@XauriEL@mastodon.nz avatar

XauriEL

@XauriEL@mastodon.nz

Canuck/Kiwi Solarpunk Satanist Cyberqueer, speculative fiction author, capitalism disliker. A mighty princess forged in the heat of battle. Ze/zer/zir

Peculiar interests:
The #Humanities
#SocialScience
#UrbanPlanning #RegionalPlanning
#Geography #Map #Cartography #GeographicInformationSystem #GIS
#OpenEducation #OpenScience #OpenCulture
#Metafiction #Slipstream
#Conlang #Conalphabet
Speculative/Fantastical/Historical Mystery/Detective stories
#ObsoleteTech
#SocialistRealist art

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XauriEL, to random
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A lot of people push the idea that generative AI can profitably be used to create preliminary studies in the early stages of the creative process, like prompts or conceptual art, preparatory to executing an original finished work. Personally, I'm not a fan. Even if the final product is your creation from start to finish, it will still be derivative of the soulless garbage output by an uncreative plagiarism machine.

XauriEL, to random
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Hot take: if your students are "cheating", it means they do not see the value of the process of doing the exercise and see value only in the grade they obtain thereby. And if that is the case, at least part of the problem is that you as the teacher (and probably to a larger extent the education system as a whole) have failed to adequately communicate why the exercise is valuable over and above the grade (and more than likely failed to adequately establish that value in the first place)

XauriEL, to random
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Anyone who scolds us for celebrating that Kissinger died gets stomped down hard. Genocidaires don't get soft-focus funeral portraits. Some people would be like "Hitler may have made a lot of bad choices but it's just bad taste to cheapen his memory like that, think about how his family feels"

XauriEL, to random
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Unsurprisingly, my Spotify Wrapped is just the chapter-theme playlist I played over and over while I was working on Hashing Function all year

XauriEL, to random
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So I seem to have become a reluctant convert to writing on my phone. I want to spend some of the empty hours at the glass shop writing, and hauling my chunky gaming laptop down there is a chore. My dad gave me a little tiny laptop for that specific purpose, but it seems to have an issue with charging and I need to get it fixed. So I've been experimenting with using the phone lately, and it's ... OK? Not a lot of fun, but I got some good work done today.

XauriEL, to random
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I've seen hot takes you people wouldn't believe. Keffals and Ana Mardoll flaming out off the shoulder of Orion. I watched a white woman claim that owning dogs is racist in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those posts will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time for X to die.

XauriEL, to random
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The only hope we have is if we make it completely socially unacceptable to use AI "art" for any purpose whatsoever. Shame people who post it on social media. Shame people who use it in their products. Shame people who use it in their "process". Demand that every publication, every marketplace, every gallery, every facebook meme group takes a hard stance against it. Make yourself a nuisance. Make people angry at you. Don't stop until this filth is purged from our society.

XauriEL, to random
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I just wonder if the people who think privatizing government services will make them more efficient and customer-facing have like. ever been to a store. or called a customer service hotline, or dealt with a corporation in like any capacity whatsoever

XauriEL, to random
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95% of podcast and youtube sponsors be like:

  • Subscription for thing that does not need to be a subscription
  • Gig app for thing that should never have been a gig app
  • One specific item being sold over the internet instead of in a store being billed as some revolutionary disruption of the market
  • Audible
XauriEL,
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@MarchViolet oh god, I'm getting Vietnam flashbacks of Raid: Shadow Legends

XauriEL, to random
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"What about people who REGRET THEIR TRANSITION!!??" "What about people who REGRET THEIR ABORTION!!!???" You're right, people should be forcibly prevented from doing anything they might regret, ever

Private
XauriEL,
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@btrinen @Liesvanrompaey @bookstodon Asimov was specifically trying to critique the "evil/rebellious robot" trope that became the legacy of R.U.R. by presenting a paradigm of autonomous robotics in which such a scenario was impossible

skinnylatte, to magASEAN
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

When I worked in Indonesia, lots of folks would read about founders talking about the times they had to ‘eat ramen to survive’ and we’d all be like, so? Indomie IS delicious! Even if I had lots of money, I’d still be eating Indomie!

Then I had to explain to them that not everyone has Indomie as default ramen, and that instant ramen in some places can be.. awful

XauriEL,
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@skinnylatte I sadly have a bone-deep distrust of the idea that instant ramen can be good bred of far too many nights eating the styrofoam-tasting crap in the yellow No-Name package with the sad packet of salty pork dust

XauriEL, to random
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The immediate corporate switchover from fun halloween stuff to immediately trying to shove christmas shit down our throats is definitely a contributing factor to my seasonal depression

XauriEL,
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I do have some warm fuzzies about christmas celebrations with family, but for most of the "season" it is drowned out by the combination of mandatory religiosity and garish corporate fakeness, the seamless blend of capitalist and christian crypto-fascism that makes consumption and ostentatious display a moral duty and punishes any hesitancy or lack of cheerfulness with screams of "Grinch! GRINCH!"

XauriEL, to random
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The idea that the amount of effort you put into your job is solely or even mostly determined by your paycheque is laughably false. People with the same salary will work 70-hour weeks or as little as they can get away with depending solely on how they feel about what they do. Workers in sectors like science, the arts or charity take a massive pay cut purely to do what they love. Minimum-wage service workers hustle just as hard as startup bros with visions of stock options dancing in their heads.

XauriEL, to random
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My newest and shiniest conspiracy theory is that at least part of intergenerational animosity is (deliberately?) manufactured in order to impede the transmission of knowledge about political organization techniques from aging activists/union bosses/etc. to the younger generations

XauriEL,
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I don't necessarily think there's some cabal of moustache-twirling capitalists planning this BTW. But these days whenever I hear "Millennials/GenZ are so entitled!" or "Boomers/GenX are so reactionary!" I just think to myself, "Someone told you that and they had a reason for doing so"

Garwboy, to random
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PSA

It's entirely possible for the standard human brain to be sad about multiple things simultaneously. If anything, it's the default norm. Emotions do not, and have never, operated on a one in-one out system.

XauriEL,
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@Garwboy while this is true, the sheer number of different things I need to be sad and angry and frightened about these days is overwhelming and emotionally numbing

XauriEL, to random
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I feel like in history class we teach too much about Hitler and not enough about Mussolini. The atrocities of the Nazis are so almost cartoonishly evil as to seem unreal, but most authoritarians are more of a Mussolini: just a confident and crafty huckster able to shout loud enough and tell people enough of what they want to hear to whip up a petty mob of resentful useful idiots

XauriEL, to random
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Please, men who buy ridiculous giant half-bed trucks, I am begging you to understand: nobody is impressed. We are all making fun of you behind your back, and the only reason more people don't do it to your face is that we know your masculinity is so fragile that you will fly off the handle at the slightest provocation

XauriEL, to random
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If anything, I think the situation between Israel and Palestine is evidence that the concept of ethno-nationalism is fundamentally rotten at the root no matter on whose behalf it is being deployed

XauriEL, to random
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Is it a "pro-Hamas rally" or is it an "anti-apartheid-and-genocide rally that you have branded as pro-Hamas because it suits your geopolitical agenda"

XauriEL,
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Yes, it is objectively evil to shoot rockets at civilians, and yes, the Jews suffered the worst genocide of the modern era. Neither of those things changes the fact that the current government of the state of Israel (notice I specifically and deliberately did not say "the Jews" or "the Israelis") is engaged in a campaign to eliminate an identifiable population in pursuit of a racially pure ethnostate

XauriEL, to random
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If there were such things as real Lovecraftian horrors, people on social media would be calling them "tentacley bois" and "heckin' non-euclidean chonkers"

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