i am a firm supporter of changing your name to whatever it you want regardless of your gender. if a woman wants to go by matt then matt she shall be. godspeed

wait ok mutuals what do you guys call your parents???????

Hey! What the fuck is going on in here

no where else

There's having sock puppet accounts, and then there's putting on a puppet show.

I do think that military doctrine produces some of the most appalling writing known to man, I don't know if it's related to cop-speak, the way that simple things need to be dressed up in bizarrely indirect neologisms, or if the military just doesn't select for good writers.

I don't want you pushing through the dilemma presented by one of my arms, so I'm going to expose another layer of your critical vulnerability to my friendly capability

There’s definitely a lot of “don’t say you’re killing people“ going on.

I wouldn't say that we're killing people exactly, just presenting them with multidimensional dilemmas across a range of active theatres that reduce their capacity for effective operations by blowing their heads clean off their shoulders

I don't think I ever noticed this parallel until this time around, but both the Xingese royalty are asked a terrible favor by someone lying immobilized and dying on the ground because they're the only one who can do it.

Buccaneer asks Ling to keep the gate closed. I don't remember his reaction in the show, but in the comic there is a several panel hesitation where his expression looks like he understands exactly what he is being asked to do - kill a bunch of people whose main crime is staying loyal to their leader in a situation they don't fully understand, the same thing that just left one of his own people dead at his feet. I joke about him being the 15 year old down with murder but he does not look happy about it. And then of course Mei is asked by Al to use her alkahestry - something intended for medical use, to help people - to send him back through the portal, potentially killing him if Ed can't get him back, and she's in tears.

In both scenes they're asked for a favor and told this is something only they can do. Big asks for children who didn't mean to get involved in the affairs of this country, but they are there to claim a philosopher's stone, even if Mei voices qualms about the ethics. You want to rule? You want to use something terrible because you believe it's the best way to protect people? Then here, do this other terrible thing. In that sense it's the same ask they've been getting their entire lives. The people we love need protection. No one else can do this. Only you. Now live with it.

fuck it, its monday and im going to be a hater, putting the specific person on blast here

this is the saddest kind of attitude i have ever seen, "you dont understand how joy works" jesus fucking christ, are you listening to yourself?

i find the attitude of "you are deriving joy out of this in the wrong way, you have to experience things internally the same way i do" to be such an immediatly recognizably wrong take that i am speechless when i see someone do it so full chested and openly. have a little shame lady

let people have fun!

this is just a nauseating ammount of self aggrandazing, listen, as someone who has been creating art for the last 25 years, as someone who has sweated blood and tears for months to work on a comic or on animation i can tell you this. my hobbie doesnt make me morally superior or better than anyone else, im not an enlighted being above the unwashed masses, i dont have some superpower that makes me so much more cool than every other "whimpy loser".

its so disenheartening, im an artist online and it seems im literally the only artist on the internet who is perfectly fine with AI art, i havent seen a single one other visual artist/illustrator who isnt frothing at the mouth at this technology. surely there has to be others, surely im not the only one.

i hope every AI user has lots and lots of fun with this cool new tool they were given, i hope they get to enjoy it and derive lots of meaning and joy out of it.

nope, dissagree with all of that too. if art is put up online to be seen for free then you cant "steal" it, its already been made public to view for free! you cant "steal" something that can be copied infinity times that is free to acess online.

if we were talking about art that was behind like, a paywall and in order to acess it people found the way to circumbent that then there maight be an argument but that is not the case. is not like the art is gone or the artists no longer posses the art they created, its still there, in their galleries, under their possesion.

second, copying someone else's style is not illegal, you cant copyright style (and you shouldnt) the whole point of art is to use what other people did as influence, or inspiration, to remix and rematch and play with whats been done before. now if someone were using AI to create EXACT REPLICAS that are not transformative in ANYWAY of previously done work and were SELLING i, that also might be a bit shady, but that is not what people are complaining about either.

your cold ass take shows a complete lack of understanding of not only how ai art works in the first place but and also how copying/accreditation works. some of these tools have been marketed for use by specifically advertising mimicking specific artists styles, people's watermarks have shown up in ai art. and it's not like the companies using uncredited and unpaid work to train these algorithms aren't making money from it. dall-e has what are effectively microtransactions for people wanting to create large volumes of artwork.

this is not even to mention the fact that companies are already trying to use ai art to replace storyboard artists or concept artists.

i just ant wrap my head around this mentality, for years and years my art was basically me trying to emulate the style of artists that i liked, i never "credited" them for it, that is how i learned to draw, even to this day im constantly incorporating things from other artists into my drawings and i dont think i have any obligation to append below every drawing "drawing inspired by so and so". if i can do it and its fine then a machine can do it as well and it be fine

Is this anything to you people?

God invented winter so girls could exchange body heat

I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."

"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.

"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?

"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.

If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.

You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.

if you expect people to spend their lives standing behind a counter or driving to and from their storage closet to stand behind that counter, so you can be served your 10$ coffee with appropriate deference, you fully suck and our conversation is over

Autistic Girlies Bracket: Round 1, Side A

Only your vote can determine which of these autistic girlies will move on to the next round.

[Image ID. Image with a purple to pink gradient background that is split down the middle by a jagged white line. There is a purple 'VS' symbol in the centre. On the left of the image is Webby Vanderquack from Ducktales 2017. On the right of the image is Dina Saruyama from Dumbing of Age. End ID.]

what don't make me choose

One day my mom overheard me and my friends talking about anime and asked what "tsundere" meant. After I explained it to her, she said, "oh, so it's just like you then", which is NOT something you can come back from

For a few weeks later she took to calling me "tsundere" at any given opportunity. It was hellish and my friends never let me live it down

I was a low verbal autistic kid that used plushies to communicate with people, and boy howdy did teachers/adults in general not like that past a certain age. Jokes on u fukkos, cool people absolutely adore seeing plushies just hangin out

Thought I’d add some pics of Edward the ducky plush! Here’s him and his lil outfit and knife, and him in my pocket while we visited an aquarium!

You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.

This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.

Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.

I need to reach my friend!

The evolution of this building can be seen in it’s masonry

(source)

And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn't know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.

I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went

"Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don't all fit in there and that's why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king." And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he's the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.

And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as "spending too much time being a king clogs your brain."

Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I'm not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.

I've heard about that, and I mean it's a comforting idea, but it sounds kinda transmed-ish? Like, even if that is true, I feel like championing that would lead to the exclusion of nonbinary people and such, not to mention the idea that being trans is something you can test for. I don't think we should trade one biological essentialism for another... Everyone should just be free to be who they're comfortable with.

That make sense

computergirls will say they dont have a crush on you when you can LITERALLY hear their fans going at max speed

radical centrism