It’s time for a game.

Tags from @zzoupz

A model of the Bastille carved into a brick from the actual Bastille [4863×2471]

Filed under i heard you hated the bastille so i put a bastille in your fragment of the destroyed bastille 

( tags via @needsmoreresearch )

i am a firm believer in the sicko4sicko relationship. characters who are obsessed with one another not in spite of, but because of, whatever bizzare or offputting or unusual things they've got going on. guys who look at each other and go "you're the only motherfucker in this city that can handle me" and they're probably right too. rivalries romances obsessions built on mutual hate undefined Close Companions. any sort of Thing. sicko4sicko.

op is posting from tamriel. or perhaps the lands between

Y'all joke but that looks DELICIOUS. Electric stoves just aren't the same.

france is burning.

667 people were arrested last night. they are curfews in place. public transport is partially closed at night.

nahel, a 17-year-old, was shot tuesday by the police during a traffic stop. he wasn't violent or armed, he wasn't a threat. but he broke the law and tried to drive away, so the cops killed him.

and now france is rioting.

there is a video so the government isn't trying to deny the facts for once. but the minister of the interior (in charge of the police) still insist that the police shot less people since the 2017 law on public safety.

but an analysis of police statistics by Le Monde, the most read newspaper in france, says otherwise. when the police shot on average 250 people each year in the five years prior to 2017, that number became 297 after 2017. for shots fired specifically on moving vehicles, the average used to be 119 and it's now 150. before 2017, there was an average of 0.06 deaths per shot. now it's 0.32.

more than ever, the police shoots to kill.

so france is burning.

Tags via @maculategiraffe

The first person diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, Donald Gray Triplett (1933-2023) died this past Friday, June 15th.

the first rule of gun safety is to not get that thing pregnant

Don't listen to them, keep cumming in that ejection port

Let's all just be honest for a second "Everyone would be raging if a man did this" has become a bizarre beating stick for any time a woman does something even mildly questionable. I see this all the time, it seems to be everyone's go to point and it's very rarely true in the situations that people are all saying this. People straight up refuse to even think about whether what she's done is even that bad solely by parroting this phrase which ironically proves the opposite of their point because they are quite happily piling on just because its a woman whereas men are so often given the benefit of the doubt.

this is the funniest tweet of all time

Wow Tor really straight up released Christopher Paolini (Eragon author)'s new book without even hiding the blatant AI noodle arms on the cover. Disgraceful.

A bit more context for anyone that's new to this: Paolini is vocally against ai art. Unfortunately (by which I mean I am side eyeing the hell out of Tor right now) the publisher used a stock photo from what they called a reputable source (and did not credit the visual designer that tweaked it etc) (this is, to my understanding, a hell of a break in Tor's usual practice regarding cover artists)(open any other book published through Tor and there's usually multiple layers of credit given to all artists and designers involved) without realizing (the threads and news sources I was seeing about the cover when it was first released were written back in december of last year) (yes, I would think SOMEONE would notice that the stock photo was in fact ai generated)(ESPECIALLY since it is so clearly fucky)(however, we've also had 5-6 months of developing our eyes to spot ai art since then)(so)(you know)(it MIGHT have been an honest mistake)("might")(i reserve any judgement atm)(concern i do not reserve at all)(but judgement i'll reserve) that the stock photo was, in fact, ai generated.

Despite Paolini's uhhh distaste for ai art, and the lash back from fans and other concerned parties, the production schedule was already far enough ahead that to redo all the contracts, printing, etc. would have pushed back publication by at least a year. And, since it sounds like Tor wasn't exactly enthusiastic about making any changes, I would assume (and by assume i do mean assume)(someone correct me on this, i do not have many in's into publishing) the cost of making those changes would have been 1. high, and 2. pushed onto Paolini, who is, like every other author out there, not making anywhere near as much money as you might think.

Tor's lack of credits for the cover and use of ai art is concerning. I did just *skim* through some articles/threads, but I didn't see any reason for the lack of credit given. Cover artists are important. The number of folks in the notes jumping to conclusions about the ethics of the author + the quality of his work is proof enough of that, albeit maybe in a nontraditional way. I cannot stress this enough: even if there were no possible moral quandaries with using an ai stock photo, the people involved in turning the stock photo into a cover should have been credited. Additionally, one of the things Paolini pointed out is that eventually, we will have ai good enough to mimic passable fiction writing. Not good enough to be ~A New Modern Classic~ or whatever, but Good Enough. Good Enough to make pulps, or popcorn novels, or other forms of "Commercial Lit". Good enough to need only as much editing as An Actual Human Author.

And to me, if Tor is willing to forego giving credit + push using an ai generated cover now to save on costs, then I've gotta wonder:

what are they going to do when we get to "good enough"?

I want to say as an author that the excuses Tor has given for not changing the cover are extremely flimsy. I was able to get my publisher to make changes to the Iron Widow paperback 3 months before publication. My other publisher recorded a completely new audiobook for Zachary Ying with an actual Mandarin speaker when I discovered after the audiobook’s release that the original voice actor who they assured me could handle the Mandarin parts was in fact Japanese and definitely could not handle Mandarin. None of this came at any cost to me. There’s so much Tor could do if they wanted to remedy this, and I know Paolini could’ve pushed them harder. He’s one of the biggest names in fantasy, not a midlister with no leverage. Even if the first print was too far gone to be changed, they could promise to do a new cover for future prints. But they didn’t. They just don’t care.

i think we should all get tomorrow off for no particular reason. the next day too. maybe all the days

You want a general strike. that’s what you want.

"A rare photo of a telecom technician hatching. He even still has parts of the eggshell on his head."

Feminists with no class consciousness are rly like "Poor Marie Antoinette she was a victim of child trafficking, sold as a 14 year old little girl to a 15 year gross old man she had never met, they didn't let her keep anything she brought from one palace while moving to another palace, she was an immigrant struggling in the highest position a woman could take in a foreign country, the rich ladies at court were so mean to her she had no choice but to LARP as a milkmaid in her special cottage in her palace to cope, she was a teenage queen for 20 years when the Revolution broke out, the mean revolutionaries accused her of SA'ing her son, ok it was one guy who I refuse to learn the name of who was immediately booed by everyone else in the court but let's blame it on the revolutionaries as a whole because they were so mean-"

Louis XVI....mistress? Hated Marie???

WHAT IS GOING ON, WHERE ARE YOU GETTING YOUR HISTORY FROM 😭

He was one of the few people who DIDN'T hate her and was very influenced by her (the flight as far as Varennes wouldn't have happened if not for Marie pushing so hard for it) so actually if she were pro-Revolution it absolutely would've made a difference

There’s this idea rooted in sexism that women throughout history are blameless.

This is often to excuse them for the bad things that happened regardless of their position of power, as seen in Marie Antoinette.

It can also be seen in the US during slavery where women are often ignored when it comes to their role in slavery. With women tending to own large numbers of enslaved people, with them often being part of their dowry. But they are only portrayed as southern damsels, never fully addressing their role in perpetuating the system.

Women throughout history were rarely objects with no self possession or agency, and while their rights and freedom was much more limited than it is today in many countries, this does not excuse the wrongs they committed or stood by.

It would be like excusing Carolyn Bryant’s role in Emmett Till’s murder as she was only a young woman. Rather than acknowledging she knew what she was doing and never viewed her actions nor their results as wrong.

You're exactly right. The woobification of Marie Antoinette is the epitome of white bourgeois feminism and that's why her stans annoy me so much. They don't realize they're parroting royalist propaganda spread after the Bourbon restoration and would rather project onto this imagined OC of a sad rich girl being tugged along by events she had no control over instead of looking into the REAL Marie, who had more agency and power than any other woman in France and chose to use it against the working class women furious at her for resisting progressive reforms.

Some have misinterpreted this post as "no one should sympathize with Marie Antoinette ever." No, I was calling out how Marie apologists garner sympathy for her at the expense of the truth. They frame facts in deceptive ways to make people think she was some kind of traumatized teenager during the Revolution, with the implication that the revolutionaries were monsters for going after her.

I know that the historical tendency to vilify women more than men creates this urge to rehabilitate women who went down with the worst reputations, but we do actually have to be considerate with our choices and be conscious of power dynamics other than gender. Marie Antoinette didn't bankrupt France, but she wasn't a blameless victim either. Olympe de Gouges had some iconic quotes but...doesn't really deserve that much glorification either when she was a Girondin supporter? Charlotte Corday had NERVE but ultimately her assassination of Marat was an extremely foolish tactical decision and accelerated the purge of the very Girondins she was trying to save.

Of this era, the women whose vilification is ACTUALLY most undeserved are the working class women themselves, like Pauline Leon, Claire Lacombe, and Simone Evrard, who were the real backbone of the Revolution but ended up being branded as mad "harpies," mindless mobs, and dismissed by even the Left intellectuals. We know very little about them as individuals because they weren't the ones who wrote or spawned essays after essays of public discourse, so unfortunately we can't make movies and TV shows about them on par with the volume that Marie Antoinette gets, but we can at least do better than whitewashing their oppressors.

(And I want to say once again that I am NOT putting more blame on Marie than Louis. There just aren't enough people ignorant enough to stan Louis XVI to annoy me into making posts like this about him.)