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Do i look like him?

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The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.

Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

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Quote of the day

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Okay so listen I wasn't going to fandom post anymore but here we are:

The way Mensah interacts with Gurathin's addiction history in Murderbot TV Edition is pretty messed up. It makes me like Mensah less (as a person, not as a character, this is a great character flaw tbh) because I have a similar addiction history and when people act like her about it I want to break something with a hammer.

Basically I want to talk about a post I saw about how compassionate Mensah is when she assumes Gurathin relapsed in episode 10, but I also don't want to attach this to that post because I don't want to harsh anyone's mellow. So no ill-will my friends, have fun with your interpretation of that interaction and I will have fun being grumpy about mine. Also this is going to be really long because I don't know how to do a read more break on New Improved (i.e. Worse) Tumblr. Sorry. ---

So anyway, when Gurathin staggers in with an entire person contained in his brain looking understandably haggard about it, Mensah's immediate reaction - i.e. going from "uh oh relapse" to "how did we not support him correctly" - does seem compassionate on the surface. But consider the following context:

1) Gurathin is an absolute champ at saying no. Rather than use a single painkiller, Gurathin let the literal killing machine he is canonically terrified of into his brain to restrain him with its mind. He put himself in his own worst-case scenario situation just so that he didn't have to take even a small risk of relapse.

2) Gurathin is an absolute champ at saying no to his friends. He did this even while his friends and colleagues, including Mensah, were actively trying to persuade him to take the painkiller. He said no; they kept trying. He had to fight not only his own pain but also their opinions to make that choice. It is in some ways so much harder to say no to your friends who care about you than it is to say no to some guy who sells drugs, because you know that your friends genuinely think this is the best option, and you know they're competent at their jobs.

3) This was a relatively low-risk situation, and he still said no. Gurathin said no to painkillers in favour of an invasive mind meld over everyone else (except Murderbot) objecting even though it was during a one-time emergency in a medically-controlled setting and would have been administered by someone he trusts not to encourage his addiction like his former employers did. Let me expand on this. When Gurathin says, "this is how it started," he doesn't mean he instantly became addicted after a single painkiller during a single surgery, so if he does the same thing now, it'll happen again. He is instead referencing the extremely common addict experience of being prescribed a medication in too high or too long-term a dose (usually but not always after a surgery), being cut off when the prescription runs out without effective alternative plans for managing whatever pain etc. it was treating, and then trying increasingly risky ways to get your hands on the substance because the issue is not only that your pain etc. is untreated now but also you are going into withdrawal, which can kill you, even with someone of the more "benign" prescription drugs they put you on. The situation snowballs and suddenly you don't recognize yourself or your life and you can't see any way out. In the surgery situation, Gurathin would have been pretty sure the cycle was not going to start again: he is with friends he trusts and who know what they're doing, not corporate doctors who don't give a shit. He has a built-in support network from the very beginning. He knows what the cycle looks like now. But "pretty sure" isn't enough for him. So he still says no.

4) Gurathin is not currently, actively struggling to stay off drugs. Assuming he got off his various substances immediately after escaping his nightmare Corporation Rim job, he has been sober for approximately six years. To get to that point he would have had to spend months (at least) tapering his doses of whatever he was on to get to the point where cutting them off was safe, making the same choice every day to keep going. Then, when he fully cut them out, he would have gone through weeks to months of physical withdrawal and like five years of regrowing his own coping skills from scratch. He would have been counting up to each big milestone: one day, one week, one month, one year, and - this is the big one - five years. In my experience, six is the year where you kind of stop counting because there are no more round numbers until 10 and you feel pretty practised and confident at saying no to what you left behind and yes to where you're going. It's not easy, exactly, but you know you can handle it. This is probably where Gurathin is at when he says no to drugs during surgery, and later when he decides to blackmail his old dealer. By year six, sure, it's a little hard, but it's only a big fear in those high-stakes situations, and even then, he has practice. He decides for himself the appropriate ways to handle those situations, because he is an adult who is aware of his own capabilities. This is the context in which Mensah's first assumption is that she and the crew let Gurathin relapse.

It bothers me, first of all, because he worked so hard to get to a point where he could do something like show up at his dealer's door in the middle of the night and not be like aw what the hell, one couldn't hurt. The immediate assumption that he relapsed dismisses six years of working and growing and becoming someone who can say no even when it's hard.

He looks terrible, but that could mean anything. Oh no, someone just gave Gurathin unexpected and terrible news! Oh no, Gurathin came down with the flu because we're suddenly in a much more crowded environment full of recycled air! Oh no, Gurathin slept really bad and just woke up from a PTSD nightmare about Leebeebee's head exploding right next to his head! Why, at this point in Gurathin's life, is the first assumption "Oh no! Gurathin relapsed!" as though he quit ten minutes ago, like he is still a little baby in recovering addict years? There's just absolutely no recognition of how he has grown and become stronger in that moment. Relatedly, I hate how self-aggrandizing it is to frame it as like, "we should have been watching out for his needs better, we made this happen." No! No you did not. Being an addict does not make you no longer a grown-up responsible for your own actions. Mensah et al could no more have caused him to relapse than they could have caused him to recover. Gurathin made those choices. Don't steal his valour. Preservation Alliance put him in a better situation, where the possibility to make those choices existed, but he was still the one who made them. Assuming you have that kind of power over him erases that. I also hate it because like four episodes ago, Mensah was the one asserting most intensely that he should just do the painkillers, to the degree that he had to say in that terribly vulnerable, this-should-have-been-a-private-conversation-but-I'm-bleeding-out voice, "this is how it started". Finally, I cannot imagine how annoying it must have been for him to have done this wild, dangerous thing on his own initiative that should have been impossible but he did it anyway, to feel high on that victory, and then to come back and get not a "thank you" or a "wow, Gura, that's so impressive" but a vaguely patronizing concern about his drug use. However: I also think whoever wrote this is a genius.

This is yet another Murderbot-Gurathin parallel, but this time, it's telling us about who Mensah is as a (flawed) leader. The Mensah who patronizingly assumes Gurathin has relapsed and she had the power to cause it right after he did a reckless, impossible, beautiful thing is the same Mensah who presents Murderbot, which somehow impossibly hacked its own governor module for freedom, with a scenario where she is its legal guardian, without real recognition of how that undermines the autonomy it worked so hard for in the first place. Mensah's virtues as a leader are her empathy, her egalitarianism, and her intense dedication to doing the right thing regardless of the risk to herself. This parallel, where she thoughtlessly steamrolls Gurathin's and Murderbot's respective agency, shows us the flaws those values have within them. Her egalitarianism can become more aesthetic than substance. Her dedication to her values can push others' perspectives aside. And her empathy can turn into a projection of her own feelings onto those she believes she is empathizing with.

This is great! It annoys the shit out of me on a personal level, and it is also premium quality entertainment.

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I'm on season 4 of ds9 now! worf! worf! worf! worf!

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My wife and I are watching DS9 and I need you to know I am LIVING for your doodles of the crew. Still scrolling through everything on your blog, really hoping to see how you draw god's bitchiest warrior (Dukat, I want to shove him in a locker.)

Thanks a lot! I made a scribble of Kira as Peter Pan a few weeks ago, so here is Dukat:

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Homestuck was absolutely complete disaster of a narrative in a lot of ways by the end but I hate it when people act like homestuck is, like Vivziepop Type Bad. For whatever critiques you can make of homestuck it being shallow or creatively bankrupt are just not accurate ones and it drives me up a wall to see people who have never read it act like it's just kind of a substanceless relic of outdated internet humor and fandom cringe. It's crazy how many people are willing to sing praises for shit that's downwind of homestuck like deltarune (and chapter 4 is by far the most homestuck deltatune has ever been by a significant margin) while also being able to completely write off the idea that homestuck has anything worth engaging with in it.

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GUARDS!! console me

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« Whenever a land hermit crab is lucky enough to come across an empty shell (sometimes because a behavioural ecologist put it there) and if no one else is around, it will stop, take a closer look and probably try on the new shell for size. If it likes what it finds it will keep the new home and continue on its way. However, if the shell is too big the crab won’t pass on by, but will sit quietly next to it, sometimes for as long as 24 hours. In that time other crabs will probably amble past and wonder what’s going on. Then a spontaneous hermit party breaks out. Don’t get too excited, though, because the main thing that happens when hermit crabs get together is they start forming queues.

A gaggle of hermit crabs clustered around a big empty shell will sort themselves out into a size-ordered line with the biggest at one end, leading to the smallest at the other. This orderly formation is called a vacancy chain, and people form them too, of jobs and houses. The crabs work out who goes where by clambering around and feeling up each other’s shells. Sometimes, if there are lots of hermits in the area, several queues will form around a single, large vacant shell and then things get a bit more interesting: a tug-of- war ensues. The biggest crabs will wrestle over the coveted empty shell while the little ones further down the line will shift queues like supermarket shoppers speculating on which checkout will move fastest.

Eventually, one queue will win control of the empty shell and, in a flurry of claws, everybody in the successful line moves house. Each crab slips out of its old shell and into the newly abandoned shell of the crab one place ahead of it in the queue. They all get a new shell, one size bigger, and quickly scuttle off, once again going their separate ways. Behavioural ecologists have worked out that forming vacancy chains provides benefits for all the crabs involved; adding just one new shell can efficiently provide new homes, of just the right sizes, for a whole gang of hermits. »

— Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells

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taylor swift would release a 30th special edition of the tortured poets department to block the vampire lestats spot on the billboard chart and within 24 hrs travis kelce would go missing

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this bitch, seriously. (affectionate. i like him, unfortunately)

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Lily Seika Jones aka Rivulet Paper (American, b. 1989, San Antonio, TX, USA, based Seattle, WA, USA) - Fire Belly Newt Sorcerer, 2020, Paintings: Watercolor

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he's free now

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an unmatched feeling actually