raveniris57 - Tumblr blog

[raveniris57]

Another day in the Office

[raveniris57]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

encountered this on united airline's website today. the unseen second option turned out to be frequent flier miles, but RIP to the one glorious moment where it seemed perhaps i would be able to show the price of my flight in some other, non-monetary format, such as bartering with goats or backrubs. the sound of a baby's laughter. your five most precious childhood memories.

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

Source

[raveniris57]

These are the moments that Hob regrets not fighting the Americans in the Revolution.

[raveniris57]

I wish wizards were real so bad imagine coming out of a wal mart and seeing some guy with long robes and a big hat in the parking lot surrounded by wacky particle effects screaming some shit like "By the moon and the starlight, by the shield and the sword, I summon to me, my Honda Accord!" And then just getting into his car and driving off

[raveniris57]

[raveniris57]

I tell you this made me laugh way harder than it should have...

[raveniris57]

When Hob said "I think I have been stood up", I full on expected the barkeeper to react to that as if Hob's date hasn't showed and telling him not to be worried because he has seen many couples fight and make up afterwards and is sure Hob's relationship will survive it. Like, I was genuinely so surprised when the barkeeper talked about "friends" haha

Okay okay okay okay but. I gotta say something SO IMPORTANT about this from my position as Tumblr Old and Local Queer Historian, because.... yes. And that is:

That scene takes place in 1989.

Why is that important, you say? Well, because this is the end of an entire decade of the AIDS crisis. There has been endless fearmongering and conservative attempts to paint gay men explicitly as disease-ridden degenerate pedo Threats to Your Community who might infect your children with AIDS and make them dirty homos by so much as LOOKING at them, pretty much. They are literally toxic people, they are generally shunned, nobody knows what to do and is terrified of the fact of how quickly AIDS patients usually die with no effective treatment. And oof it makes me feel Some Kinda Way for Hob, born in the middle of the Black Death and who was haunted by that shadow all his life, experiencing this as a queer man in the 1980s. Like, he almost certainly lost several friends to it at least, watched them die, probably went in there to the wards when few other people would, both because he's immortal anyway and he doesn't think it's right to leave them alone.

Anyway, in the UK, it was literally only 2 years before, in 1987, when Princess Diana opened the first dedicated AIDS unit at London Middlesex Hospital, and publicly shook hands with a man who had HIV -- which was shocking because many people still thought you could get it through casual physical contact. So while on the surface, Hob looks like your average 1980s douchebro -- he's got the brand new Porsche, the slicked back hair, the giant brick cellphone, the works -- he is still going into public to have a date with a man he is in love with, regardless of whether either of them will ever admit that or act on it. (And given how 1889 ended, if Morpheus does show up, they ARE kinda gonna have to talk about it in some way.) Hob is, in this moment, incredibly vulnerable. Emotionally and socially for sure, and if the local macho assholes clock him as a Fag, probably physically too.

So that conversation when Hob says he's been stood up is absolutely LOADED with subtext, things he isn't saying, and things the bartender understands about him and tries to support. They're British, so by nature they're not huge on talking about their feelings, but Hob says he's been stood up. He doesn't use pronouns, he doesn't say it was by a girl, and if the bartender used the word "couple," it would generally presume that he too thought Hob’s date was a girl. So he goes for the most careful, also-has-a-long-queer-history use of "friends." He implies it's more than that, but he doesn't say so or put Hob on the spot for probably dating a man, because again, it's not safe.

After that is when Hob orders a drink, and the bartender tells him that people in this country can do anything if they have money. He's trying to subtly communicate that this is a safe place and he won't judge, and Hob picks that up immediately, which is why he is so shocked to hear that the White Horse has been sold and is going to be torn down for condos. Hob is losing not just the one place he can be assured (well, until now) of meeting his Stranger, but a place that has been subtly communicated to be safe for him personally, as a queer man in 1989. That is undoubtedly part of why he immediately refuses to countenance the idea of this actually happening, buys the pub, makes giant signs, hangs out in the New Inn until Dream actually does come back, etc. So like... there is so much going on in that scene, and maybe only 25% of it can be said aloud. Which I think is absolutely critical for you younguns to understand, so. Yeah.

[raveniris57]

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[raveniris57]

junji itō was so right when he said this