How many jobs do you think I can get on a middle school education
Fuck the school
I’m just going to be homeless when I’m older
I’ll never find a job
What if I don’t get into college
I can’t wait until we go up to the high school and get out of this hell hole
What if I’m accidentally outed
I’m running on anxiety and spite
Presenting gives me anxiety
I actually cried over this last night
Some days I don’t want to exist at all
I’m going to go home and cry
I’m going to go bald at 14 from stress
Somebody just stab me
Generation Z kids are here, and we are very, very afraid for our futures.
• honestly i’m just gonna die before i get my assignments done
• good future? who is she? never heard of her.
• (in response to the question “what’s your dream job?”) professional dead person 🤙
“I hope I turn into a blueberry, it means I don’t have to finish high school”
“how much does it cost to be dead for a living?”
“you know, i really didn’t think i’d make it this far in life but this body just keeps on tickin doesnt it??”
“im gonna die before finals. or die during finals. either’s good but id rather die before”
“she has my consent to kill me”
“i wish death upon me”
Teacher: “3 means tri. And that’s what you all need to do, you need to try. And 2 means di.” Like 5 different kids: “I want to die.”
“If I die, can I get an A on the test?”
gen z doesnt fear death, we embrace it
“Don’t worry, we’re all going to die. Hopefully, soon and painlessly.”
“What more does the world need to end? I’m ready for it to end. C’MON, WORLD!”
“You can always throw yourself in front of a car… A little painful, tho.”
“I give up.”
What’s your problem? “If I only had one problem I would be happy.”
There’s no way you’re having so many problems at your age. “Not only I have, but I can see the ones I’ll have when I’m your age.”
“I’m not in the mood for existing today.”
“I HAVE FINALLY FIGURED OUT WHY THE MATH CLASSROOM IS ON THE HIGHEST FLOOR!!!!” “Why’s it on the top floor?” “So we can jump out the window and die!”
“I hate myself” “You shouldn’t do that, but same”
“To quote our fabulous overlord Gerard Way, ‘When I grow up I want to be nothing at all’”
“So, who’s going to report the bully?” *cricket noises*
“What do you want to do today?” “Die.” “Well that’s a bit morbid, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“The years pass so quickly, I feel like I’m wasting away.”
“Please kill me now.”
“Well I’m sorry! I don’t have a life.”
*burst into tears when watching a video about global warming*
“Is… is school more important than your mental health?” “Listen if I get less than an A my mom will kill me.” “That doesn’t sound so bad, can I join?”
“So what’re you doing?” “Talking about dying.” “Cool.”
*female friend doesn’t know how birth works*
“Can I die now.”
“fUCK THIS ASSIGNMENT. (teacher) can go fuck themself I don’t even care anymore (comes from an A student)”
i literally cried during my verbal french test
dude, I’ll become a whore if it means you get out of your house
i want people to know im dead so that the other people going through this shit can live
im so scared of the future i dont want to see it
I hope this ride breaks
the fct that im living for someone ive never met in person says something
i hope i have good handwriting on my suicide note
i wish time would stop so i could breathe
im more scared of my parents then my bullys
I failed this class, so I’m a failure.
What’s the point in trying if I’m going to be a failure anyway?
Grades are more important than my mental state I guess
I can’t handle college
My suicide notes are typically on the back of my notes or report cards
I don’t want to go home
I’ve imagined myself jumping off the school roof many times
This isn’t worth it, nothing is.
I’m only allowing myself to eat or sleep once I know I’m passing.
“That’s not healthy.”
“I can’t force myself to work otherwise.”
Scar for every problem I get wrong.
Can I just please go by my preferred name and pronouns?
If I die I won’t have to go through that again.
Oh my god
I just realized how fuckin sad we are
– “Can I just lay in the middle of the road and wait for on coming traffic to turn my into road kill? Cause that’d be great.”
– “See y’all later, I’m jumpin off the roof.”
– “If I fail this test, I’m gonna pray to whatever god there is to just strict me dead right then and there.”
– A student: “I just gonna fucking kill myself.”
Literally the tenth grade English teacher: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
– “Hey, we’re all gonna climb to the roof and pretend we can fly, wanna come join us?”
– “What could be better than some trig problems?”
“Death.”
– In probablity and statisics class: “What do you think the probability of me just dropping dead right now would be?”
– “What do you want most in life?”
“The sweet embrace of death to take me away.”
– “In the end we all amount to nothing anyway so what’s the point in learning vocabulary we’ll never use?”
– “I’m fine. I haven’t slept in days and I’m running in pure caffeine and spite at this point but it’s great.”
– “I’d rather get torn apart by a pack of angry wolves than go home and show my grades to my parents.”
– “Is death and option?”
Theres more I’ve said and heard but I’m too lazy
– for 4 years i cried in bed all night praying i would die in my sleep
– “dude i havent slept for 4 days”
“Oof same”
“Bro im not even joking tho”
“Oh..its only been two days for me tho”
– “i spent 49 hours on this and got a F”
– “im actually just going to jump off my roof tonight”
– “the only thing i hate more than school is myself”
“I’m gonna die before I’m 30, mark my words.”
“I’d rather have unprotected sex with someone who has HIV and rabiies than to do this presentation.”
“Someone just got mugged a couple of blocks away from here and got their skull cracked open!” “God, I wish that were me.”
“Hey, if we don’t pass this test, are you up to coming to my house and making a suicide pact?” “Hell yeah man, I’ll bring the rope.”
“I’ll probably never go to college at this rate, so why bother?”
“Why do you never bring your book?” “Because I haven’t bought it yet and because I’m too poor to afford it. Please stop asking me, I beg you.”
“The only reason I want to take extracurricular activities is so I can never go back home and face my parents.”
“I want to be dead. Failures should be dead.”
“I wish someone could understand that I have anxiety and give me some space. Not even my therapists understand that.”
dear world: please look at what you’ve done to our generation
so what im getting from this (as a fellow gen z kid) is that we’re all fuckin depressed (which,,, what a fucking m o o d)
I’ve just gotta add:
“This is the second time in two weeks I’ve brought vodka in a water bottle to school”
“I’m terrified of failure to the point where anything below a B makes me want to hurl myself out a window”
(Talking about a concussion) “you can die from those, right?” “Yeah” “excellent. Completely unrelated, but can you beat me over the head with your history book?”
“I’ll pay you $40 and a bagel to push me down this flight of stairs.”
“What’s the point in planning for college when I don’t even see myself lasting that long?”
“I haven’t slept in a week and I’m starting to taste colors at this point”
“I think it’s so easy for me to laugh because it’s bordering on hysteria half the time”
“I keep writing love letters to the Grim Reaper but he hasn’t responded yet”
“I studied all night and I got an 87%. Guess I’ll die.”
“Idk weed sounds pretty good rn”
“You don’t eat much do you” “no. I’m broke, Mr. Moneybags”
For nearly 200 years the Irmandade da Boa Morte — Sisterhood of the Good Death — have achieved a central role in regional society, preserving some of the traditional African values that slavery brought to Brazil.
The Sisterhood began as a bank in 1823, founded by freed slaves, to finance the freedom of men, women and children still bonded by slavery. The community, which is still made up of the descendants of slaves, is one of the oldest and most respected worship groups of Candomblé, the major African-based religion in Brazil. The sisterhood practices a syncretized worship that combines Candomblé, Catholicism and Islamic elements. Thanks to their microcredit scheme, and the two hundred religious events they organize throughout the year, the Sisterhood have achieved a central role in regional society, preserving some of the traditional African values that slavery brought to Brazil. (Source)
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
The first thing you have to understand is that no one wants us. No one has ever wanted us. And by us I don’t mean fans in general, but creative Fandom, if you will. Transformative fandom–writers and artists and gif makers and vidders and podcasters and podficcers and the community that supports them.
Don’t be fooled by the occasional mainstream media article that uses mostly respectful language or the academic study that talks about transgressive fannish behavior like it’s admirable. People reading those news articles laugh at us and you don’t exactly see universities creating Fandom Studies departments.
Nor do we have the buying power we like to think we do. Think about it. We wouldn’t have to transform media to suit ourselves if that media already existed. If Marvel gave a damn about Fandom money vs fandom money, they’d be the ones posting the explicit Cap/Iron Man pics. They’ll take our money, but it’s not as important as small-f fandom money because there’s nowhere near as much of it.
So that leaves ue as exactly what we are: extreme niche hobbyists. And you know what? We’re not even nice, easy, safe, niche hobbyists like knitters or…idk, curling fans. We like trangressive sex a whole lot, we tread a very fine legal line in a time when intellectual property laws are a big fucking deal, we’re hard to advertise to, and, to make things worse, we have a nasty habit of dragging our platform admins into our petty, internecine Fandom Drama.
(seriously it’s like if the dude who runs the Giants SB Nation site went running to the SB Nation admins saying that the dude who runs the Dodgers site is a pedophile just because he implied Madison Bumgarner might be a little racist.)
But Telesilla, you say. Are we really bound to your fate? Destined to spend our fannish lives like you have, migrating from one site after another, always losing people and history along the way? This is so depressing! There has to be an answer!
Well, once upon a time I thought the answer was “by fans for fans” and wow, have I been burned by that one. Our greatest triumph is routinely attacked by its own users and our best functioning social media platform doesn’t have the bells and whistles corporate sites can offer. And AO3 and Dreamwidth are the success stories. Ask me about JournalFen. (on second thought, don’t. I don’t have the energy to explain without overusing the word “robust” and talking about ice weasels.)
I’m enough of a Old Time Internet Person to still think doing it ourselves is the best answer we have, but it takes a special kind of person to dedicate themselves to serving a notoriously fractious internet community that has no money and wants you to cater to their every whim. It takes an even more special kind of person to do it long term. Fandom history shows us that those people don’t come along often. (personal history shows me that I am, alas, not one of them.)
Until they do, we’ll just lurch from corporate platform that doesn’t really want us to corporate platform that doesn’t really want us. Because that’s the bottom line–we’re an extreme niche hobby and there’s no real money to be made off us. Under late capitalism…well, I don’t want to be that Fandom Old, but really, what did we expect?
Ignisfilimundi 