You won’t see this every day but making sure the system cannot proceed unless women have a seat at the table is the best possibly thing you can do in a place of privilege.

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

#one day an igor forgets the lock the cage and a pack of penises escapes into ankh-morpork#the watch spends the next three weeks rounding them up

how DARE you leave this in the tags (affectionate)

Everyone knew it was best not to look too closely at Igor's jars.

Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:

"They have ethcaped, thir."

"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."

"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."

"Appendages."

"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."

"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.

He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."

"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."

Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?

"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."

"Err... what? Of course you were. I mean. Very good."

Pictured: An Igor harvesting appendages

#[a loud crash is heard from the lab] #[another igor runs past with a giant butterfly net. stopping briefly at the door to shriek 'THE VULVATHS''] (via @the-wave-finally-broke)

It turns out to be a brilliant feat of advertisement, as the people too shy or uncertain to go visit Igor rightaway effectively get a chance to discretely window-shop in public.

An unfortunate side effect being that a small girl, denied of her rightful need to be a Horse Girl by the limitations of being a native Ankh-Morpork child[1], would have adopted one of the larger Appendages of the pack and named it Free Willy. Her insistence that she could understand her pet through a bond of mutual sympathy was both touching and troubling, as was her announcement that Free Willy did not want to be attached to a governing body and forced into service, saddled with clothing, or made to perform tricks for audiences. With no Igor having the heart [2] to take it from her, the child was allowed to keep Free Willy, who lived for five healthy years in her family’s pigeon loft and eventually passed away from natural causes after a battle with another fighting cock. The child went on to write a well-acclaimed children’s book, The Willy that Would Be Free, which was, necessarily, a pop-up book.

[1] where an ordinary working class child CAN form a magical bond with a horse, in the form of a pie, labeled as beef.

[2] ha

Look, it got longer.

So did Free Willy.

Strong progressive parties with engaged labor unions are the best defense against fascism.

Corporate tyranny is the enemy. Billionaire overlords want you destitute.

Get the guillotines!

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

There was a paper in 2016 exploring how an ML model was differentiating between wolves and dogs with a really high accuracy, they found that for whatever reason the model seemed to *really* like looking at snow in images, as in thats what it pays attention to most.

Then it hit them. *oh.*

*all the images of wolves in our dataset has snow in the background*

*this little shit figured it was easier to just learn how to detect snow than to actually learn the difference between huskies and wolves. because snow = wolf*

Shit like this happens *so often*. People think trainning models is like this exact coding programmer hackerman thing when its more like, coralling a bunch of sentient crabs that can do calculus but like at the end of the day theyre still fucking crabs.

and also they're not remotely sentient, can't do calculus, and they're not doing what's 'easier.' the algorithm doesn't, and inherently cannot, know what a 'wolf' is. it never knew that it was supposed to be differentiating dogs from wolves. it's not possible for these programs to ever know what they're differentiating, so this doesn't just happen often, it happens 100% of the time. it's just a matter of whether the program is under enough scrutiny for the incongruity to be noticed

adding these tags bc damn this person put it so much better than i did! this applies to literally all of these models- you can replace the words 'wolf' and 'white' with whatever you like and it's still 100% accurate

[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #'alright computer here's your training set of wolves vs not-wolves' #'note. a wolf is a higher than average amount of white pixels' /End ID]

@fayet supplemental reading to my attempt to explain ai! in the case of natural language processing it would be: The sentence "I'm bringing money to the ..." is statisically most likely to be completed by the word "bank".

Since I get asked  this quite often, here are some elaborations on my mature books.

Of the dozens of titles I've created/worked on three are mature themed, and of those three only one would be an extremely spicy meal where others are often fading to black when it comes  to sex scenes.

The two that are simply mature books that don't shy away from sexuality (kinda like game of thrones i guess :P)

sunstone is a romantic comedy for the mature readers that treats sexuality in a mature way and not just as mature content. It is a story about loves and lives of a bunch of bdsm kinksters and as such it examines both the people and the kink itself in its varied forms. Don't expect some serious dark  story about doms claiming some random people and dragging them into deep dungeons where they teach them to love the kink.

sunstone is not that story. It's a story that shows you  the person behind the curtain. Shows you the kink for what it fundamentally is, a fun bit of sexual larping, an often overly expensive hobby and the most scenic route one might take to achieve an orgasm. However beyond all that sunstone is a story of people's discovery of self. Of growing and learning  about love, life and kink, one fuckup at a time

Fine print is a modern day greek tragedy where gods and mortals mingle, strike deals, fuck and stab each others in the back. It is a story about hubris, about, about the good and destructive sides of both love and desire told through some very flawed characters with a lot of room to grow.

This story examines sexuality from its simplest forms of momentary escapism from the troubles of one's life to absolute willing surrender to one another. It examines love from being generous and understanding, to it being corrupted by insecurity and possessive. Fine print is a divine drama for the mature readers.

The one book that is extra spicy and is technically not a book yet (crowdfunder planned)

Crimson after hours is a collaborative project between my wife Linda Sejic and me and would be the spiciest of the bunch as it  revolves  around a bunch of out shared universe characters meeting up at the crimson bdsm club for an after hours party where an increasingly drunk game of truth and dare leads to some exaggerated storytelling of their sexual triumphs and failures.  Expect the same comedic tone that you would find within blood stain and sunstone with some very spicy  moments in-between. A very spicy comedy lasagna on this one.

This is the only tiktok where the automated voice actually adds to the cinematic experience

freedom

This is absolutely what a cats internal monologue is like <3

Actually Ive decided to be angry now

“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s

and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves

In that sense, it’s a hopeful story

“If she can have a happy ending in a story so similar to our own, maybe one day we can as well.”