"not my circus, not my monkeys" is probably my favorite expression. i might plausibly own a circus, i could be a ringmaster, and i may in fact even have an ape or two in my possession! but these apes? they are raucous and filthy and whatever miserable excuse for a circus trained them should be ashamed of itself. i'm a professional. my apes would never. i take no responsibility. sham circus.
Me reading this realizing tunglr dawt kom gave me more information about my medication than MYDOCTORRRRRSSSSSS MYYYYYYYY FUCKENNNNN DOCTORSSSSS PLURAL MULTIPLE DOCTORSSSSSSSS
This rat doesn’t know anything, but it knows that sometimes snacks fall into its cage, and sometimes the floor shocks its feet. It likes the snacks, and it hates the shocks. It will tell you to do things that produce snacks, and it will tell you not to do things that produce shocks.
This little rat is not the only power inside your head, and it might not be the strongest, but it’s there and it has influence.
So pay attention to how you’re treating the little rat.
If every time you learn something new, you say to yourself “ugh, I’m so ignorant for not already knowing this,” you’re shocking the rat. You’re teaching it to be afraid of learning new things, to associate it with embarrassment and self-criticism.
Remember to feed the rat instead. Tell it “now I know, and that is good,” and let it eat its snack in peace.
If every time you take care of yourself and your home, you say to yourself “ugh, I never do this enough, and I’ll never get it right,” you’re shocking the rat. You’re teaching the rat that it was safer when you didn’t try to take care of things.
Feed the rat instead. Praise what you have done, forgive what you haven’t, so the rat can feel safe.
When the rat takes a step in the right direction, even if the step is too small or slow or not in quite the right direction, feed it. Don’t shock it for being imperfect; it’ll only learn not to take any steps at all. Feed it, and let it get bolder, and take bigger steps, and give it bigger rewards for those bigger steps.
earlier this week Twitter user ppuccin0 tweeted about a fashion article that advised against tops with large floral patterns, saying the wearer was in danger of looking like a "ロマンティックおばさん," or a "romantic auntie." the tweet went viral with many agreeing that a "romantic auntie" sounded like a very nice thing to aspire to be, and some even posted illustrations or photos tagged with the trend
illustration by Toyota Yuu (author of Cherry Magic)
illustration by 141shkw/Sora Midori (author of Beautiful Curse)
photos by Takinami Yukari (author of Motokare Mania and Watashi-tachi wa Mutsuu Ren'ai ga Shitai or "We Want A Painless Romance")
illustration by m:m (mangaka of Matataki no End Roll)
illustration by ooinuai (mangaka of Onikui Kitan)
illustration by ma2 (mangaka of The Reason We Fall In Love)
hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.
For my own future reference, and for anyone else who wants it, a list of authors mentioned in the notes. (I cannot promise this is comprehensive, there are a lot of reblogs and I might have missed some.) I've included a link for each author, where possible I've tried to find one that leads you to their books, prioritising own websites/publishers, falling back on wikipedia otherwise.
If you find any mistakes in the links let me know and I'll edit. This post will be in two parts, because I literally broke tumblr with how many authors there were. I think it's about a hundred and fifty.
Petals Kalulé - fiction, poetry [Petals is noted as using she/they, I'm not 100% sure of their gender identity and past a certain point it feels weird to investigate too much]
glam metal modern but also your contractor is going to jail dawg
Sometimes a house is so ugly, disgust boomerangs back into a form of respect.
This is a rare phenomenon, one which should be treated seriously. I've been looking at ugly houses professionally for almost a decade now and I can say with confidence that there are only a handful of true goose eggs that meet the mark. This house -- this remarkable, revolting house -- located, of all places, in Randolph County, North Carolina, is perhaps the finest goose egg a rogue and most certainly confused contractor could possibly lay.
Yeehaw, man. For the curious, the house is on the market for over 500 grand despite being badly sited and measly 2600 square feet. Most of that is devoted to the lawyer foyer which is not the choice I would personally make, but hey, to each their own.
Most of the houses on McMansion Hell these days are submissions from members of the McMansion Hell Patreon, either in our discord server or on our livestreams. This one, however was a total fluke. I came across it by accident because my brother is looking to move to the area in order to be closer to my folks. (I doubt he'd be interested in something this, uh, unique.)
Now, in all these years, I've never devoted an entire post to the exterior of a house. As they say, there's a first time for everything. There is so much going on with this house, all of it in direct opposition to the concept of taste, it requires a deeper investigation than the initial exterior image usually allows. (Also the entire interior is, as one might expect, entirely dark gray, complete with that awful washed out laminate flooring.)
(here is a sneak peek inside. the rest is not really important nor interesting.)
Anyway, without further ado, let's hit it from the top.
First off, no, I don't know what is inside this house's giant, hammerhead-esque forehead. It's not supported by anything so my assumption is, well, nothing. They put this in there for the sheer aesthetic love of the game.
The vinyl siding and black trim will continue until morale improves. Also, I zoomed out here to include the forehead (fivehead?) just because the scale is INSANE -- that's like a 50-50 wall-to-fivehead ratio. Honestly, even though things in the world are pretty dire, I wouldn't trust that cantilever with my life.
The window layout on this thing makes me wonder if the people who put it together have eyes that can see and a brain that connects to them. Now, I'm not going to invoke the Greek orders or anything, but I am going to say that every single architectural rule is being brazenly broken here. Total impunity. The window and door don't line up at the top, which is the bare minimum of common decency. Then there's that little guy pulling a Leeroy Jenkins up in the corner. You go dude.
The trim on these masses is starting to look AI generated but it's probably just the HDR every realtor uses. The FaceTune of the field. Anyway, I think it's a bad idea to put what looks like builder grade wood flooring on the outside of a house. It's giving mold. It's giving sunbleaching. It's giving Etsy.
As we can see, another familiar McMansion Hell enemy has also made an appearance: the prairie mullion window. There is no reason to use this window unless it involves building a fake bungalow, but the worst possible place to use it is in this particular situation. It's the only window with white mullions, it looks weird with the siding, and it's not exactly """modern""" or whatever this house is supposed to be.
(Often I wonder if some people believe that modernism is just "doing some stuff with squares" and the more squares there are the more modernist it is. Probably not true, but then again, I'm not the one pulling massive profit on houses that look like doo doo so jokes on me.)
Zooming out again because context still matters even in the most nonsensical situations. The funny thing about this house is that the only normal part of it is the front door and even then... what?? Also, look at that siding-less patch of brick on the right. As though to say: haha! Finally, I love how the stairs lead down into a bunch of rocks. Serves you right!
Thanks to advanced screenshotting technology, we can see that there are also prairie mullions on these other windows, it's just that they're a more reasonable black. Don't worry though, the windows are still offensive. They're two windows stuck together in order to give the impression of a single continuous one. (Remember the inside shot?) Nice try, bucko. Second, why don't the two windows meet where that little band of siding is? Well, we all know the answer to this question. (We don't, in fact, know the answer to this question.)
This is my favorite part of the house. It's almost good, to me, which is why I saved it for last. I have no idea what the hell that glossy composition book siding is but I love it. I've never seen it before. I also like how they're doing a weird entablature-quoin combo thing with it, but only on the right side of the house. There's some great five-cornice action going on but, thanks to the precedents set by truly mid postmodernism, it works.
Unfortunately there are some downsides here. What's the deal with that tiny, skinny stone? brick? veneer? Second, why is the siding just hanging off the edge like that? That whole little section where the three (four?) cladding meet is precipitous. The cheapo off-white developer special garage door with the little trad elements is a nice gesture, one that tells you life has no meaning. Why bother?
Anyway, after all that, if we put it all together again, we get this:
LLMs are an extremely advanced form at a grand scale of the auto fill suggestions your keyboard has. The algorithm it runs on was given a scoring metric, and its only, singular goal is to maximize those points.
And when the people behind these models have a motive to get people to use them and pay for them, the scoring isn't about being right, it's about telling you what you want to hear. It's about eliciting a positive response of performance from the users.
Fun fact: ChatGPT is dumber than when it was released. The moment it began training on users who wanted to hear something not inherently the truth, it lost accuracy. The moment it wasn't just the scientists grading its performance, it became a machine meant for appeasement of the consumer.
People don't buy a machine that tells them the objective truth. People buy a machine that tells them the words that make them feel better.
When I was drunk one night and watching the Jellyfish livestream, I reached out to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a dumb question about their jellyfish... And they actually emailed me back.
(yes, these are actually my own screenshots, I am in tears laughing)
DO YOUR ANIMAL EXPERTS HAVE TO UNTANGLE THE JELLYFISH
AND THE ANSWER IS FUCKING YES, THE JELLIES GET TANGLED SOMETIMES LMAO