gallusrostromegalus:

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

jouskadevil-blog:

uncanny-tranny:

Transphobes who say their pronouns are beep/boop or something else in their bio underestimate my willingness to adhere to those pronouns

I love the normalization of neopronouns for this reason. Transphobes are just gonna get their “ironic” pronouns used and respected lmao. Neopronouns users were so based for doing this.

A classmate in undergrad once tried to test me by claiming she would only agree to respect nonbinary pronouns if I used Her Majesty as pronouns for her.

She lasted 2 days before she realized I had absolutely zero problem doing exactly that and was too embarrassed to ever argue with me about pronouns in class again.

When I was working at the greenhouse, one of my coworkers was getting flustered because he was a Proper Gentleman who called everyone “Sir” or “Ma'am” and was getting genuinely heated that there wasn’t a gender-neutral honorific for nonbinary people like me.

“Well, you could always call me ‘Your Majesty’.” I said.

As a Joke.

Because in addition to looking and sounding like an older Yosemitie Sam, he took me Extremely Seriously and addressed me as “Your Majesty” for the rest of the summer. Which was hysterical because it was things like “Your Majesty? Where is the fungicide?” and *gestures at me* “You’ll have to as Their Majesty about the tomatoes.” He also would call every single person he could not immediately identify the gender of “Your Majesty” and also everyone that had neon hair.

So yes, you should absolutely rigorously adhere to someone’s pronouns (Especially if they’re unusual pronouns), because it’s respectful, because it’s clowning on assholes, and because it is fucking delightful.

(via heartburstings)

implusle:

excellent question he will still be seventeen actually

(via whetstonefires)

therobotmonster:

transfantasma:

The beef tallow thing is a legit complaint for McDonalds (McD’s used to use beef tallow for their fries and now they try and fake it with bullion in the oil and no, it is not the same) but that has nothing to do with diners.

But this post of mine has almost nothing to do with the OP, so…

I find it hard to shit on people misidentifying the problem but still upset about a legitimate issue. My whole life restaurants and food manufacturers have been swapping to “healthy” alternatives and formulations yet the food never seems to get any healthier, just cheaper and worse tasting.

Trix isn’t any fucking better for you, it just has corn-syrup aftertaste and there’s no prize in the box. The McD’s fries aren’t killing you any slower and they aren’t any more vegetarian-friendly, they’re just cheaper to make. You can’t own your media but you can rent it forever.*

I’d love to get a float, but a capitalist self-dealing scheme means the machine is always broken… and is it really a float if it’s made with ‘frozen dessert’?

The enshittification of everything via late-stage capitalism is so huge that it’s hard to comprehend enough to even rail against it. But the withering and loss of the little joys and silver linings? The ruination of that special little thing? That’s easy to latch onto.

And what really makes the whole thing sting isn’t that I, an old man, am losing these things. It’s that they aren’t there to be shared with the new generation, that I am forced to hoard those joys in my memory when they should be living on.

There will be a loot box in every game but no prize in your cereal.

*“forever” here means 'until the studio doesn’t feel like paying residuals and banishes your show to the shadow realm.

(via whetstonefires)

190729:

lemonlurkrr:

hyperfixation sucks I think just a little too hard about a guy who isn’t even real and I could start crying any second

(via captainkirkk)

willowcrowned:

caper. pickle. english is a beautiful language. so many sandwich toppings that are also detective words

(via queen-mabs-revenge)

headspace-hotel:

psychotrenny:

nutsacktorturer:

suinicide:

thememedaddy:

I need a link to this

This is how the Resident Evil developers see Europe

o conselho tribais

This sounds completely insane but I swear just fucking around on Google Earth street view all over the world will cure you of whatever problems you have going on in this regard

(via whetstonefires)

play-now-my-lord:

play-now-my-lord:

play-now-my-lord:

i keep seeing posts to the effect of “period blood isn’t special or different than other blood” and in spirit that’s true but i keep on having the autistic objection of “wait, I went through sex ed, it’s not actually the same thing as blood, it’s a mix of blood, enometrial tissue, and discharge/mucus”

periods happen because of the uterus developing and shedding endometrial lining on a roughly 28-day cycle. this is related to pregnancy but like everything about the reproductive system it is not solely related to pregnancy. the goal if you’re avoiding menstruation is for it to fail gracefully - i.e. no endometrial tissue develops, no period happens. (this is actually perfectly achievable for people not on testosterone, most doctors are just weird about it and insist on birth control cycling because they have weird ideas about women.) the danger whenever it stops (which can be caused by dietary irregularity, hormonal changes, etc) is that it hasn’t failed gracefully and endometrial tissue is still developing in the uterus, because if it gets stuck in there or escapes containment it can cause endometriosis, which is very dangerous. get that shit checked out if you’re experiencing weird pain or irregular periods you can’t explain some other way; endometriosis is detectable by a non-invasive ultrasound so looking for it isn’t even all that shitty

above all i think mystifying the bodily functions of roughly a third of the entire human population is a serious mistake, and one that laypeople aren’t alone in making (again, many doctors have extremely weird ideas about periods!). read up, stay on top of stuff, everyone’s got a body and you gotta be good to yours. be ready to advocate for yourself in the face of being blown off by doctors too, they’re routinely very ignorant and stubborn about taking uterine conditions seriously, especially if you’re visibly queer/trans/nonbinary

(via whetstonefires)

pippin-pippout:

For those following the SAG and WGA strikes there’s new shit a-brewing, this time targeting background actors (aka extras).

Some may know that one of the issues SAG is fighting is that studios want to take virtual scans of background actors and use them in perpetuity (meaning forever) without any additional compensation to those background actors. So you would just see a bunch of AI generated humans in future movies based off of a background actor that worked one day.

This is already shitty because working as an extra for 3 days on a union set (if you receive a union voucher each day) is one of the main ways to qualify for SAG eligibility. This means that a lot of actors working background do not yet have union protection and likely do not have an agent or manager to protect them. Disney has already allegedly told background actors to do this on the set of Wanda Vision: https://www.avclub.com/wandavision-background-actors-say-disney-scanned-them-1850709900

WandaVision background actors say Disney scanned them, didn't say why

The argument over digital replacements of background actors and extras is a major sticking point in the SAG-AFTRA strike

The A.V. Club

Here’s where it’s worse.

There is one main company that supplies background actors for major union and non union productions. Central Casting. They love to brag about their very long influence in the industry - in old movies dating back to the 40s you can hear jokes about hiring extras from Central Casting.

Central Casting has been including an electronic document for all actors in their database to sign as part of onboarding. Signing it gives Central Casting the right to use your images, your videos, and YOUR LIKENESS in perpetuity, forever. They would OWN your likeness. Instead of it being a studio supplying the AI background actors, it would be Central Casting instead.

Receiving any work from Central Casting in the future is conditional upon signing it. No signature = no extra work = no extra income for union actors trying to make health insurance minimums, no union extra work for pre-SAG members.

Alexis Winter|Casting Director on Instagram: "Sounds like, maybe it’s time for all these background actors to give a call to Central Casting

312 likes, 15 comments - aw_casting on August 27, 2023: "Sounds like, maybe it’s time for all these background actors to give a call to Cent

Instagram

SAG already reached out to Central Casting to tell them to stop. Central Casting refused.

Edit to say: this is not new. It’s part of actors onboarding and is called the Photo, Image, and Video Release. It’s phrased to sound like you are just giving them permission to use your image and video for CC’s website and promotional purposes. But the actual language is much broader. It’s only recently being brought up as a point for discussion because some casting directors (who are generally supportive of the strike) started pointing it out.

Central Casting is owned by Entertainment Partners which is also a giant software conglomerate and owns a lot of the software used to organize background casting and pay actors. https://www.ep.com/company/about-us/

(via whetstonefires)

aiweirdness:

AI versus a giraffe with no spots

On July 31, 2023, a giraffe with no spots was born at Brights Zoo in Tennessee.

Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from around the internet, and/or on a few standard image datasets. But there likely haven’t been any spotless giraffes in their training data, since the last one to be born was probably in 1972 in Tokyo. How do they do when faced with photos of the spotless giraffe?

Here’s Multi-Modal In-Context Learning:

ALT

And InstructBLIP, which was more eloquent but also added lots of spurious detail.

ALT

More examples at AiWeirdness.com

Are these crummy image recognition models? Not unusually so. As far as I can tell with a brief poke around, MMICL and InstructBLIP are modern models (as of Aug 2023), fairly high up on the leaderboards of models answering questions about images. Their demonstration pages (and InstructBLIP’s paper) are full of examples of the models providing complete and sensible-looking answers about images.

Then why are they so bad at Giraffe With No Spots?

I can think of three main factors here:

1. AI does best on images it’s seen before. We know AI is good at memorizing stuff; it might even be that some of the images in the examples and benchmarks are in the training datasets these algorithms used. Giraffe With No Spots may be especially difficult not only because the giraffe is unusual, but because it’s new to the internet.
2. AI tends to sand away the unusual. It’s trained to answer with the most likely answer to your question, which is not necessarily the most correct answer.
3. The papers and demonstration sites are showcasing their best work. Whereas I am zeroing in on their worst work, because it’s entertaining and because it’s a cautionary tale about putting too much faith in AI image recognition.

(via whetstonefires)