REMEMBER:

• if you don't understand the post at a glance it's because op wrote it wrong and needs your help
• if the post doesn't contain all the contextualising information you need to understand it, op is gaslighting you
• if you haven't experienced the phenomenon the post describes, op is making it up for clout
• if you haven't encountered the type of person the post describes, they're a strawman that doesn't exist
• if the post doesn't address a topic you'd prefer to talk about, it's a distraction, missing the point, and talking over you
• if the post makes a good point, it is your duty to contribute to human enlightenment by nitpicking it to be more correct

and most importantly:

• every online conversation is a competition and you must win

shakespeare was so funny for that scene where the antagonist tells the protagonist “let the record show that i AM into women THAT BEING SAID holy shit, thou mars, seeing you here is like an even better version of my wedding night. like WAY better. i’ve been dreaming about you every night for years, and in my dreams we take off each other’s armor and beat each other to a pulp and i wake up all hot and sticky 👍”

coriolanus 4.5.126-131, 135-139 be upon ye

When a book is bad, oh well, the failed artistry of one rube, maybe co-authors. But when a movie is bad, and you consider the military-like scale of production, man-hours, the money involved: you must understand, it feels like I’ve been at war with the world for 29 years.

you actually don't have to hand it to the catholic church ever, like under any circumstances

"heehoo chicago man beefing with trump!!!" okay. I hope they both explode

I think some of you had too much fun making memes about Conclave and forgot about the genocide and colonialism and imperialism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and

I hate trump too but this is who you're cheering for

Like generally, if taking any post about how AI users are evil and/or morally deficient and/or entitled manchildren because they don't care about the environmental impact of their little toy and replacing "using AI" with "watching youtube" (or "playing games online", or "watching netflix" or "streaming music" or any other frivolous internet activity with a similar level of environmental impact) would make you no longer agree with it, that's a pretty solid indicator that it's not actually environmental impacts that you're concerned about.

@shirtshawaiian well, I *have* looked it up and Objectively speaking it's "anywhere near" and then some. The most unfavorable estimate for energy consumption from individual AI usage (the one commonly used by people when they talk about how bad using AI is for the environment) is that a single chatgpt query uses 2.6Wh of energy. Watching a 1-hour video on the internet uses 400 to 800Wh, depending on factors like video quality or what device you're watching it on. This means that the environmental impact of watching youtube (or netflix, or any other video streaming service) for an hour is roughly equivalent to using chatgpt 153 to 306 times.

And like. I am someone who doesn't use AI or fw the AI Industry, and spends a frankly unhealthy amount of my free time watching youtube. But I'm just pointing out how, once you put the energy consumption of individual AI usage in context of how it compares to the energy consumption of pretty much anything else we use the internet for, and notice how you never see statements like "I'd fw watching youtube if it wasn't so bad for the environment" from the same people, the way people on here talk about the environmental impact of AI starts looking less like a principled environmental stance and more like a post-hoc attempt to add moral legitimacy to a stance that actually has very little to do with environmental impacts.

[ID: tags. # like generally is being very generous here #i have thoughts on this i wanna come back and type abt it in tags #took me a few rereads to comprehend the post #bc Objectively ai is impacting the environment in a way different from youtube video games etc #like just replacing the text makes the past False #post* not past #like thats just misinformation at that point #then again i could be wrong i will be honest haven't researched the environmental impact of using youtube etc #but im pretty sure its not anywhere near what Al is doing #i'd fw Al if it weren't unethically sourced and also so bad for the environment /end ID]

does watching netflix, youtube, etc destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for Black and brown communities, or is the only metric "energy consumption"?

Considering that keeping any of those services running requires relying on the usage of datacenters whose carbon and water footprint had already been a cause of concern for years before generative AI was even invented, and that the practice of building datacenter infrastructure near impoverished black and brown communities definitely didn't get started with the invention of AI, the answer is: Yes, netflix, youtube etc. also destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for black and brown communities, and the fact that you're flippantly asking this question as a gotcha is further evidence of how people treat the environmental angle primarily as a way to add to the appearance of moral legitimacy over the AI Techbros™ and nothing else.

I’ve loved movies ever since I was a little kid. Just stepping into that dark theater, with the smell of fresh popcorn, was like being transported to a whole other world. It used to be so magical. But now I’m thinking about boycotting movies altogether. Why? Because I can’t seem to watch one anymore without having some stupid theme shoved in my face.

Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore. Take this Sonic The Hedgehog 3 movie they got out now: I watched it expecting to be dazzled and entertained, and instead I had to sit there as they introduced a big, central theme and then spent nearly two hours exploring the living hell out of it. Who wants that?

I went to the theater to be amused and distracted by a film about a super-fast hedgehog, not to witness these gratuitous scenes that glamorize the importance of teamwork. 

Give me laughs. Give me thrills. Even give me a scary villain now and again, why not? But spare me this obsession with making sure we all know your movie is about friendship, or perseverance, or whatever. You can stop crafting your movie around some aspect of human nature you find interesting, because I don’t care about that. At all. 

Full Commentary

Illustration from New Elucidations of Thomson’s Seasons, 19th century

it’s sad “rest in peace HOTTIE” isn’t a meme but a YouTube comment I found about the behind the scenes of the exorcist amd the deceased playwright jason miller because I think of it all the time and want to use it for other things

Sainsbury's fly killer packaging design material, 1960s-70s. From the Sainsbury Archive.

need this on my blog

ALT

:)

one of my most annoying moves when people irl hit me with "if you're trying to force D&D systems onto non hack and slash gameplay you're not playing Real D&D any more" is to mention that a full ruleset for playing american football with hobgoblins and living trees was published in dragon magazine complete with cut and fold scoreboard 30 years ago. it has rules for when it's legal to cast lightning blast.

I'm not endorsing it, I'm just saying. like it or not that's real dick tugging shitting vomiting delivering babies out on the field D&D