time now and everyone at work is sick all the time" its immune system damage from covid

"im sick again, but i tested and its not covid haha" its still probably covid, rapid covid tests have been estimated at 30% positive accuracy by researchers who are factoring in strain mutation and user error

"no one can drive anymore, what happened" its brain damage from covid

"why am i suddenly mentally ill" its brain damage from covid

"i started feeling weak, breathless, confused, distracted, irritable and in pain but it was a while after i got covid so its not long covid" long covid sets in a random number of months after your covid infection and also asymptomatic covid can cause it

"ive still never gotten covid, isnt that great" unless you are an undiscovered genetic freak (possible) or youve been living in a clean room, you have had a covid infection. it may have been asymptomatic

"im sick but its from blood clots, heart disease, asthma, nerve damage, narcolepsy, etc" covid attacks the entire body and can cause all of these things as downstream effects

"ive already had covid so i probably have pretty good immunity by now" covid does not work like this. the more times you are infected, the more permanently injured you will become, and the more vulnerable to further covid infections and infections of all other viruses and bacteria

"ive been vaccinated so im safe" covid does not work like this. vaccination lowers your likelihood of developing severe infection, it does not protect you from contracting the virus

"well what am i supposed to do" wear a mask

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and voryn dagoths balls, which you can see in the foul murder artwork

at least nerevar died surrounded by friends 

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being transgender is really funny cause youre kind of expected to do a better job than anyone else at dismantling all internal & external symbolisms or significances of the sexes of the human body & do a really job at “not caring about that stuff” while at the same time having it maybe define your experience of reality in a really fucking particularly sharp way

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what about an omelettes situation? you eatin that thang? little hot sauce on there?

The Ones Who Stay and Bite

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There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

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[pizzawizard420]

i’ve got a bad case of poster’s lung

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I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was one of the best works of sci-fi of our generation and one of the best works of transgender fiction ever written, and there are world renowned authors who still have successful careers after they publicly assassinated the nascent woman who wrote it. I don't think they should ever know peace.

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meat hat child

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climbing around in the crawl space of my house to fix the heater like a rat or some kind of vole

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trans people will literally go “i have a complicated relationship with my history with gender and sometimes see it as a gender i ‘used to be’ and i don’t really look like a cis person of either gender and i don’t think i can fit it into simple categories” and everyone will spontaneously combust