ilovebill-and-gustav:

The way men are being completely misogynistic and calling Margot Robbie “mid” and “ugly” when she’s playing a strong, independent, female lead, but we’re completely and totally in love with her when she played a mentally ill woman who was in an extremely abusive relationship totally disgusts me.

anyways, live, laugh, love barbie 💖 💕 💓

eternalfarnham:

pipermintz:

I feel like if humans swallowed rocks like birds do to help grind up food we’d have so much fun with it.

Can just imagine all the girlies on tiktok going “I know this is a bit controversial but I honestly love using limestone as a gastrolith. Not only can you readily forage it but they are just so pretty when smoothed out after regurgitating them”

and then all the comments would be like “ girl 😭 😭 calcite dissolves in stomach acid!! Just use quartz if you want a pretty gastrolith like 💀”

I like this site. Y’all just shotgunning counterfactual timelines

soberscientistlife:

The rich are villains!

astraldemise:

thebooknotthemovie:

astraldemise:

astraldemise:

astraldemise:

girl i know i love old boats and they got into accidents all the time and i wouldnt exactly regard an ocean liner as a not horrifying mode of transport but i just remembered we used to have those fucking balloon airships. i dont like planes myself but thank god we started making air transport out of shit that wasnt 100% flammable

ALT

domt like that

girl they used to catch fire for no reason and kill everyone

THAT WAS ONE TIME

it happened a few times

battlecrazed-axe-mage:

battlecrazed-axe-mage:

We’ve all gotten just a bit too comfortable being jerks to strangers on the internet I think

We’ve also gotten WAY too comfortable reading meanings and intents that aren’t present into single-sentence posts from people we don’t know

cafffine:

be pro-aging but wear sun screen. sun protection is not beauty industry propaganda it will save you. wear it. or else.

potato-gay:

creepymutelilbugger:

you just got press crow’d. reblog to instantly press crow your friends

cmoroneybooks:

AI using your writing to train.

Hey writerly friends! Here’s your warning that Google is making updates to terms and service allowing them to mine your data and train AI with it. It’s focused on emails right now but Google docs facing a similar change is on the horizon.

Keep your eyes peeled for terms of service updates because you’ve already accepted future changes once you hit accept the first time. Unpublished novels do not have the same copyright protections as published novels and lawsuits are much more difficult to win. I would highly recommend anyone with a large amount of writing in Google docs start removing it from that platform.

If you don’t want your writing used to train AI (and to be clear you won’t be paid for it) then it’s time to start looking at alternatives to Google Docs.

Some thoughts on alternatives

Microsoft Word - unlikely to implement AI training

Microsoft Word is possibly the safest bet at the moment. The Office suite makes most of it’s money from corporate licensing. That depends heavily on strict privacy rules. The risk to their reputation is too high to even attempt it on just the personal version of Word. If you want to be very very cautious, get Word Professional as there is ZERO chance of it being used for AI scraping.

$159.99 USD one time purchase OR subscription model for $69.99 per year which comes with all of the Microsoft Office suite and significantly more cloud storage.

Microsoft Word Professional is $439.99 USD. You really don’t need it for writing.

Scrivener - unlikely to implement AI training

Scrivener would probably not survive the kind of controversy AI scraping would cause as their customers are exclusively writers.

$59.99 USD one time purchase per platform (if you switched from windows to mac you would need to repurchase.)

Libre Office - read all the terms and conditions or don’t risk it.

Libre Office has an AI tool. There are no stories circulating about them scraping user’s data but they’re not near as big as Google and may not have drawn enough attention yet.

Free! (Which unfortunately makes data scraping more likely.)

Also don’t forget:

Platforms like Ao3, Wattpad, Smashwords and possibly even Tumblr are all being targeted by AI companies for data scraping. In fact OpenAI are being sued for doing just that.

Be careful where you post your writing.

That’s all folks!

findingfeather:

elljayvee:

weaselle:

quiteegregiouslychuffed:

lookninjas:

prismatic-bell:

silverhand:

the-cimmerians:

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

• Biden/The Former Guy
• Biden/DeSantis
• Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.

There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.

Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.

Speaking as a Michigan resident:  Look at the laws being passed in Michigan.  Now look at the laws being passed in Florida.  Spot the difference?  That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party.  That’s the difference.  They’re different parties.  It is not the same.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled?  Keep fucking voting.)

D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy

look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill. 

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps
raise federal minimum wage
make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants
protect civil/public water sources from pollution
cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change
increase gun regulation
lower and control prescription drug prices
improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions
protect net neutrality
protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years.

Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.

Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.