So i thought it would be the funniest shit to make fanart for @xmajordumps au, specifically with the roblox face narinder post. So i hope ya enjoy the cursed doodle of them lmaoo
I know people won’t care because you all assume every country that isn’t in the west is automatically homophobic and/or transphobic, but enshrining this bigotry into law, enabling more institutional and state violence is making my heart weep.
for those who do care, Silent Majority is actively fighting against this bill and I do hope people can support them.
Listen to me. Men are boxes and women are circles is made up. Those how to draw anime books are made up. 99% of all style guides are made up. But color theory is very very real.
There’s a fic on fanfiction(.)net that I’ve kept tabs on for years to see if it’s been updated or not. While I’m no longer even in the fandom it’s written for, it just has one of the greatest storylines I’ve ever read. Last time it was updated was 2011.
The other day, I decided to reread the entire thing and leave a very in-depth review of what I thought of each chapter. I also mentioned how I started reading it when I was 13 and am now 21, but always came back to see if it was ever finished because I loved it so dearly.
Today, said author sent me a private message saying that her analytics showed that the story was still getting views even after all these years, but no one ever bothered to leave reviews other than “update soon!!!”, so she never felt motivated enough to finish it. She said that me reviewing every single chapter with lengthy paragraphs made her cry and meant the world to her. She also mentioned that she felt encouraged to write the two remaining chapters needed to complete the story and that she would send me a message the night before she updates the fic.
I’m literally sobbing. I’m so excited :’)
Please always remember to leave a review when reading fanfiction!!! It means a lot to a writer.
Seriously, this is what keeps us going; YOUR COMMENTS.
And you think my ranting about it is just being salty! It’s not! Reviews can mean the difference between feeling motivated and feeling out of place.
COMMENTS ARE WHAT MAKE IT WORTH IT!!!! AND NOT JUST ONES THAT SAY ‘NEXT PART’ OR SOMETHING! THE NICE ONES THAT TELL US WHAT YOU LIKED OR ENJOYED!! THEY MAKE MY HEART DO A DAMN SOMERSAULT EVERY TIME!!
If you wanna protect AO3 or character ai. Or Wattpad. Or Tumblr. Or discord. Or even the right for undocumented people and minors to use the fucking Internet reblog this I swear to God. Reblog this and reblog as many KOSA posts as you can go on their website and contact your Representatives. Do it. Do it. Do it.
The remake reboot prequel sequel industrial complex is killing me but the good thing is I don’t have to watch any of that. I can just think “that sounds boring or otherwise doesn’t interest me in any way” and do something other than watch it
“They’re making a willy wonka origin story with timothee chalamet,” you might say to me. “They’re doing a live action the last airbender again, didn’t you love avatar?” I don’t find it necessary. This is nothing to me
I agree…
with the exception of DuckTales. That reboot was amazing.
DuckTales is an exception because it was made by people who grew up with the original 1987 series/the Disney Afternoon block and were influenced by the comics, especially those made by Carl Barks and Don Rosa. They showed genuine respect for the source materials while having the reboot be its own thing. 😌 A lot of the other reboots, revivals, prequels, sequels, and what not are made to be cash cows that capitalize on nostalgia; in other words, most of them don’t follow what I like to call the “DuckTales Method” of bringing back beloved IPs.
I miss when every new transformers show was trying ultra hard NOT to be G1.
i love cis allies so much. there’s a cold spell rn and i told my cishet friend that it was getting so cold i might turn into gender solid and she just laughed so hard. like she was genuinely caught off guard. i appreciate both her sense of humor and the fact that she had never heard this age old genderfluid joke before
Cis allies are the best!!!! I have a friend who’s a year younger than me, and he’s a cis ally, and he’ll make gay/trans jokes, but not jokes making fun of gay/trans people, actual funny ones. It’s great
i want there to be more fanfic aus where everything is the same but for one minor detail. everything is the same but there’s sentient animals wandering around. everything is the same but everyone is called gerry. everything is the same but two characters are siblings for no reason
At the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2018 there was a show called “Hamlet, But Hamlet’s a Chicken.” It was more or less what it said on the tin. They had made arrangements to borrow some therapy chickens, and for any scene that needed Hamlet, an affectionate handler gently carried in that day’s chicken (it would be one specific chicken for any given performance, but they didn’t have one chicken play Hamlet the whole time as that would have stressed out the chickens) and set her on the stage and then the chicken got to wander around and do whatever she wanted as the other actors did the scene.
There was also, I think, a scene with swordfighting where it was “the fight scene, but everyone’s using pool noodles” and some other similarly bizarre changes, but the MAIN thing I remember
was Hamlet’s soliloquy
because they just announced, “Hamlet’s soliloquy!” and then brought out the chicken and set her on the stage and then let her just hang out being a chicken for like FIVE MINUTES and the entire audience watched, completely riveted. It helps that chickens are cute. At one point she fluffed up her feathers and everyone gasped. A+ show, would go see it again.
i cannot begin to explain the emotions i feel every day knowing that this post i made in the middle of playing tf2 when i was 16 is going to be the one thing of mine that has made the largest impact on the world by a fucking mile
i cannot begin to explain the emotions i feel every day knowing that this post i made in the middle of playing tf2 when i was 16 is going to be the one thing of mine that has made the largest impact on the world by a fucking mile
Fantasy Is A Metaphor For The Human Condition, a comic about magic, and art, and speculative fiction, and being sick, and how they all intersect. Originally laid out/pencilled November-December 2017, when I was in a very difficult place emotionally as I was relearning how to draw post-brain injury.
You know I used to think “tumblr’s absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn’t require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it’s not actually doing any harm”.
Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between “guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere” and “guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere” and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn’t require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.
Do you have any idea what you did, Zoe? It feels like you should. You’ve been doing this a lot longer than Alice has by certain definitions of interpretating time loops. That isn’t my specialty. I’m a Poison Guy who lives in Seattle. I’m not a Timeloop Guy. I do poisons. I got cursed by a wizard named Edward so that I can secrete poisons from my skin. That’s what I am.
You were always the one that lied, Zoe. For as long as I’ve known about you. You’re the liar. Nothing you say was supposed to be taken as true. That’s how it’s always been from the very beginning. But now you got an ending with Alice. Your story is over.
Do you have any idea what you did, Zoe? And if you told me “Yes, I do”, could I trust that?
If you told me “No, I don’t”, is that better?
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I want to start by saying that the sea looks beautiful today. I want to start by telling you that I love how it looks when the stormclouds start parting like armies routed by the cavalier sunbeams piercing through the enemy lines to breach the gray waves and turn them blue. I want to start by saying that I can feel the cold, clammy sand beneath my toes as I dig my feet into wet low tide, and that I don’t mind when I accidentally cut the sole of my left foot on a bit of oyster shell. I want to be happy for you, Zoe. For as long as I’ve known you, you were never really happy. You were just really, really good at putting on a happy face. So good that every time I saw you and Alice it felt like I just wanted you back. And every time, you would make some excuse to come back. You wouldn’t stay for long. The loop would be coming back around by that point. You’d need to go back to the start again. But that was okay, because I got to be there for it. I got to see it all happen.
Zoe, I want to tell you how happy I am for you and Alice. But I’m not as good at lying as you are. Please answer.
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Greetings Honorable Alchemist Zykocea the Radiant, if that is your real name. I am Dolarion the Omnipotent. I have been informed by a mutual acquaintance that you have succeeded in your goal of awakening your beloved, the Venom Mage Dark Queen Alkaxicae, to the nature of your imprisonment, and that she has successfully broken your bindings.
Please be aware that this was a great and terrible thing. Please be aware that there are consequences for doing this. Please be aware that we are trying to reach out to you about your car’s extended warranty, Zykocea the Radiant, and about a great deal many other things.
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Zoe, when you were just the lying god trapped in an endless cycle of a meaningful journey, you were given very specific rules to follow. So was Alice. You have both broken those rules and I don’t know where either of you are now but it’s important that you know what’s going on. You turned this into a story, Zoe. Do you have any idea what that means?
You made yourselves the main characters. And then your story ended.
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Fuck you I hate you fuck you I hate you fuck you FUCK YOU FUCK YOU. IS ANYONE EVEN FUCKING READING THIS? WAS THIS ALL A FUCKING TRAGEDY FOR EVERYONE THAT ISN’T YOU?
WE’RE STILL HERE ASSHOLES YOU DON’T GET TO ESCAPE THAT EASILY
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Sorry. That was rude of me. Please let me try again.
When you ended the story you turned the timeloop into a narrative, and you made yourself and Alice both the main characters of the narrative and also the writers of the narrative.
You made yourselves into a story about two lonely gods on a road trip in love and trying to make that love strong enough to be a romance and not a timeloop.
Fuck. This isn’t working, is it? I’m not getting through to you like this. Of course I’m not. I wasn’t supposed to be able to have my own point of view.
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I can’t make the main characters understand what it’s like to be an anciliary plot point. I can’t make you understand what I mean when I say I only exist for you and Alice to grow as people. You only made me because you wanted to spend more time with her. I’m only the tiniest piece of your stories, I’m never even shown onscreen, but at least I’ve got it better than Merlin or Dolarion. I’ve definitely got it better than the Oldest Ones.
Zoe, do you have any idea what it’s like to be the Oldest Ones, except that you were born retroactively after being mentioned by a (relatively) young god stuck in a perpetual 3 day birth-and-death-and-rebirth cycle? By definition, you made it so that the Oldest Ones are not actually the Oldest Ones. They’re bit roles. They’re one-off statements to build a grander tapestry for your world. We all are here because you made a story big enough for all of us to be in it.
But you’re not in it anymore. You’re gone.
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Picture this, for me, Zoe. Picture a stormy night. There’s no moon. No stars. The power is out all across Seattle. It’s kind of cold, but not as bad as it could be. You’re standing on the waterfront, with your back to the city, and you’re staring as hard as you can out into the distance.
Could you tell, exactly, where sky stopped and sea began? Where the world ended and the horizon started? If you look at the beach, it’s like the whole world has turned into the endless abyss lapping up sand like a thirsty dog. You can drown in a sky that isn’t there, because that’s all there is.
That’s what it’s like, basically, trying to get you to hear any of what I’m telling you. I sit at the edge of the city limits of Seattle, I put my mouth right up to the point where my world stops and everything you haven’t said existed starts, and I whisper and I scream all these things and more into the remnants of what you left behind because the hope is that one day you’ll hear something any come back to finish what you never started.
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Dolarion’s gone. The Oldest Ones are gone. Merlin’s gone. Silver Tongue Burgess was born dead in an oil fire. It’s just me, the poison guy who lives here in Seattle, and I’m surrounded by sea and something that doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s really lonely. You’d think that by saying “all the poison guys you knew live in Seattle” that there’d be more of us, right? Except you only knew me. Which meant I’m the only one Alice ever heard about. She didn’t ever meet me. I never spoke to her. Technically speaking I never spoke to you, either, Zoe. I didn’t get to say a word. You spoke for me. You spoke for all of us, and none of it was true.
But I was the destination in a way that mattered enough to Alice to make me sort of true when you made this a story. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?
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I’m choosing to believe it means something, Zoe. I’m choosing to believe that I can mean something in a way that matters. I don’t have a face or a body or a name or a reason to exist that isn’t you and Alice and being in love. But I do have a belief that the love means something to me.
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You aren’t hearing this, are you, Zoe? You never were. You never could. I’m angry at something less than a ghost. I’m angry at a story because it ended, which ghosts like me don’t get to do. You left behind the narrative because ending it mattered to you, and you left me behind, and I’m haunting it.
If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what’s happening.
(Disclaimer to start: I’m a software engineer who’s been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)
Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what’s going on now. I’m gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of “we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later” went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.
Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.
Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and
But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.
So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.
But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.
But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010’s was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you’re still beating the system.
So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.
You hear constantly about “Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable”, yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren’t stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that “eventually” when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.
The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.
Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you’re in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.
Now it is scary and risky to throw money at “could eventually be profitable” tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.
You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get “now that you’re a captive audience here, we’re forcing ads or we’re forcing subscriptions on you.” Don’t get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It’s just that it’s come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it’s soiled its own diaper (maybe that’s too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.
Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.
Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say “See! We’re not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials.” And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies’ value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The “beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area” era of tech is drying up. And we’re still unionless.
Never mind that last part.
And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI’s Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor’s amount of momentum. Here’s Microsoft’s prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They’re willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.
Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the free money days. It’s their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say “see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you.”
To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It’s a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let’s be real, half of that profit “potential” is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It’s a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice’s worth.
It’s the thing that will win investors back. It’s the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It’s the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.
I think one sad reality of Christianism as a religion is that if you look at what Oily Josh said and only follow that, worst case scenario is there’s no afterlife and you’ve been tricked into being nice by a middle eastern conman two thousand years after he died. But somehow mainstream Christianism is all about shitting on people who aren’t you.
“Jesus would forgive student debts” instantly makes a midwest R-senator explode.
If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what’s happening.
(Disclaimer to start: I’m a software engineer who’s been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)
Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what’s going on now. I’m gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of “we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later” went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.
Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.
Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and
But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.
So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.
But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.
But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010’s was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you’re still beating the system.
So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.
You hear constantly about “Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable”, yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren’t stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that “eventually” when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.
The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.
Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you’re in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.
Now it is scary and risky to throw money at “could eventually be profitable” tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.
You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get “now that you’re a captive audience here, we’re forcing ads or we’re forcing subscriptions on you.” Don’t get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It’s just that it’s come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it’s soiled its own diaper (maybe that’s too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.
Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.
Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say “See! We’re not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials.” And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies’ value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The “beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area” era of tech is drying up. And we’re still unionless.
Never mind that last part.
And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI’s Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor’s amount of momentum. Here’s Microsoft’s prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They’re willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.
Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the free money days. It’s their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say “see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you.”
To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It’s a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let’s be real, half of that profit “potential” is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It’s a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice’s worth.
It’s the thing that will win investors back. It’s the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It’s the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.
Adding to this, Hurricanes can and WILL shift at the last minute and so an area that was SUPPOSED to be hit is no longer in the danger zone, but they had already evacuated. But now the new area has to be evacuated, sometimes in less that 12 hours and that means shelters have to be opened up, emergency services need to be in place, people who were off now have to be on call, it is honestly a logistical nightmare.
This time also has a disaster within a disaster because apparently there was a HUGE fuel contamination issue, and a lot of gas got contaminated with diesel so now people CAN’T evacuate because their cards are dead/at risk of dying due to getting the contaminated gas. Also going to be a big issue with generators. (Source: https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2023/08/27/florida-gas-contamination-idalia/)
And before anyone says “Well, that’s what they get for living there/why don’t they just move?”:
Moving costs more than evacuating, and evacuating is expensive enough as it is for some people.
There is not a single place in this country, or in any country, that is not at risk of natural disaster in some form or another. Wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards … we can’t all just move to places which won’t get hit with this shit because those places *don’t fucking exist.*
you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain
if you’re so stressed that you’re puking your guts up every morning, are unable to eat or keep anything down, you can’t look at light without feeling infinitely worse and feel exhausted and in pain all the time (or whatever your particular stress induced symptom set is) you’re not just feeling like that because you’ve willed it into being. your body is begging for relief from the constant barrage of stress hormones and it requires the fundamental source of stress to go away, not just distracting yourself from the symptoms
just because the root is psychological doesn’t mean the result isn’t an entirely physical process.
This and also “your body is desperately trying to alert you to the fact that stress is killing you”
“This feels like a show made by an algorithm catered to the kind of fans that hate filler and side stories in animation and hates when characters make jokes. It tries so hard to be more adult than the source material that it ends up playing much safer and less complex than the cartoon made for kids!”
My job in the leftist compound will be driving one of the little train rides around the perimeter and taking pot shots at libertarians and other small animals with the loaded turret mounted on the caboose
The cars are full of leftisms strongest warrior children who cheer for me when my aim is true and boo when my righteous ammo hits dirt or trees by accident
Okay this is a BRILLIANT illustration of how the fast fashion industry devours literally everybody it touches, but knowing what I know about models, I’m willing to bet these people JUMPED at the chance to look exactly as they feel on a bad day on the runway and not be fired for it.
fandom culture has fundamentally broken some of you.
you are so obsessed with fiction and discussing it in the most surface level, fandom-centric way that you have forgotten how to interact with the real world.
the fact i am seeing multiple people posting baseless theories to “prove” Aaron Bushnell was transgender is fucking disgusting and invasive and inexcusable.
if you look at the story of a man who self immolated while screaming “Free Palestine” in a desperate attempt to combat genocide and think “omg but what if X” or “it’d be even more tragic if Y,” then you need to leave fandom spaces. i mean it. you have to go outside and relearn how to perceive and respond to and care about real human beings and world events.
Aaron was a real man. he had hopes and beliefs and fears and loved ones. he was trapped within America’s imperialist system and was so harrowed by the Palestinian genocide that he saw only one way out.
he was not a faceless tragedy or a character. he was not a toy for you to put in “what if” scenarios or make identity headcanons around. his death was not fictional story beat to make you have “feels.”
and the genocide he died to fight? that’s not worldbuilding. it isn’t a background story or driving action. it’s real. people are being butchered and starving and dying en masse. we are witnessing a real time ethnic cleansing.
when we say free Palestine, we mean it. this is not a slogan for your favorite show.
I’m really glad that Aaron’s self-immolation for Palestine is getting attention, but on November 8th there was also a Congolese man who did the same thing for the genocide happening in the DRC. From what I read in the article above, his fate and identity are unknown but I think his story should be getting equal amount of traction and I haven’t really seen anyone talking about it on Tumblr specifically yet.
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you know I really wish I could be a jauntily-dressed little nonbinary fag wearing dark academia vamp-core outfits but the truth is …I’m way too lazy. I’m pajama nonbinary. I wanna sleep instead
genuinely god bless u little gay nerds who put on petticoats and cravats and dress in layered sweaters and do your hair up intricately every day to go to Menards and shit. I have worn the same sweatpants for a week now
