saw this on twitter and wanted to save it here

Here’s a link to the Stress First Aid instructors manual (2018) from the U.S. Forest Service Department of Agriculture, directed at Wildland Firefighters. It explains the original diagnostic tool cited under the adapted graphic above (Watson et al. (2013)), which was based off a model developed by the Navy / USMC for identifying and mitigating combat stress / potential PTSD.  The link below provides an overview of the stress continuum model (ie: basis for the adapted graphic above) but also basic tenets of the stress first aid model and how to employ them:

https://www.frames.gov/documents/nafri/Stress_First_Aid_Instructors_Manual_90_Minute_Oct_2018.pdf

the sound of an orchestra tuning up makes me go crazyinsane it makes me start thinking about the eventual heat death of the universe and how someday somewhere an orchestra is going to tune up for the very last time. ever. and then the sun will swallow the earth & turn into a white dwarf & all the stars will go out & meanwhile a gazillion light years away sentient life will be evolving from silicon. and maybe they will have orchestras also

I'm glad Jon Moxley gets to engage with his bloodletting kink on tv

adventure time lore is insane. it starts off just being a goofy kids show that has magic for no reason, but then you learn that all magic users are manic and/or depressed (what betty calls sadness and madness). because it turns out magic is actually a cosmic force beyond mortal comprehension, that itself was learned from cosmic entities that predated the existence of time itself inside a sea of monsters. and "magic" really is just understanding more about the nature of the universe than most people. that, in a way, reality isnt "real" and understanding that allows you to mold it. and thats magic. but that drives you to insanity and/or apathy. and there are beings who hold significant cosmic importance who are more prone to magic. and the reason magic became prevalent on earth is because of a nuclear war a thousand years ago, which released the entity that represents the destruction of all life onto the world. and after a nuclear apocalypse this gave way to a new earth, where magic could thrive. but a lot of the beings we see arent even magical, theyre just mutants from what happened 1000 years ago. and humanity as we know it has been all but wiped out. but everything stays the same because cycles of war and violence continue. and it doesnt matter if its nukes or magic. everything stays the same, but still changes.

women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i'm going to fucking kill

;___;♡♡♡♡

genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don't lean into diet culture / body shaming?

also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don't want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.

Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.

So, may I recommend:

He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it's good for easing yourself into things.

You also don't have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don't want to/can't. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don't have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.

I second Hybrid Calisthenics, that's the program I use. It's run by one guy who's taken it upon himself to make exercising more accessible and it's completely free! Each exercise has different variations based on your ability and each variation is further divided into different levels of difficulty so you can work up to where you want to be. If you can't do a single push up for example then this program will help you work up to the point where you can, and if you're a master of push ups then there are more advanced body weight exercises you can tackle so you can keep moving forward in your training without stagnating. The routine offers a full body workout with absolutely no equipment required for the beginning levels. The only reason you would need to buy anything is if you want to work up to a full pull up, at which point you would need actual pull up rings

Here's his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that's easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial

Also want to recommend Diamond Dallas Page’s program specially designed for people with limited mobility. You do have to pay, something like $45 for the whole thing, but it is for people who are literally bedbound so they can eventually sit up on their own and stand up.

Compare paychecks with you co-workers. It is the best way to get equality.

In the USA it is illegal for them to even ASK you not to talk about your wages

Goes on my “Eventual conversion to sea worship” moodboard

I think that Terry Matalas "knows Star Trek" in the sense that, like, he can tell a Markalian from a Lethean at a glance, and if you asked him what classes of ships took part in the battle to retake Deep Space Nine, he would be able to rattle them all off, together with their crew complements, armaments, and maximum warp capacities. But I don't think that he understands Star Trek.

I kind of feel this way about Akiva Goldsman, too. Like, he's definitely a big fan, but he's a completely different type of fan from me and my friends. The fact that Ethan Peck only learned there was a queer reading of Spock at a con in 2022 is proof of that.

@liz-squids absolutely nailing it in the tags here!

"When curation fans get transformative jobs"

I'd say that hits the nail on the head!

Because it's true that there is no right or wrong way to be a fan. If you, as a fan, can't recall the names of the seven people flying off into the sunset at the end of season 1 of Picard, but you can recite the class and history of every single ship in the season 3 Fleet Museum, that's a perfectly valid way to enjoy this show and this franchise.

But it's not good enough for the people in charge of writing and creating these shows! That's how they end up spending absolutely mind-boggling amounts of time, money, and effort recreating the Enterprise-D bridge in every possible detail - and then introduce that set in a scene where their characters, who have just witnessed every. single. young. person. who has ever used a Starfleet transformer (their own children among them!) and should be tense, devastated, and fearing for their lives and the lives of everyone they lost, instead wax nostalgic and joke about chairs and carpets.

It's how we get tons and tons of detailed background information about all the different Starfleet ships seen anywhere in the background throughout season 3 - but we have no clue what happened to Kestra and JUST COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF LARIS!

You CANNOT run a franchise on curating nostalgia alone. It works for a while, as the curation fans are in utter bliss and the casual viewers (which is the vast majority of the audience, let's be honest) get some nice nostalgia feelings and don't notice the shoddy writing as much as long as the vibes mostly work. But it's not sustainable. And probably sooner rather than later, it'll start turning off the casual viewers, too. The critics are already starting to see through it, from what I can tell.

You need to have people running these shows who care about the stories and the characters on a deep enough level to give their writing a true core and not just a hollow shell of cool starships and nostalgic recreation. Because at that point, you're not writing a new chapter of a familiar story, you're building a museum to the stories that came before. And eventually, most people will get bored, no matter how beautiful and dear the objects in the museum might be to them.

The example that I keep coming back to is rooting Vadic's origin in the whole Changeling Plague thing. Like, yes, Section 31 engineering a plague against the Changelings was something that canonically happened; what are you going to do with it? How does the fact that these Changelings have legitimate grievances against the Federation affect their arc, or how our heroes deal with them? Oh, not all? Our heroes are just going to remorselessly execute them anyway? Well that's, uh, very 'Star Trek' I guess. Thanks for reminding me of that thing I remember from that show I like, though.

*chanting quietly* tree law tree law tree law tree law

i think kids online should really get back to making internetsonas instead of whatever fuckshit this is with putting their entire real faces, names, ages, and such everywhere. you're not gonna realize how nice internet privacy is until you dont have it anymore and no chance at getting it back. make up a guy and a name and just be that online. make up conflicting details about your completely made up backstory. make a fursona or something

i saw people talking about this on THIS website, saying how it was Suspicious if you didn't have your ostensibly real name and info on your account like. NO THAT IS WHAT IT IS FOR. be safe!! be a made up wizard!! (and sure as hell be someone your job/parents/school/we won't find) this isn't faced book. also, i really hate to break it to you, but that person who has full name and info on their acc ......... could also be making it up

a reading list on the human labor behind AI, machine learning, data labeling, and content moderation

bringing a global labor perspective to the “ai is gonna steal our jobs!” discourse that usamerican creative workers don’t really like…

(based on this twitter thread)

Google’s AI Chatbot Is Trained by Humans Who Say They’re Overworked, Underpaid and Frustrated (12 July 2023)

“If you want to ask, what is the secret sauce of Bard and ChatGPT? It’s all of the internet. And it’s all of this labeled data that these labelers create,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University. “It’s worth remembering that these systems are not the work of magicians — they are the work of thousands of people and their low-paid labor.”

The Hidden Workforce That Helped Filter Violence and Abuse Out of ChatGPT (11 July 2023)

ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often for wages of just two to three dollars an hour, they helped make the viral chatbot safe. WSJ’s Karen Hao traveled to Kenya to meet those workers and hear about what the job cost them.

The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution: The global labor force of outsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI — and the most at risk (11 July 2023)

Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.

Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human (20 June 2023)

You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic (18 January 2023)

OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.

To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. … The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour…

The ‘Invisible’, Often Unhappy Workforce That’s Deciding the Future of AI (9 December 2023)

Among a range of conclusions, the Google study finds that the crowdworkers’ own biases are likely to become embedded into the AI systems whose ground truths will be based on their responses; that widespread unfair work practices (including in the US) on crowdworking platforms are likely to degrade the quality of responses; and that the ‘consensus’ system (effectively a ‘mini-election’ for some piece of ground truth that will influence downstream AI systems) which currently resolves disputes can actually throw away the best and/or most informed responses.

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence: Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.” (13 October 2022)

So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.

A factory line of terrors: TikTok’s African content moderators complain they were treated like robots, reviewing videos of suicide and animal cruelty for less than $3 an hour (1 August 2022)

“The devil of this job is that you get sick slowly — without even noticing it,” said Wisam, a former content moderator who now trains others for Majorel. … While TikTok does use artificial intelligence to help review content, the technology is notoriously poor in non-English languages. For this reason, humans are still used to review most of the heinous videos on the platform.

Human Touch: Artificial intelligence may be making some jobs obsolete but it has given a new lease of life to one group of people who play an unglamorous but critical role in the machine learning pipeline: first generation women workers in Indian towns and villages (20 July 2022)

“Any major technology company in the last 10 years has been powered by a throng of people … At some level, there’s denial. Investors like to hear that technology sells itself once you write the code. But that’s not really true.” … “Data work has a racial and class dynamic. It is outsourced to developing countries while model work is done by engineers largely in developed nations … Without their labour, there would be no AI.”

Desperate Venezuelans are making money by training AI for self-driving cars (29 August 2022)

How the AI industry profits from catastrophe: As the demand for data labeling exploded, an economic catastrophe turned Venezuela into ground zero for a new model of labor exploitation (20 April 2022)

Most profit-maximizing algorithms, which underpin e-commerce sites, voice assistants, and self-driving cars, are based on deep learning, an AI technique that relies on scores of labeled examples to expand its capabilities. … The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labor to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work” … is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.

Over the last five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become a primary source of this labor. The country plunged into the worst peacetime economic catastrophe facing a country in nearly 50 years right as demand for data labeling was exploding. Droves of well-educated people who were connected to the internet began joining crowdworking platforms as a means of survival.

Facebook Faces New Lawsuit Alleging Human Trafficking and Union-Busting in Kenya (11 May 2022)

“We can’t have safe social media if the workers who protect us toil in a digital sweatshop… We’re hoping this case will send ripples across the continent—and the world. The Sama Nairobi office is Facebook’s moderation hub for much of East and South Africa. Reforming Facebook’s factory floor here won’t just affect these workers, but should improve the experience of Facebook users in Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, and other African countries.”

Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop (14 February 2022)

Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user. …

The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook… is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon: Big tech relies on the victims of economic collapse (22 September 2021)

Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance — just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programs follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus — primarily black — populations [in the United States] are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labor for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programs represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.

(an excerpt from the book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Philip Jones)

AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem (11 December 2020)

A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans. (16 August 2019)

A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential. “This is an expanding world, hidden beneath the technology,” said Mary Gray, an anthropologist at Microsoft and the co-author of the book “Ghost Work,” which explores the data labeling market. “It is hard to take humans out of the loop.”

[book] Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts (June 2019)

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day

[book] Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (May 2019)

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. … services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.

[follow-up articles about the book here and here]

Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor (28 March 2019)

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. … “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’… They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”

How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine: Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen (5 February 2014)

Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. … But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.

on a serious note regarding the wga strike and (as of 1:50 AM PST 7/13) upcoming sag-aftra strike, dsa-la has a fundraiser called The Snacklist which provides snacks and water on the picket lines here in LA. right now the funds they have will not last through the end of the summer, especially given the current and upcoming heatwaves necessitating more supplies. if you have a couple of dollars to spare it's a great way to directly support the writers (and potentially the actors) during this difficult time!

happy first sag-aftra strike in 60 years to all who celebrate.

if you are an enjoyer of media (which i will guess based on your presence on tumblr that you are) please consider donating to the snacklist (linked above) or to any of the following mutual aid funds that directly support striking actors/writers, IATSE and teamster union members who are also out of work and by and large refusing to cross the picket lines, and nonunion PAs and assistants (like yours truly) who are directly impacted by the work stoppage. everyone in this industry works unbelievably hard to bring you the shows, movies, webseries, and variety programs that you enjoy and every worker deserves a fair contract. any support you can give is extremely meaningful.

The Entertainment Community Fund provides emergency financial assistance to anyone in the entertainment industry who is unable to pay their immediate basic living expenses such as housing, food, bills, and healthcare.

The Union Solidarity Coalition has been formed by members of the wga, sag, and the dga to help cover the cost of healthcare for IATSE and teamsters who will not get enough work hours to qualify for their coverage this year due to their refusal to cross a picket line.

The Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund (also run by the Entertainment Community Fund but separate from the above link which supports all film and tv workers) offers assistance to tv and film support staff and assistants who are not protected by a union and have been displaced from low or entry level positions.

Drive 4 Solidarity is an IATSE organized event in August raising funds for all union and guild members. Tickets are available for those in socal but donations are being taken as well.

Humanitas Groceries for Writers fund provides WGA members with grocery gift cards.

Green Envelope Grocery is a grocery fund for all workers in the entertainment industry regardless of union status.