The Asexual Double Edged Sword Is That A Lot Of People, Particularly Queer Discoursers(tm) Online, Are

Every page of the legendarium is dripping with love. Love for Christopher love for storytelling love for history and language and nature and the world just a kind of slow reveling in the best parts of living that makes Tolkien’s work so antithetical to modernity and feel so timeless

nothing, just tolkien originally writing down the hobbit because his son christopher kept complaining that he'd change the details from night to night and then christopher later being so crucial in taking tolkien's notes and turning them into fully written novels of worldbuilding. loving someone to the point of creation and then having them help you finish the job.

"There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, 'A poor choice of words in 1954'," he says. "And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now." So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. "It's genuinely amazing that...these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text," he says. But, in his view, that doesn't make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, "but no one wants to use that term, because it's not as sexy".

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023

been getting really into rockhounding lately and the subreddits are great

words just get better when you put boy in front of them. boykissing boycuddles boyfriend boylove.. many such cases

people have invented so many different ways of rephrasing "don't transition" to sound plausibly progressive enough to bystanders that they'll think trans people are over-dramatic for reacting negatively to it.

medical transition is permanent so you should really consider it thoroughly and put off trying it unless you know for sure. yes, just keep second guessing yourself. 6 months, 3 years, 20 years...

you might not like how you look. other people might not like how you look. you might not look cis. don't you want to be desirable? do you want to risk feeling worse and more insecure? you look so good now! we think you're so hot right now, and you wouldn't want to change your body and make it not hot to us, right?

you are so valid if you don't transition. you don't need to transition. no one needs to transition. it's just cosmetic, it's just aesthetic, it's all optional and means nothing at all. (no, of course this is unrelated to arguments used for insurance not covering transition, or doctors denying care.)

why do you even want to transition? are you trying to look cis? are you trying to adhere to beauty standards? are you doing this to look hot? that's regressive and outdated and assimilationist. (if you want us to take your politics seriously, you shouldn't transition)

it's a waste of resources/privileged/bourgeois to transition. it's kind of morally suspect that you would transition and still ask for help ever in your life. why should we support someone who's transitioning if they're obviously not oppressed anyway.

DIY HRT is too dangerous. you could hurt your body. you could get arrested. your life will probably end if you take HRT. if you can't access HRT legally, you just shouldn't take it. not for transphobic reasons!! just for your own sake <3

like when will it end

A boy shares the news of Yuri Gagarin's space flight with local shepherd (1961)

you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

😈 You are not bound by the Hays code.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

😈 You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.

Leftists who are committed to the idea that the PRC can meaningfully be called a socialist nation are the intellectual equivalent of someone who has been forced to take a poison pill their entire life and finally decided to solve the problem by switching the pharmacy they get the pill from.

This morning I had like the lesbian equivalent of that part from the Brian David Gilbert cooking video about getting called Boss haha