yes, but it can only sing Peter

I got some very intense, frequent bullying in 90s Latin America for being perceived as queer, before even understanding myself that I was actually queer.

I don’t think there was ever anything like the jocks from US movies. Bullies tended to be troubled kids from difficult backgrounds, the kind of kid who would be themself exposed to violence and abuse at home or in their neighbourhood. A handful were from religious fundamentalist families.

There was some hostility towards children who took school too seriously or were perceived as teacher’s pets, but I don’t think that in itself would have inspired “slapped every day” levels of bullying. I don’t remember bullying due to what today are called fandoms or geeky interests; they were just much less known.

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

Futurism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.

Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Baby’s life. “Genocide” isn’t mentioned once, or “fascism”, or “borders”. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of “ecosystem” is in the expression “Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems”. The only mention of “climate change” is to say that it will lead us to a “reconfigurable architectural robotic space”. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesn’t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditions—considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: “What does the future hold for those born today?”

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

The representative of the fascist party in Germany says she’s “lesbian but not queer”. I think it’s the same case.

I tend to like “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” more than “Behind the Bastards”. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.

My daily podcast is “It Could Happen Here”, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:

• Live Like the World is Dying
• Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• It’s Going Down
• Final Straw Radio
• Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and “The Business Plot”)
• Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
• The Iron Dice
• Bad Hasbara
• Frontline Herbalism if you like plants