in honor of 4chan exploding, I want to remind you all that they used to do “raids” on Tumblr.

they tried to flood the popular tags with gore and porn. this was when Homestuck was at its peak, so they were a target too. (side note: tags barely functioned at all at this point so trying to make them useless was like throwing a molotov into an already burning building but try telling that to 4channers)

but the Homestuck fandom was ready and countered by flooding the tag with weirder, more explicit Homestuck porn and gore.

to the point that the trolls themselves got weirded out, fucked off, and never attempted a “raid” again.

everyone moved on but I stayed there because that is one of the funniest fucking things to happen on this website.

Pepperidge farm remembers

✨🎂 Happy 413!! ♡🎂✨

Some character names are "I researched saints' lives and Medieval flower symbolism and etymology for ten thousand years to come up with the perfect name that has a hundred billion layers of symbolism" and other character names are "I just think it sounds nice :)" and 99 times out of 100 readers will neither know nor care which is which but somehow it's still very very important on the writing end

Right now it is of great allusive importance that the character has a disyllabic name with an initial S and a terminal emphasis. Don't ask why, just go with it.

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

RIGHT??

I'd just like to clarify some things about Senator Cory Booker's marathon Senate speech in protest of the present administration and everything they are doing to the American people.

Senator Booker was NOT allowed to sit down, eat, or use the bathroom during his speech. Sitting or leaving the room to use the bathroom would be considered yielding the floor. Eating would have interfered with his speaking and the person who has the senate floor must continue to speak, except when listening to questions that they will then answer.

He only took occasional sips of water.

The person who previously held the record for longest speech on the Senate floor did have bathroom breaks and also did things like read from the encyclopedia.

Senator Booker did not do that. His speech was to point out the damage that this administration is doing and he stayed on that subject.

Senator Booker's speech did reach many people. It wasn't a silly stunt that was done so that he could take the record for longest speech. He wanted to show the country that democrats will do something to bring attention to the problems we are facing. That democrats are listening to them.

Senator Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes to "make good trouble."

also like, a Black man breaking Strom Thurmond's record is absolutely *chef's kiss*

for those who are too young to know about Strom, he was literally a white supremacist

And Strom Thurmond was filibustering the Civil Rights Act. Which is why it's so awesome Senator Booker wrecked his record

THIS WAS AN ACTUAL POST BY THE POKEMON COMPANY. 

don’t click off after it hurts you, please

Pokemon Heritage Post

Why does that guillotine have a smaller hole.

It’s so you can still see the “blade” at the bottom, to trick you into thinking it went through clean.

I got one of the kits that comes with all these little cheapie magic tricks at a scholastic book fair once and my grandpa was so mad at them when I tried them on him. He let me do each one and told me I did a good job then put them on the corner of the dining room table and muttered over them for like three hours and filled several pages of notebook paper with criticisms. The unsleights-your-hand guy is making me cackle because I just keep looking at him and going "grandpa energy."

"ohh 00s diet culture isn't back because of ozempic, you're overreacting"

idk i keep seeing previously size-inclusive brands remove plus-sized versions of their clothes from their catalogues entirely, even lines specifically aimed at bigger sizes are cutting their size range down and chopping the bigger ones. i keep seeing mean skinny tiktokers get famous because they said something rude about fat people. when i ask my doctor about weight loss (which my country's gender treatment clinic requires before i can access even preliminary talks about hrt), i'm immediately offered drugs about it - drugs which, according to the doctor, we don't know the long-term effects of. but surely! surely it can't be worse than being fat!

like why are people acting surprised? we've made being extremely wealthy the aspirational aesthetic to strive for, made 'being skinny and having a lot of time and money to stay beautiful' a not only viable but lucrative carreer for people, and then released a drug that is wildly expensive and will make people thin.

of course people are gonna make being thin the ultimate status symbol again - it more than ever before signals wealth and leisure-time.

like, do you think it's a coincidence that people are back to constantly spouting 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' again? and pretending being fat is a matter of lacking self-control around cake or whatever? as if people haven't spent decades trying to get these fucks to understand that actually healthy produce and the time to maintain your body are extreme luxuries in our society?

anyway my broke fat ass can't find pants i like and can afford because the size-inclusive lines i'd have shopped at previously have axed anything over a size xl

and like. i'm not even that fat. what the fuck do people bigger than me do. it's really heinous right now for fat peeps.

I wonder also about how much of the removal of inclusive sizing is part of the anti-DEI wave. With the way I've seen people complain that size-inclusive workout clothes are "promoting obesity," it's pretty likely they consider providing clothes that fit people to be an insane demand made by the woke mob. Since the United States is currently on a path to make it so no one has to look upon a body that isn't cis, white, and abled...being either jacked or itty bitty is probably a requirement too. I don't know how much this is affecting other countries, but certainly the US-owned companies are trying to make everyone look like the people in those 1950s advertisements that right-wingers love so much.

The U.S. government is taking people off the street and sending them to the place in the bottom picture without charges filed, no arraignments, no due process and without notifying anyone of the people’s whereabouts.

El Salvador intends to never release anyone from CECOT.

Real talk? If you are a tourist, DO NOT come to the US right now. They haven’t sent any tourists to El Salvador yet, but they have locked innocent people up in US facilities simply because the officers were on a power trip.

Wanted to see if I could ‘improve’ Shino’s boruto design a little bit. It’s not the best but it’s something 💀

I’d like to introduce everyone to my new theme song

Always reblog.

Genius

I love it when pets do the thing where they've clearly figured out that certain steps result in an outcome, but they can't quite DO it themselves.

The cat understands that their food is in this container, and that their human gets it, and brings it to the dishes, and then there's food.

But having no thumbs has prevented them from their triumph.

I on the other hand love that he insists on using the bowl even though he could probably just rip/chew a hole in the bag.

Which indicates that he's probably not quite sure WHICH of the steps are crucial so he's earnestly repeating them all.

(kids do this too - it's called overimitation and there are experiments on it.)

An attempt was made.

A sentence I never wished to write…A GenAI video of Donald Trump sucking Elon Musk’s toes was displayed on the TVs at the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Text over the video reads ‘Long live the real king’

No, this is not a good use of generative AI.

What a horrible day to have eyes.

Is there an award for trolling? Whoever did this deserves that award.

Love this new Netflix genre of "Accidental Dad and his Adopted Problem Child join hands to overthrow the government which has been lying to everyone with centuries of propaganda"