[Image ID: A social media thread about neurodivergent hacks.

Photograph of a person with their hand over their eyes. Caption reads "Please give me your most unhinged neurodivergent hacks. I don't mean 'set multiple alarms on your phone!' I mean something you did that was truly unhinged but you don't regret it at all."

Anika: "my brother threw away all his socks and bought 3 10-packs of simple black socks. now he doesn't have to sort and fold them, he just throws them in a drawer and any two socks he picks will match"

JamestownMuse: "Roleplay. I'm not doing dishes, I'm cleaning my tavern before meeting the dangerous but handsome highwayman."

charlotte: " 'Big Light Torture' leave all the big lights on until the tasks are finished"

Niche: "it is to set multiple alarms but unhinged twist: they're different songs for every hour so I know that time is passing. has REALLY helped my time blindness"

[username cropped]: "when im frozen in bed doom scrolling I chuck my phone as hard I can across the room. either I get up to grab it (undoes the paralysis) or I continue rotting (but without my phone, so healthier"

Loke22: "I hate doing skincare but I know I have to so I imagine I'm some undead creature like a zombie and I have to keep embalming myself to stay fresh"

[username cropped]: "I can expand on this but I used to get upset if things weren't how I planned. So in all my plans, I just plan for things to not go as plan and then when they don't, it was part of the plan."

MnM_Kitty: "Cleaning buddy. I have a plush duck named George I set in the room I need to clean. I cannot leave until George is pleased with the cleanliness. He is watching"

Anonymous: "Realize that neurotypicals depend on social lies and find them fully acceptable, so you can create your own internal structure for what counts as harmless lies that make your life easier." End ID.]

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

it really is crazy how quickly people were willing to just let chatgpt do everything for them. i have never even tried it. brother i don't even know if it's just a website you go to or what. i do not know where chatgpt actually lives, because i can decide my own grocery list.

A seldom-discussed synapsid evolutionary trend is becoming a potato

It’s a versatile shape! Lots of muscle for running, climbing or burrowing neatly packed in a small storage space.

Not counting the reconstructions of the extinct animals, clockwise we have:

Why I don’t like AI art

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2, and in BLOOMINGTON at MORGENSTERN BOOKS on Apr 4. More tour dates here.

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

AI can never be horny or spiteful. There is no feeling of whimsy, or awe. AI can never create real art.

Couldn't have worded it better. Art IS communication. Even what ultimately doesn't make the cut was cut for a reason - consciously or subconsciously. And it invites the reader, watcher, observer, even the dreaded consumer of the artistic output to engage with the art, even if just in passing. And AI "art" is hollow because there's no I in the art, no conscious mind full of decision, and so the output is bland and pleasing in the worst way, inviting the mind only to disengage.

Fredy Perlman, Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom

this is targeted tumblr content

This is what language is for. Evolution. Ridiculous, wonderful evolution.

This is so good, I'm awake at 3am and glad of it - for this has arrived on my dash like a boss

the "tried to make him the main character" part killed me bc, indeed, caesar is not the main character of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

@suzeranity - OMG 😂😂

“They all did slay”

This is SO DAMN DAMN GOOD. I think Shakespeare would have approved.

kitty car 🐱

it really is crazy that if your body happens to look a certain way then its presence in any sexual capacity is automatically deemed "fetish material" and the people decrying it are convinced that they're somehow protecting your dignity. i think if you can't see someone express attraction to somebody with an amputation or who's 300lb+ or any other bodily variation without calling them a disgusting monster then that might actually speak less to your righteous dedication to the marginalized and more to your bigoted neurotic hangups about our bodies and sexual agency

last night we ordered papa johns and cheesy bread and my girlfriend was talking about the price and how it was higher than she expected because of the cheesy bread and she seemed like she was implying that she didn't think we should have gotten it, and when talking about eating the leftovers for lunch she said "can i have the rest of the cheesy bread" and i was confused because i'd only had two slices and i assumed that she had about the same and i was asking her like. do you want to eat the remaining 10 slices?? for lunch?? and she proceeds to tell me she had one slice of pizza and then like 2/3 of the cheesy bread we got last night

I feel guilty about the cost of the cheesy bread but I love the cheesy bread, is this hard to understand

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

Tags via @deadpanwalking, editor and ass-kicker extraordinaire

i really think this tweet is onto something

#exact same opinion but in my experience plenty of the children are over the age of 24 as well

This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

my girlfriend has been talking about this since ancestry kits became A Thing

Neil Gaiman thought: I think right now, and whenever anything like this happens, people are focusing too much on deciding what shows/books are cancelled, what movies they’re not allowed to watch anymore, there’s that post going back over Gaiman’s whole career attempting to find evidence of plagiarism for every single thing he’s ever written….

X person has been revealed to be awful, what’s most important now is to expunge the contamination and prove myself virtuous.

But I think what’s more important is to think about what breaks in our society that allows this to happen, the classism and misogyny and cycles of abuse that cause it, the lack of supports that allows it to continue, what the victims need to help them recover, how to speak out when you see something like this happening, etc etc etc, these kind of things. And I usually see much less of this discussion happening.

I get that it’s much more satisfying to have a circle jerk about all the secret clues we as fans could and should have noticed, debating about whether we’re allowed to watch Coraline anymore, arguing about if general themes in common with classic stories or fairytales counts as plagiarism, but like, this really doesn’t help anything, and it’s very self-serving.

What is the actual important issue here, is it the bad things that happened and what needs to change to make this not happen again? Or is the issue making sure the content we consume is pure?

Just something to think about.

You cannot consume your way into a better world.

Today's Seal Is: God Damn The Sun

i remember there was this one tweet complaining about straight women for jokingly calling themselves bottoms, and this isn’t shade on that tweet in particular. but there definitely are some, maybe even a lot, of straight women who in fact aren’t bottoms, and don’t enjoy bottoming, and they’re probably going to spend most of their lives having sex that they don’t enjoy because no one told them they had other options