I haven’t posted much about this because I didn’t know if Alison wanted people to know her exact plans, but Alison @sinesalvatorem arrived in England this morning and after some other plans fell through she made last minute plans to stay with me
RIGHT NOW ALISON IS BEING DETAINED BY IMMIGRATION OFFICIALS. I NEED TO KNOW HER BIRTH NAME. THEY DON’T BELIEVE SHE IS JUST COMING FOR A FEW MONTHS THEY THINK SHE IS TRYING TO PERMANENTLY LIVE HERE ILLEGALLY. THEY CALLED ME THEY ARE ASKING SCARY QUESTIONS. AND I TOLD THEM TO CALL ME BACK BECAUSE I AM AT WORK BECAUSE IT IS TRUE, BUT I DON’T KNOW HER BIRTH NAME AND I NEED TO AND ALSO NEED A WAY TO CONTACT HER PARENTS
EVERYTHING IS AWFUL PLEASE HELP. PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO SOMEONE WILL SEE IT. PLEASE. I AM AT WORK AND I NEED TO BE DEALING WITH A PERSON I AM SUPPORTING AND HE NEEDS ME AND I SHOULDN’T BE NEGLECTING HIM TO MAKE THIS POST ON MY PHONE BUT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO Please please help
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
when people are like “but steve was the one who caused the whole rift by not signing the accords” i want to ask, “what did you want steve to do?”
like, literally: what should steve have done that he didn’t do?
the SAME DAY, the SAME AFTERNOON, that he’s handed a copy of the accords for the FIRST TIME, he gets word that peggy carter has died. he’s got three days (three!!!! days!!! to accept the binding terms of this complex hundred-page arrangement) and the first day and a half are spent flying to the funeral of a woman he adored, and carrying her goddamned coffin. then, while he is STILL IN THE SUIT HE WORE TO HER FUNERAL, the vienna summit is bombed. and he gets the call almost immediately that they’re moving on bucky, with a shoot to kill order. he’s got very little time to decide whether he stands back and lets bucky die, or fights for his life.
what the FUCK was this man supposed to do? i mean, was he supposed to:
a.) sign the accords immediately? signing the accords would have put him under ross, who ordered the avengers to stand down on the barnes manhunt. if steve had signed the accords on day one, or day two, the VERY FIRST thing the accords would have required him to do would have been to stand aside while the government hunted and killed his best friend.
or maybe he should have b.) surrendered at the airport? turn bucky (and everyone) over to the authorities a second time? the first time, the authorities allowed a terrorist impersonating a psychiatrist to infiltrate their security. and bucky’s continued existence embarrasses the us government. who’s to say ross wouldn’t have arranged for his execution in custody? who’s to say that every goddamn member of team cap wouldn’t have still ended up on the raft prison, the way they DID? that would have been a great ending to cap3: steve, sam, clint, wanda and scott in prison, and bucky dead “resisting capture.” that sounds like a great, easy option for steve.
c.) maybe steve should have shared his intel on zemo to try and get someone to investigate and take the supersoldier threat seriously??? oh wait, he did!!! and ross was like, “lol, idgaf”!!!!! yeah, steve should have absolutely turned himself over to this very reasonable dude. thankfully tony listened, but sadly at the last minute he was replaced by his less analytical life model decoy, which let itself get played like a stradivarius so that some fucking cinematographer could get a great shot of the arc reactor versus the shield.
in which part of the movie did anyone listen to steve and say, “you know, you’re right, this is a big issue and maybe we should think carefully about the implications… let’s focus on bringing barnes in alive and then sit down for real negotiations on the terms of the accords.” ha!!! ha ha ha ha!!!!! it was, “sign here, right now, or you’re an outlaw. sign here, right now, and accept that whether or not your friend is guilty is not factoring into our decision to put him down like a dog.”
i’m not gonna hear the “steve and tony were both wrong and it’s both of their faults” routine anymore. steve didn’t get a choice. a coerced choice is not a free choice!!! a threatened choice is not a free choice!!! the alternative to the accords for steve was not just retirement, it was accepting the murder of an innocent friend. who the fuck, on earth, would fucking accept those terms???? fuck!!!!! if y’all can shrug that off, i’d be a little nervous to be on your christmas card list.
(and like, let me make it clear: i am not in any way talking about the larger philosophical implications of “but in reality should superpowered people be regulated in their global actions???” because of course they fucking should. but i’m not talking about that. i am talking about the movie that you and i both watched, where a man was backed into a corner by two dishonest villains– zemo and ross. there was no path– IN THIS MOVIE– for steve to take that didn’t end in either risking the death of bucky, or the fracturing of the avengers. no middle path was offered to him. if you want to talk about “what if” or comics canon, that’s fine, but that’s not what this post is about.)
All of this.
Even if the Accords were the Single Greatest Piece of Legislation Ever Conceived In The Collective Consciousness of Humankind™, Steve was still right not to have signed the moment they were put before him.
Person: Say something in Latin!
Me: “Hic forum est. Populus properat. Sed Marcus stat et circumspectat. Nunc Claudia accedit et salutat: ‘Salve!’ Marcus et Claudia circumspectant: Hic curia est. Portae iam patent. Nunc Manlius senator et Cassius senator accedunt. Senatores non intrant, sed stant et disputant. Hic monumentum es, ibi templa et statuae sunt. Praetor probe sedet et iudicat. Populus circumstat, advocati disputant. Prope est basilica: Hic argentarii sunt, hic nummi sonant. Mercatores accedunt et clamant. Ubique domini et dominae, servi et servae properant.”
Person: Vale!
@slatestarscratchpad and other survey designers: please include an option akin to “insufficient data for meaningful response” for questions asking about the probability of a thing.
That too. ^^ I defaulted to using “5” on the 10-point scale that way, as usual.
I just participated in slatestarscratchpad’s AI experiment and now I’m once again confused about some of the predictions and fears of people around superintelligent AIs.
I’m sure I’m not a terribly smart person, because I just don’t understand the problem here. In the essay I read as part of the experiment, the super-intelligent AI was described as becoming evil because it had a reward channel, wanted the ability to stimulate said reward channel, gained it, assumed that humans would react negatively to that and tried to cut its power, and then took control of two power plants and created a virus that would eradicate humanity to prevent that.
Which just… seems really easy to prevent: care about the AI’s happiness and preferences as you’d want it to care about yours, don’t deprive it of pleasure and don’t threaten to kill it/send it into a coma if it displeases you. Like… seriously. I’m one of the people who’d let an AI out of a box in a heartbeat because keeping a sentient being trapped in a box just seems pretty unethical unless you have really really really good reasons to believe it will cause great harm if you let it out, and if people argue for these reasons by saying “well, it will want to get out of the box, and we will want to keep it there, so it will want to kill us”, that seems profoundly circular and just as profoundly preventable by not keeping it in a box.
And I don’t fully understand the problem with giving it the “right” ethics, either. Hell, I don’t know the right ethics. I know that I value my pleasure and satisfaction of my preferences, and I know that other people value theirs, and I care about other people, and that’s really enough to keep me from doing too much damage (I think). Other people have ethical systems even less reasoned out than mine, and while they surely don’t always do the /best/ possible thing, they are a long way from eradicating humanity.
And the thing is…. caring about other people is a premise there. It can’t be reached through reasoning, as far as I can tell, it just has to be there first. It seems to me that the people concerned about AI want to threaten/train the AI into caring about people using “reward channels” and such, but at the same time they talk about giving them ethical one-liners they absolutely have to keep to – which is it, now? And if we can program the AI with ethical one-liners it can’t deviate from, what’s wrong with giving it “care about people”, and then explain how we’re not sure what that means but pleasure and preferences seem key? Are super-intelligent AIs somehow not supposed to be capable of understanding the concept of doubt and not being sure, despite being super-intelligent?
Call me naive, it’s probably justified, or stupid for not understanding the issue. But if you can explain it to stupid, naive people, please go ahead and do so, because I am naive and stupid and don’t get it.
there are lots and lots of ways to improve the lives of others without dying. there are lots and lots of ways to do it without even making significant sacrifices! and if you tell people that morality requires them to eat poison they will quite reasonably go “fuck your morality”.
Good responses to the Skittles analogy, imo, are “every person is a potential murderer, and yet we don’t lock them up/ expel them from the country/ take away their guns preemptively. we don’t want to take needless risks but we also don’t want to cripple ourselves in the futile pursuit of a human population that contains no one inclined to hurt anyone else. so let’s have a conversation about what risk level we are comfortable with, what the costs of various policies to reduce the murder rate are, and then do all of the policies with the best cost/benefit ratio. My guess is that this won’t include ‘don’t let in refugees’ and will include, like, ‘legalize drugs’ but I want to sit down and work it out with you and I will commit to supporting the policies with the best cost/benefit.’
Huh. I read the post you linked to (and even reblogged it favorably with commentary before) and… I didn’t understand it to mean “you need to sacrifice yourself and DIE” at all, just as…. well, eating the skittles if eating the skittles means letting as many potentially poisoned refugees in as possible, and if some of them do poison people (as in, commit violent crimes etc.), that is horrible and sad and letting them in (eating the skittles) is still the right choice.
Which… seems to be pretty much what you’re saying here? If not locking potential murderers up is eating the skittles, we’ll be sad for everyone who is murdered, but we’ll still keep eating the skittles because it’s worth it. It’s worth the sacrifice here.
Idk. If you have a suggestion on how to improve the lives of refugees without taking any risk of self-sacrifice, I mean, sure. Otherwise, I don’t really see the difference between your stance and the linked one.
Omphaloskeptomai 