shewhodancesunderthemoon

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

Gaza Updates:

– At least 48 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since dawn, including 33 people waiting for aid.

– Al-Awda Hospital reports 60 people wounded by occupation forces near the Netzarim Corridor aid distribution point.

A message from us:

– Israel continues bombing across Gaza, with occupation ground forces destroying what remains of homes and infrastructure in the north.

With everything going on, Gaza is being forgotten. The genocide has not stopped and the forced starvation, mass slaughter of civilians and destruction of homes and infrastructure continues.

Please keep sharing videos, stories, and testimonies from Gaza on your socials. Go to marches, take direct action, educate people on BDS and use our resources to keep Gaza in peoples minds 🫂

Don't forget that we need help. Donate to us. We are going through very difficult circumstances and hunger is exhausting our bodies. Donate here

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

As , the United States, potentially heads into another forever war I can only think of this quote.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

anyway you should always remember that all those foreigners you see dying on the news are just as real people as you are who have just as much interiority as you do. there is nothing about you that makes you more important and it is by pure chance that you are not in their position. in fact, this holds for all of history. every person, no matter the horror of the fate that befell them, had just as much interiority as you do. i feel like some people haven't fully internalized this.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

From here.

More from the piece here but Read the Whole Entry and subscribe to the Substack.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

This is a legitimate and damaging cultural shift for all involved parties and it needs to be addressed.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

the fact that a lot of progressive people truly cannot tell the difference between a woman who is sexually objectified, and a woman who is an active sexual participant is bad bad bad bad bad bad bad

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

for the past two years i have been sponsoring a tuberculosis detection rat in tanzania, her name is carolina. she sniffs sputum samples & alerts her handlers when she detects TB. recently she turned 8 & aged out of the program, so they held a retirement party for her & sent me photos.

while carolina moves on to live a life of rest & luxury in the retirement kennels, her role is being passed on to her successor, tamasha. she is 2 years old & was named after the grandmother of one of her handlers.

(with her handler priscus)

here is a description of tamasha:

"Tamasha is also quite playful! She enjoys jumping, climbing, and sometimes does a joyful little dance when placed in the TB evaluation enclosure – as if celebrating her enthusiasm for the work ahead. She’s also a big fan of avocado, her favorite treat for a job well done."

im not afraid to admit that this email made me cry like a stupid baby. you can sponsor your own big beautiful TB- or landmine-detecting rat through APOPO HeroRATS. they send you an update on how your rat is doing each month, including photos.

[shewhodancesunderthemoon]

As AI art gets harder to clock, I feel like we are going to need to have a discussion about attribution and it's probably going to bum some people out.

Because the surest way to avoid platforming, reblogging, or encouraging AI art posting is to know where every image you share originated and that's 1) boring, tedious research and 2) extremely limiting in what you feel you can reblog. But if unattributed images never gets traction, people will start attributing their images.

I've been guilty of this in the past, but for a while now it's been my policy that if I can't verify the origin, I don't share the image. That goes for stuff like screen grabs of headlines too -- more than once I've avoided spreading misinformation by saving a post to research before I reblog, then seeing the post refuted before I've been able to verify it.

And I usually try to attribute photos I take -- case in point, the "woman with shrimp" post gets a lot of attention but not one comment about it being AI, despite it being pretty similar to something you'd get from an AI. That's because I clearly state it's in a museum and link to its catalogue page.

I'm not saying this to scold anyone -- I think yelling at the Internet to cite its sources is very much a losing game -- but because I don't see this discussed much. We're such fertile ground to be fooled by AI art because we've grown accustomed to not questioning the origins of any given image. And of course I also want to encourage both OPs to attribute their images and rebloggers to verify unattributed ones.