eviltwintomboy

[eviltwintomboy]

How do we rectify our favorite authors and their transphobic/racist/homophobic views? Can we read H.P. Lovecraft or Roald Dahl today without getting angry over their views?

#writing #literature #writer #thoughts

[eviltwintomboy]

Hey friends, Benjamin Maldonaldo reached out to us on Instagram and asked us to share his post about a SOLARPUNK SURVEY which is super awesome!! He wants to take the temperature of what solarpunks are thinking/feeling about solarpunk itself as a movement/genre for his bachelor's thesis, and we think it's a rad concept. Here's the link:

"Dear Solarpunks, my name is Benjamín Maldonado, a Chilean 21 year old Solarpunk enthusiast that throughout the last few months, has tried to learn as much as possible about the movement and genre. This personal passion led me to choose Solarpunk as the subject of my thesis for the Bachelor of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University. The following survey will be part of that thesis, where I will ask you about your thoughts on different matters like the Solarpunk movement, Solarpunk content, Solarpunk communities and some basic demographics. Based on the time I have spent in Solarpunk forums, it is very likely that you are also curious on what other Solarpunks think. Given this, after I close the survey I would like to share my findings with you all, hopefully contributing to the ongoing debates within the community. Your participation in this survey is entirely voluntary, and all responses will be kept confidential. Your personal information will not be divulged, and your individual responses will remain anonymous. The data gathered from this survey will be used solely for research purposes related to this research, supervised by Assistant Professor Rodrigo Ochigame and Assistant Professor John Boy

Although I am sure there are a lot of underage Solarpunks who have a lot to say, I sadly will not be allowing people younger than 18. This is solely a legal matter. Your understanding and cooperation on this matter are greatly appreciated."

[eviltwintomboy]

This was an interesting read!

I always forget this wasn’t a thing everywhere but my high school had a fun and innovative way to torment us in PE. They got heart rate monitors. It was this awful strap that went under the bra line and paired to a watch. The first day was great cause we got to set our resting heart rate. We did this by laying in a dark room and napping.

But then once a week we’d have to strap on these monitors and go running. The monitors were old tech and didn’t always pick up your heartbeat, so you’d have to use cold water between it and your skin to get a better connection, gods know why. Warm water never worked. After the day our watches would be collected and our efforts recorded.

The idea was that if your heart beat too fast you were supposed to stop, and if it was too slow you’d speed up. In practice this was ridiculous, staying in the green zone all class was ridiculously difficult.

Even people like me who were stubbornly resistant to running the mile couldn’t stand the horrific constant beeping and made attempts to placate the reviled machine. It was always fairly miserable. I had PE first thing in the chilly morning, dashing cold water on my skin before running around half awake was the low point of my week.

But for some unknown reason, the teacher insisted that no play could happen on these days. We were given the freedom to run all over campus but woe betide us if we tried to make a game that actually made this enjoyable.

We’d initiate games of tag only to get yelled at for not just… running. Any kind of play was forbidden. On one memorable occasion someone got a kickball and we started an impromptu soccer game with it.

If someone’s heart rate got too high they’d drop to their knees to wait out the shrieking of their watch so an extra element was added to the game of trying to win without going too hard. I remember being absolutely delighted, the thrill of that game still lives in my heart, hoping I could score a goal before my heartbeat betrayed me to the hated watch.

When the PE teacher found us we were soundly scolded and the ball was confiscated. Our happiness burst like a soap bubble and we turned our back to the enchantment of the green field and resumed slogging along in a grey haze as expected.

#ramblies #ffs foibles #high school #story #writing #poetry

[eviltwintomboy]

[eviltwintomboy]

I learned how to be quiet about pain when I was very young. I learned how to fold in on myself like laundry, to take up less space in the cupboard. I learned how to keep the peace around me by sweeping the dirt under my own rug.

I have been taught that expressing my less favourable emotions is just complaining—something weak people do when they're too incompetent to solve their own problems.

Incompetent. Incompetent. This word is very important to me. Incompetent is the word I am always running from. To run from incompetency means to run from feeling dejected, feeling lost, feeling hurt. To run from incompetency is to run towards goodness. To run towards a me who knows all the answers and shoulders all the burdens and shrugs off all the pain.

Some days I am not very good at this race I am running. Days when the past lurches forward to bite my ankles, or days when the future looks back to scorn my present.

On these days I am weak. The poise slips. It's all too easy to cry a little and vent my fears. I forget that I am supposed to be keeping all of this shut away where no one else can see. I forget that I am not supposed to be dragged down by these feelings in the first place.

Today I feigned nonchalance and I feigned it well. No one noticed that I was hurt by the thing that happened, and sitting alone in all my hurt, I was bitterly gratified. I had fulfilled the proper narrative of an animal who is injured and returns to its cave to lick its wounds only in private.

But there is a desperation for the hidden pain to be noticed. This is the Achilles' Heel of the whole stealth operation; it threatens the little play I have constructed in which I suffer alone and inconvenience no one and am all the stronger for it.

Today I stood upright to talk to my mother and doubled over in pain the moment she left the room. It is satisfying, knowing I did the valiant and honourable thing of keeping the damn pain to myself. It is infuriating, the way my eyes flickered to the door in the dark and private hope that she would come back in and witness me while I was down.

I want to be strong and hide all the hard things away. I want someone to see my efforts to hide all the hard things away and realise I'm strong. I want to bring to life this character I have created who suffers without complaint and is loved when the truth is revealed. Who suffers well.

This is the person who stores up agony to a breaking point, to justify the ultimate snapping of composure. This is the person who wants to be depended on relentlessly and one-sidedly, so that someone someday might notice the unfairness of it all. This is the person who virtuously and righteously take all the hits without a sound, so that when they finally, inevitably break, their pain will come to light all at once and inspire awe and guilt in equal measure.

Who am I, really? Is it terrible to want to play this character? Perhaps some old wound craves acknowledgement and understanding and doesn't know how else to ask for it except by hiding until it festers.

Strength. Competency. Resilience. Dependability. Independence. They have all become synonyms in my black and white dictionary. They have all become straws for the drowning man.

I self-impose silence. I take pleasure in denial and secrecy. I take pride in successfully keeping a problem to myself.

Pride. That's another important word. I think I have too much of it, although it pains me when others point it out. Pride implies I think highly of myself, which is something a good person should never do. Pride is so audaciously self-absorbed, so high-and-mighty, so filthy with ego. There's probably a lot of it in this damn thing I've written.

Pride is the other thing that keeps my mouth shut. The thing that says I should be austere, untouchable, immovable. Pride is the thing that says look here, you don't have a lot going for you so you better keep this mask on right if you want to be good. If you want to be admired.

These terrible things keep me safe. I can't let go of that stupidly noble character or that cowardly pride. I need them to shield me from the reality that I am emotional, not all that put together, and honestly hopeless most of the time.

I need to have something worth liking about myself. I need to have a grit that makes me undeniably good. I need to have a strength that goes unsung, that lies in wait of discovery.

What an exhausting way to live. But it's the only way I know.

#writing #prose #prose poetry #poetry #words #literature #art #spilled thoughts #my art #my writing

[eviltwintomboy]

#coffee #writing advice #funny writing #writerly #christians #christianity

[eviltwintomboy]

Plot twist! Jack survived and changed his name to Gatsby!

you ever think about how much rose tyler loved jack because i do. she loved him so much. she saved and unmade him in the same breath, she loved him so much. whoever jack harkness was, folded into the thing he became after rose breathed life back into his lungs, abominable and glorious, so much that the doctor can barely look at him. rose loved him so much that she fixed him in time, but not in hers. she destroyed every dalek for love of the doctor, but she brought jack back from death and held him there for love of him.

[eviltwintomboy]

The Kate Middleton mysteries, as channelled by Emery Robin (from here):

#royals #detective stories #kate middleton

[eviltwintomboy]

Growing up, I desperately wanted to belong. I wanted to fit in. I was a square peg in a round hole. It took me decades to realize most children spend the rest of their lives as adults trying to escape the boxes they stuffed themselves into.

#life #the universe #and everything #thoughts #musings #writing blog #writing

[eviltwintomboy]

Me and my demons

Artists is nho eskape

[eviltwintomboy]

Colleen lived and worked a couple of towns over from me in MA. I went to a high school where such was either invisible or not reported, but I naturally selected classes taught by women. The school I was an aide at in Wilmington, MA (Wildwood) had a special needs student come home all banged up and bruised, and I knew exactly who had done it. Abusive teacher stayed.

If you are an adult you should not be afraid of teenagers. You should not be worried that teenagers are going to be mean to you. Teenagers cannot bully you, you are an adult.

I hear so many people in their 20s and 30s say absolutely wild things about teenagers, like “oh no it’s a group of teenagers they’re gonna think I’m cringe” yes. That’s normal. Who cares. They’re children, they’re caught between the awful stages of “no freedom” and “no support system”. They’re aging into a struggling society. They’re talked down to and dismissed every day of their lives. They’re trying to build a life without knowing what’s ahead. They’re preyed on by tech companies desperate to snatch up every molecule of their attention. Get your head out of your ass and talk to them like people. They’re people. They deserve to be treated with respect even if they think you’re not “cool.”

#womensrights #high school #bullying #abuse #abusers

[eviltwintomboy]

I don’t, either.

i kinda don’t remember the last 4 years of my life

#it’s kind of embarrassing to admit to others that you’re trapped in a depressive episode spanning years but it’s reality 😍

[eviltwintomboy]

Dyslexic adventures!

Follow me on WEBTOONS

#comics #webcomic #dyslexia #ristay #dyslexic #writing #poetry

[eviltwintomboy]

From instructions on how to opt out, look at the official staff post on the topic. It also gives more information on Tumblr's new policies. If you are opting out, remember to opt out each separate blog individually.

Please reblog this post, so it will get more votes!

#yes #third party sharing #third-party sharing #scrapping #ai scrapping #polls #tumblr #tumblr staff #poll #please reblog

[eviltwintomboy]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

#at the risk of sounding like a star wars character... i've got a bad feeling about this. #chrissy speaks #long post #-gestures broadly- #solarpunk #writing #poetry #literature #depression #ai

[eviltwintomboy]

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

#good news! #we could all use some! 😅 #but it's always nice to have confirmation that our good actions do make a difference- not just the bad ones #trees #forests #reforestation #tree planting #global warming #climate change #climate crisis

[eviltwintomboy]

Today's aesthetic is ecopunk