#I've seen this video several times

[licorishh]

Replayed Modern Warfare 3 2011 on Veteran tonight and goooooooood night. Blood Brothers never gets any easier to watch no matter how many times you've done it and the ending really never misses huh

I apologize for the amount of yapping in the tags I reread it all on mobile and started giggling because it went on for so long but eh. Blessed are those who won't shut the freak up and all that

[lesbianwithchainsaws]

I've somewhat made a horror movie blog (not on tumblr) so now I need to figure out what to post there. There's several topics I'd be interested in exploring, but idk how to make them sound interesting or good

[invinciblerodent]

i just test drove my endgame plan for Petyr's build on Minsc in my "current", Iona playthrough.

well, uh.....

he may have joined the party all of one day ago, but the way he just carried us is VERY on brand for such a warrior of legend.

the fight in the Guild Hall took two rounds total. We took no damage whatsoever. And the only person we lost was the bodyguard that was standing in front of the Zhentarim fighter, nothing really that we could have done for her.

yeah, i feel like it's fair to say that this build is... viable lol.

(it's 5 levels of gloomstalker ranger, 3 levels of thief rogue, and 4 levels of battlemaster fighter, dual-wielding hand crossbows. it's.... kind of really OP. I felt actually bad for bullying the Zhents like this.)

[ctl-yuejie]

fascinated that ForceBook had pretty nice chemistry in episode 1 but by now I really don't feel TopMew - not only because they are the two characters I understand the least - but ForceBook actively try not to have chemistry

very solid acting in my opinion but leaves me watching the trainwreck of SandRay through my fingers as my heart hurts, giddy about BostonNick as the heat starts to burn them, while feeling like I am poking some curious looking sludge with a stick to see if something happens when TopMew are on the screen

[blossom-hwa]

finally finished queen charlotte and now I am a wreck. no amount of spoilers could have prepared me for the last scenes what in the fuck. 

[numetalpuppygirl]

idina menzel........

[winxys]

i don't understand ppl that don't like wookjin

[talaricula]

Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :

Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources

Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)

Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women

Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women

Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)

Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)

Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community

Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS

Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough

Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media

Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards

Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories

Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")

And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue

Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)

[intersectionalpraxis]

"If a pig catches both a human influenza A virus and an avian influenza A virus at the same time, it can spark a process known as viral reassortment — a genetic exchange in which flu viruses swap gene segments." "Those swaps can introduce dramatic changes, producing a new virus with certain properties of a non-human strain coupled with the capacity to infect and spread between people." "The death rate in humans may be upwards of 50 per cent, World Health Organization data suggests, though it's possible that milder infections are getting missed, skewing the case fatality ratio. Still, in a population that's never been exposed, the global impacts could be dire." "More human cases could also be happening under the radar among farm workers who've moved to the U.S. from abroad, don't speak English as their first language, and may be hesitant to seek medical help, he added." "So I think there's probably underreporting on both sides," Armstrong said." "If [H5N1] gets into a population where there's constantly animals going in and out … it might not ever leave."

I've been watching this develop for the past several days, and apart from being terrified most people will not take this seriously (I've seen a handful of people already shout conspiracy on social media and it's alarming to see, as always). What I wanted to point out is that pandemics are going to continue to be our 'normal.' I watched a great video on YouTube a while ago (I believe it was by Vice?) that touched base on how this is going to become our new reality because of multiple factors (such as our proximity to animals, and environments/etc). It was when Covid hit and they did a piece debunking some of the misinformation floating on the internet. If I can find it I will post it here because it was informative and relevant to pretty much any world crisis we will see around any virus that spreads among a human population.

This post isn't trying to fear monger anyone, I just hope more people are aware of what is happening because this is important to talk about. There are already cases (of cows getting this bird flu) in the US, and I won't be surprised if there will be instances in more countries around the world. As usual, keep washing your hands/keeping good hygiene practices, masking up (and if you aren't I hope you consider it), and taking precautions if you do happen to visit/work or go near a pig or poultry farm too:

I'll keep track of this here of course, but please stay informed folks. And also FU to any governments who will try to minimize this or try to diminish the severity until it's too late and community spread happens like Covid because their actions are influenced by capitalistic interests.

Update (April 7th, 2024, 9:32pm EST): to anyone wondering where some of the source information originates from -here is a link to the CDC. They are tracking documented avian virus outbreaks in the US and the public can access it here:

[gooseworx]

I've seen people blame me for the content farm videos saying I could have stopped them, as if I'm not the one feeling the most pained and disgraced by their existence.

I've talked to Glitch about it when they first started showing up, plus several other times when people kept asking me to do something about them, but nothing will be enough to stop them. I can be your scapegoat if you want, but it's not going to change anything.

When all is said and done, I hope at the very least, Digital Circus can be a somewhat enjoyable show in a vacuum. My job is to write and direct a show, so that's what I'm going to be focusing my efforts on. I don't know whether or not I'll succeed, but I'm going to try.

[simptasia]

an unexpected closing to the year was a boy meets world special interest hitting me with a steel chair

[ms-demeanor]

Friends, I think we need to talk about Covid.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I am aware that there are people who need to exercise extreme caution about Covid; I live with someone who has two solid organ transplants and who is at the most immune compromised level of immune compromised. *I* have to be extremely cautious about covid.

Masking does prevent a certain level of transmission, and people who think they may have covid should mask and people who are concerned that they may be at high risk for covid should mask.

You should be vaccinated and boosted with the most recent vaccines that are available to you; covid is highly transmissible and very serious, you do not want to get covid and if you do get covid you don't want it to be severe and if you do get covid you don't want to give someone else covid and up-to-date vaccinations are the best way to reduce transmission and help to prevent severe cases of Covid.

We should be testing before going to any gatherings, and informing people if we test positive after gatherings, and testing if we suspect we have been exposed.

It is bullshit that there aren't good protections for workers who have covid; you should not be expected to go to work when you are testing positive

It is bullshit that people who are testing positive are not isolating for other reasons; if you have Covid you should not be going out and exposing other people to it even if you are experiencing mild symptoms or no symptoms.

We do need better ventilation systems for many kinds of spaces. Schools need better ventilation, restaurants need better ventilation, doctor's offices and hospitals and office buildings need better ventilation and better ventilation can reduce covid transmission.

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

The claim that the pandemic is still as bad as it's ever been and in fact may be worse but we can't know that because "they" (the CDC, the government, capitalist institutions that want you back in the office, the university industrial complex that wants your dorm room dollars) are covering up the numbers and

Significant grievance at the fact that people are acting like number one is not true and are putting you at risk either out of thoughtlessness (because they don't realize they're putting you at risk) or malice (because they don't care if the sick die).

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

If you are concerned about communicable diseases you have to be realistic about the fact that our society doesn't go out of its way to prevent communicable diseases - norovirus among food service workers pre-pandemic is pretty clear evidence of that. You are going to have to be proactive about your safety rather than expecting the world to act like Covid is at 2021-2022 levels when it is measurably not.

[sarasade]

One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".

Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.

That's the TL;DR version of this post. 

ANYWAY here is the long version

Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".

One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.

Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.

It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.

This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.

People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.

I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.

Anyway if you want to read more:

- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info

-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos

-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.

-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa

- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.

-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge

[astraltrickster]

This submarine situation is so wild. I'm always morbidly fascinated by industrial disasters and shit, because as much as they're tragic, they're also...usually some incredible monuments to the hubris of the wealthy, and amazing cautionary tales, and this one...this one is one of the best at that purpose I've seen in my LIFE.

Three business moguls including the CEO of the company involved, one of their adult sons, and one researcher who is on the record saying that he'd be at peace dying on a dive, climbed aboard a cobbled-together submarine to go visit the wreckage of the Titanic - a ship all but synonymous with the hubris of man, the ship declared unsinkable, whose maiden voyage was packed with the highest of white high society (and that glamorous side that adorned the papers to drum up excitement was specifically white high society; this came decades before nondiscrimination laws, the first class tickets at the center of all this pomp and circumstance were restricted by racist policies typical of the time (*this has been edited for accuracy and clarity)). Of course, despite all claims to the contrary, this big metal behemoth was, in fact, no match for the might of the icy sea. The contrast of the celebration and the hype of the launch with the severity of the disaster in the end, the broken promises, it all feels almost too poetic to be real.

Someone looked at that wreckage and thought, "there's a market here." Seeing nothing but dollar signs resting on the graves of a thousand, he built a submarine. It looked lovely and polished and refined on the outside. On the inside, it had no seats, was visibly thrown together out of parts from camping stores and big box hardware stores, and was controlled with a video game controller and one button - a duty which was to fall to one of the passengers after a crash course, but today, fell to the CEO himself.

This man fired a whistle-blower during the construction. He complained about safety regulations. He built a submarine that was bolted closed from the outside. He came up with no emergency plans, despite the need being apparent. He charged a quarter of a million dollars to ride it.

He christened this glorified sardine can Titan.

And so, down these 5 went.

And, just like with the wreckage they were going to see, something went wrong.

And so they vanished.

It feels like a plot line that resulted from the writer's strike. It's so on the nose it feels like a story written by scab labor. And yet, and yet, much of this is common of industrial disasters. The Challenger disaster. Alaska Airlines flight 261. The ultra-wealthy choose spectacle and/or profit over safety, time and time again. It's the same story almost every time...though, this one certainly has its own unique twists. The purpose. The name. The man who organized this was not only staring down constant reminders that no man, no matter how wealthy, is any match for the sea - reminders of the awe-inspiring power of nature - and instead of seeing it as something to respect, he saw it as something to conquer, as a trivial matter.

And he, and those who trusted in him, are now paying the price, most likely with their lives.

Reality truly is stranger than fiction.

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Shakira - Ojos Así 1999

"Ojos Así" is a song by Colombian singer Shakira and was released as the fifth single from her fourth studio album, Dónde Están los Ladrones? (1998). Infused with nuances of Arabic pop, the lyrics tell of the singer travelling the world but not having seen eyes like her lover's. It was written by Shakira, composed and produced by her, Pablo Flores, and Javier Garza. It is sung mostly in Spanish, with a few verses and backing chorus in Arabic. It was later adapted into English by Gloria Estefan as "Eyes Like Yours" and included on Shakira's first English studio album Laundry Service (2001). Music critics praised "Ojos Así" as one of the album's best tracks. "Eyes Like Yours", however, was met with a less favourable reception, with reviewers commenting that it paled compared to the original. At the inaugural Latin Grammy Awards in 2000, "Ojos Así" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and received a Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) Latin Award in 2002. The music video won the International Viewer's Choice Award (North) at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. "Ojos Así" ranked on several charts in Europe and was a top-ten hit on the Billboard Latin Pop Airplay chart in USA. It received a total of 78,8% yes votes!

[wordstome]

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)