Hi everyone! Here's your Daily Reminder to Click for Palestine!

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

Rocky Horror is turning 50 next month and people still act like being gay was invented by Ellen in 1997

But honestly! Renowned French poet Théophile de Viau wrote the poetic ode to King James titled "The Duke of Buckingham," containing the immortal lines "One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde/Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre/And it is well known that the King of England/Fucks the Duke of Buckingham" exactly 400 years ago and people still act like being gay was invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890

Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in the 25th century BC and people still act like being gay was invented by renowned French poet Théophile de Viau 400 years ago

Gilgamesh and Enkidu "loved each other like man and wife" in 2700 BC and ppl STILL act like being gay was invented by Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the 25th century BC

lug and grug T4T scissor in cave 2.5 million year ago

hugs

ghost stories are alarmingly easy to spread tbh

when I was like ten I was walking back from the chip shop near my gran's house with a neighbour and we took a short cut down an alley which was enclosed by garages except for one part which was wire fenced and led to the electricity shack

and while I was walking I chucked a chip over the fence. the girl walking with me, C, reasonably asks why I did that

"oh, don't you know?" I say, as if I'm not equally out of my own loop

she shakes her head. the enclosed alleyway has no streetlights. it's after dark. the shack is isolated in the distance.

"a little girl who lived up on the court climbed the fence once on a dare. she went up to the shack and touched it, but there was a wire sticking out, and when she touched it, she got electrocuted and died, right there. if you come back in the daylight, you can still see the black mark."

[editor's note: the court was the smaller road off the side of the crescent, which was the one C's family and my gran lived on. the houses there were slightly more expensive and newer, almost all occupied by wealthy commuters to the city, where most of the crescent houses were occupied by retirees and locals who worked on the trading estate. naturally, crescent kids hated the court. houses there got bricked about once a month.]

"no she didn't," C says

I made up this story for absolutely no reason and with no plan, but I'm not gonna back down now. "sure she did. and if you go past on your way back from the shops and you don't leave her an offering, she'll follow you home through the streetlights. one flickers behind you, then the next, then the next, until you get home. and then the lights start to flocked inside the house. even if you turn out all the electrics before bed, it'll be too late. she's inside. and you'll wake up on the night and see her, and she'll be so awful to see it'll stop your heart."

[editor's note: the streetlights always flickered. this was because our neighbour monkey george kept setting the junction boxes on fire]

"I never did before and she never followed me home!"

"do you come down the alley after dark? or do you take the main road with the streetlights?" I knew she didn't use the shortcut, because I'd been the one to talk her into it that night. she was three years younger than me and scared of the dark.

C claims not to believe me, but she throws a chip over the fence too, and walks the rest of the way looking over her shoulder. I get to pride myself for the night on being good at scary stories, and don't think much more about it.

fast forward six or seven years. I'm back in town. I'm on my way back from the chip shop, taking the same shortcut home. ahead of me on the road are a couple of kids I vaguely recognise as old playmates' younger siblings.

they stop, and I watch one fish out three sweeties from the pack they're sharing. they take one each and throw them over the fence. they carry on walking.

I realise that this is probably my fault, as are any resulting pest control issues around the old electricity shack.

when I get to the fence, I throw a chip over.

Update on Nour and her family

I am close friends with the Al-Habil family, whose situation I have discussed under our “#ibtisam al habil” tag. There is still a lot of concern for the youngest child Nour, who is a disabled teen about whose situation you can learn more under our “#Nour Al habil” tag.

Torrential rains have flooded the streets of Gaza and all but destroyed the family’s tent. They are inundated with freezing, extremely contaminated water, which is extremely dangerous for 15 y/o Nour.

Nour is immunocompromised due to her heart condition. These flood waters carry gangrene, cholera, and polio bacteria among numerous others, as well as many viruses and pollutants.

We were about halfway through raising the funds for the tent when Nour’s mother, Ibtisam, suffered a herniated disc after sustaining an injury while moving a barrel of water. She is in severe pain, and can barely move. This is not only miserable and unhealthy for her, it also prevents her from caring for Nour.

In addition to the ongoing $2,000 USD needed for shelter, the family now needs $300 USD (about $433 CAD) to help Ibtisam manage her pain and be able to move.

New temporary goal: $52,971 CAD

Currently: $50,804 CAD

Need to raise: $2,167 CAD (about $1,500 USD)

VERY URGENT SUPPORT NEEDED!! Teen girl in danger of organ failure!!!!

An unknown individual hacked the family’s bank account and stole $1000 about to be used for Nour’s treatment!!

Nour needs to receive this treatment IMMEDIATELY!!!! The treatment costs $800 USD, about $1,142 CAD. We need to raise this money URGENTLY or young Nour could go into HEART FAILURE!!

PLEASE donate what you can, and share the family’s campaign as widely as possible!! Copy and paste this link across all your social media platforms and ask your followers and friends for support!! LINK: https://www.gofundme.com/f/4qzqg-help-a-family-from-gaza

Currently: $56,240 CAD

New temporary goal: $57,382 CAD

Progress: $60 out of $1,142 CAD, or about $42 out of $800 USD

Thank you to our anonymous donor for your support! Please continue to share this post and donate anything you can, even $10 CAD (about $7 USD) helps!!!

Progress: $110 out of $1,142 CAD, or about $77 out of $800 USD—just under 10% of our goal

Thank you so much to another anonymous donor!!

PLEASE keep sharing!! Nour desperately needs you, this is a matter of life or death!!!

just two girls hangin out by the flowerbed

pitter patter putter patter *you look down and see this*

@clawfootboy​

I trust him

Okay but this is exactly what I love.

The above image is a historical artifact. Colima dog. It dates back to circa 100 BCE-300 CE. (x)

And, around two thousand years later it was originally shaped with care, painted with love, and adored… someone draws it. Draws it using a new technological device that allows modern people to shape things with care, paint with love, and even move them -on a screen, glowing.

And the said person decides to share it with the world. The whole world adores it.

I love the connection between past and today. We were humans back then, and we are still the same.

Cute dog :)

I decided to join the RWBY Create Space contest! ☕️

Out of Touch

Yes

Now that nanowrimo has officially called it quits allow me to suggest roughdraftmonth.org as a substitute. It’s a small community with a discord server and it’s what I used instead of nano last November. There are flexible goals and we use trackbear to track our word counts. Everyone is super nice and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a nano substitute! We are having another writing event in June, come join us!

it’s nice being back home for spring break. I missed playing my favorite game Annoy The Cats

at least sisyphus only had one never-ending task. i have like 50 and all of them cost money

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

the student said, "i'm reading a zen buddhist cookbook. with no recipes." and the teacher replied, "ah, dogen's instructions for the cook, written in 1237?" "yeah," said the student, "it's saying not to let rats fall into the rice pot"

letting rats fall into the rice pot violates the buddhist concept of nonviolence, ahimsa. and this is one of the more dauntingly advanced cookbooks i've ever seen

ingredients: 1 grain of dust.

step 1 turn the Wheel of Reality within the grain of dust