They stayed talking through the night, the hare joining in after a prolonged bit of pouting. Crawburn had led a fascinating life: born in the mundane world, he’d followed his lady-love to the Sidhe only to be cruelly rebuffed for his effort.
“Did she turn you into a bear?” Emily reached for an apple. Her initial discomfort with Crawburn had faded, for all his fearsome bulk he was proving to be a gentle person.
“Oh no, she turned me into a man.” His soft, deep chuckle still held some of the old sadness. “I’d seen in her a beautiful bruin and lifemate, but in the end she was only an elf playing at dress-up and slumming in the mundane. She told me that my kind of devotion was better suited to a soft-handed human and so she changed me.”
it’s time to stop supporting businesses who have funded trump’s win and champion his ideals among their workers and customers. teslas are fucking awful to begin with. stickermule are lame sellouts who don’t pay their workers enough anyway. leave them in the dust while you support small businesses, particularly those supporting people struggling the most
“It really doesn’t change anything” well no shit the sky isn’t going to open up and bring forth the change you want through purchasing choices, but if you you buy your boxes from Uline, camera stuff from Really Right Stuff (seriously fuck RRS), lease a Tesla etc you are just polishing the boot that is pressing down on your neck. Every dollar you choose to spend elsewhere is a dollar Uline doesn’t get to spend hurting you it’s pretty simple, your other choices are probably not going to be saints…but at least you don’t have to feel like the dumbest cog in the rube asshole machine
I always schedule my newsletter for the first Monday of the month and no, I don’t look at what holidays or events are happening around that time. Anyway, This one is about little delights, and finding something to put things in.
There’s a delight to certain types of objects. The smallest thing can hold so much memory or joy inside it. I think a lot about a specific scene in the short Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore. It’s Eeyore’s birthday and both Pooh and Piglet had found presents but ruined them somehow (Pooh ending up with an empty jar after eating the honey, Piglet with a popped balloon). They hand these gifts over, feeling they’ve failed their friend, but Pooh finds a good way to spin it:
“It’s a Useful Pot…” Pooh says, “And it’s for putting things in.”
Eeyore puts the deflated balloon in the jar, takes it out again, returns it to the jar, takes it out again. There’s a familiar feeling there, like when you find a really cool jewellery box or pill case and maybe you don’t have the right jewellery or meds to justify it but look at all those little spaces made so specifically for specific things!
What with the holiday(s), forgot to share this week’s update for The Audacity Gambit! On a detour to the king, Emily is introduced to a friend of the hare’s. Check it out here!
Dry-Eyes grumbling, they set off in the general direction he’d waved his paw. At first they made good time, but eventually the women had to stop, Dry-Eyes circling Emily’s head while they waited for the hare to catch up. His bounds could draw him ahead of their travelling pace, but he couldn’t keep up the speed for long. Emily offered to carry him but he clicked his teeth, offended.
“That would be terribly undignified. How would it look if I came up to my friend carried in the arms of some mundane human?” Emily argued that she was technically Folk and they finally found a compromise. She’d carry him until they were close and he’d finish the rest of the way on his own four feet.
As the light breaking through the trees dimmed, the hare wriggled in Emily’s arms, scratching her with his nails. She dropped him.
I know it’s been talked about before but I still don’t think it’s been emphasized how *fucked* today’s internet experience is for children. I didn’t know what the word “discourse” was when I was 8, or 10, or even 13. I was too busy playing the nigh-limitless amount of flash games out there on the internet and making sure my neopets were fed. Like I cannot stress enough that if I had free time on the computer, 9 times out of 10 I could go and play a jaunty little game someone had whipped up and put out there for no other reason than that creating games was awesome and easy to do. Or go to some page that existed just to collect memes; you see back then there were more than 4 sites, and you didn’t need accounts to visit them. I didn’t get targeted ads. I wasn’t exposed to any sort of political ideology. I spent a lot of time on the computer but no one site monopolized my time or tried to fucking manipulate me into using it more. The internet was for more than one thing back then, and honestly I don’t think enough people realize how much has been stolen from us.
I understand the feelings of despair, but the rest of the internet is still very much out there. There’s a growing and dedicated movement to take it back from corporations. I’ll link a few of the neat little websites I’ve found on Neocities and in various other places.
And this is by no means a comprehensive list, no. This is just a sampling. There’s so much out there just waiting to be discovered– you just have to go looking for it! (And remember, kids, be careful out there– computer viruses and malware are still very much a threat, so I encourage you to get uBlock Origin or NoScript– or both– for your web browser before you start web surfing! Also never give out any personal information! And for the love of all that is good, and for your own safety, please stay away from the porn sites if you’re under the age of 18.)
Have fun, stay safe, and
HEY KIDS, YOU WANT MORE GAMES? ITCH.IO HAS PLENTY OF WEIRD GAMES YOU CAN PLAY ON YOUR BROWSER OR DOWNLOAD ON YOU COMPUTER. Just remember to always check tags and description to avoid finding things that are for a much older audience.
There’s also special browsers like NuMuKi that you can still play old flash games on!!!
Literally reblogging this mainly for the VGMusic link. That place fucking raised me in my own little solitude of *actually being able to find and download and listen to* video game tunes as a preteen in the mid-2000s, even if they were just (usually very accurate) recreations that people had made.
That site taught me about MIDI. It enticed me to learn to MAKE MIDI files. It’s where my entire digital music skillset began, and in turn I contributed a handful of MIDIs to the site, and so did many people I’d come to call friends and acquaintances through the Homestuck music and general VGM communities!!
We so desperately need to support sites like these, so please do give them a visit and, if you find value in what they provide, maybe thank the creators in whatever ways feel right to you💙
Shout out to Chase for a photo from the archives for this playlist cover.
October is always fun because I’m building or refining a monster playlist AND my monthly playlist (see all my Halloween playlists here). Like, how many songs from scary/spooky movies does one add? This time around, just two: ‘Tenebre’ (from the film of the same name) and 'Wolf Like Me’ which has been used pretty often but most recently in Wendell & Wild. Balanced, I think, by the inclusion of 'Crockett’s Theme’ by Jan Hammer for Miami Vice.
Also, The The’s new album sounds like Jack Skellington breaking out to do a solo album and I’m all about it.
Related media to some of the songs:
Joshua Ray Walker’s album of covers, What Is It Even? is full of bangers and he discusses the influence of the women on his work and “countryfication” these particular covers over at Holler.
Go enjoy Roxy Music on Old Grey Whistle Test singing 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ on Youtube. I always picture the setting to be one of those wild glass-walled modernist homes that are so Los Angeles, like the Stahl House.
'Downhill’ is from Pom Pom Squad’s latest album Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, which bangs. They’re a joy of a band and the latest album is aesthetic as hell, as the lyric videos on their Youtube can attest.
There’s this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You’ll see people say shit like “generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!” and bullshit like that, and it’s just… not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went “oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!” and then just… made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I’m given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don’t use them so I don’t know the details, but I’m told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.
To be clear, I don’t like generative AI. I’m sure it’s got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I’ve seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let’s not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It’s turned the usability of search engines from “rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads” into “almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results”, especially if you’re looking for images. It’s a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I’ve seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I’d say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is… not great. And the fact that it’s often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals (“you don’t have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!”) is also not great.
But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there’s hysterical bullshit. And the whole “AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn’t” thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being “real art” – a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven’t bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.
People latched onto the fact that training these giant models is extremely intensive work, and hence uses a lot of power. Once they’re trained they aren’t that costly to run and are improving constantly. You can run a lot of models on a consumer grade GPU.
some additional context for the energy costs of the biggest models:
AI is a new market to capture, but it also represents an unprecedented amount of influence corporations can wield against the people who use its products. And smaller tech companies (with a lot of cumulative venture capital) are racing to integrate other AI services into their various apps. So tech companies are desperate to capture the market.
This is the land rush: tech companies scrambling for control of commercial AI. There is suddenly a valuable space to be captured, and every company is desperate to control as much of it as possible. This is a moment that rewards aggressive action and punishes cautiousness. This is what the “move fast and break things” model is built for. So rationality be damned, tech companies are all spending as much as they can on building the biggest, most expensive AI models imaginable right now. The promises of huge returns from speculative investment breaks the safety net of rationalism.
And so now, everything clicks into place. Every tech company is desperate to train the biggest and most expensive proprietary models possible, and they’re all doing it at once. Executives are throwing more and more data at training in a desperate attempt to edge over competition even as exponentially increasing costs yield diminishing returns.
Model training consumes vast amounts of energy for the sole purpose of gaining a competitive edge. The value isn’t that a better tool is created, the value is that you use tool A instead of tool B. In these cases the goal isn’t to produce something significantly more useful, it’s to shift who has what market share. Corporations are willing to place very high value — and spend vast quanties of resources on — goals that provide very low overall utility.
And since these are designed to be proprietary, even when real value is created the research isn’t shared and the knowledge is siloed. Products that should only have to be created once are being trained many times over because every company wants to own their own.
Profit is always the top priority, and companies are speculating that AI is a bottomless pit of profit. This means there is a spike of irresponsibly high demand for energy, and things have gotten weird. Bad-weird.
Of course it’s not like there’s researched stories about the specific water use needs of data centers
hey kids did you know that computers didn’t used to automatically connect to the internet. it used to make this screaming noise. we should have listened.
We still have to painfully torture a server like the Jabba’s palace BDSM robots in Star Wars, we just don’t hear their screams anymore
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