vash3r

[vash3r]

タキオン by ProfNote [Twitter/X] ※Illustration shared with permission from the artist. If you like this artwork please support the artist by visiting the source.

[vash3r]

thinking about it now and the term “artistic nudity” is kind of reactionary isnt it

[vash3r]

instead of either having a server be muted or unmuted discord should introduce a setting called special princess mode where the server is muted except ☝🏽 for one person that is your special princess and the emoji0oo990op09iop09i8o09i8op09iolp-09op-0opyujiko8o9i8ukol9iukolp9i8uki sorry. i got a drop of oil on my keyboard bc i was eating hummus with a little bit of olive oil earlier and i was cleaning that off. anyway and the notification icon is a heart. and they have to to call it that.

[vash3r]

[vash3r]

[vash3r]

🚨There is a secret episode of Game Changer out now on Dropout -- the one Sam doesn't want you to see! Go watch it now before he demands it needs to be taken down! It's the one we've all been waiting for!!!

👉Watch it on Dropout here 👈

[vash3r]

I got an email with the semi-annual report for one of the index funds I invest in, and it begins with this sentence:

A young woman sits in the back seat of a car, smiling as she looks down at her smartphone which she holds in both hands. She has long dark hair and is wearing a colorful patterned scarf.

There was a beautiful five seconds where I thought this was some sort of freeform poetry or oracular prophecy with an allegorical relationship to ETF valuations, before I realized that it was the alt text for an embedded stock photo that I had blocked in Gmail.

[vash3r]

i really like this flavor of mikuteto yuri from the songs my toy and gifted by @dovewingkinnie . i love ragebait yuri

[vash3r]

i fucking love reactions in texting apps like discord. theyve revolutionized how i communicate. i can put a bug on your message

[vash3r]

acquired tastes are so funny. the mindbreak of food

[vash3r]

Underutilized aesthetic: when you try to do something a little too specific with your modern OS and it pops up a window with a completely different UI style than the rest of your computer software to do it, usually from an older version of the OS

[vash3r]

Critical support to the onlyfans star I'm reading an interview with whose scaling 'nurture lucrative parasocial relationships with paying fans' by training a chatbot on her history of messages and content and running it 24/7 to create instances for each fan who messages her.

But also lmaoooo

[vash3r]

[vash3r]

your maid fucking bit me. look at me. i know you told her to do that. she wouldn't do that if you didn't tell her. it was calculated and businesslike

[vash3r]

What if you were watching porn that seemed totally normal and then at the end it hit you with this

[vash3r]

What if you were watching porn that seemed totally normal and then at the end it hit you with this

[vash3r]

The difficulty of trying to poke at people's assumptions about what is "real life" and what is not; why "online" life must be abjected compared to "real" life; why certain fields, activities, works of fiction &c. have "value" and others do not; why certain questions are worth asking, and others are not—

the difficulty of trying to work 'upstream,' as it were, to question all of that, is that people always have the option of shutting down the question by retreating to a previously assumed position, rather than actually attempting to answer it ab initio. Their opinion is already the cultural default idea! They can just gesture back at it and act as if it's obvious, rather than engaging with your argument.

"Life that occurs online is less valuable than real life" -> "Why is that?" -> "Because it isn't real" -> "How do you define 'real'? Why are certain activities that a person can engage in more 'real' than others?" -> "They are different because some are real and others are not"

"Activities that involve physical movement are more real and valuable than those that do not" -> "What makes activity that occurs on a couch or in a bed less 'real'?" -> "Because you are just stuck inside rather than being in the real world" -> "What about disabled people? If you cannot leave your house, is your entire life less 'real' and 'valuable' than that of somebody who can?" -> "Oh my god, please go touch grass"

"These people are getting excited about their internet fanfictions and little video games instead of having real sex like normal people" -> "What is the idea of 'normalcy' doing for you here? Why is it better to be 'normal'? Why are, say, sexting, sexual role-play through instant messaging, and writing and reading pornographic material, less 'healthy' or 'real' sexual behaviors than having 'real' sex? What contributes to your ideas about the categories of 'real' versus 'fake' sex, what belongs to each category, and the relative health / normalcy or pathology / abnormality of those categories? Can we historicise these ideas?" -> "Oh my god, someone clearly needs to get laid"

"Smut is rotting these people's brains" -> "Why is pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit content innately noxious or valueless?" -> "It's smut!" -> "What about Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover?" -> "That's different!" -> "Why, other than cultural prestige, is it different? Can you create, from first principles, a general analytic that would allow you to, when presented with a work of fiction, decide whether it was 'smut' or whether it had value? Are you certain your analytic would always agree with what the literary establishment had decided?" -> "I mean, it's Lolita. I wasn't talking about Lolita"

"Oh my god, look at this article title! 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl'!? What are humanities coming to?" -> "Why is that absurd?" -> "Jane Austen and masturbation?" -> "Why do you think these two things are so antithetical? What makes historical medical ideas about masturbation an inherently infelicitous lens through which to view Austen's works? What is it about Austen, or about masturbation, that makes this combination laughable?" "I mean, just look at the title of the article! 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl'!!! It's ridiculous!"

"The New Historicists are off talking about contemporary ideas about race and gender and medical science rather than doing the work of a literary critic!" -> "What is the work of a literary critic?" -> "To critique literature!" -> "What does that entail? Why should any one analytic lens be the only one that constitutes 'literary critique'? We can trace the historical development of different analytic lenses throughout the creation and sequestration of "literary analysis" as an academic field—so why should some of them be 'real', and others spurious?" -> "They are making articles like 'Little Dorrit and the Medicalisation of Disability in Science Periodicals of the 1850s' instead of explicating the characters, plot, and themes of the work in itself without reference to contextualising discourses!" -> "What is bad about reference to contextualising discourses?" -> "It's not literary critique!"

"There is a difference between low and high culture, and high culture is better" -> "What is the difference? Why is 'high' culture better?" -> "High culture inspires people to think deeply about life and art" -> "Is it impossible to think deeply about 'low' culture? Can the analytic lenses applied to 'high' culture not be applied to 'low' culture? What would be infelicitous about such an application? Are these lenses innately not suited to 'low' culture, or is the perceived mismatch a matter of cultural ideals that can be historicised, politicised, problematised? Is your reverence for 'high' culture due to some innate quality within the work itself, or due to what obedience to these standards can buy you?" -> "No, it's not about cultural standards, some works are just better than others" -> "What about cases where something is considered 'low' culture at one point of time, but later re-evaluated and considered 'high' culture? Has the work itself changed due to its changed designation? Would you have new respect for a work you had previously dismissed if its cultural evaluation changed? If so, how can you claim that your reverence is due to a quality innate to the work itself, and not to your desire to have your engagement with culture respected by others?" -> "So you think your 100k word slow-burn enemies-to-lovers Stucky fic is as good as the Mona Lisa? Please get a life"