the inherent eroticism of being doc ock

My name is Grizzle Hardwire, cyber detective and/or spacer. I walk through the rain slicked streets of downtown Neo Hampshire, neon outlined holos of Pleasure Techs beckoning me into a hotel. Four of them are topless women, but ones a guy cuz like, its the future and theres gay guys probably. But just one cuz like, not too many. And not me, im the protagonist.

That is a fun noise there

neoliiii

You MUST unmute this the text DOES NOT do that cat justice.

happy pride everyone

man left without meaningful tasks for a week seen walking around with a notepad to critically assess all the wall-ceiling angles in his home with genuine contempt

absolutely fucked

It's like. No I don't have a bad relationship with my father. Yes I love my father. No I do not know my father. Yes I have fond memories of my father. No I cannot remember ever knowing my father. Yes I know my father loves me. No my father has never said he loves me. Yes I am just like my father. No I am nothing like my father. Yes my father has taught me many things. No I have learned nothing from my father. Yes this man is my father. No I do not know this man.

opens box that reads "i wanna draw again". inside lies a note. the note says, "mental illness and difficult circumstances have taken years of interest, accessibility, and skill away from me. i want to forgive myself for that. i want to heal my relationship to my hobbies. i want to feel connected to something that once made me feel good, but the cyclic discouragement is difficult to overcome." i turn over the note. on the back it reads "wannta drawe sexy bodies awooga"

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.

watching reddit go into a full death spiral is like watching the specifically trans equivalent of the library of alexandria go up in flames

like yes reddit is also the only place on the internet you can get an actual answer to any question in general. but it’s also a huge centralized community database about which surgeons will fuck you over, who takes what insurance, which doctors you can trust, how to write a template therapist’s letter, insurance appeals, peer support, questions that feel too stupid to ask anywhere else, diy guidelines, “hey this is embarrassing but,” finding trans people in your area, explaining why you need PTO without getting way too personal about it, safety tips, et cetera you get the picture

Someone on trans Reddit just bought the url transgender.org and have put out a call for folks to help turn it into a replacement (and more). Here's a link on r/ftm but it's open to everyone

Here's how to use the archive.org Wayback Machine to save webpages. Get what you can while it's up, prioritize the most important information. And save links to the pages in a text file so we have a record of what survives.

r/datahoader is also providing resources for saving and archiving reddit info. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/

Lion King (1994) explaining the importance of stylized 2D animation: Lion King (2019) and Cats (2019):

Kimba The White Lion (1965) explaining the importance of an original idea:

Lion King (1994) Lion King (2019) Cats (2019)

Shakespeare (1564) explaining the importance of an original idea:

Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):

Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1160 – c. 1220) explaining the importance of understanding that all creative work is inherently derivative once you study the oral tradition of storytelling and history and that’s okay because generations have always reformatted tropes and themes to make them relatable to their current audiences 

Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):

Tyrannosaurus rex (Late Cretaceous) explaining nothing because he’s a don’t give a fuck

daily reminders

In case you haven't been keeping up with the latest in Reddit drama:

Herewith your sporadic reminder to be careful what you ask for: you may get it.

Leaving aside the whole debate about the ethics of AI art and copyright, I think one of my biggest gripes with the AI art industry is that generative AI art has this natural tendency towards producing weird and surreal imagery that I actually think DOES have a lot of artistic merit and potential if explored and leaned into as one of the unique strengths of the medium.

Like, when AI image generators were at the stage imbetween the vaguely recognizable imagery produced by neuralblender and the type of generators we're seeing today, they were producing really fascinating imagery that I'd argue had value as a contribution to the art landscape that was entirely unique to AI, since the weird surreal quality of the images was the result of Machine Learning programs interpreting words and images in a fundamentally different way than humans do.

Like i'd argue shit like this indisputably has a place as its own artistic style/medium, it's surreal and weird in ways which are completely distinct from what a human artist could produce because its unique strengths come from details that are inscrutable, ambiguous, and hard to parse to the human mind, which a human artist would have an extremely hard time mentally visializing, let alone translatong into an art piece.

But since the main selling point of AI art for both the people making these generators and the teach aficinados who are a little too into them is that AI art can serve as a cheaper/faster replacement and/or alternative for the work of human artists, progress is measured not in terms of how well they can use and explore the distincly non-human quality of AI art, but instead in terms of how well they can supress it to make it more closely mimic the work of human artists. So all advancement in the tech is geared towards progressively getting rid of the things I find artistically interesting about the medium instead of towards leaning into them as strengths that give it a unique, artistically worthwile style.

Like, I don't think AI art is inherently "soulless" or devoid of artistic merit, but I do think the focus on trying to make it increasingly indistinguishable from art produced by humans strips away the things that gave it artistic merit to me. This thing can produce imagery that is weird and wild and hard for us to even conceive but the profit motive's tendency towards rewarding homogenization has neutered that to turn it into a factory of increasingly bland, generic, serviceable imagery.

as soon as a line is drawn delineating two groups of people where before there was only one i will show you where the line runs down the middle of someone's body

had to censor so tumblr doesn't nuke it but this is one of my favourite gerard donelan comics -i don't know what else to say except the vibes are immaculate

Let’s talk about something called the “sunk cost fallacy”.

Say that you’ve bought a concert ticket for $50 for a band that you don’t know that well. Half an hour into the show, you realize that you don’t actually enjoy the music and you aren’t having a good time - instead of leaving the concert to go do something else, however, you sit through the remaining hours of the concert because you don’t want to “waste” the cost of the ticket. 

Congratulations, you’ve just fallen victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

The “sunk cost fallacy” is something that all humans are prone to when we make decisions. Simply put, it’s the human tendency to consider past costs when we make choices, even when those costs are no longer relevant. When you’re deciding whether or not to stay at that concert you aren’t enjoying, you will likely consider the cost of the ticket when you’re making your decision - for instance, you’d probably be a lot more willing to leave a $5 concert that you aren’t enjoying than a $50 concert that you aren’t enjoying. But taking the cost of the ticket into account at all is a mistake. 

When you’re making a rational decision, the only thing that matters is the future. Time, effort and money that you’re spent up until that point no longer matter - it doesn’t make sense to consider them, because no matter what you decide, you can’t actually get them back. They are “sunk” costs. If you decide to stay at that concert, you are out $50 and you’ll have a mediocre evening. If you decide to go leave and do something more fun, you are out $50 and you’ll have a better evening. No matter what you choose, you have lost $50 - but choosing to leave the concert means that you haven’t also spent an evening doing something you don’t like.

The sunk cost fallacy is sometimes also described as “throwing good money after bad” - people will waste additional time, resources and effort simply to justify the fact that they’ve already wasted time, resources and effort, even if it leaves them worse off overall. 

Common examples of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life include:

Perhaps the most damaging example of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life, however, is relationships. 

People often use the length of a relationship to justify staying in it. You’ve probably heard this logic - you may even have used it yourself: “I can’t break up with him or the two years we spent together will be for nothing.”

“If I leave her, it will mean I wasted the five years I spent with her.”

The reality, though, is that staying in a mediocre relationship doesn’t “give you back” the time you’ve already invested in that relationship. It just makes the relationship longer. If you stay in a bad relationship for five more years to avoid “wasting” the first two, you haven’t actually made those first two years worthwhile - you’ve simply spent seven years of your life in a bad relationship. There’s nothing we can do to recover time and effort (and in most cases, money) that we’ve already spent. But we can forgive ourselves, and we can stop letting our past mistakes continue to define our futures. 

To put it in Marie Kondo’s words, those things have served their purpose to you, even if their only purpose was to teach you that you do not like that thing. That ticket has now taught you that you do not like this type of band/concert, and leaving the concert is not a waste of that ticket because the ticket has already served its purpose to you. Don’t hold onto things solely out of guilt, because their purpose in your life is over now, and holding onto them will not bring you joy.

The neurodivergent experience is talking about your brain as if it's a separate entity from your self

i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

its so disgusting that you actually have to practice skills to retain them. just stay in my brain for retrieval pleaaaaaaassssssseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

one of my "special interests" in the past couple of years has been exploring fast fashion vs. slow fashion. it has been a long journey trying to find clothes that actually 1) fit me 2) look good 3) are made from material that is not actively shoving plastic in the ecosystem 4) involve ethical labor, fair trade, fairly compensated, etc

before i did this research, i really had no clue about fabrics or fashion brands. i used to think i had zero interest in fashion, in fact.

i grew up wearing walmart and thrift store clothes, and when i went to college i bought clothes from target and asos. something started to shift a little bit when i found vintage resellers on etsy and ebay... those clothes were so unique. but a lot of the vintage clothes were polyester blends, stiff, and would fall apart as easily as my asos clothes. i would leave them hanging in my closet and never wear them. i would wear the same old t shirts and jeggings every day. i felt like it was impossible to ever wear comfortable clothes, or ever feel good in clothes, so why bother?

it started with linen. linen is very comfortable and pretty sustainable. i was amazed that i didn't feel the urge to rip my clothes off when i wore linen. lightbulb number one.

a friend let me borrow a nooworks dress, and i went to the store and got some overalls. wow. overalls. lightbulb number two. holy shit, you can wear overalls. you know how people say "not binary or non-binary but a secret third thing." that's overalls.

i realized i loved the bonkers prints that nooworks had, and all of it was soft, and made ethically. it was a higher price point than i was used to, which gave me pause. but then you realize: we're not supposed to be buying dumb clothes every other weekend. and isn't a slightly higher price point for soft clothes that you won't want to tear off your body worth it?

so i started my research. i made a spreadsheet. the prices can be all over the place across brands, so i made a column for prices. sizes can be all over the place too -- people always ask me "where is the plus size slow fashion?" it's there. just look at the size column. people say "isn't it better to buy secondhand?" yeah, it is. i have many links to secondhand sources.

if you have any suggestions or additions please let me know, it is a living document.

update 6/2023: i added some stuff, deleted some stuff, and this spreadsheet is now huuuuuge! so i made some adjustments for better readability and use. i also added my lists of bags and backpacks so it's all in one place. remember the order of operations: resist buying on impulse, research and compare, trade / buy secondhand, and then, lastly, buy new if you have the $$$.