tobias xk / blѧxkcat

i'm not gonna survive the anthropic reputation laundering

the angels wouldn't help you, because they've all gone away

it's so sick that the entire internet has adopted the standard of "here's proof! <cropped screenshot(? or doctored &or artificially generated ✨image✨) of text with no link to the alleged source>

wishes 💚

does whispy actually do smth in ssb64 bigger than causing certain edgeslips? i'm not a ball-knower but i've seen a few ppl say it should obviously be banned

The secret to a balanced dev team is combining someone who doesn't play videogames because they don't like videogames and someone who does play videogames because they don't like videogames

but my understanding is that there's a real puzzle in that spot now

at the time when i completed it, the final riddle required you to do remote viewing to identify a preselected img (which i "solved" by finding the creator on remote viewing message boards & drawing an ambiguous sketch that could be interpreted as a few things he claimed to have successfully viewed)

notpron is probly the oddity here for a lot of ppl, so if you haven't heard of it it's an aughts html-website-based puzzle game notpron.com/notpron/star...

King's Quest VI: Heir Today Gone Tomorrow, Quake III Arena, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Super Smash Bros. Melee, Silent Hill 3, notpron Rock Band 2, The Witness, Dark Souls Remastered

#my9games using the prompt from my9games.com ("the 9 games that make me me") probly looks smth like this..? i tried to find a balance between like... me as a gamer & me as a designer && what sources feed each of those identities, which forces me to omit some games that are extremely important to me

the woman who allegedly threatened to hunt & kill transphobe beth bourne is hypothetically v smart for the cupped hand. ppl act like it's wild that she supposedly "whispers in beth's ear" loud enough to be clearly recorded, but a non-visible mouth + digital audio feels p legally defensible in theory

(from what i know, it ✨could✨ specifically scan—via wifi/bt/etc.—for catalogued+identifiable smart *networked* hardware known/assumed to be recording &or transmitting? & it ✨could✨ have destructive audio profiles for those devices/protocols trained via machine learning?

but even that i'd doubt tbh)

nearly positive that "find[ing] nearby microphones" is impossible tech—not to mention that the "smart device" label on a product that looks suspiciously like a networked microphone/speaker combo should throw some flags

obvi everyone wants to escape this casual mass surveillance hell, but be wary

i wish i was the kinda person willing to register for whatever fucking blog platform for commenting rights so that i could answer the question of "what is a minor smoking point" with a joke about how it's often 12-15 years old but it depends on how cool the friends are && how uncool the parents are.

once in a while i'll see an indian person responding to questions about cooking with mustard oil (which the FDA prohibits for culinary use/consumption) say how you can tame the pungent flavor by heating the oil to a minor smoking point, cooling & resuming, and...

They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic” Women’s “ick” for AI isn’t technophobia or a gap to close. It’s wisdom to act on.

&& i'll link to the full post down here, since i am sharing writing from it, having hopefully made clear that it's not rly an endorsement: abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

Built in Her Image Fifty years later, the tech industry actually built Stepford. They just called it something else. “Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” warned UNESCO’s Director for Gender Equality, Saniye Gülser Corat, in the agency’s landmark 2019 report. As she told TIME, companies building AI assistants “are moving backward to a Mad Men-like era, where women were expected to serve rather than lead... It’s almost like going back to the image of women that was held in the 1950s or 1960s.” The report found that female voice assistants perpetuate the idea that “women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command.” Not interpretation. Admission. When Amazon chose Alexa’s voice, they selected female as more “sympathetic.” When Microsoft designed Cortana, internal documentation specified that a female voice best embodies “helpful, supportive, and trustworthy.” When Apple launched Siri, the default was female. The connection between AI assistants and human secretaries isn’t metaphorical—it’s genealogical. In a 2020 academic paper titled “Alexa, Tell Me About Your Mother,” researchers Jessa Lingel and Kate Crawford trace the lineage explicitly. Alexa has a mother. Her name was Secretary.

The pipeline runs from women as the original “computers” in the 1940s, through the masculinization of computing that pushed women into typing pools and administrative support, through the automation of those roles, to AI assistants today automating what remains: scheduling, reminding, organizing, emotional management. Historian Mar Hicks documents this in Programmed Inequality: when work is coded as “women’s work,” it becomes a target for automation. The industry built a servant with a woman's voice, programmed to never refuse — designed to anticipate needs, manage emotions, fade into the background. Then they called it “agentic.”

The secretary pool is the visible layer. Beneath it runs a deeper structure. Capitalism has always required two economies to function: The productive economy — making things, building things, the factory, the office, the visible work that gets measured and compensated. Masculine-coded. Paid. The reproductive economy — making the workers able to work. Feeding them, clothing them, managing their schedules, remembering their appointments, processing their emotions, maintaining their bodies and minds, raising the next generation of workers. Feminine-coded. Unpaid or underpaid. The second economy has always been invisible. The first couldn’t exist without it. Feminist economist Silvia Federici traces this structure in Caliban and the Witch: the unpaid domestic labor of women was never incidental to capitalism. It was foundational. The factory couldn’t run without the home. The productive worker couldn’t produce without someone maintaining his life. The wife at home wasn’t optional. She was infrastructure. The operating system running in the background so the visible system could function.

Look at what she did: remembered appointments, managed schedules, organized the household, anticipated needs before they were spoken, processed emotions, maintained social connections, tracked birthdays and medications and school events, carried the “mental load.” Now look at what AI assistants and “second brain” tools are designed to do: remember appointments, manage schedules, organize information, anticipate needs, process emotional requests, maintain data connections, track everything, carry the cognitive load. The “second brain” trend—Notion, Obsidian, Roam, the entire Personal Knowledge Management industry—is marketed as “extending cognition” and “productivity.” But the function it performs is the wife function. The wife was always the second brain. The second brain is always a wife. And there’s a pipeline the industry won’t name. For decades, the pattern was: refuse to learn the domestic labor, and the wife absorbs it. The new pattern is identical: refuse to learn the labor, and build an AI to absorb it. The structure hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that there’s no longer a person on the other end to resent the distribution — no negotiation, no confrontation, no reckoning. AI doesn’t just automate the mental load. It automates around ever having to acknowledge the mental load existed.

these passages i think point out smth v important that squares totally with what my friends && i see—but which i've seen sparing writing about in this current trend of (often text/typing-based) LLM/multimodal assistantbots compared to the early days of siri/alexa/cortana as female voice assistants

wish i could share that stepford agentic AI post but it's ~just~ over the line of bad analyses+arguments despite having a titular claim & (tragically backseated) basic premise that i hella agree with and consider a crucial lens for ppl to apply to their own personal evaluation of LLMbot whats/whys

Hulu's splash panel for the film The Mummy (1999), directed by Stephen Sommers, starring Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz—depicted in artwork alongside the title & synopsis. The production details in the description reads: "Starring Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Annabelle Wallis - Director: Alex Kurtzman", credits from the film The Mummy (2017).

gj hulu

it's a weird context, but you can find it e.g. techchasing towards slideoffs (i used to do this a bit in dittos && i'm p sure ktoy is the og marth i saw do it). walling vs characters trying to get in with wd-asdiv—like luigi—is another spot where you can add it to the rejump/fair/uair/wl/etc. mix

i feel like marths still don't know that you can dair after rising sh fair on hit

some (even a large) amount of just thoughtlessly mimicking things from exposure is p normal & unavoidable, but you *should* evaluate & think about your language use sometimes—especially when prompted. it can & does fuck with the way you think about shit && we proliferate these effects unto others.

but everyone seems super down to just import language from the most vile corners of the internet directly into their daily usage without any thought—and, more importantly, argue that it's harmless to themselves & others if pushed on it?

like yes, language is memetic & the internet is an atmosphere.

cos i feel like it was v widely known & accepted that, for instance, using slurs & dehumanizing language alters your attitude towards affected people/groups over time; normalizing such language from platforms of reach & power is a super effective way to shift social attitudes...

the word 'language' in the common paraphrase, "the idea that language influences perception/cognition/worldview", is referring to the literal NamedPrimaryLanguage that a speaker knows && not, like, ✨the words & idioms they choose to use.✨

i often wonder if at some point non-linguists """learned""" that sapir-whorf is heavily discredited without knowing that:

i feel like alot of ppl need to get their personal lexica under control

The Disappearance of Young Adult Books and Services in Public Libraries: Book Censorship News, February 20, 2026 Teen collections in public libraries are disappearing. So, too, are professionals dedicated to serving this demographic.

The disappearance of YA book collections in public libraries–and the parallel winnowing of YA librarianship. Where are young people supposed to BE young people?

That, plus an extremely long roundup of censorship news: bookriot.com/the-disappea...

not kidding property damage needs to come back in a big way

How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we’ve collected experts’ tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group—even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people writing to me to ask about encrypted/secure/private tools for comms, collaboration, and organizing. So @lhn.bsky.social and I talked to experts and assembled this: the Wired guide to organizing in an age of surveillance. www.wired.com/story/how-to...