Bisexual, asexual, intersex, non-binary, trans, and Queer in every color
Itās #Pride month! I usually am much more vocal and celebratory, but I lost a friend last week. Arabella Proffer, artist, awesome human, was a huge supporter (+member) of the #LGBTQIA community. We used to talk about how we #bi folks often overlooked if we have cis male partners. So today, just raising up #bisexual #asexual and generally all those under the Queer umbrella of goodness.
Here is Arabella dressed as feminist icon Furiosa (wearing my clothes because of course I randomly have all that stuff plus a wrist guard). Iām Trinity from the Matrix, transgender coming out movie extraordinaire. I did not, at that time, have a black cat suit. That has since been remedied. Arabella and I had so much fun; she threw the best parties, had the best sense of humorā¦ wrote and published a photography book about weird Cleveland bathroomsā¦
So hug you queer friends today, and celebrate pride ā¤ļøš³ļøāā§ļøš³ļøāš
Starting off the Flowerpunk bestiary with probably one of my favourite creatures to design, the sabre-toothed swan.
The sabre-toothed swan is a truly frightful beast. Feared even by the nocturnaphrax and the vorkuu, the sabre-toothed swan is known for its savage nature and is often referred to as the bully of Darkling Forest.
Standing up to 30 feet in height, you do not want to pick a fight with one of these. Their claws are extremely sharp, particularly the claw on the lifted toe used for slashing anyone that gets too close, and their wings beat strong enough to knock you over. They have a bite force of about 5,000 PSI and are known for swallowing prey whole. Their diet consists mostly of water creatures, including kelpies. Those enormous dagger-like teeth are used for latching onto particularly energetic prey.
They have been known to exist in flocks, but the flocks typically donāt exceed 10 members. It isnāt uncommon to see lone pairs or even a swan that has existed by itself for a long time.
These creatures communicate both through vocalisation and body language. The majority of their vocalisations come from the pseudo-gills on their necks, which are specialised sound-producing organs. The majority of sounds produced are too low-frequency for human ears to pick up. They also communicate by chattering their jaw, which is often mistaken for rapid gunfire.
Their most famous sounds are their hellish screaming-honks, which with the help of their pseudo-gills can reach a deafening 130 decibels.
Breeding season takes place between April-May and the mothers typically lay 7 eggs, much like their smaller counterparts. However, the cygnets will remain with the mother well into adulthood and often donāt migrate far from their original home. It is believed that the behaviour of these creatures has changed drastically as their species has become increasingly threatened. Family bonds are very strong and while swans will relentlessly bully other species, it is rare for them to fight amongst themselves. The parents are fiercely protective over their young and will batter anything that gets too close.
Surprisingly, cygnets are much more docile than the adults and may even imprint on you. The swans are capable of befriending humans on extremely rare occasions, usually if a human directly benefits the survival of their cygnets.
Cryptobiologists have also discovered that these creatures, much like all mega-fauna capable of flight, have unique magic-producing ganglia distributed throughout their bodies. These āMana-Gangliaā are what allow the creatures to fly, or even exist at all. However, flight is extremely rare and only takes place during migrating seasons, if at all.
On a final note, it is still up for debate what hidden form these creatures are capable of transforming into and cryptobiologists still argue over whether it is the nearby Willow trees found by freshwater bodies or boulders. The oldest sabre-toothed swan on record transformed itself into a stone bridge as its disguise, the final form it eventually died in which still stands in its original location to this day.
Owltober Day 13: Whatās Your TOH quote to Live by?
āUs Weirdos Have to Stick Togetherā. This. Quote. Means. So. Much to me. I donāt really fit in with my family and while my Parents try to understand They never will with somethings, So I never really had a lot of friends.
Then I made my Tumblr Account and I finally found a place where people were interested in my weird little theories and observations, people werenāt going to tell me I was radical or illogical and I have had more fun since I made this account then in long time.
To every Weirdo (Affectionate) who liked, reblogged my posts or even followed me I have a big thank you to all of you, Thank You so much, You made me feel welcome when my own home often felt empty and frustrating. Thank you
Ok so today I was on the bus with another trans guy and we were talking about how hard it is to get testosterone. The waiting lists, the price, all the doctors you have to go to, that kind of stuff. Except, we were calling it ’T’, like you do when you’re both closeted and in public.
Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’
To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’
The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’
We let her take us to the supermarket. We let her show us, excitedly, where the tea was. We both bought loads.
Okay, I’m a data nerd. But this is so interesting?!
She starts out by looking at whether YouTube intense promotion of short-form content is harming long-form content, and ends up looking at how AI models amplify cultural biases.
In one of her examples, Amazon had to stop using AI recruitment software because it was filtering out women. They had to tell it to stop removing resumes with the word “women’s” in them.
But even after they did that, the software was filtering out tons of women by doing things like selecting for more “aggressive” language like “executed on” instead of, idk, “helped.”
Which is exactly how humans act. In my experience, when people are trying to unlearn bias, the first thing they do is go, “okay, so when I see that someone was president of the women’s hockey team or something, I tend to dismiss them, but they could be good! I should try to look at them, instead of immediately dismissing candidates who are women! That makes sense, I can do that!”
And then they don’t realize that they can also look at identical resumes, one with a “man’s” name and one with a “woman’s” name, and come away being more impressed by the “man’s” resume.
So then they start having HR remove the names from all resumes. But they don’t extrapolate from all this and think about whether the interviewer might also be biased. They don’t think about how many different ways you can describe the same exact tasks at the same exact job, and how some of them sound way better.
They don’t think about how, the more marginalized someone is, the less access they have to information about what language to use. And the more likely they are to have been “trained,” by the way people treat them, to minimize their own skills and achievements.
They don’t think about why certain words sound polished to them, and whether that’s actually reflecting how good the person using that language will be at their job.
In this How To Cook That video, she talks about the fact that they’re training that type of software on, say, ten years of hiring data, and that inherently means it’s going to learn the biases reflected in that data… and that what AI models do is EXAGGERATE what they’ve learned.
Her example is that if you do a Google image search for “doctor,” 90% of them will be men, even though in real life only 63% are men.
This is all fascinating to me because this is why representation matters. This is such an extreme, obvious example of why representation matters. OUR brains look at everything around us and learn who the world says is good at what.
We learn what a construction worker looks like, what a general practitioner doctor looks like, what a pediatrician looks like, what a teacher looks like.
We look at the people in our lives and in the media we consume and the ambient media we live through. And we learn what people who matter in our particular society look like.
We learn what a believable, trustworthy person looks like. The kind of person who can be the faux-generic-human talking to you about or illustrating a product.
Unless we also actively learn that other kinds of people matter equally, are equally trustworthy and believable… we don’t.
And that affects EVERYTHING.
Also, this seems very easy to undo – for AI, at least.
Like, instead of giving it a dataset of all the pictures of doctors humans have put out there, they could find people who actively prefer diverse, interesting groups of examples. And give the dataset to a bunch of them, first, to produce something for AI to learn from.
There must be a way for image-recognition AI software to take these tests and reveal how biased a given model is, so it can be tweaked.
A lot of people would probably object that you’re biasing the model intentionally if you do that. But we know the models are biased. We know we all have cultural biases. (I mean. Most people know that, I think.)
Anyway, this is already known in the field. There are plenty of studies about the biases in different AI programs, and the biases humans have.
That means we’re already choosing to bias models intentionally. Both by knowingly giving them our biases, and by knowing they’ll make our biases even bigger. And we already know this has a negative impact on people’s lives.
Itās so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification
I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable
Do you ever find that thereās something you know you need to write, and you know roughly what needs to be in it, so you start writing it, but it takes months and months to finish because even though you know it all fits together, you donāt quite know HOW it all fits together?
Anyway, thatās what writing this was like. Thereās still so much more to say about magic and weird/neurodivergent people, but I wanted this to be concise, and I just about managed to make it so!
I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know if it resonates.
