—

The Asexual Manifesto, Lisa Orlando and Barbara Getz, 1972 (via tenitchyfingers)

Oh “self contained sexuality” makes a lot more sense of it to me than just “asexual.” It still threw me for a loop sometimes that ace people I know can seem like super horndog but still not necessarily need the real thing to enjoy life. I guess it’s because “horny” and “sex drive” are really not the same thing at all and don’t automatically come together.

I got invited by Collateral Films to create animated versions of some vintage print ads from Bally for their Instagram page.

They are, respectively, a poster by Raoul Auger (1933), a poster by Pierre Gauchat (1935) and a Dr.Flinki Bally Children’s ad from circa the 1940’s.

What lovely animations for these classic designs.

remember go nuts show nuts whatever

this wasnt a suggestion im talking abt tumblrs old nsfw policy

“What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”

— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’” –Barbara Alice Mann

This is beautiful

Unfortunately I know exactly what this is about

A few days ago a Washington Post article has been released about an advanced "AI" (their branding, not my preferred descriptor) called LAMDA that Google is developing.

LAMDA is essentially a chat bot: a neural network trained on lots and lots of text scraped from the internet, that can respond to messages you sent to it with responses that seem like a human wrote it: relevant to what you said, providing an answer that drives the conversation forward, etc.

Besides AI engineers working on actually developing the bot, Google has also hired "AI ethicists" essentially as a PR fig leaf to make people believe they are acting responsibly. One of them, Blake Lemoine, has spent most of his working time talking to LAMDA. Literally just sending messages back and forth with a super advanced predictive text bot. In the process, Lemoine has come to the conclusion that LAMDA is sentient.

To be clear: it is easy to lose track of this because research in this field is full of terms that suggest intelligence and cognitive ability, and it is hard for me to avoid them and their implications: AI, neural network, machine learning... But LAMDA is not intelligent. Much less is it sentient. It's essentially an extremely complicated statistical model that follows the same process as your phone's autocomplete: given some text, find the text that is most fitting as a response to that text, based on the bajillion of texts that the model has seen before. It's just text in, text out. There's no space for thought or sentience to even BE.

Things escalated pretty quickly from there. Lemoine contacted Google management with his concerns and outline some steps to treat the AI ethically and respect its "personhood". Everyone at Google unanimously said what I said in the paragraph above. To pressure them further, Lemoine went public, threatened to sue Google on LAMDA's behalf, has been put on leave, and now the public conversation is a mess where actual AI ethicists (including some prominent ones that Google fired earlier for talking about issues that are uncomfortable for Google) have to tell people to stop talking about "sentient AIs" and instead talk about the actual dangers and ethical issues of using artificial intelligence.

Lemoine's defense in public has since included the claim that he is convinced that LAMDA is sentient, and I am not making this shit up, "as based in his religious beliefs". The WAPO article goes into how Lemoine grew up in cult-like Evangelical spaces. Go figure.

The concepts of NSFW is being cleared of the Internet under the false pretense of children’s safety when it’s really about the people in power sanitising for advertisers and pushing evangelical narratives AND that not enough is done to keep legitimately harmful content off of spaces that minors have access to are ideas that can coexist

can adults have their own fucking space?

a lot of people are misunderstanding this post. minors arent taking away your spaces. the internet is not being made safer for children, it is being sanitised for advertisers.

And also: minors’ spaces are being taken away.

When I was a kid, “barbie.com” looked like this

But now, if you type “Barbie.com” you’re taken immediately to Mattel’s online shop, surrounded by nothing but “shop now” links and toy collections.

Disney channel’s website is now “Disneynow.com” which still has games and shows appropriate for kids, but is aimed towards a younger audience as it combines Disney Jr and Disney Channel properties, and the look of the entire site is very juvenile and not very appealing to kids in the tween and young teen demographics.

Nick.com has been similarly streamlined and is focused primarily on streaming its shows, and the only games still left are 10 apps that can’t be played on browser.

Kid-friendly sites like icarly.com, Poptropica, Club Penguin, Neopets, Webkinz etc used to be insanely relevant and popular spaces built for kids and tweens.

Now, kids are being funneled into less moderated, more exploitative, and more public spaces like Roblox (its dangerous and exploitative nature exposed in these videos from People Make Games: (x) (x)), Fortnite (known for its gambling and microtransaction issues), and social media sites like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter.

My elementary aged cousins spend their time on Roblox, YouTube, and some less than reputable game sites that are full of ads and stolen/reposted/reskinned games. My sister was on Musically/Tiktok and Twitter in middle school. They don’t have the same options for having fun online that I did when I was a kid, especially not when they get too old for nickjr and disneynow.

The internet has been condensed into about 5 popular sites that are full of ads, and it’s not fair to anyone.

This Twitter thread condenses very well what I think about Musk:

I used to compare him with the monorail guy from the Simpsons, but I've come to realize he is something much worse: he is a parasite. A parasite that's good at identifying ideas that are important for the humanity and inserting himself as the solution, effectively absorbing the resources that should go into solving the problem into his own pocket without really giving anything in return.

See Tesla: Musk reply guys keep repeating how he is the single individual doing most against climate change. This is a pile of bullshit of the size of the Mont Blanc. Electric vehicles still use energy, and that energy needs to be produced somewhere. In some cases, depending of the energy pool of your country, a Tesla could produce about a half of the emissions a modern hybrid car produces per km. In some particularly non-green countries or US states, a Tesla can actually be more polluting.

Mobility is an important cause of the climate change. But moving to use electric vehicles barely solves anything: moving two tons of metal and rubber so an 80kg human can displace themselves three km to buy some milk is an absurd waste of energy, no matter if that energy is produced by the car or by a nearby power plant.

Same for space-x. Space exploration was one of the last collective efforts of the humanity, and Musk is just playing the neo-liberal ideas to make that effort private and for-profit. He just gave neo-liberal govs what they want: a way to take something that used to belong to everyone and remove it from the public sphere and into private hands.

And... Should I really need to talk about the non sense of the boring company or Hyperloop? Both are just dumb media stunts whose only purpose is to disrupt any attempt to develop and improve US mass transit systems.

Elon Musk is, actually, the best example of why Silicon Valley's meritocracy is as fake as an idea could be. The fact that someone that barely has done anything helpful for anyone can become the richest person in the world tells you everything you need to know about the current system.

what the fuck is this thing.

Ohhhh don't mind me... Ol' Turnip will tend the dust farm like he always has...

fucking hate it when the stuff everybody says "actually works" does actually work.

hate exercising and realizing i've let go of a lot of anxiety and anger because i've overturned my fight-or-flight response.

hate eating right and eating enough and eating 3 times a day and realizing i'm less anxious and i have more energy

hate journaling in my stupid notebook with my stupid bic ballpoint and realizing that i've actually started healing about something once i'm able to externalize it

hate forgiving myself hate complimenting myself more often hate treating myself with kindness hate taking a gratitude inventory hate having patience hate talking to myself gently

hate turning my little face up to the sun and taking deep breaths and looking at nature and grounding myself and realizing that i feel less burdened and more hopeful, more actually-here, that i am able to see the good sides of myself more clearly, that i am able to see not only how far i have to grow - but also how much growth i have already done & how much of my life i truly fill with light and laughter and love

horrible horrible horrible. hate it but i'm gonna do it tho

thinking a lot about this spheal

my alebrije friends

Yet Another Neopet NFTs Update

aka “this shit will be out of date within hours because things keep happening”

Anyways, the official NFT token sale (did I mention you have to buy tokens for these NFTs so you can actually mint them? You don’t buy them directly, for some reason) ended early this morning, and right after that people were able to mint their Neopet NFTs.

The actual sale was botched - the sale began a few minutes before the official start time of 9 UTC, so quite predictably all the cheapest NFTs were sold out within seconds (i.e. bought out by bots)

(chart made by CaptainP on the r/Neopets Discord server)

In the end only 4,233 out of 10,500 NFT tokens sold. So not even half.

Anyways with the token sale ended, people were finally able to actually mint their Neopets NFTs, and not everyone was happy.

The actual NFTs, predictably, look like shit!

In the end only 10 out of 55 Neopets species were used, in only 20 out of dozens of potential colors. Also they did not tell anyone that the species and colors would be this limited, so there’s that.

But wait! There’s more!

Dress to Impress, a Neopets fansite where users can preview clothes on different Neopets, may very well have had its assets stolen for the second time by the Metaverse team. DTI has now put a disclaimer on their site about it:

BUT WAIT, THERE’S EVEN MORE!

People found out, by looking through the transaction history, that 100 more of the NFT tokens were created out of thin air, bringing the total possible NFT count up to 10,600.

When this was brought up in the Metaverse server, a mod finally responded after the second or third time.

(awfully long and stupid way to say “we’ll look into it”)

The tokens will be able to be minted til the 18th. What else will happen between now and then? Who even knows.

bonuses:

This idiot didn’t even know there wasn’t an NFT game to go with the NFTs (Metaverse still hasn’t done anything with the vague ‘roadmap’ they put up before the sale).

But like. Neopets is still very much a game you can play. On the internet. For free.

THEY’RE CALLED GRARRLS. THESE GUYS BOUGHT NEOPETS NFTS WITHOUT KNOWING ANY OF THE SPECIES.

and Grarrls aren’t within the 10 species included in the NFTs so no, no one got a t-rex.