Opal

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

My father's government name is nowhere in his yearbooks. When I went to his step dad's funeral, NOBODY used I had ever heard him called before.

Before transition, I went by my middle name, not my first name, because my mother didn't like using my first name.

Wasn't an issue until "Opal".

Baffled by transphobes insisting that the name on your birth certificate is Your True Name Forever when it was common in my grandparents' generation to just...pick a name you like and use that, nbd. I literally found out both of my grandma's birth certificate first names FROM THEIR OBITUARIES.

Billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, the other predator named by Ava Cordero in *2007*, was identified as being in the redacted Epstein files in Congress today.

Age verification?

My first cassette tape was Weird Al's "Even Worse".

My Nintendo's cartridge loader got fucked up & wouldn't work without a Game Genie.

We knew 10 highly violent parodies of the Barney theme song and sang them constantly.

Jurassic Park used computer effects? Holy shit, how?

USA? Oh yeah, I heard of that country.

That's where the pedophile president openly kidnaps children and everyone lets it happen, right?

🎶 we don't want him, you can have him, he's too fash for me 🎶

"The DOE contends it is eliminating unnecessary excess regulations without sacrificing safety. But... the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and other outside observers remain concerned that safety is falling by the wayside to better serve the global AI race."

The guy who is my bellwether for where the dumb money is going—he had a cloud engineer phase, crypto phase, nft phase, AI phase—has pivoted back to DJing, which is what he was first doing when I met him 20 years ago.

Call it a "ladder mate" if you want; I'm gonna keep calling it "dog-walking my bitch until he falls over".

Most people experienced the fall of the Roman Empire as: “One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it.”

I'll take "this motherfucker" over "this individual" any day of the week.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

thinking about Ring's mesh surveillance and tapping the sign

Kind of gives away the whole game that all the crypto ads this year have been replaced with gambling and AI ads.

But, Soatok, what if I just watch it for the ads?

Inshallah.

Ma'am if you want to change the outcome of elections, you need to talk to white people

Black people do not put republicans in office.

looking at twitter is self-harm
staring at the horrors is self-harm
looking at twitter is self-harm
staring at the horrors is self-harm
looking at twitter is self-harm
staring at the horrors is self-harm

it doesn't make you more informed just more anxious and scared

that is what they want

it does rule that the villains have to pretend this is good

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

GM: Charisma check.

Mamdani: [rolls natural 20]

GM: that’s a d6 how did you

Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

man just one or two more posts and I'm gonna fix american leftwing politics i can feel it

Why the fuck would anybody want to come here?

My commissions have made me very happy over the years. I have always tried to pay a fair amount, typically including a generous tip because artists need money.

At no point did that make me an artist, and at no point will typing a prompt into Midjourney ever make anybody else an artist, either.

In the end, a "creative prompting" expert is still not an artist. They were never being "gatekept" by people who put in the work. They never learned how to make art; only to commission in the most asinine way (and be the bullying BITCH of a patron who constantly asks for changes and modifications).

What AI has done is not to give people without talent a new artform or creative outlet.

It has given these nitwits unlimited access to commissions by no-cost "artists" that don't actually have any soul or capability to understand or contextualize or make a statement with their "work".

I've commissioned art from people before. I got to give a description of what I wanted, and art was made. I always try to leave as much to the artist as possible, because tiny details should not take precedence over the artist's creativity.

At no point would I EVER claim to have "made" that art.

If I ask for an AI image of the Everglades, I'm sure I'll get back an uncanny valley picture of America's largest swamp.

If I ask an artist to draw the Everglades today, I might get back a sketch of a concentration camp, because that's today's context and the artist's view right now.