When writing alt text, ask yourself if you would picture an approximation of the image if it was described to you over the phone using the alt text you've written. Doing that exercise can be a good way to determine if you're on the right track.

Every administrator, every board of trustees, every president, chancellor who bent the knee to Trump and his cronies should immediately be stripped of their position and driven from their institutions.

People can say it’s utopian or dreamy but it’s a fact that you have to believe new things are possible, fundamentally, in order to make them real. You have to make the choice to believe that more than this is possible & not be resigned to this being the way things have to be because it’s not at all.

this is why the whole “oh, suffering creates great art” thing is bullshit you know what’s conducive to art? a roof over your head and food on the table you know what isn’t? stressing out over where the fuck the rent money is going to come from

Would also be very interested to know this, #medievalsky

Many people have told me I should change my last name, but instead, Donald should change his. "Donald Epstein" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather

Chronic pain is disability. So to everybody out there in pain all the time, you're disabled. I know we keep our chronic pain to ourselves because no one wants to hear about it & do our best to manage. But if it affects your day to day functionality, you're a disabled person.

I’m drinking and talking to strangers at the bar and I recommend it

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Exasperatingly frequently necessary reminder that the weaponization of ableism and fatphobia and homophobia and transphobia against your political enemies still works to NORMALIZE those things, thus SYSTEMICALLY HARMING your supposed allies.

I'm just going to keep repeating this until the apocalypse. AI doesn't *know* anything. AI only knows what something *looks like.* It's not "hallucinating." It's predicting text based on trained data. AI doesn't *KNOW* anything.

Only people who come with a preexisting platform can get on social media & only promote their writing. Artists should use social media because they want to & as they want to, & see who's attracted to find out about their art based off that, not only post to sell art.

Yeah, hi, I’m a person with “mobility challenges” (excuse me while I hurl). What we want, by and large, are not expensive, heavy devices that will “help us walk again”, but ramps. I know, it’s not sexy, as technology invented before Christ, but it is overlooked in favor of…this. Repeatedly.

I am 100% on board with being extra mean to conservatives; we just don't need innocent people catching strays just because they have incontinence or a particular body type. It's just so easy to call every elected Republican a Nazi piece of shit. No one gets hurt except the deserving.

DID YOU KNOW: In Star Wars, the body temperature of a Tauntaun is Luke Warm b/c they drink Hoth chocolate. Thats why you usually find them Leian down. Meanwhile, if you stab multiple Siths with a lightsaber at one time thats called a Sithskebab. … I hope these lame puns forced you to smile. 🙃

Roses are red Violets are blue You can resist AI hype Luddites were sexy, too

Ill be clear about why I am so angry and critical about it: Im seeing a good portion of my students who have imbibed the notion that they dont have to read, think or write for themselves because ChatGPT/CoPilot will do their thinking for them, and its terrifying. It should scare all of us.

One amongst many reasons I won't use "AI". I'm autistic. By definition that means my brain thinks differently to the majority. AI spits out the average of its training set. By design it will water down my thoughts into mediocrity. I've done a lot of work to learn to celebrate my square-peg brain.

The problem is not that they're passing, the problem is that we're having to flunk them in high numbers and report them for academic dishonesty and all of it eats time no one has for children who have been handed toys they cannot control or function with or without. This is bigger than grades.

Here's the thing with AI et al. LLMs were, and potentially still could be, an interesting and even genuinely useful technology. They were chugging along fine in the background for some years before this hype train started, and I can see why early innovators feel aggrieved that everyone hates it now.

A lot of people who regurgitate "improvement" talking points to discredit any criticism of AI have little to no awareness of the trickery that occurs behind the scenes to provide this mirage. Not only for autonomous vehicles, but the army of human labour used to fine tune generative AI.

That Super Bowl Ring ad backfired spectacularly.

making a list of american institutions that are meeting this moment, and so far I've got burning man and paleontology down here... guess we're rebuilding society around the study of dinosaur bones and doing drugs in the desert

It’s one of the things I think adults stand to learn from kids. How to navigate the world with the humility and curiosity that comes with knowing that you only understand a minuscule fraction of all things.

I used "smooth-brained" as a dig until a father of a boy with lissencephaly -- the medical term for the condition -- wrote me an incredibly patient note to explain what his son had to deal with. This phrase is a gratuitous insult to parents and children who are already suffering. Don't use it.

Writers should stop being so bougie that they think they need an actual degree that makes them an official artist (LOLZ) & situating themselves as cushy academics instructing rich kids on writing for life, & maybe their work wouldn’t be bougie & they’d write what connects with the working class.

Angry atm and gonna use this space to vent. I got home only to discover that my vacuum cleaner broke. And the big problem that I've discovered with that scenario is that you can't really say that they suck once it happens. ... 🙃

Just a reminder that in MN, the Walz admin put optum ai in charge of deciding whether Medicaid and related payment requests were fraudulent. It aint just republicans.

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

I honestly can't blame a platform for being sick of having to scramble to implement age verification for the states and countries that pass these laws, often with little to no implementation period (SC just signed one with immediate effect!)

it drives you insane how much erosion of freedom is justified by concern for kids when the people who actually hurt them will never face consequences

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

Good morning! Taxing the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans down to the median wealth of the next-richest 9% ($5.2 million per household) would free up $48 trillion. Redistributing that to the poorest 50% of Americans would give *68 million households* an average of *$700k per household*.

if i know discord for anything is that they can and will pussy out if people bully them enough for something. get fucking loud about this

For me it's the fact that: 1) things have always been shitty for some of us, 2) that it's not recent that material things have degraded, and 3) the word kinda implies active participation? Under the empire's foot we don't have enough autonomy to say... fully resist what is put in stores. Example ⬇️

"Doctors can be wrong, too!" Yes, and you can have a meaningful conversation with them that isn't just autocomplete. Yes, and you can, in extremis, sue them for malpractice.

There are some great threads going about how awful sugar plantations were. I just want to add something as a historical romance author: every time you see someone adding a sugar cube to tea in a historical romance, think of those threads and the blood-soaked cost of the sugar.

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth ! Feb 9: Education Q: Why do Black kids not do well in school, or in subjects like Math and Science? A: This is only true in extremely racist countries. A racist person cannot teach a Black child effectively. It's not race. It's racism. Read the whole thread.

Liberation is a collective effort, not an individual one. An individual might stand as a symbol of liberation, but it is still a collective effort. This is the through line of the histories of liberation symbolized in this show: the only way through is together and we will be stronger for it.

Reminder that black people's have loss over 300K jobs since that man took office. These commercials reflect that.

the yanks are livetweeting ads again

Yes! I was just discussing this with my autistic daughter recently: small talk is making friendly noises to humans. We autistic people tend to get caught up in the content (do I answer honestly to “how are you doing?” etc.) and feel pressure—and viewing it instead as a script to be performed helps.

I get that everyone who is in the know knows this already but I am quite happy for a publication to be surfacing it again, especially for readers who may not be aware

This is not at all breaking news at all and many have pointed out as such but this is also the key reason why many folks will not partake of your Substacks (because it is hosted at THE Nazi bar)

I've asked so many people to please quit substack, and if I see a substack link, I rarely, if ever, click on it. and I know amazing people that I love and respect and learn from are on there and it makes me so sad. in case it helps you to finally quit that place: www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

This has been revealed since 2021 . Their comms(?) Woman is one of the most flagrantly antagonistic people I’ve ever seen online They started by purposely creating a wealth inequality that favored white creators … white reporters treated it like it was a questiib