for the love of everything that is good and nice DON'T DO THIS

Please do not do this! I'm happy to talk about 'what ifs' or 'what happens next' even if I can't write a whole fic but PLEASE don't put any fics into AI!

#i'm so exhausted#fic being scraped off ao3 by bots is bad enough#readers actually FEEDING fic into AI is breaking my actual heart#DO NOT EVER FEED FIC INTO AI WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION#99.999% of authors are THRILLED to discuss AUs for their fics#the 'what ifs'#the 'missing scenes'#the possible alternate outcomes#JUST ASK THE AUTHOR TO CHAT WITH YOU ABOUT THIS#most of us would cry with joy if you gave us the chance to ramble about our fics!#DO NOT FEED MY FICS TO AI PLEASE I BEG YOU -@cicerfics

Oh my god what no don't do this what the fuck

I spent a good chunk of my weekend scrambling to finish this comic. I hope you like it. I was really trying to push myself with the colours.

You know what’s wild? This comic still gets reblogged every single day. I made it so long ago it doesn’t even feel like my own work haha. Anyways, I guess I’m glad people still like it but it’s very weird to have One Piece of Art that Doesn’t Fade.

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

some good theories in the notes but I choose to believe those are made by a village or perhaps king as an artificial home, to attract and keep a wizard. like a beehive

While artificially built towers do attract wild wizards a wizard will naturally build their own tower as they enter the later stage of their life cycle. For the first couple hundred years of their lives wizards are extremely mobile and may travel almost anywhere in the world or even beyond. A tower usually begins as a workshop which the wizard returns to during their migration in order to store trinkets and artifacts which they collect during their travels. As the collection outgrows the available space in the workshop a combination of the concentration of volatile magical energy and the wizards natural desire to build secret passageways causes them to begin expanding the workshop. This usually starts with basic "bigger on the inside" magic but due to constraints around energy usage for sustained large scale spacetime warping they will eventually turn to more traditional methods of building. There are some documented cases of wizards whose workshops expanded outward instead of upwards, resulting in labyrinth structures rather than the more traditional tower. It is still unclear what environmental pressure causes these divergent structures. As the wizard ages and their exploratory phase winds down their travels will focus on a progressively more narrow subset of arcane knowledge until they find one secret of the universe complex enough to prompt their transition into the final stage of the wizard lifestyle. By this point they will almost certainly have a fully fledged tower or have settled into one they've found already existing. Their desire to travel is generally severely reduced by this point and outside of quests to discover certain highly specific items related to their studies it's possible that they might not leave their tower for months or years at a time. In some cases they may begin this phase several times if the secret they started pursuing is less challenging or less fundamental to the operations of the universe than expected. When they do find their final subject of study and find the answers they sought, they will finally reach the end of the wizard life cycle, either via death caused by hubris, merging with a larger consciousness, ascendence to a different plane or to godhood, or metamorphosis into a litch. Other wizards may sometimes occupy the abandoned towers of a former wizard but most will move on in order to build their own before entering into these later stages. Very rarely a particularly social variety of wizard may build several connected towers and share resources, these are called schools and over time they will tend to attract a large number of younger and weaker wizards seeking shelter.

Absolutely brilliant analysis of wizards and their migratory patterns through the ages. I can personally verify that this is accurate, and you may now consider this properly peer reviewed and accepted.

My cat’s body is so loose and saggy that he blended in perfectly with a sweater on the ground. When my mom was cleaning up, she thought he was part of the sweater and grabbed him. :(

You GRAB miette??? You grab miette like a sweater???

true crime is becoming to girls what ww2 is to boys

#there’s definitely some amount of difference#because a lot of women get into true crime#because they’re overly aware that the majority of the murder victims are women#and it’s kind of a response to knowing how dangerous it is to exist in this world as a woman- like ‘this could be me’#or ‘this is how i would protect myself if i were in this situation’#or even trying to make true crime seem more like a show because it makes the possibility that they’ll be harmed seem less likely#but also there’s serial killer fangirls so like#you really can’t defend that

The majority of murder victims are, in fact, men.

Specifically, 79%.

The most murdered group, specifically, are black men.

The LEAST murdered demographic are middle class white women, who oddly make up a majority of the murder victims shown in true crime programs and news reports, and also the ones who make up the majority of true crime fans.

It’s called Missing White Woman Syndrome, and it’s based in racist disregard for non-white lives and patriarchal protectiveness of (white) women and it leads white middle class women to have a vastly overblown idea of their own vulnerability to random serial killers.

Note, ‘overblown.’ These women are feeling fear for a vanishingly unlikely occurrence, akin to preppers who spend their lives preparing for Russian invasions. It’s not a healthy or rational fear, and it shouldn’t be encouraged.

The analogy is also apt, even if watching out of own personal fears. In the end you’re still watching police propaganda, to justify the use of the prison systems (or capital punishment), and it’s purposely playing on your fascination and disgust to do this. The same bigoted system most privileged will buy their way out off anyway. Its reactionary as shit lol.

from “violent delights” by sarah marshall

(image id under the cut)

Keep reading

One single republican decided to base his vote on a reasonable evaluation of available data and it quite possibly improved thousands of lives. I hope maybe in my lifetime I’ll see an America where that isn’t shocking for a politician to do, and maybe one in which people’s entire well being doesn’t come down to just one extra guy having a shred of decency.

something very charming about “I don’t really know what’s going on here but I don’t think it’s my problem” as a response to the anti-trans hysteria

If you like the word “queer” reblog.

#fun umbrella. we r all sitting under it like the big rainbow thing in elementary school gym class

Behold: the queer community

Climate crisis is coming for all of us. We need to vote for people who are not insulated from reality via donor bribes.

We need a robust EPA. The current Supreme Court wants to end the EPA and Federal power to regulate our air and water. Never forget.

Get involved. Vote.

The air quality that is so shocking in New York is identical to the air quality I grew up with in Los Angeles. The EPA and the AQMD changed all of that, and I don't ever want anyone to have to experience what I did. It was awful. We must insist on strong environmental laws and severe penalties for those who break them. We owe it to our kids.

Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn on marriages. And Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for the DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but that religiosity does

This is a really good writeup.

Something it leaves out, which I think is very important and a major nail in the coffin of “porn addiction”, is that researchers did brain scans of “porn addicts” and found that they have the opposite response to the brains of people addicted to drugs, alcohol, and gambling:

This matters because a) the treatment for someone with an addiction that has affected their brain is different to people who are having problems that don’t have those effects, and b) the belief that porn is addictive like alcohol is a major plank in conservative attacks on it (and on sex workers). The reason that this has come back up now is that both Republicans and Democrats in Texas are trying to force porn websites to post disclaimers about porn being “biologically addictive” when it isn’t.

The 2023 American Girl Doll of the Year is Kavi Sharma, a South Asian American theatre kid who loves Wicked SO SHE HAS A REPLICA ELPHABA COSTUME. I am absolutely ecstatic that kids get this.

SHE ALSO HAS THIS!! BECAUSE SHE PERFORMS A TRADITIONAL DANCE ROUTINE WITH HER FRIENDS AT SCHOOL AND SHE LOVES BOLLYWOOD

If you are on the East Coast and trying to figure out what all of these air quality warnings mean and what you should do, here is what the colors and corresponding AQI numbers mean. The updated AirNow map is at this link:

Edit: this was posted at 10:50am on June 6 2023 and the screenshots were taken around 9am.

This map shows wildfire locations:

(NASA Earth Observatory image of the Quebec wildfires by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview)

And if you're wondering why all these wildfires seemed to come out of nowhere:

While we are on the topic, since I've seen some comments in the notes! If you have been getting air quality warnings from your weather app but not much else of use about why the sky looks weird, or have otherwise been dissatisfied or confused about where to get reliable information about why the sky is orange, you should be aware that virtually everything that for-profit weather companies like AccuWeather and the Weather Channel show you is simply repackaged taxpayer-funded data from the National Weather Service (NWS) (and more broadly, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that is home to the NWS). Private companies have a vested interest in making sure they have a vital chokehold on the flow of weather information in the US, to the point of heavy lobbying about what and how NWS can communicate to the public; the former AccuWeather CEO (and Trump nominee for head of NOAA 😬) spent years arguing that NWS should be "entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of Accuweather."

To paraphrase Michael Lewis and his book "The Fifth Risk," which does a deep dive on the services that the federal government carries out, private companies that rely on publicly funded data essentially scam you into paying for the same information twice - once as a taxpayer supporting public investment into necessary services like weather monitoring, then again when you are forced to pay for the results of that investment.

I recommend you find your local NWS weather office and get set up so that you get your weather alerts straight from them:

It won't be as slickly packaged, perhaps, but all the critical information (and more!) is there, free of ads and free of the often bogus forecasts and sketchy content that these companies add on to attract an audience:

This site has been going around Twitter trans accounts quite a bit lately, so just pointing out here too that it'll do fuck all, they're exploiting trans people at a time when hrt is particularly hard to access and please don't give them your money

fuckin exploitative bullshit marketed in the worst way imaginable

literally selling laxatives as weight loss supplements

Reddit post by Dr Will Powers

No actually, this needs to be in the body of the post.

This isn't someone looking to make a quick buck off the backs of desperate trans women.

This is someone who is gathering a hit list. This person may use your info for active swatting, but not just that, this product will kill you.

This product is outright dangerous. This dose of ashwagandha is ASTRONOMICAL. It's anxiolytic - meaning that it causes agitation and anxiety - and if you take this dose every day you'll be developing serotonin syndrome within 4-6 weeks, and an ER trip/death within 8. And if you're on medications that interact (SSRIs, antipsychotics, most kinds of opiates) or alcohol, this risk is magnified.

This person wants to KILL YOU.

Also the photo they're using for the founder is AI generated. The easiest tell is the neck tattoo seemingly merging with the collar of the shirt, and none of the locs actually having an end that connects them to the scalp.

There's a terf in the comments screeding about how this totally isn't a rightwing psyop and it's asian fetishizing trans ppl obsessed with anime doing this, so here's some irrefutable proof that it is, in fact, a right-wing dox honeypot!

If you go to any post by TheQueerQuirk on Twitter and replace the username part of the url with transaretr8ors it will redirect you to the same tweet with the new username, indicating that TheQueerQuirk's old username WAS in fact transaretr8ors. You can test this yourself.

They're also stealing images from r/transtimelines for fake reviews.

Their domain name was registered on June 2 and the address marked is a common scam address (seemingly of the Icelandic Phallological Museum).

THIS IS A HONEYPOT. THEY'RE COLLECTING ADDRESSES. YOU COULD BE SWATTED, HAVE YOUR IDENTITY STOLEN, OR AT THE VERY BEST RECEIVE A PRODUCT THAT WILL CAUSE SEROTONIN SYNDROME.

SPREAD.

hello trans friends and allies! the Tennessee Senate has passed bill SB 1440, which will hinder trans people’s ability to change their legal names and gender markers. this will go into effect July 1, 2023 which is in less than a month. 

what you can do right now is visit https://www.inclusiontn.org/tnncp and access free emergency name change services from legal professionals. if you don’t need these services, you can also donate to help cover the costs.

please please spread the word and share to your friends in TN as we only have until the end of this month! 

Theres a novel by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade, which has an alien spacecraft land in rural England in 1345 during the Hundred Year’s War. The local baron has been raising an army to help King Edward against the French, and immediately assumes this must be some kind of enemy trick.

In a way, he’s correct: the aliens are scouts for a brutal and repressive interstellar empire, which has dominated numerous planets through their devastating technology.

Unfortunately, this reliance on advanced weapons means they’ve completely forgotten all forms of melee combat and Sir Roger of Tourneville leads his militia to defeat the aliens easily.

They spare a single enemy, forcing him to fly the ship at spearpoint. They intend to raid behind enemy lines, capture the king of France to end the war, and then go onward to reclaim the Holy Land using the same tactic.

In an attempt to outwit the knights, the alien pilot actually travels to the nearest Imperial planet, where he expects the occupying military forces to save him.

I won’t spoil the details, but the knights accept this as a challenge and declare the launch of the “high crusade”.

That last picture is so stupidly badass I might tattoo that next to my dick cause it ain’t getting any better after that

Lin-Manuel Miranda is not untalented but he shouldn't be making billion dollar disney movies or whatever. This guy should be in a garage making deeply earnest but unpolished rap opera concept albums and posting them online for a niche fanbase of no more than 100,000 too-online theatre nerds. Hiring him to make forgettable paint-by-numbers radio friendly disney princess pop is trying to raise devil's pupfish in captivity. You have to stop giving him money and let him go make cringe in his natural habitat or you're never going to get anything good.

lady who picked up her laptop a minute ago gave me a little origami crow that was like a billion milligrams of dopamine directly into my brain

This always fucks me up to think about

@nika-spacejunk

Im now picturing touch sensitive autistics just feeling a fabric and thinking. "Omg this feels like horrendous city planning i CANNOT wear this!"

Rating the birds in my backyard by tendency toward violence

Northern Cardinal, 4/10

I'm sometimes worried the male is sexually harassing the female but I'm pretty sure they're just doing some elaborate public pickup roleplay. The rest of us didn't agree to participate in your kink, guys.

American Robin, 1/10

Literally just some dude hanging out. Never bothered anyone but worms. Big fan of the way you just stand there in the middle of the grass like you forgot what you were supposed to be doing.

House Sparrow, 10/10

You're a gang. You're participating in gang violence. There's ten billion of you living in a single wood pile and it's been civil war for three years now. When will the bloodshed end?

Tufted Titmouse, 1/10

A shy baby. A pretty little guy. I saw you on the neighbor's garage roof and time stopped. There were anime sparkles around you. Come back.

European Starling, 9/10

Why is it always you? Listen, I know, I KNOW the sparrows are the problem, and YET. When the fighting starts, it's always you in the middle of it, provoking them and then screaming like you're an innocent bystander defending yourself. I'm onto you.

Carolina Wren, 3/10

This rating is not for physical violence, which you don't engage in, but for your role as an incurable narc. A tattle tale. I know they're fighting again, okay? I see it. Our yard has been a warzone for years, you don't have to make a big announcement every time someone misbehaves.

Eastern Wood-Peewee, 0/10

If this were "birds who think they're better than everyone else," you'd get 10/10.

Red-bellied Woodpecker, 6/10

It's a utility pole. It's not a tree. You're surrounded by trees that are full of bugs. But there you are, on the utility pole. Committing vandalism.

American Crow, unrated

For who am I to cast judgment on the actions of La Famiglia? I assume you are doing what is best for the neighborhood. If I could, though, without criticism, make a single observation. That when large numbers of you gather in the ominous dead cottonwood - no? No, you're right. None of my business.

Great Crested Flycatcher, 5/10

Frankly, I think you could be doing more. I think your name implies a great potential. I think you should massacre the insects. I think your beak should drip with viscera.

Stay tuned for more criminal activity!

1) While I laud your observations as well your discretion re La Famiglia, I gather you have never encountered Bongo, Son of Bongo, or their ilk whose life's mission is to eradicate the male cardinal that lives in the sliding glass door *bonk* *bonk* *bonk* *bonk*

2) I would like to submit House Finches/Purple Finches/All the Damn Finches 8/10 for birdfeeder squabbles that were our breakfast entertainment pre-internet.

3) Having moved west, I know why the Aztecs saw hummingbird as a war god. Sooner or later some evil mastermind is going to genetically modify hummers back to dinosaur size, feeding them on fruit smoothies and Red Bull, and kill us all.