hello I'm 31 and I'm a bisexual mess doing my best
Icon made my @dokelsss
hello hi! welcome to my blog, I’ve been trapped here for eternity and made a nice little home for myself on this webbed site.
- call me Hattie. my url was originally a reference to Hatchan the octopus man from One Piece, but I also wear a lot of hats, so it works on two levels
- I’m a New Yorker and a professional dog walker
- I’m a mammal, you can use any pronouns for me, I mostly respond to Hattie or Hatchan
- I’m deaf and wear hearing aids
- love animals. all kinds. fauna of the earth is my #1 favorite thing. beasts and creatures of all kinds!
- drug use is morally neutral, I like psychedelics and cannabis
- my #1 interest is storytelling and narrative! I love metanarrative!!!!! When a story references itself or its medium or the concept of storytelling I just go nuts for that shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- I like people and talking to people, I welcome asks and messages and interaction! feel free to give me your controversial opinions on nyc. you can be a city hater, I can take it, but I will tolerate NO SLANDER about public transportation, trains and transit systems are beloved to me
- my tag for personal posts is #lifeblogging (like liveblogging, except about me)
also I have the blog s3lfl0v3.tumblr.com as a kind of collection of stuff that makes me feel better when I’m not good. follows there are always welcome. beinghuman is hard sometimes
So I saw a post about couples who look alike, and my brain went off on a tangent so far from the original post that I’m gonna make my own post.
My mom always thought it was cute and funny when couples looked alike. I find it neither of those things.
So when I started dating my husband, I was like “HAHAHA!! Nobody can accuse us of looking alike!”
Except…
We’re both 5’3”. We both weigh around 180 and carry it in the belly (him more handsomely than me). We both have eyes that crinkle up really tight when we smile, and both of our smiles are broad. We’ve both rocked a buzzcut, we both wear glasses, we both have the same casual nerdy style.
look, there's just no two ways about it, you have to read the locked tomb. you Have to read the locked tomb. it is simply not optional. there is a point in the future wherein you have read the locked tomb which means that you are going to read the locked tomb. the deal is as good as done. the locked tomb is a series of books and you have to read them. it's not a law of the state, it's a law of nature, it's newton's fourth law of motion. newton's fifth law of motion is that you have to listen to the fiction podcast the silt verses but I'll let you warm up to that one.
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
one of my earliest video game memories was my neighbor from down the street burning me a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon onto a CD and giving it to me for free, with the caveat that one day a week he would sit behind me and backseat game HARD. like "build this here, okay now build this here, no not there, HERE, okay now make a path here," etc etc. i never minded it at the time, i genuinely had no idea how to play so i thought he was teaching me. years later i learned that him and his family were Orthodox Jewish and him backseat gaming me was his way of getting around the Sabbath ban on playing video games
I am sad and melancholy for a stupid, stupid, stupid reason and I don’t know how to fix it but unless I fix it I am doomed to rot away tonight so fuck it, I’m going to talk about it
First: I have tickets to a disco dance night that I bought many months ago, and I was talked into buying a bunch of tickets as a bulk-buy-ahead-of-time deal, and at the time I had visions of inviting all my friends and having a great night out on the town at a rooftop dance party. The money is already spent (and I did get a good deal, I’m not gonna be broke or anything but also I definitely cannot get a refund bc its tonight)
Second: One of the people I invited ahead of time got injured so he won’t come, the second person is his wife so she won’t leave him so she’s out too, the third person is my husband and he had surgery yesterday so he’s not that bad off but also he shouldn’t/won’t be dancing the night away with me. So that’s 3 different tickets that were for sure GONNA be used except the reasons they can’t be used all happened literally yesterday
Third: the other friends I made in the past few months, that totally would be down to go with me, are instead going to a different party, for someone I don’t know but they all know. The person who is hosting the party has her birthday today and I never met her and therefore I am not invited, and I can’t just invite myself, and I shouldn’t really expect to be because again we never met so I can’t just pop into a random person’s party unless it is communicated that its an “everyone welcome, bring a plus one!” type of party which it is NOT
So basically my options are to use the tickets to this danced party to do a very limited amount of dancing, and only attend with my husband, but keep an eye on his condition the whole time– or wallow at home and be sad. And I’m leaning towards the “be sad” part of things because idk the only type of drunk I want to get tonight is messy crying drunk and I don’t think I have it in me to boogie down on a rooftop.
A movie idea where a kid is being raised in a cult that believes in ritual sacrifice and that their first born is destined to die and do so by forcefeeding the child a mysterious substance that begins to slowly make the kid rot from the inside out. The real horror of the story is the child fighting so hard to get much needed medical attention as they deteriorate only to be dismissed by every adult because that's their parent's constitutional right to practice their religious beliefs and they have the authority to decide that the kid deserves to die so they refuse to intervene.
The cultist parents aren't wearing bonnets and living in some secluded commune or anything, they live in an upper middle class home with a granite top kitchen island and a pool. Granted they dress a bit plainly but it's nothing out ot the ordinary. The parents are depicted as model citizens, regularly showing up to PTA and HOA meetings and throwing neighborhood bbqs. They go to their church on weekends and that's where things begin to spiral.
The kid has grown up in this "church" her whole life and she feels the full weight of betrayal and confusion come her 10th birthday when her parents reveal their firstborn's "ultimate destiny." She has to be held down kicking and screaming to be fed the substance only known as "the miracle".
Over time the kid starts showing symptoms of "the miracle" and is lying on the floor in a fetal position and begging her parents to help her while they all gather around and pray that their god kills her. Her younger siblings clap and chant and bounce around with glee, not understanding what's happening because they're young. Nobody will help her. Her death is a miracle to them but she is terrified and wants to live.
When she finally escapes the house and goes to the doctors the doctors almost immediately call the kid's parents and then gaslight her that her symptoms are "just a tummy ache" when previously the doctors and nurses showed intense concern that she's vomiting blood and black goo. They know it's bad but they don't want to deal with the lawsuit.
The film does not establish much lore about the cult or how widely known its practices are to outsiders, rather it should leave the audience disturbed and outraged asking questions like "how is everyone okay with this? Why isn't anyone helping this kid?"
Unironically a bigger obstacle in my life than weed or phones ever were. Everyone fear mongers porn when its cookie clicker we should be worried about.
Love that the locked tomb is an in-depth exploration of the complexity of human relationships, love, grief, co-dependency, devotion, identity; all encapsulated in a profoundly queer, eco-feminist narrative, but when I have to explain it to my friends I just go: okay now imagine if nuns were goth and magic
To everyone who says they use the "lesbian neceomancers in space" tagline, I'm glad for you but it doesn't work for me because it's not right... It IS right technically but it is not in any way a summary of the what actually happens in the book and not even close to presenting the themes of the books.
Tbh, my angle for a non-spoiler summary is usually "the first book is a closed-door murder mystery with a group of people who are there to become demi-gods/super powerful servants of god, and our protagonists are gothic lesbian nuns, and it's all in space (it's kind of like among us haha). The second one deals with the aftermarth of that and has little to do with the first in terms of plot but it's incredible (it's my favourite) and somehow, it is also kind of like among us... Now the third one, I cannot explain this without the other two, but it's very a beautiful book about being a kid and about fighting imperialism. Just trust me".
Of course this depends on which friend I'm trying to explain it to and the level of detail they will accept for spoiler reasons. But honestly any zero-spoiler summary feels like a disservice to the themes of the books because you can't really speak about the cavalier system in depth, or the lyctors... situation, or anything about Alecto
A collection of time travel humor text posts, not censored by me.
All of these really made me laugh, and laughter is a very good thing sometimes. All of the time, actually. Unless you're doing something that requires a still hand or silence I guess.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Any frank assessment of your own achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces that attended those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "Well, if you don't have the foresight and work ethic to be born in 1971, I can't really help you."
When it comes to tech, being born in 1971 – to a computer scientist father, no less – conferred a tremendous advantage for my career chances. My dad – a refugee – came to Canada at a time when post-war public services meant that he could become the first person in his family to go to university, all the way to a doctorate.
That set me up for life in a house where tech and education were all around me. Both my parents are teachers, both from working class families where no one had ever gone beyond high school, who found themselves in a time and place where it was easier than at any time in history for people from backgrounds like theirs to attend university. I got to go to university, too, at a time when education was cheap enough that I could drop out of four schools before figuring out that it wasn't for me, and still be debt-free, largely thanks to income from a series of part-time jobs.
When I dropped out of my final degree program, it was to take a job in tech at a time when anyone with a little creativity, work ethic, aptitude and curiosity could walk into a career. Millions of us did it, and I ended up working as a freelancer, then founding a startup, and then going to EFF. I know I work hard, I know I apply myself to understanding the world around me, but also…when it comes to this kind of career, I was born on third base.
There's plenty of this to go around. Think of boomers who bought their "starter home" with the income from their first job and traded it in for a succession of larger, nicer homes, each of which skyrocketed in value. Some of those people fancy themselves to be veritable Warren Buffets for having had the shrewd financial insight that buying a house and living in it was a good idea. The truly smart ones know that they just got lucky.
There are world-historic forces all around us, creating moments and circumstances that contribute to the life-thriving of those of us who are lucky enough to be suited to the moment we find ourselves in.
Take computing: for decades, computing was ruled by Moore's Law, an unbroken run in which computers got faster and cheaper every year. If you were interested in the kinds of computing applications that were well-suited to serial computation – programs that worked best when run on a single computer – you were in luck. Even if your application or field of study was expensive and difficult to realize on today's computer, you could just stand still for a year or two and a much faster computer would park itself on your doorstep, ready to solve your problems.
When Moore's Law tapped out – when the pace at which transistors got smaller and computers got faster slowed and plateaued, and the expense of even modest performance gains climbed infinitywards – computing changed with it. Parallel computing – putting more cores on a chip, more chips on a board, more boards in a system – took off, as chipmakers and system builders switched from a focus on building their computers tall to building them wide.
As parallel computing took off, so did parallel applications. This is the beginning of the graphics revolution, as GPUs – components made up of many, many low-powered computers – became more central to academic research and commercial product roadmaps. But it wasn't just graphics that saw a huge lift here: any task that could be parallelized got easier and cheaper to perform every year, in a steady trend that has run to this day. This is the era of performance gaming, VR and AR, cryptocurrency, and, of course, AI.
In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly introduces the idea of the "adjacent possible" through the example of the helicopter. Da Vinci sketched a "helicopter" – blades in the shape of maple keys attached to a kind of wine-press screw – in the 15th century. In the centuries that followed, many other people had the insight that twirling blades of that shape on a screw of some type could provide lift for some kind of heavier-than-air craft. But it wasn't until strong alloys, internal combustion engines and light, energy-dense refined hydrocarbon fuels came on the scene that the helicopter became possible, whereupon it was all but inevitable, with several people independently inventing the helicopter all at once:
In the same way, the computing industry's focus on parallel computing made life easier for people who burned to do something parallelizable. Then the achievements of the parallel computing partisans drove more investment in improvements to parallel computing hardware and theoretical work on how to parallelize other problems. This feedback loop raised the profile of parallel computing applications, attracting more bright and ambitious people to those applications, whose even more impressive accomplishments brought more people into the field, more capital into hardware development, and more resources to parallelization research.
The point being that world-historic forces, combined with accidents of history, shape the outcomes of individuals, companies and disciplines. It's much easier to be an accomplished graphics wizard in an era in which GPUs are doubling in power every year than it is in an era when linear computing is getting the lion's share of investment and improvement.
These forces and accidents have acted on AI in ways that profoundly shaped its development. The latest AI boom started when a group of machine learning researchers tried a minor variation on existing techniques and saw a major improvement in the outcomes. This is one of the most exciting kinds of breakthrough: if tweaking a single variable in a small way produces a large improvement, then it may be that further tweaking will produce even more improvements.
