batman: what’s the situation?

commissioner gordon: Harley and Ivy have hijacked an AM radio station and taken the employees hostage

batman: what are their demands?

commissioner gordon: they haven’t issued any. they, uh.

batman:

[commisioner gordon turns on the radio]

harley: —you gotta walk away, sweetie. His family sounds completely toxic, if not outright emotionally abusive, and he’s too enmeshed to see it.

caller: no, you’re right. you’re right. I gotta do it.

harley: you got this, honey. now, stay on the line a minute, I’m writing down some the names of some books for you and you can get those from Ivy after we’re done. okay! our next caller —

[commisioner gordon turns off the radio]

batman: what station is this?

commisioner gordon: WGTM.

batman: the one that rebroadcasts rush limbaugh?

commissioner gordon:

batman:

commisioner gordon: you know what, i probably didn’t need to call you for this.

I WOULD PAY MONEY FOR RADIO SHRINK HARLEY OKAY? I WOULD CALL RADIO SHRINK HARLEY OKAY?

“alright, babe, one more reminder that my license was revoked which means i have to tell you this as your friend and not as a mental health professional: you have two options here. one of them is safe, legal, and healthy, and will have lasting long term benefits. the other one is fun.”

reblogging for this extremely accurate addition.

Ivy’s segment is where people call in to ask why their succulent is dying and she yells at them for watering it too much.

oh, VERY good

A few weeks in Selina gets dragged into it, and starts offering advice on caring for cats with special dietary needs and stuff. It inevitably turns into Jackson-Galaxy-esque explinations.

"My cat keeps attacking my feet."

"How often do you play with him?"

"Not as much as I should, but he has a basket of toys right there where he can reach it."

"He wants to play with you. Grab a teaser toy or a laser pointer and go nuts. He'll wear himself out in about fifteen minutes and you can go back to work."

great, now i actively want someone to start a podcast that’s just in-character episodes of batman villain radio shows

You know, I actually think this would make for a really good Killer Croc redemption storyline

Cause the guy's whole deal is him lashing out at society for rejecting him because he has a skin condition (ignoring the cannibalism in certain adaptations), which means radio would be perfect for him. People can't see him, they can only hear him, and I imagine he has a sort of warm scratchy voice that sounds like he chainsmokes and it feels warm like an old wool blanket

Maybe he tells stories, maybe he does interviews, maybe he takes calls, whatever. But he becomes a fixture of late night Gotham, beloved by late shift workers and night owls, and Waylon Jones becomes a household name amongst a decent chunk of Gotham. That way, when he's eventually outed, people stop reacting like "AAH A CROCODILE MAN" and start being like "hey, it's our Waylon!"

I just like the idea of Croc being accepted and even loved by the people of Gotham

Plot twist:

The show is sponsored by Wayne Enterprises.

If you ask Bruce in his billionaire-playboy-philanthropist-idiot persona, he’ll tell you talk radio is the fastest-growing communications segment in the country and you’ll be left wondering how the fuck this man runs a successful business.

If you are one of the select few who knows him in his “also I am Batman” capacity, he’ll tell you overall crime has gone down since the villain-run station has hit the air, and also if Harley Quinn can talk someone out of the early stages of an abusive relationship before he—or worse, the Gotham City Morgue—has to get involved, so much the better.

(Also, Ivy sent him a very nice orchid with very clear, vaguely-threatening care instructions, as a thank-you for the funding. Alfred follows them to the letter, of course.)

Shelving this right next to the one where the Riddler gets a YouTube account and/or escape room business.

i’m starting a movement to stop calling this shit “artificial intelligence” cause it’s fucking not. it’s not intelligent, and the things it produces are not informed by logical choices. it doesn’t know how to research sources for you. it doesn’t compose art thoughtfully or meaningfully.

call it machine-generated, text generator, chat bot, but it’s not intelligent.

I have started calling it Artificially Generated in my head and I support all of these.

I use “algorithmic iteration” as my expansion of the acronym - because that’s what it is - iteration of text-like objects with the choices determined by algorithms.

I’d offer the following suggestion: your tag block is like a movie poster, not a movie trailer. 

By which I mean, from your tag block, I should be able to get a decent idea of the following: which genre your fic falls into, and therefore which tropes to be looking out for; who the main speaking characters are and how they’re related to each other; which couple is the main romantic pairing (if applicable); what the specialist warnings are to do with your fic; what age group you’re writing for; and who the author is.

I should not be able to figure out the major plot points, the full cast list, the subtleties of the relationship between the main pairing, or the main jokes - please leave me with a reason to actually read your fic rather than just the tag block. 

This is a headline on an actual news website.

Yes please.

follow me for more piping hot takes, like: 

Hey, Maybe If You Hate Something A Lot, You Should Just Not Engage With It

It’s Okay To Just Dislike Something, You Don’t Have To Make Your Loathing It Your Entire Identity

Fandom Should Be Fun But It Seems Like It’s Making You Miserable; Maybe You Should Step Away

or how about this banger:

Just Because I Think You’ve Gone Overboard With Your Frothing Hate Doesn’t Actually Mean I’m A Fan Of The Thing In Question

Boosting signal

Do you think Naomi Novik ever looks at AO3

sees some incest mpreg

and whispers to herself “I never wanted this.”

No. :)

Ok, so something I've noticed that is utterly baffling to me is that all the Americans I know primarily dry their clothes using a machine called a dryer. I don't even own a dryer. So, I need to know:

These kind of questions really make me angry.

I have had people in my real life ask me similar things. Like this is some kind of “gotcha” where my resolve will suddenly crumble when it comes to very large people who cannot walk. As if I might then conclude “oh, well, at that point dieting and weight loss and bullying and abuse ARE the best path to health.”

No. No no no no. No.

I would love to live in a world where people who weigh 500 lbs have access to clothing that fits, furniture that accommodates them, medical care that actually understands their bodies and their needs. I want to live in a world where people who weigh 500 lbs can freely access whatever mobility aids and physical accommodations they need, without shame, guilt or abuse.

I want to live in a world where people who weigh 500 lbs can leave the house and feel safe and comfortable.

Now all of THAT would improve super fat peoples health. Not this objectifying, dehumanizing, faux concern exhibited by people like the OP.

People who weigh 500 lbs are not your fucking gotcha. Super fat people struggle day in and day out to exist and thrive in this hate-filled world. Show them some damn respect.

i’m going to, for the duration of my reply, assume avalxche was asking these questions in good faith, even those these particular questions have, historically, not been asked in good faith.

the fat acceptance movement, fat liberation, and body positivity in general (though that last one has been co-opted by people of all sizes now) all rely on every fat person being accepted. at no point will a “but what about—” question ever be replied to with a “oh, you’re right, they aren’t part of this, they can be dehumanized just fine!” keep that in mind going forward. i do understand that some people within the fat acceptance movements might accept bodies on a conditional basis, but they are doing fat acceptance wrong.

these types of questions are also why the fat acceptance movement and anti-ableism are so intrinsically linked. because these clarifying questions have boiled down to “do we still accept fat people if they’re disabled?” the obvious — to us, at least — answer is of course. why on earth wouldn’t we? but the society we live in, world-wide, is incredibly fatphobic and ableist, and so that isn’t as universally obvious as it should be.

the short answer remains, every single fat person in the world should have their bodies accepted, cared for, and accommodated for. they should face absolutely no guilt, or shame, and they should not be made fun of for their bodies in any capacity. yes, even those people. and those ones too. this includes any fat person you can imagine, even the ones you think are ‘bad.’

hope that clears things up.

i also want to draw attention to the biggest issue i have with this ask, which is the line: “i understand that weight looks different on different people.”

the body neutrality/fat acceptance movement is explicitly not about how fat people look. we’re not trying to change people’s attitudes towards fat people so that they think, “actually, people above such-and-such weight are attractive, despite everything society has told me.” the value of fat people’s lives and happiness doesn’t hinge on how the weight “looks on us”, it hinges on our intrinsic value as human beings who don’t deserve medical oppression and limited access to the necessities of life like clothing and furniture.

I'm just going to address this particular question posed by @avalxnche:

"Also, what about people who physically cannot hold their own weight on their own legs?"

I'd like to point out this is a very ableist question.  Hi, I work in the disability sector, and I could point you to about twenty customers of the organisation I work in alone who "physically cannot hold their own weight on their own legs" and who have weights of under 50kg.  (Yes, I’m talking about adults).

No, they're not available as targets for bullying, food-related abuse, and dehumanisation either.  Hope that clears things up for you.

This tweet is just... Odd. Very odd.

Like... You live like this? You write like this? You think like this??

I want to be absolutely clear that, when I write an alcoholic character, it's because I think that alcohol addiction and drinking to excess are cool. Just like when I write a criminal, I'm trying to persuade you, the reader, to take up a life of larceny and murder. Just so long as that's understood.

Oh good, because that's 100% the message I take from fictional media. For instance, I watched Hannibal for recipes and relationship advice.

Yeah, because when I took up writing as a hobby in Australia all those years ago, it was because I genuinely wanted to be a moral instructor and guardian for readers in the USA.  I always wanted to write the sorts of stories where the heavy-handed moral lessons are printed in big bold type at the end of the story just in case someone might have missed them in the actual text. 

Seriously, what is wrong with you people?  It’s like the only reading material some of you are allowed is Aesop’s Fables and the bible, and you can’t comprehend the notion of any kind of written material which doesn’t contain moral lessons.  Gods know how you cope with something like a bus timetable.

I got my ears pierced in a Claire's Accessories in 1992.

please go to a professional piercer

piercing guns (as used by claire's or other mall spots) cannot be fully sanitized

I got my ears pierced when I was twelve, at a beautician's shop in the nearest big shopping mall to where I lived. The other option was the local pharmacy. There were no designated professional piercing places around in suburban Western Australia in 1983.

Source

If the government is involved this will just be another disaster! 😂😂😂

Government inefficiency is due to private influences (corporations and the rich). Anyone who seriously thinks the private sector is more capable of handling public services simply has to read the article directly above for an example of how they are failing you. This move to make tax returns a public service is the exact opportunity to prevent private influences from muddying an otherwise efficient process

Reminder that in most industrialized countries, the government collects your financial data (as the US government does), calculates your taxes for you, sends you a bill, and you only have to file paperwork if you disagree with their figures. The US was going to build this sort of system in the 1990s but tax preparation companies (including the one which wrote Quicken) lobbied (i.e. bribed) Congress to stop it from happening.

"I DONT WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO PARTICIPATE FAIRLY IN THE FREE MARKET BECAUSE THEN I WOULD ALWAYS CHOOSE THEM FOR BEING THE CHEAPEST OPTION AND THERE WOULD BE BE ACTUAL COMPETION FOR ALL PRIVATE COMPANIES AND THEY WOULDN'T CONSPIRE WITH EACHOTHER AS MUCH!"

I’m in Australia, where the Australian Taxation Office collates the data they have on you (given to them by your employer(s), your bank, and anywhere else you’ve had to provide your tax file number) and provides that to you, for free, to enable you to put in your income tax return.  I timed “doing my taxes” last year (for a completely different argument) and it literally took me less than four minutes all up.  I have very simple tax affairs: one employer, one bank handling all my accounts, no major donations, and no deductions to consider.  It cost me nothing.

It’s worth noting private sector “efficiencies” measured against public sector costs are usually achieved by the private sector being very selective about the types of clients they take on. 

I've been reading Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr and one concept that I think is absolutely crucial and one of the best resources I've found for understanding my own experiences as an intersex person is the term Compulsory Dyadism.

Dr. Orr coins the term: "I propose the expression 'compulsory dyadism' to describe the instituted cultural mandate that people cannot violate the sex dyad, have intersex traits, or 'house the spectre of intersex' (Sparrow 2013, 29). Said spectre must be, according to the mandate, exorcised. However, trying to definitively cast out the spectre via curative violence always fails. The spectre always returns: a new intersex baby is born; one learns that they have intersex traits in adulthood; and/or medical procedures cannot cast out the spectre fully, as evidenced by life-long medical interventions, routines, or patienthood status. And the effects of compulsory dyadism haunt in the form of disabilities, scars, memories, trauma, and medical regimens (e.g., HRT routines). Compulsory dyadism, therefore, is not simply an event or a set of instituted policies but is an ongoing exorcising process and structure of pathologization, curative violence, erasure, trauma, and oppression." (Orr 19-20).

They continue on in their book to explore compulsory dyadism as it shows up in medical interventions, racializing intersex + sports sex testing, and eugenic and prenatal interventions on intersex fetuses. This term makes so much sense to me and puts words to an experience I've been struggling to comprehend--how can it be that so many endosex* people express such revulsion and fear of intersex bodies and traits, yet at the same time don't even know that intersex people exist? Why is it that people understand when I refer to my body in the terms used by freak shows, call myself a hermaphrodite, remember bearded ladies and laugh at interphobic jokes--yet do not even know that intersex people are as common as redheads? Understanding the term compulsory dyadism elucidates this for me. Endosex people might not comprehend what intersex actually is or know anything about our advocacy, but they do grow up in a cultural environment that indoctrinates them into false ideas about the sex binary and cultivates a fear of anything that lies outside of it.

From birth, compulsory dyadism affects every one of us, whether you're intersex or not. Intersex people carry the heaviest burden and often the most visible wounds that compulsory dyadism inflicts, as shown through often the very literal scars of violent, "curative" surgery, but the whole process of sex assignment at birth is a manifestation of compulsory dyadism. Ideas entrenched in the medical system that assign gender to the hormones testosterone and estrogen although neither of those hormones have anything to do with gender, a society that starts selling hair removal products to girls at puberty, and the historical legacy of things like sexual inversion theory are all manifestations of compulsory dyadism. For intersex people, facing compulsory dyadism often means that we are subjected to curative violence, institutionalized medical malpractice that sometimes includes aspects of ritualized sexual abuse, and means that we are left "haunted by, for instance, traumatic memories, acquires body-mind disabilities, an ability that was taken, or a 'paradoxical nostalgia....for all the futures that were lost' (Fisher 2013,45)." (Orr 26).

Compulsory dyadism works in tandem with concepts like compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality to create mindsets and systems that tie together ideas to suggest that the only "normal" body is a cisgender one that meets capitalist standards of function, is capable of heterosexual sex and reproduction, and has chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive system, and sex traits that all line up. Part of compulsory dyadism is convincing the public that this is the only way for a body to function, erasing intersex people both by excluding us from public perception and by actively utilizing curative violence as a way to actively erasure intersex traits from our body. Compulsory dyadism works by getting both the endosex and intersex public to buy into the idea that intersex doesn't exist, and if it does exist then it needs to be treated as a freakshow, either exploiting us to put us on display as an aberration or by delegating us to the medical freakshow of experimentation and violence.

Until we all start to fully understand the many, many ways that compulsory dyadism is showing up in our lives, I don't think we're going to be able to achieve true intersex liberation. And in fact, I think many causes are tied into intersex liberation and affected by compulsory dyadism in ways that endosex people don't understand. Take the intense revulsion that some trans people express about the thought of medical transition, for example. Although transitioning does not make people intersex and never will, and the only way to be intersex is to have an intersex variation, I think that compulsory dyadism affects a lot more of that rhetoric than is expressed. The disgust I see some people talking about when they think about medical transition causing them to live in a body that has XX chromosomes, a vagina, but also more hair, a larger clitoris--I think a lot of this rhetoric is born in compulsory dyadism that teaches us to view anything that steps outside the sex dyad with intense fear and violence. I'm thinking about transphobic legislation blocking medical transition and how there's intersex exceptions in almost every one of those bills, and how having an understanding of compulsory dyadism would actually help us understand the ways in which our struggles overlap and choose to build meaningful solidarity, instead of just sitting together by default.

I have so much more to say about this topic, and will probably continue to write about it for a while, but I want to end by just saying: I think this is going to be one of the most important concepts for intersex advocacy going into the next decade. With all due respect and much love to intersex activists both current and present,I think that it's time for a new strategy, not one where we medicalize ourselves and distance ourselves from queer liberation, not one where we sort of just end up as an add on to LGBTQ community by default, not even one where we use a human rights framework, nonprofits, and try to negotiate with the government. I agree with so much of what Dr. Orr says in Cripping Intersex and I think the intersex and/as/is/with disability framework, along with these foundational ideas for understanding our own oppression with the language of compulsory dyadism and curative violence, are providing us with the tools to start laying a foundation for a truly liberatory mode of intersex community building and liberation.

*Endosex means not intersex

Endosex people, please feel free to reblog!

Boosting signal.

Mainly because this idea of “there is only the arbitrary oppositional binary we have created, nothing else” is at the root of a lot of different problems in a number of different fields.  

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

May I point people at “Writer Beware” ( https://writerbeware.blog/ ), which is a blog which is associated with the SFWA, and serves as a bit of a clearinghouse for information about writing and publication scams out there.  Being affiliated with the SFWA, they do tend to focus a lot of science fiction and fantasy publishing markets, but they also cover romance, horror and just about any other fiction publishing market out there.

I seem to remember reading about Webnovel and their dodgy contracts on Writer Beware - https://writerbeware.blog/2023/01/20/bad-contract-alert-webnovel/. 

If you’re interested in writing and being published, Writer Beware is a good site to look at in order to avoid a lot of the scammers and grifters out there in the publication market.

What if the expulsion of Adam & Eve from the Garden of Eden was a meet-cute at the start of a celestial rom-com?

End of the world averted by the power of being English.

Gen Z is fucked because they don’t consider actions to be inherently evil but only evil within the context of people they deem “deserving” of punishment, so now everyone’s a psychopathic little busybody with a hero complex thinking they can play judge, jury and executioner.

Remember those two ladies at Disneyworld who somebody said “looked racist”? They weren’t wearing Confederate flags or Neonazi symbols on their clothes, they were just a couple of fat older women dressed in t-shirts and board shorts. So someone on Instagram deemed it perfectly acceptable to mock them for being fat and unattractive, because they were assumed to have been “deserving” of it.

The same mentality is used to mock poor people in the South. Again, because everyone in the South must be a racist redneck. So suddenly it’s fine to sneer at them having poor living conditions, their political needs not being listened to by the Democratic party, for natural disasters to ravage their homes etc. Because they’re obviously all racist, so it’s okay that they’re poor and suffering. They “deserve” it.

Do you understand why this whole “It’s okay if I do this to the right people” mentality is totally fucked up? You’re acting bigoted to people and justifying it by associating them with a negative trait. Which is exactly what racists do. What homophobes do. Literally the actions of the people you think deserve every kind of misery, you are doing that yourselves.

Evil begins when you treat people as things.  (This includes yourself, by the way.)

Start there.  Work outward from there.  

i do think that one of the worst things “activist” spaces on the internet ever did was convince young marginalized people that individual people, complete strangers, were their oppressors. no, matt from chemistry class isn’t personally oppressing you because he’s a guy, that old lady at the bank isn’t personally oppressing you because she’s cis, your waiter isn’t personally oppressing you because they’re white. individuals can and do contribute to systems of oppression. but seeing random individuals you encounter in your daily life as your oppressors will do nothing but trick you into punching laterally or punching down because you think it’s “empowering.” you might get a momentary rush of endorphins from snapping at the male cashier bc #menaretrashuwu but all you’re doing is being shitty to a random guy making poverty wages.

i saw a tik tok the other day that like perfectly described this phenomenon, how gen z (and some young millennials too tbh) pushes for systemic justice and equality, but refuses to give that on an interpersonal level, and like. y’all. you simply cannot achieve systemic change if you’re not also working toward interpersonal change. you will do more for your own liberation by treating others with sensible patience and kindness than you will pushing this toxic individualist narrative of “i don’t owe anyone anything and i get to act however i want to people i view as my oppressor.” we need class solidarity now more than ever.

this is what happens when we let this mindset become the default. this person is 15 and already using this mindset to spread bigotry. we have to work to deprogram our spaces and focus on collective liberation, because “i’m just hating my oppressors” is no longer an excuse to act like a bigot. it never was.

it is quite literally, by definition, bigotry.

Big fact: You do not need to have systemic power over a group to be bigoted or prejudiced against them.

Being marginalized does not immunize you against being a bad person. You cannot accumulate "marginalization points" and become "untouchable". At some point, it doesn't matter if you say it's "punching up" - you're just punching.

Evil begins when you treat people as things.  (This includes yourself, by the way.)

Start there.  Work outward from there.  

Things that should be 100% covered by the government, period:

In Australia most of these are covered by various government schemes, although often it’s for certain groups of people.

Glasses, you need to have a health care card (which means you’re either on government benefits or on a provably low income) and what it means it you’ll get single vision lenses in cut-price frames for a lower cost than usual.

Hearing aids - again, you need to have a health care card, but you can get a hearing aid fitted and prescribed for free.  The batteries, however, are not covered by government subsidy, and they’re expensive little whatsits.

Mobility aids - Need to be on the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) if you’re under 65; if you’re over 65, I think the Aged Care system will help subsidise it.

AAC devices - again, NDIS if you’re under 65.  Don’t know whether they’re available to people over 65 or not.

Prescription medications - this is where the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme Safety Net comes into play.  For all Australian citizens (or all people who have a Medicare card number - same effective difference), once you have paid a certain amount for PBS-registered prescription medications (which are already subsidised by the government) in the course of a calendar year, the price paid for each prescription drops to a much lower rate, and once you pass a second threshold, the price drops again (to nothing).  For people who are on a low income (health care card, again) they get the lower price to start with, and when they reach the first threshold, their prescription cost drops to zero.  (The trick with this one is that it runs by household - so everyone in the household needs to be listed on the same overall Medicare card number, but with different individual identifiers). 

Therapy - mostly if you need a lot of physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, dietician assistance, etc, you need to be either paying for private health insurance ancillary health cover, or you need to be on the NDIS if you’re under 65, or registered with the Aged Care system if you’re over 65.  The NDIS will tend to fund a certain level of therapy hours with each plan, and often they’ll specify how many of which hours you’re allowed to spend their money on (for example, my plan for autism includes a lot of psychology hours, but not much PT or OT).  If you’re needing mental health care, it is possible to get a Mental Health Plan, which will allow you a grand total of 10 psychologist visits at the Medicare bulk billing rate (if you can find a psychologist who firstly, bulk bills, and secondly, has the capacity to take on new clients) per year.  This is basically a maintenance schedule - you hopefully won’t get any worse than when you started, but you certainly won’t be getting any better. 

Just on a whim, because I know that Alcibiades is one of the weirdest and funniest characters in ancient Greek history, I asked ChatGPT "What's the weirdest thing Alcibiades ever did?"

ChatGPT came back with the details of something Alcibiades (henceforth referred to as 'Alci' so I don't have to keep typing it out) was accused of, but acquitted of.

When I pointed out that he had been acquitted and may not have actually done this thing, Chat GPT apologised and said, "yes, he was acquitted", and then went on to tell me that, nonetheless, the event was significant because it made Alci flee the city.

Alci did not flee the city, he was sent away on a military expedition, which was exactly what he'd wanted and asked for. When I pointed that out, ChatGPT apologised again for being wrong.

I asked again for weird things he might actually have done, and was told one version of a story I've heard before about how Alci stole some stuff from a friend. ChatGPT's version was different from what I'd heard, though, so I mentioned that, and only then did ChatGPT acknowledge that there were different versions of the story. As part of its apology and correction, ChatGPT said that it did not always have access to all information - but then proceeded to provide details of the version of the story I'd heard before, showing that it did, in fact, have access to that information.

I asked again, what is the weirdest thing Alcibiades ever did? ChatGPT gave me an answer, which was a story I'd never heard before, so I asked for a source. ChatGPT told me it was in Plutarch's Lives, and I presumed it was in his Life of Alcibiades, so that's where I looked. When I said I couldn't find it there, ChatGPT told me, sorry for not being specific, it was actually in Plutarch's Life of Nicias. So I went and read Plutarch's Life of Nicias and couldn't find it.

So I told ChatGPT that I couldn't find the story in that book, could it please be more specific? What I was hoping for was a chapter or page number or something, I just presumed I'd missed it.

ChatGPT came back with "no, actually it's not in that book, it may be a later invention, there is no concrete evidence for this story."

TL;DR: ChatGPT cannot be trusted. Even when it does give you a source, it can be wrong. It has no capacity to evaluate the accuracy or likely accuracy of the information it gives you. It will present you with wrong or debatable information and give you absolutely no indication that it may not be correct, or that other versions or interpretations are possible.

gotta remember that chat GPT works basically the same way autocomplete works, but it can autocomplete longer runs of reasonably coherent text.

it’s not looking up facts, its both trying to say the thing that’s most likely to come next in the text it was trained on, and also trying to not perfectly replicate the training text, because it’s supposed to be a bit creative.

what this means is that it’s actually primed to lie to you. you can feed it nothing but perfectly factual text and it will spit back lies because the truth replicates the training set too closely.

it’s not really capable of answering a question the way a person might.

what it does is generate text that reasonably seems like what an answer to that question might look like.

it’s a bullshit generator.

it is made to bullshit tech investors. (who exclusively talk by making up things that sound correct without regard for the actual truth) so, if you’re smarter than a venture capitalist then don’t fall for the bullshit meant to ensnare venture capitalists.

That's a really good way to put it!

Things ChatGPT might actually be good for:

In time, Chatbot AIs may be able to come up with decent story summaries - you feed it the fic; it gives you a one-paragraph description. You decide how much of that to use, and whether to change it because the focus you want is something else.

Item #1 - drafts of business contracts - is so fucking useful that, on its own, that would guarantee the chatbots are never going away.

What chatGPT will never be good for:

(Give it three years and wait for the hilarious lawsuit when one company sues another over some clause buried in the AI-generated contract that nobody noticed until some intern pointed it out at a board meeting.)

I have a colleague at work who is using it to generate bureacratese.  And yeah, it is very good at that - I haven’t seen such good bureaucratic bullshit (sound and fury signifying nothing) since I stopped receiving dole payments.   But then, bureaucratese is about using language to simulate meaning, not create it, so it makes sense that a language simulator would be good at it.

Okay but this is serious, I work in retail and I had a lady come up and ask for 2 $500 Google play gift cards. We have been trained to look for these scams and to warn the customers NEVER give the card numbers over the phone unless you have met this person face to face. I told the lady this and she started crying, saying they were the IRS and that if she hung up they would call the police and have her arrested. They wanted to keep her on the phone so she couldn't call her husband, who was more aware of how the IRS works. I was able to convince her to hang up and call the police on *them* instead, and saved her $500.

Scams are serious, people lose a lot of money and older people are targeted the worst because they're easy targets.

First of all, the IRS will *never* call you and ask for money, and they definitely won't call the cops on you. They'll get your money if they really want it through taxes.

But now they're trying to target our generation using crypto, which is super hard to trace if the money gets lost. So they're getting smarter, and they'll use whatever they can to get you to give them money.

What you really need to know or take away from this is: NEVER, and I mean EVER, buy a gift card and give the barcode number on the back to someone over the phone. It is ALWAYS, 100%, a scam!

Please be safe and hang up on these fuckers the second they ask you to buy a gift card.

I had a young guy, couldn't be more than 25, who also fell for one of these scams.

He came into my store, and bought 2 $500 Visa cards (which are known to backfire, and be unviable if you buy too many). The one card did backfire, and wouldn't work, and thus, he began crying and panicking.

The guy told my coworker someone had a picture of him, and this person would get said picture to go viral if he didn't send them the numbers for the cards. The young man, panicked, broke down crying, and said he wasn't sure what to do.

My coworker told him to call the police.

Another older man, elderly, came in and bought a $500 Apple card, claiming it was for his lawyer who would send it to his kids.

This older man sent the numbers over the phone, then the "lawyer" claimed the numbers didn't work. The man was home by this point, and since he was disabled, he called the store asking politely, worriedly, for a refund. I told him he'd have to call Apple for a refund, since we can't do it and the card said it activated on our end.

He ultimately sent in his neighbor who tried talking to me, and I told her the same thing: she has to call Apple for a refund, the card is perfectly viable, and activated.

So some takeaways from all this:

Scammers will nearly always say the card doesn't work, even though they're actually activated

Scammers will nearly always ask for the maximum amount of payment available to a card (usually $500)

Scammers will nearly always blackmail you

The IRS will NEVER call you, that is illegal on their end, and they only communicate via mail

Anyone of any age can and will fall for these scams, so bear in mind these things, and do not fall for them yourself! Always call the police!!

Worth knowing government agencies and departments are required by law to accept the legal tender for their nation.  If you have someone who is saying they are from a government agency who will not accept cash or a cheque, hang up, and call the agency back through their main switchboard.