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crystal

@cim.bsky.social
470 followers 1.8K following 1.8K posts

33 / f / chicago. mechanical engineer / product designer, speedrunner, vaguely leftist, queer / polyam / transfemme. @iscrystalme on Twitter

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Reposted by crystal
alyson “end journalism” greaves @badambulist.bsky.social · 11h
Imagine looking at the media landscape—music, books, movies—and concluding that it would be better if it were all simply infinite reflections of yourself, if you never had to be exposed to another personality, another experience, another life. Just you, you, you. Sounds fucking horrifying.
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Reposted by crystal
lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 29/09/2026
what keeps me up at night is these guys have basically never received real pushback and they still lost their minds and shredded the federal government's regulatory capacity when employees started griping too much in the company slack. What if you actually arrested one of them for their crimes
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
yeah I think my life is probably better off deleting the Instagram app from my phone. nothing I do there is a good idea. I think this means nothing on my phone will show me reels anymore? maybe I'll be able to get bored and put it down again
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
we as a society have to stop having those freakishly weird reels or clips where someone's head is physically pinned in one place while everything else moves. it's deeply unnatural and gives this horrid vertigo
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
is Chicago capable of opening and operating a lesbian bar that is not hosting a special event every single night. like a bar where I can just show up and not have to like Have Something Happening at all times
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I don't know what I expected but the Friday night experience at Pizza Lobo, which I feel is worth emphasizing is a _bar_, is that of having roughly two dozen children sprinting around the patio and throwing rocks at patrons for two hours. Wait staff had to lecture the idle and distracted parents!
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I think the Instagram algorithm has detected a downward trend in my mental health because it keeps showing me content about winding garage door springs for some reason
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Reposted by crystal
Evan Maple VO @evanmaplevo.com · 22/09/2026
it’s been said a ton already but I really do appreciate mamdani so throughly dismantling the core democrat ideology of “we actually can’t ever do anything helpful or good because of. circumstances”
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Outside the obvious timebomb of selling out trans kids to appeal to ~16 bigots in deep Ohio, an underplayed part of the whole "trans kids in youth sports" stuff is making the most psycho Little League parents the most important political demo in America. They're joy vampires for the kids themselves!
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
a lot of people act like there's a trade being offered where we give up trans athletes in sports and in exchange fascism is defeated forever
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
it's really deeply funny that dnc establisment consultants all seem to think that regular human adults know who hasan is and also care
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
brick privilege is the joy of only lesbians realizing you're hot so you can just glide through life unbothered
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Reposted by crystal
mcc @dryad.technology · 18/09/2026
This may be a little awkward, but this is why I think the discussion around "AI doomerism" is kinda broken.. Imagine a political compass. On the X axis, put "AI works". On the Y axis, put "AI is an existential threat to humanity".
"AI doesn't work. AI is not an existential threat": Pure skepticism gets you here.

"AI works. AI is not an existential threat": The conventional tech press is here.

"AI works. AI is an existential threat": OpenAI and Anthropic are here, and everyone is reasonably making fun of them for it…

"AI does not work. AI is an existential threat": …but I think we should be paying attention to *this* corner, and the right-wing doomer narrative distracts from it. Maybe that's why the right-wing doomers are saying it!
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 18/09/2026
I think it’s pretty fun to watch the rationalist millenarian AI sex cult sputter and squawk like a flock of turkeys suddenly confronted with a mirror over “the public found out about you and they think you’re evil, but also enormous dorks.”
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Reposted by crystal
Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
AI critics: This is a theft machine for lazy turds with no imagination AI Stans: This is the greatest, most powerful tech in history. It is not a theft machine. There are no original thoughts anymore People Who Created AI: This is a theft machine for lazy turds with no imagination
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Reposted by crystal
Vote Angel 2028🏳️‍⚧️ 👉😎👉 @benotafraid.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Ah so talerico wasnt lying to get elected, ita literally what thebparty is telling them to say www.advocate.com/politics/tra...
advocate.com
Democratic Operatives Want Candidates to Talk About Trans Athletes — Very Quickly, One Time — and Then Move On
Party advisors are reportedly trying out a new strategy on the culture war issue.
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Reposted by crystal
Jane @jane.meangirls.online · 17/09/2026
this is probably the worst language i've seen a democrat use. saying "transgender ideology" is straight out of the right wing playbook. this is looking more and more like Labour, so I don't want to hear any more shit about how even the transphobic democrats broadly support our rights.
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
my keyboard sicko era has reached full swing now with some printed wrist rests and tenting stands
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
there really ought to be a Division brown line stop, like, I'm not insane for thinking this right? I feel like the absence of one is for like historically racist reasons (proximity to Cabrini Green)
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Reposted by crystal
skáld @danglinghemmie.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
talarico reminds me of how democrats spent years trying to "moderate" on immigration and getting nothing in return and now we have the best funded paramilitary force on the planet disappearing people across the country while running a system of concentration camps with no oversight
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rue @deathcarpets.enterdeepfo.rest · 14/09/2026
the crazy thing is that all these dems who win primaries supporting trans people and then give it up at the first sign of resistance in general elections are communicating more than anything that they are weak willed cowards who will fold for a stiff breeze
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
"We didn't hit a plateau, we're actually all agreeing to keep our product shitty because it's *too dangerous*!!!!!" the credulity with which mass media is treating this wild and baseless claim is inexcusable
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Reposted by crystal
Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 13/09/2026
No candidate, regardless of party, will ever get my vote if they call me a "biological man" and advocate for laws targeting my community. Its that simple.
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
okay but real talk is this the ideal keyboard layout for doing CAD
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
what you can just hook up an iPhone to a thunderbolt dock and it'll like use the monitor and keyboard and stuff? whoa. this thing should run Mac OS
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Reposted by crystal
Lorelei Lee (they/them) @loreleilee.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A thing I don't see enough in convos abt LLMs is how they egregiously misunderstand what writing is FOR. LLMs assume writing is primarily meant to be consumed by other people. But the actual act of producing language on the page is a process of DISCOVERY. It's a process of finding out what you think
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Someone at work expressed the deranged opinion that shake shack is the best burger in the world, which is obviously false but now I do want shake shack
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
why has nobody designed a full size video game controller for adult size hands with a bunch of buttons that all feel *exactly* as crisp and clicky and low profile as the buttons on a GBA SP
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Reposted by crystal
confettie! @spacebeer.net · 02/09/2026
news
US map with a Skeleton burning in hell overlayed on it. NYC is marked with a puppy and a rainbow
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
it's like fucking insane that good home internet costs more than $1000 a year, right, like, why is this normal
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I think we can kind of quantify how useless someone's job is based on how long it took for them to figure out AI was terrible at it. If they never figure it out, was it a real job in the first place?
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
aw man, 6 am Bluesky. haven't seen you in years
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Reposted by crystal
Jane Ball (living dead girl) @jane.inurhead.lol · 02/09/2026
i notice that every time one of these dems excited to throw us under the bus loses like this, a lot of cis people celebrate along with us, like they realize that allowing for any bigotry against anyone is a threat to everyone. We are gonna win.
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Reposted by crystal
🐈‍⬛🎃🔪 Adam Jay 🍁💀👻 @bullgooseparty.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
When you’re excited for fall on September 1st
The gang from Over the Garden Wall and everything is still green but Greg is excited
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
how different would the world be if we had sent a PSA to like CTOs in 2012 that just said "fyi: the cloud is just someone else's computer"
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Reposted by crystal
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Very much this. Holding space for refusal of this tech is a key resistance strategy. That means advocating for that option in e.g. school policies (if we can't get a full ban) but also simply being visible in our own refusal, so that others see it as possible.
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Reposted by crystal
🏳️‍⚧️ Ciara RayneCloud 🏳️‍⚧️ @ciararaynecloud.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
What was that about, "This wont spread through the party, you're over reacting!" ?
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I've had a preoccupation with playing pong at my birthday, and I feel like what is guaranteed tonhappen is that I will go to all the effort of setting up cups and a table and then literally nobody else will be into it
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Reposted by crystal
Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I think it's bad that the Democrats' House leader is having secret chummy meetings with a guy doing a domestic ethnic cleansing operation and funding a genocide abroad, then spending his entire week going on cable news to complain about a lefty Twitch streamer who nobody knows. Sorry for offending.
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
anyone got opinions on making a database for clothes? some desire to plan outfits but mostly I want to semantically keep track of how many of different categories of items I have (eg nice red tank tops, black jean shorts, etc) in such a way that I can sort and play with the data in a couple of ways
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Reposted by crystal
lumberjack wharfie @lumberjackwharfie.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
LLMs and that whole class of machine learning models should've stayed relatively quietly developed by computer science academics to make it easier to perform complex operations on data structures like JSON objects and various flavors of XML, not boastfully turned into The Psychosis-Inducing Chatbot.
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Reposted by crystal
mattie lubchansky @mattielubchansky.com · 24/08/2026
the way of the future | patreon.com/lubchansky

PANEL 1: MATTIE is looking down. A SECOND PERSON is on the ground.
MATTIE: WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE?
PERSON: OH I'M MOVING AROUND LIKE A LITTLE WORM.

PANEL 2: Closer in on the PERSON, who smiles beatifically.
MATTIE: SEEMS UNCOMFORTABLE.
PERSON: IT'S THE FUTURE! ALL THE BIG MONEY IS ON IT, MANY ARTICLES AND LEADING FIGURES ARE SAYING IT AS WELL.
PERSON: WHO AM I TO ARGUE!

PANEL 3: MATTIE puts a hand to her chin.
MATTIE: I JUST DON'T SEE THE BENEFIT. FOR MY OWN LIFE.
PERSON: YOU CAN EITHER GET WITH IT OR PERISH IN THE FUCKING DUST, OLD WOMAN.

PANEL 4: The PERSON holds up their phone. On it is a photo of a tech CEO-looking guy on the ground, being interviewed by a journalist
TEXT: DAVOS 
TEXT: CEO OF SquirmX SAYS WRITHING AROUND WILL ACCOUNT FOR 700% OF US ECONOMY WITHIN 2 MONTHS
PERSON: THAT'S A DIRECT QUOTE.
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
legalize single player video games 2026
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
how do the cottagecore queers at the Crane Wives show get so hip and fashionable, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
they need to invent an Old Town with architecture about as beautiful but with an average household income like 70% lower
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
there really oughta be a division brown line stop
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crystal @cim.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
is there some reason the Metra NCS line only has one reverse commute train option each day, and they aren't even 8 hours apart so you can't possibly use them for a job
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