wordsthativelost

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Please forgive me for ranting, but...I am so tired of AI. Just so tired. I don't want Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or Meta AI, or whatever other energy-sucking, water-wasting, mediocrity-spewing LLM is currently being thrust upon me. I just want to be left alone to create in peace.

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behind every late diagnosed neurodivergent person is a parent who has absolutely nothing going on at all don't worry about it

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First time my kids saw Shakespeare's TWELFTH NIGHT, my son asked in all seriousness "So did they make this play entirely out of quotes?"

i love when you read/watch an influential piece of storytelling and you're like ohhhhhh ok i see. so everyone else was copying this guy's homework

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generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

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Propaganda for When The Angels Left The Old Country: The minute I finished reading this underappreciated gem, I immediately started thinking about whom I could recommend it to; no, who needed to read it; no, who DESERVED to read it. While set in a very specific place and time (Jewish immigrants to New York City in the first part of the 20th century) it is a love story unlike any other. Yes, there is romantic love here, gloriously queer; but more than that it is about love between friends, among families, for a community, for new experiences, for ancient traditions, for words and books and stories, for oneself and who one is meant to be and who one can become, all through the eyes of an angel and a demon like none other you've met.

Favorite Standalone Books

Round 1

Propaganda for the Brothers Karamazov :

"dude this book is crazzzy. like you could dedicate the rest of your life to analyzing it and never run out of things to say. as one of my profs said, you can have hours of discussions by just opening to like any page at random out of the like 800 pages. if you like complicated family relationships, a really radical portrayal of religion that religious scholars can't seem to fully agree on, unreliable narrators, murder mysteries, a unique and complex philosophy, a 14 year old who declares himself a communist cause he heard of it and decided he should be a radical but doesn't actually know anything about it, and also hate the West, then this is the book for you!"

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hello i love this so very very much

In a garden....

I blatantly borrowed a stained glass Tiffany image called "Guiding Angel" and modified it (a lot!) to create this painting. Watercolor, ink, and acrylic on 12" x 16" hardboard.

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If I ask nicely will people reblog this and tell me what their most common breakfast is? Not your favorite necessarily, just what you have for breakfast most frequently? 🙏🏽

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I'm OBSESSED with the Council of Nicaea. It's spring of 325. Christianity has been legal for 12 years. Constantine wants a unified religion for the Empire but the church has already schismed three different ways in the 3 centuries since the death of Christ, and legalization ITSELF causes a schism. They don't even all agree that being a legal religion is good. Now they're schisming about the nature of Christ. He can't persecute them into agreeing and Lord knows he's tried.

So Constantine calls all the bishops to his fucking summer resort, on the imperial dime. 280-318 bishops are going to argue about if the Logos (Christ) was "eternally begotten" or the first creation of God. Santa Claus is going to punch Arius in the face for saying the Logos was created. While we're here, let's set a date for Easter, which we also never pinned down. And we have to decide if eunuchs can be ordained because EVERYTHING HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.

I've been to church conferences. I lose it every time I think about this. Bishops coming into Nicaea tired from the road (travel's a curse). Rural bishops coming to the seat of power for the first time. There's one guy who doesn't understand Robert's Rules and another guy who won't stop bringing up points of order. Someone's sleeping through all the speeches; he's just happy to be on vacation at the emperor's summer resort. The decision made here will form the closest thing Christianity has to a universal declaration of faith for the next 1700 years and it's going to take THREE MONTHS and we have to do it again in 6 years

I'm fancasting my Nicaea movie as we speak

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The only adhd tips that actually work:

1. Never tell anyone what you're planning to do until you do it (you will get a premature dopamine hit and sense of accomplishment from telling them and lose motivation to actually do it)

2. Never sit down (never sit down)

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For the young who want to

BY MARGE PIERCY

Talent is what they say

you have after the novel

is published and favorably

reviewed. Beforehand what

you have is a tedious

delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done

after the play is produced

and the audience claps.

Before that friends keep asking

when you are planning to go

out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you

had after the third volume

of remarkable poems. Earlier

they accuse you of withdrawing,

ask why you don’t have a baby,

call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

take workshops with fancy names

when all you can really

learn is a few techniques,

typing instructions and some-

body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks

a license to hang on the wall

like your optician, your vet

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose fillings fall into the stew

but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to

like it better than being loved.

Copyright Credit: Marge Piercy, “For the young who want to” from Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). First appeared in Mother Jones V, no. 4 (May 1980). Copyright © 1980, 1982 by Marge Piercy and Middlemarsh, Inc. Used by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency, Inc.

Source: Circles on the Water (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)

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“The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”

— Dare to Disturb the Universe: Madeleine L’Engle on Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of Children’s Books | Brain Pickings (via thingspeopleasklibrarians)

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If te techbro fascists hate humanity that much, it's probably because they fear it. And rightly so; it is precisely the art and creativity and community and messiness and sheer contrariness that makes us human that can and must and will defeat them.

I'm having a thought and I need to write it out to see whether I agree with myself.

I'm reading More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, which is excellent (review to come on Wednesday) and a certain chapter combined with a topic that's been on my mind lately, creating a realization that is shaking me.

A thing I keep coming back to again and again lately is that the determining aspect of the current administration is their definition of strength, which seems to be standing alone. Being totally independent. You see this in Trump, et al.'s foreign policy, in which the end goal seems to be to completely alienate all other nations of the world. This is obviously a profoundly stupid idea because it's self-defeating. But it makes sense if you believe that any dependence whatsoever on another is weakness. This is why they hate the idea of a give-and-take, we-both-benefit arrangement, even though that is objectively the best way for human individuals, societies, and nations to operate. They don't even want the US to have less-powerful allies that are dependent upon us (think NATO) because if anyone else benefits, then that shows weakness in us. Hence: tariffs. This is a worldview in which anyone else getting anything means that we are being taken advantage of.

The one exception to this is having people grovel. These guys, especially Trump, love when people grovel because it feeds their egos. The only acceptable kind of relationships to have are with enemies and bootlickers. Period.

They have a horror of responsibility, and these two relationships are the only two that don’t require them to be responsible to or for anyone else.

This is all deeply related to gender, since strength = masculinity, so masculinity = standing alone. Any kind of cooperation or symbiotic relationship or even just mutual exchange is female-coded and so both weak and contemptible.

Anyway, I've been thinking about all that, and then I've been reading this book, and I came to a chapter where Warner talks about educational technology and how the past century or so has been the story of one person after another trying to invent a "teaching machine" to solve the "problem" of education. Warner asks, reasonably: "What is this problem they are trying to solve?"

"...the 'problem' the teaching machines are trying to solve is the inherent variability and messiness of learning. In order to circumvent these challenges, the students must be changed from a human into a product. Once students are a product, we can use our machines to shape them. "The teaching machines keep failing because humanity gets in the way. For the teaching machine to succeed, we will have to decide that some aspects of our humanity are unimportant or inherently flawed, leaving us better off if we're governed by the outputs desired by the machines."

I read this, and it all came together. (Which would delight Warner because the book is about how reading and writing are ways of thinking and feeling and cannot be banished in favor of mere information-intake.)

The thing holding the tech bros and the MAGA politicians together, besides their lust for money and power, is hatred of human-ness.

These people share a profound, worldview-determining antisocial-ness that drives everything they do. They hate humans. They hate being human. They hate when other people are human.

They want to turn people into productivity machines or obedient automatons. They don't want people to be people.

They hate the messiness, the time it takes to do all the things that make us human. They hate the way it requires cooperation and inefficiencies like mistakes. They actually hate learning, wanting to replace it with a system that's similar to a computer downloading a new program. They hate art because they think it's a waste of time and its only purpose is as a little "treat" to incentivize us to work harder. They hate actual relationships because those require vulnerability, dependence, and sacrifice. Most of them actually seem to hate sex except as a way of asserting (violent) power over others. They view children not as human beings but extensions of themselves.

Underneath all this, I think there must be either a profound fear of and/or rage against vulnerability and aging, so it's no surprise that these people are also obsessed with living forever and "optimizing" their health. They are constantly fighting the human body and the human mind. Probably because they're scared of death.

Now, we're all scared of death. But most of us throughout human history have been wise enough to know that the solution to that is community. Make your mark on other people, leave a legacy, plant trees for your grandchildren to sit under. Leave people who will remember you fondly. Maybe even leave some art that will move generations to come. But that view of the world is being increasingly undermined by our culture's values and incentives.

Our culture has been on a trajectory towards this for a long time. When you view the world as a market, when productivity, efficiency, out-puts, and end-products are the only things that matter, you are going to end up hating human beings because we cannot be reduced to these things no matter how or corporate and political and technological overlords try.

If you look at it this way, fascism and the AI/crypto/NFT hype are both declarations of war against our humanity. I'm sure there's a literature about fascism as hatred of humanity, though I am not knowledgeable about it. But these AI people really seem to believe that a machine will be better than a human. And why shouldn't they think that? Humans require food and rest and songs and hobbies and mistakes and negotiations and cuddles and sex and art and time, and if you don't value any of those things, of course a machine that is purely focused on the most efficient output is an upgrade.

This realization makes Severance more relevant to me, since the central technology of that show is creating a way to outsource all the pain/monotony/discomforts of life so you can skip right to the "good stuff." This, of course, reveals that the tech creators do not understand that the messiness of life, all the friction and grit, are the point, and that we are not human without them. But if you don't want to be human, of course you'll figure out ways to jettison these things.

Understanding all of this makes me understand why I so viscerally hate the AI hype. I do think there are some limited ways in which AI could be very helpful, but the hype isn't that. The hype is, "You won't have to write! You won't have to do your own research! You won't have to take the time to learn an instrument! You don't have to be human! Think of all the time you'll save!" And that hype never once acknowledges that if you do save that time...there will be nothing worthwhile to use it on. What is the center of their view of a good life? Nothing. They don't think about it. There's no there there. It's productivity and efficiency for its own sake; it's capitalism taken to the ultimate extreme.

No wonder I hate it.

And now that I've written all that out, doing my thinking through the practice of writing, I see that I do think I'm right. Probably I am just slow and y'all have all realized all this long before I did. But it's a profound realization for me, and it leaves me more energized to fight against both fascism and technocracy. The most terrifying thing about our current moment is that the people who have the most power to shape our lives and the future of humanity are the people who hate humanity the most. They are the most immature, foolish, and thoughtless people imaginable. We can't let them win.

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This post should replace the Letter to Jude in the Bible.

"Historical" tabletop RPGs will be like "this game is based on rigorous historical research of medieval Western European society, and while it does have wizards, they're informed by authentic, period-accurate beliefs about how magic worked", and I'll be like "are the wizards really based on medieval Western European beliefs about magic, or is it a bunch of 1970s Neopagan 'ancient witch cult' stuff in a funny hat", and the game will be like "those are the same thing".

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Okay, I wanted to reblog this, just because I love the transcript, which renders "Nazi" as "Not See". Because that is what Nazi rhetoric is. It is an active choice to NOT SEE the humanity we all share. It is willful violence, and should be treated as such.

Some very eloquent notes on violence as a necessity for resistance.

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I'll come out and say it. IF TRUCKS ARE THIS DANGEROUS, THEY SHOULDN'T BE ON THE ROAD. Seriously. This "PSA" is the equivalent of "Hi, this is your friendly rabid wolverine, explaining how to interact with me in your preschool." No, GET THE RABID WOLVERINE OUT OF THE PRESCHOOL. We don't need long haul trucking. We have trains for a reason.

A PSA about trucks from a truck driver

I and some colleagues were talking about how we wish everyone could see the safety videos that our company was showing us, because I don’t think most people understand how traffic works in a truck. So here’s some things we wish everyone on the road knew.

- we’re not kidding about tailgating. If you’re right behind us on a straight highway? Chances are we have NO IDEA you’re there, which means we can’t anticipate any of your movements. Plus slowing down takes multiple downshifts, so we might start decreasing speed way earlier than you expect.

- We’re not kidding about any of our blind spots. WE CAN’T SEE YOU, GUYS.

- That bit about slowing down taking a while? The same goes for when you’re in front of us. Don’t cut off a truck. Oh god, PLEASE don’t cut off a truck. If you cut me off, I’m not irritated, I’m terrified. For YOU. It can take 7 to 9 seconds for us to stop. DON’T CUT OFF TRUCKS.

- Before you get mad about how slow we’re going on the highway, keep in mind that many companies govern their vehicles so they literally CAN’T go over 60 or 65. This is a good thing, I promise. Because…

- Do you know what happens when a car meets a truck in an accident? The car gets totaled and the truck needs a new coat of paint. You will not win this fight. I know nobody likes getting stuck behind a big dumb truck, but it’s not worth your life.

We are trying our best to protect you from our 80,000 pound death machines. Please help us out.