queen of the fucking world

Good news! Scientists have discovered that the Omelas child's chains are made of an ontologically unbreakable material so there's nothing anyone could do to free her even if they wanted to so there's no actual moral dilemma

Good news! Scientists have discovered that the Omelas child's chains are made of an ontologically unbreakable material so there's nothing anyone could do to free her even if they wanted to so there's no actual moral dilemma

Funny that was your first thought whereas i thought "surely we can make the hole a lot more comfortable"

you lack my resolve

shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

this is the full quote.

It's worth noting also that while this has been doing the rounds again recently, he said it well before the current plague of generative AI slop was upon us. The clip is from a 2016 TV documentary. The specific bit of animation he was reacting to was a demo of the computer animating a ragdoll-like model body to try to find ways to move it forwards. While a living creature will normally try to avoid injuring itself as it moves, the computer algorithm had no such inhibition and so the virtual ragdoll would flail around and drag its face across the ground. The team working with it thought it would be a good way to animate creatures like zombies for horror movies because it was so inhuman and bizarre. Miyazaki was reacting to the inhumanity of it, and the fact they thought it was clever to create something so grotesque with no greater point to it than "Isn't this gross and weird?" I'm sure it was a painful criticism to receive, especially if they were all excited to show animation legend Hayao Miyazaki what they were working on, but I think he gave them something really important to think about.

I can scarcely imagine what he'd have to say about the lifeless plagiarism machine that is gen AI.

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

Honestly Im shocked this isn’t more well known, especially with how digital everything’s become

I only just found out about this, but I can already tell that a lot of English teachers would especially love this since it would be a good way to provide students with classic literature (Shakespeare, Frankenstein, Little Women, etc) without costing them or there school.

Which would be especially handy for public school teachers who often have to buy things out of pocket due to how little of a budget they are allotted

my main takeaway from that post is that the "asexuals should be put in meat grinders" crowd didn't actually go away they just got quieter

it really is crazy how hearing the word "aphobia" makes the compassion just immediately drain out of people like a plug got pulled in the soles of their feet. ace people can talk about our experiences with ostracisation and medicalisation and corrective rape and abusive relationships and assault and conversion therapy and familial rejection and societal pressure and self-hatred and loneliness and erasure and lack of representation, and everyone agrees that those things are bad. but the second the word "aphobia" is mentioned people are instantly just falling over themselves in their desperation to Commit To The Bit

Tea and Lemon - Kim Harding , 2021.

Australian , b. 1971 -

Oil on canvas , 50 x 70 cm.

So Crawford won. Elon is, as far as I know, still being investigated for ~election crimes~ in Wisconsin. Canada is still investigating Tesla's alleged fraud with rebates. Illinois just elected a bunch of Democrats for local offices. Louisiana rejected a bunch of Republican proposed changes to their state constitution. Cory Booker held the floor of the Senate for 25 hours, breaking the record of racist shitheel Strom Thurmond and in the process, listing out the sins of the Trump administration in the Senate records and delaying their vote for some other Trump asshole. And Speaker of the House Mike Johnson got embarrassed by House Republicans joining Dems in opposing him and threw a baby hissy fit and shut down the House for a week.

We didn't get Florida. But look at all that up there.

Oh and tomorrow, Tesla has to share information about how many cars it actually delivered in the first three months of the year, which unless they fudge the books, is going to be a lower number than they would like, and might make their stock dip some more. Or just drop. Forbes has provided a little graph of their sales.

Edit: and oh shit! Mike Waltz fucked up again and got caught using fucking Gmail for work discussions. Gmail. Because Google never spied on anyone. (He has a government email address.)

"contrapositives are for cowards"

If I had a hundred years - Tristan Unrau , 2022.

Canadian , b. 1989 -

Oil on linen , 38 x 31 in.

It’s crazy and fucked up that being yourself is actually the solution.

It’s like. When I was told to “just be yourself” as a kid I thought it was a passive thing. Like oh easy I just have to sit here and be myself. but the reason so many people think that “being yourself” is bullshit advice is because you actually have to make active choices to do this and it WILL make your life way more fun. You have to wear t-shirts of bands that were popular ten years ago because you like them. You have to do your hair in a way that you find cute or comfortable even if it’s “so nineties”. If your friend says a food you enjoy is gross to them, you can’t be afraid to admit you casually disagree. You have to do hobbies that you’re interested in even if you’re bad at them and you cant feel like you have to get good at something before you tell people it’s an activity you do. You have to read manga and comic books in public and get piercings your relatives think are unattractive. You don’t have to tell people you dislike that you dislike them, but you don’t have to give them your time and attention either. You have to rewatch that kids show you’re nostalgic for even if you’re in your 30s. You have to change your name if you hate it, even if only a few close friends can know. You have to get fun girly drinks at the bar. You have to order hot chocolate when you don’t like coffee and black coffee when you don’t like sweet things. I am still bad at practicing this but it is the only way to make it all tolerable.

First you have to realize that "yourself" is a construct built by the decisions you make. Then it becomes clear that being yourself is a deliberate and intentional practice, not a passive state of existence.

men lose their masculinity (the social reward for correctly performed manhood) through advocating for, sympathizing with, or doing labor that is allocated to women.

(and I'm not talking about some innate, spiritual, or psychological masculinity. I mean social masculinity--being regarded by higher ranking men as masculine.)

you genuinely do lose your current standing if you meaningfully and consistently object to the economic, legal, and interpersonal status of women, especially in ways that implicate men around you.

many men believe that if they are willing to do this, occasionally, then they are owed a recuperation of their masculinity through some other means.

if they are sacrificing masculinity through advocating for women politically, then they expect to bolster their masculinity through receiving expressions of gratitude and adoration by women ("feminist men are so hot" "consent is sexy" "pro-choice men get laid more" etc.) or they expect to bolster their masculinity through emasculating other men by asserting the standards of masculinity they adhere to are the "real" masculinity ("real men support women" "sexists are immature boys, I'm a man" "I'm secure in my masculinity and they're insecure" etc.)

to dismantle patriarchy, you need to be able to advocate for women even when it means losing gendered status. other men mostly will not respect you, and many misogynist women will not respect you either. it might not get you laid or praised or validated. in fact, it will probably subject you to increased scrutiny and criticism (because feminized subjects are always subject to such, and if you lose social masculinity, you too will experience this to some degree).

will you still advocate for women even if there is no social benefit and only social cost? do you have principles, or do you just want the fantasy of being a benevolent ruler?

Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

More Info: Cory Booker breaks a 68-year-old Senate record with a 25-hour speech (NPR - April 1, 2025)

any time i hear the insufferable transphobic athlete arguments i think of that one time in middle school when my boys lacrosse team did a full-contact scrimmage against the girls team (who typically play with limited contact) and i, a six-foot, 180lb defender, got utterly laid-out by this 5-foot-nothing girl experiencing the newly-unleashed animosity accompanied by violent sport and as i looked up at my assailant from flat on my back i experienced a brief bout of heterosexuality and fell wildly in love and then had to be taken to the ER because i had a concussion

“from flat on my back i experienced a brief bout of heterosexuality” took me out

That was the concussion

i need pepple to understand that in the first place leather has always been made from the byproducts of butchering animals for meat, otherwise the skin is just tossed and unused. there were some companies farming for leather for a while, particuarly alligator leather, but those were not the norm. peta did so much harm in their campaigns against leather as a concept (its not unethical. yoi get the skin when an animal dies. thats why most leather clothes in the usa are cow leather, bc thats the biggest meat animal here) that its almost impossible to buy anything "leather" that isnt made of plastic that it so fragile and shitty that the very Thread Holding It Together rips the fibers apart. it will last for maybe a year two if youre lucky, and wont biodegrade and was made out of something that isnt naturally occurring in the first place and is one of the biggest causes of pollution globally

i do not care if you personally think nobody should slaughter or eat animals, it is Going to happen anyway. you cannot be so obtuse thst you think making more plastic that causes pollution endless damage to the animals you claim to care about so much is better than omnivorous human beings eating other animals and using their bodies completely.

No but the Hunger Games really said "what do you hate more- the atrocities or the people who commit them against you? Because like it or not there IS a difference. If you hate the people who commit acts of pure evil more than you hate the acts themselves, what will stop you from becoming just like your enemies in your pursuit of justice? What will keep you from commiting those very same acts against THEM when the opportunity arises? And what then? The cycle of pain and suffering will never stop. Round and round it'll go. Nothing will ever change. But. BUT. If you hate the atrocities. If you hate the vile, senseless acts MORE than you hate the people who did them to you. If you are able to see that evil is evil regardless of who does it... The cycle ends with you. No, you may never get justice. But you will never be responsible for making others, even your enemies, suffer the same crimes you have. The atrocities will never be committed by you, never by your hand. And that's the way you change the world. It's the ONLY way" and that's why I am sure it will never stop being one of the most relevant works of fiction ever created

More on why the Hunger Games is such good dystopian fiction. Don't sink to their level! If they do the Hunger Games themselves, then they have effectively lost.

it's genuinely nuts that medicine became real. like in 1800 doctors are clearly charlatans who will fucking kill you for no reason, and in 1900 they're recognizably doctors. now they only kill people sometimes

like to their credit as a profession they shaped up pretty quickly once the basic knowledge was available. if you could have just gotten them washing their hands thousands of years ago they would have had a shot