stealthcake

[stealthcake]

I love this so much.

Sometimes it feels like you've lived your whole life in a house that's always a little bit on fire. Like it's usually just in one room and you make sure to wet the walls around it so it doesn't spread and that usually works. You were expected to take more responsibility over fire containment when you were like seven because it's not like you can expect your parents to always be 100% on guard about making sure the whole house doesn't catch fire, and you figure that's just how things are like.

And sometimes as a kid you visit your friends' homes and some of then whisper to you - grimacing with embarrassment - about how they're not supposed to tell anyone this, but there's a whole room in their house that's currently on fire. And you're like yeah it's ok I'm not supposed to tell people about the way our house is a little bit on fire all the time, too. And then you visit some other friend's house and there's no trace of fire anywhere, and you think "wow, these people are really good at hiding their house fire."

And one day you show up to work like "hey sorry I'm late, I forgot to wet the walls before going to bed last night and my whole house burned down", and you're startled by the way people react, acting like that must be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. And you're just like "chill, it's been years since the last time this happened, and it wasn't even that bad this time", and that just makes people more shocked, acting like that's the weirdest and most concerning thing they've ever heard anyone say, which only confuses you more.

And then someone tries to explain to you that people aren't supposed to have an ongoing house fire. Most people actually never experience a house fire in their lives. Like not even once. Not even a little bit. The normal amount of having your house be currently on fire is zero.

[stealthcake]

Never assume wickedness when it could just be incompetence.

And maybe consider that most of us are wicked and incompetent from time to time.

Ok, well, not you. Of course not you. Sorry. I meant me.

not to sound like a christian facebook mom but some of yall need to have grace in your hearts for the people in your lives or the people you pass once on the road and never see again like you literally need to stop assuming the worst of everyone and their intentions it is poisoning your brain. you can be careful and responsible without being a miserable person. it is possible i promise

[stealthcake]

Our baseline state is ignorance.

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[stealthcake]

If someone says. “who cares what other people say?” my response is usually, “Everyone. Everyone cares. It’s why you get embarrassed if you fart in an elevator.”

Don’t make me ashamed of my insecurity. I have enough problems.

[stealthcake]

Being mean to strangers online feels like yelling at a car that cuts you off. Except that they can see what you say, so doing it makes you an asshole.

[stealthcake]

The proportions in the AI girlfriend ads are strange enough that I feel bad for budding robosexuals. If that’s what they need they should at least get decent art.

But then I guess it’s this generation’s dakimakura, so realism isn’t the goal.

[stealthcake]

If you have bad stuff in your life and your friend won’t let you refer to it, they aren’t a friend. They are an acquaintance.

Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.

And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.

It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.

[stealthcake]

Touch the Love.

I had a boss that would say that to me. She was a designer that later opened a new age retail store. She was sincere, grounded, and funny. A good person. Idealistic, who believed that intentions affected outcomes.

Maybe they do, but not enough in this case. Channeling energy doesn’t help if there is no foot traffic. And catering to rich hippies wasn’t a great plan even then. Everyone wanted to do it, because it let them dream their dreams while chasing money.

But, you know, if you want to sell stuff, and you don’t want to create a bullshit “need” with marketing, then you have to look at the needs people already have. My liking something doesn’t guarantee that there is a market for it, especially if I’m not flexible about where I sell. So the store didn’t do so well.

But that’s beside the point.

She would say, “touch the love” because she believed that touching things made you fall in love with them. Or it could.

Now, decades later, I’m learning about how the sensory system is a fundamental part of cognitive development. And, in an era where sapience is being imitated by agents with no access to complex sensation, I am thinking a lot about how all meaning is derived from the senses at some point.

Our senses matter. Very much. As we grow more isolated an deprived of sensation, I worry. I know there is great creativity and kindness in much of the younger generations. And I deeply appreciate the wealth of knowledge available to me in this digital era.

I just would like to remind whoever might read this that sensation is very important. Tangibility is a wonderful thing.

Y’all have a nice night.

[stealthcake]

The idea of having no choice but to use Chat GPT is so strange. The only way I can think of that being true is if you have to sift large amounts of data in a short period of time, and your job depended on it. But it would have to be non-exploratory , otherwise you are missing any useful rabbit holes.

Are people saying they need it for, what, writing? It’s not you writing, though. If someone wants writing from you, usually the fact that you do it is important. They want to see how you communicate, how you think, or what you know. Maybe you are supposed to learn something by writing. So having ChatGPT do it is just not doing it and lying about it. The goal is not accomplished.

I know AI can do good things. But we, as a species, are foolish with our toys.

My main worry with AI is more that it is making us stupid and uncreative, and it’s blocking person-to-person communication. It takes the problem of people not reading or being able to watch a full movie and expands it. The loss of creative jobs and the plagiarism are both important, but I think the loss of skill and connection is going to be more harmful in the end.

[stealthcake]

Privacy extension for Chrome

If anyone wants it, here is an extension for Chrome that tells Google Analytics not to collect your data. Google made it, take that as you will:

The same site has a link to a Facebook cookie killer, that seems worthwhile, so here it is:

Hey, this one removes social media buttons, that seems good:

That's all, good luck.

[stealthcake]

No choice? Fuck, that’s depressing.

The only time we don’t have a choice is when someone’s survival is at stake. Everything else is about comfort and convenience.

"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.

[stealthcake]

I hate the word “kiddos.” It’s just so twee. From what I see in the Momosphere, this may mean I am a horrible, dried-up husk of a woman. Ah, well.

[stealthcake]

saying “be safe” like a spell that’ll protect them

[stealthcake]

was talking to my mom about how white people ignore the contributions of poc to academia and I found myself saying the words "I bet those idiots think Louis Pasteur was the first to discover germ theory"

which admittedly sounded pretentious as fuck but I'm just so angry that so few people know about the academic advancements during the golden age of Islam.

Islamic doctors were washing their hands and equipment when Europeans were still shoving dirty ass hands into bullet wounds. ancient Indians were describing tiny organisms worsening illness that could travel from person to person before Greece and Rome even started theorizing that some illnesses could be transmitted

also, not related to germ theory, but during the golden age of Islam, they developed an early version of surgery on the cornea. as in the fucking eye. and they were successful

and what have white people contributed exactly?

please go research the golden age of Islamic academia. so many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for their discoveries

people ask sometimes how I can be proud to be Muslim. this is just one of many reasons

some sources to get you started:

but keep in mind, it wasn't just science and medicine! we contributed to literature and philosophy and mathematics and political theory and more!

maybe show us some damn respect

[stealthcake]

Terry Pratchett wrote my brain

I was rereading a bunch of his quotes, and he was just so freaking fantastic. I've never read any author that had that combination of wit, wisdom, and rage. And a deep, thoughtful compassion. Packaged in a large collection of extremely goofy fantasy stories. So here is today's Terry Pratchett quote. I will post these as often as I can remember.:

"You couldn’t say: It’s not my fault. You couldn’t say: It’s not my responsibility. You could say: I will deal with this. You didn’t have to want to. But you had to do it." - Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

[stealthcake]

You know what the essence of love is for me? Dealing with shit. Literally.

Putting a hot compress on my first cat’s infected booty.

Dealing with the various and abundant grossness that came out of my daughter.

My grandmother diapering her husband as he became disabled.

I think if you love someone long enough, you end up dealing with gunk.

And, personally, I’m ok with that. There are a lot of things I’m not very good at. But when I’m giving that kind of care, I know it’s good enough. It’s enough love, at least for that moment.

[stealthcake]

Language is funny. Beyond being precise, it can be an ingroup/outgroup thing. Someone not knowing the right language means they are from the outgroup. The people we need support from. For practical reasons, it’s good to be kind. And because they can’t know exactly the right words most of the time. It’s impossible. There is contradicting information and you can’t always tell who to trust.

Sometimes people do the whole “it’s not my job to educate them” thing. Why not, though? Whose job is it? How do we decide who has that responsibility? If there is trash on the ground, I pick it up. If there is a crying child I comfort them. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t put them there. If I’m there and I can help, it’s my job.

I’m queer, disabled, ND parent of an ND child, female. If someone from a different group wants to support or share my experience I’m going to let them. It’s fucking rare.

I was discussing the incident mentioned later in this piece with my wife yesterday and I saw another post by someone earlier doing something mentioned in here and I'm finally going to say something about it.

There is a serious problem in leftist spaces, especially online, especially on Tumblr, when it comes to language.

The way people are expected to speak just to even enter these spaces is incredibly complex, to the point of being outright hostile to those who haven’t already spent time in them. And it’s not just newcomers; people who have important things to say, people speaking from lived experiences, people who don’t have English as a first language but still deserve to be heard, are constantly talked down to or even pushed out entirely for not using the "right" words.

This gets even worse when you factor in how often new terms are coined in English, and then people are shamed for not immediately knowing or using them.

I saw someone reblog their own post saying something like, "I know for a fact more than half of y���all didn’t understand a fucking word I said here."

And honestly? That stuck with me, because yeah, I’ve felt that before. Not because I don’t value critical thinking! because I absolutely do! I just made a post on that too! but because so many of these posts are written in a way that makes them Functionally Inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t already have the right background knowledge. And at a certain point, if you actually want your words to have an impact, if you actually want to create meaningful change, then you’re going to have to accept some things:

People will not always use perfect language.

2. People will not always know the exact terminology you personally prefer they use when engaging in discourse.

3. Dismissing or attacking people for how they say something, instead of engaging with what they’re saying, is actively harmful.

And more than that, if you genuinely want people to understand and engage with the things you’re talking about, especially people who don’t speak English as a first language, especially people without access to higher education, especially people who don’t even know where to begin when it comes to self-education (because yes, that is a skill that has to be taught) then you are going to have to be the one to adjust sometimes. You are going to have to let people say things imperfectly. You are going to have to take a step back and engage with the message rather than just the words being used to express it.

One of the experiences that made me realize that I, as a non-native English speaker, was not welcome in Tumblr leftist spaces was when I spoke about real-life oppression I had experienced. I left one word out of my post, a word which honestly, was not even important when talking about an incident that had Happened To Me, not theory, not hypotheticals or any what-ifs of oppression, a story, a story about something that happened to me.

And because of that, people sat in a Discord server, picking apart my words, accusing me of awful things, and then came into my askbox throwing jargon and buzzwords I’d never even heard before, then got mad at me for being frustrated that this was happening.

Think about that. People who are directly impacted by oppression are being pushed out of spaces meant to discuss it because the way they speak doesn’t conform to certain expectations. That is not justice. That is not solidarity. That is not progress.

There is a fundamental disconnect here between theory and praxis. Ironically so many of you do not know what praxis is, because most of you engage with a lot of theory, and not a lot of praxis, you use the word praxis a lot, but, ironically, you have no idea what it means.

{to put my money where my mouth is, it means Doing Something, in the simplest possible terms}

In theory, leftist spaces should be accessible. They should be places where people can speak openly about their experiences, learn from each other, and work toward meaningful change. But in practice? There’s a gatekeeping of language so intense that many people, particularly those who are marginalized in ways beyond just their political beliefs, are outright excluded.

And this is something I need people to sit with: The assumption that the "right" language is easy to learn, or that anyone who doesn’t use it is being willfully ignorant, is an inherently privileged stance. Knowing where to find information, how to process it, and how to integrate new terminology into your vocabulary is a skill that is largely tied to education. Having the time to engage with leftist literature and theory, to stay up-to-date on every new term that gets introduced, is also a privilege. And the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge this, that they expect perfect articulation from everyone, regardless of background, and punish those who don’t measure up, is a huge problem.

Worse still, the same people who act as gatekeepers of this language often fail to communicate their ideas in a way that is accessible at all.

This doesn’t mean that complex ideas should never be discussed. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t strive for accuracy in their language. But it does mean that if your goal is to educate, if your goal is to spread awareness, if your goal is to help people understand and join the movement, if your goal is to engage with fellow oppressed people, then you have a responsibility to meet people where they are. You have a responsibility to make your language understandable.

Because if people can’t even process what you’re saying, then what’s the fucking point?

And before anyone says, "Well, people should put in the effort to learn!" Let me make something very clear: They do.

People who are new to leftist spaces, or who are coming in from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, are often trying their best to engage. They are listening, they are learning, they are processing. But if the response to every mistake, every slightly off phrasing, every unfamiliarity with a new term, is immediate hostility,

or even if it's just 'hey I see you're sharing a personal moment, but can you change your language to make me, personally, more comfortable with you discussing your oppression?' then you’re not teaching.

You’re just making sure only the people who already think and speak exactly like you get to stay in the room.

Your language, your terminology, your theory? none of it means anything if you can’t make it accessible to the people who actually need it. And it means nothing if you use it to Exclude rather than Include.