genuinely fucked up that if i want to interact with someone online i have to say words and have a conversation instead of just mashing my face against them like a cat
reblog to mash your face against your mutuals like a cat
Alright, i wanted to make a post about what’s going on. I wasn’t able to stay in Denmark (since it was over the 180 day period by the time they were deciding) and left February 1st
Luckily i was able to stay with @fishandchips321 and @icannotgetoverbirds in the UK so i didn’t have to go back to the US where there’s a nonzero chance that within the three months needed to reset the “90 days out of 180” rule for my stay that it would become impossible for me to come back due to the potential for my passport getting confiscated.
The trip itself cost over $1000 because of how short notice it was. Thanks to all of you for sending what you could so there was enough there between that and us needing to use my card for food and unexpected expenses at the end of the month.
We need to use my account to save up for the official residence permit because the cost of it exceeds what she is allowed to save (let alone the fact she STILL HASN’T BEEN PAID AS OF WRITING THIS).
After converting to the currency my gfm reads it it’s $1214. Which is a lot more than what i have left. Hopefully this time the dust will actually settle and i’ll be able to stay.
Another necessary expense is that i need to order my medicine. Luckily it’s something i can get without a prescription at the strength i need. I haven’t been able to get in touch with my GP since being out of the US since my cell service doesn’t usually work and their online portal seems to have wiped my login, which is another $83-$112 (depending on if i want to carry over a year’s supply or not). I like the reduced frequency of being spontaneously lightheadedvand dizzy it’s given, and considering all the stuff going on it would be less than ideal for that to repeat. It doesn’t have the same effect if i split the pills, i tried rationing them when i knew this was coming up while in the US and it didn’t work
I broke a nail. From it grew a little tree sap. I kept breaking my nails until I had grown a forest. I broke all of my nails into tiny pieces and then realized I was naked. I woke up, confused.
The dreamer is destined to create a great empire through conquest. Or do a lot of writing and/or coding.
My manager was in the break room with me and she said ‘I don’t ever remember oranges being THIS hard to peel’ and I just responded 'they’re making them harder to peel’ without thinking and she looked and me and said. Why?
does anyone have that reddit exchange screenshot where someone is like “what colour is this mouse??” and posts a mouse who is like in some sort of purple world with confetti around it and the top comment is like “it would be easier to tell if your mouse wasn’t at the club” . i keep thinking about & referencing mouse at the club and i cant find it
polycule where one guy has an “i can fix him” mindset and another guy has an “i can make him worse” mindset about the same third guy. net zero moral change
A proper money laundering scheme should be a business which is in no way profitable, run by the brother or cousin of a mass murderer who’s really passionate about making a specific kind of food or something but has no idea how prices or advertising work, frequented by folks who you should absolutely never make eye contact with!
I was a limbless body floating in the vacuum of space for what felt like years. All of a sudden, a rotting corpse with a black cat’s head called to me by the name Phobos.
It spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand, but I agreed to whatever it said.
I was then sealed within a planet and spent hundreds of years experiencing life through the eyes and ears of the inhabitants (namely one girl who I later found out looks suspiciously like Aphrodite) of this planet.
Years pass and a black shadow begins to envelop the whole planet, exposing me at the very center. It looked at me with sockets where eyes should be, and warned me that I’ll end up back where I started.
“porn brain” is a far right conspiracy theory, misogyny in porn is a result of structural societal misogyny and not the cause of it, the way to help sex workers is decriminalization and worker’s rights, banning sexual expression is fascist. i will not be taking questions at the time.
u just gonna admit u have erectile dysfunction like that
absolutely scalding insult from a person who gets into super mario shipping discourse
this probably hasn’t made the news in other countries - huge mining company Rio Tinto managed to lose this little capsule (8 x 6 mm) somewhere in West Australia:
it’s caesium-137, the stuff that has made Chernobyl uninhabitable, and you don’t want to be standing within 5-10 meters of it, because it’s blasting out beta and gamma rays. you REALLY don’t want to pick it up, because it’ll give you radiation burns.
what’s nuts is it seems to have somehow escaped from its “secure” container and fallen out of a bolt hole while being transported, and then nobody noticed for TWO WEEKS.
anyway there are fire fighters on their sixth day of scouring 1,400 km (!) of desert road right now, but it’s so small that it may never be found (I think the detection radius with the equipment they’re using is maybe 20m). it’s so small that it could have stuck in a car’s tire treads, or been picked up by an unfortunate bird or other wildlife. it has a half-life of 30 years, which means it’ll be dangerously radioactive for centuries.
I think a decade or two ago it used to be common for artists working in Photoshop to explain that “no, this is really ‘painting’ just as much as traditional media, it relies on the same skills”. But now the AI art tech kindof vindicates the traditionalist-purist side?
Like, it seems clear that generating images from text prompts isn’t painting, but at the same time there’s a continuum, and out of the many labor-saving devices like perspective tools, custom foliage brushes, posable 3d models to paint over, etc, it’s hard to say where the line is. So the new tools retroactively make the previous ones suspect…
maybe i’m just basic but this actually seems pretty simple? all of these are just different media. goache is not watercolor is not photoshop. some skills transfer more than others. (appropriately enough the paintbrush function on photoshop transfers a lot with trad media paintings but a lot of the more specific and interesting new things you can do with it are less so, obviousy.)
some media have a much lower skill floor for producing something passable - despite a lot of effort i can’t really reproduce someone’s likeness reliably with pen, but i absolutely can with photography despite never attempting anything like that. really good photography is a skill, same with promptcraft. (hic rhodus hic salta, if you think anybody could make those balenciaga edits, same as jackson pollack or whatever)
that said, i feel like even with the fancy tricks pre-AI digital illustration has a skill floor more similar to traditional paintings’ media than to photography or generative ai, so if people want to draw a convenient line there for identity purposes that seems fine to me
I feel that just saying “if people want to draw a convenient line” is treating the matter too lightly! People respond differently to paintings and photos. People on social media respond really differently to paintings and AI works. :) Unlike gouache versus watercolor there are value judgements involved. So what exactly is valuable?
🎨 Back in the day, when Leonardo da Vinci argued that painting is more noble than sculpture, he said one of the reasons is that the painter uses linear perspective.
Now to return to the proposition concerning what was said about low relief, I will say that it involves less physical fatigue than full relief, yet it is a much greater investigation, for the proportions interposed by distance between the parts of bodies, from the first part to the second, and from the second to the third in succession must be considered in [low relief]. If you have not considered these [distances], perspectivist, you will discover no work at all in low relief that is not full of errors in cases when greater and lesser relief is required for the parts of bodies as they are closer or farther from the eye. In full relief there will never be any such error because nature helps the sculptor, and for this reason whoever does full relief is deprived of such difficulty.
If you use 3d reference figures, you are similarly deprived of the difficulty. One specific skill is automated away.
🎨 A traditional painter spends a bunch of time learning to mix paints and will say things like “one of my favorite pigments is alizarin crimson”. In digital this is obviously irrelevant, and instead people will e.g. apply color to entire areas by messing around with the “curves” or hue/saturation tools. Actually, digital photographers use the same tools to postprocess their pictures. This makes the process a bit less premeditated and more experimental: instead of mixing a particular hue you can move around the sliders until you happen to come across a good one.
Or, you can use AI tech to go directly from line art to colors. I guess you can try this multiple times until you happen to come across a good one. (Someone on the youtube page comments “OMG~ i was struggling with coloring and here we are WOOOOW~ Thank you~”.)
🎨 One case I had in mind. Some acquaintance was looking at a scene from a Makoto Shinkai movie and exclaimed “so beautiful, it looks like a painting!” and I replied that it’s literally a painting. But is it? Back in the 1980s it would have been created using physical paints, but now it’s drawn digitally. It makes heavy use of photo references. At least in some cases I would guess it’s drawn/traced directly on top of photos. In any case you can make similar art that way: by googling I found somebody’s “tutorial on painting over a photo to turn it into a Makoto Shinkai style anime background”, or a another similar tutorial.
The process described in the tutorials doesn’t rely on drawing skills or perspective construction, because you trace. It does require a sense of color, but in a curve-tweaking way that is more like modern photography than traditional painting. The rendering is quite mechanical (“now we draw lines everywhere”). I think we have traveled quite a bit towards the “not painting” side of the spectrum even before we bring out the modern AI tech (“AnimeGAN: The Photo AI That Can Turn Any Photo Into a Shinkai or Ghibli Anime”).
So how many tasks are automatable before the nobility of painting is in danger? I guess my point is that nobody really had to think about this until now, because digital and traditional painting were obviously similar enough to count as “the same thing”. But going forward I think the way commercial images are produced will become radically different: some mix of rough sketches, posed models, text-based prompts, extrapolation from mood-boards, etc. And I suspect people will want to distinguish “that thing” from “painting”. Maybe we have already overshot, so some of the practices that we accept now will be considered “not painting” in the future.
Lots of very good thoughts here, and I think as productive realities slowly wipe away “ai art: yes or no” debates I think instead these sort of “what do we actually value when we say we want the human element in art” questions are going to be the more fruitful ones, which this is definitely pointing at.
It’s been the kind of day that culminated in my telling someone moments ago that the date was the fifth of Wednesday.
I hope you all have a really good fifth of Wednesday.
you fool
you just created another tumblr holiday
Bold of you to assume that was not my intent!
Wait wait, it’s a certain number of years before the calender cycles back to being the same. Does that mean it’s only on that certain year each time or every fifth of Wednesday?
Also the OG post was on December 5th so would it only be December fifth Wednesdays?
Well, I live by the axiom that more fun is better than less, and also I’m constantly bewildered by dates, so I’m an every fifth of Wednesday kind of a guy.
Due to budget cuts, we are eliminating the benefit of the doubt. If it looks like a fascist dog whistle, then it just fucking is. We regret the delusions of normalcy that this may have removed for you, but believe this will lead to a stronger country.
I did not read these tags as “my road of good intentions end where roads always lead” the exclusion of the word “such” may not seem important, however it changed the answer from “hell” to “Rome”
Me and Greg talk about this in the newest episode of Red Connections but the reason nobody will ever “take one for the team” and do something that directly threatens capitalist hegemony is because the only thing that leftist organizing in America is doing is working on improving people’s quality of life and playing damage control. We all have too much to lose, union jobs to fight for, etc. — why would we throw that all away going to jail for sabotaging a weapons factory or something? I am by no means saying that purposefully making people’s lives worse on purpose so they have less to live for is a viable strategy either (that is where we’re headed regardless, though!). The left, the fucking DSA and PSL and SRA or whatever need to pool their resources together on SOME kind of a limited united front that provides legal defense and solidarity for everyone who takes actions that risks their careers by putting them at odds with capital. People need to be allowed to openly oppose the state and still have a LIFE to fall back on rather than just fucking dying alone in a blaze of glory. Housing, armed protection from fascists, shelter from the state, anything at all to give people an alternative way of having some semblance of a life after putting themselves at odds with the status quo. “Building power” and creating a parallel structure at odds with capitalist society is not this incrementalist getting socialists on the city council bullshit that we’ve already been trying to do for decades. Dual power means moving as a bloc capable of taking action and sheltering ourselves from retaliation by the state and capital - we can’t rely on the bravery of individuals who are willing to throw their lives away setting themselves on fire or assassinating a CEO, we need to provide people with a livable alternative to the system they put themselves in opposition to.
It makes no sense that “over the counter” refers to drugs that you DON’T need a prescription for. This has always tripped me up because…. prescriptions are kept behind the counter and the pharmacist has to hand them OVER the counter to you, you can’t just grab them. While non-prescription drugs you just take from the shelf. God I hate English expressions
‘Irredeemable media’ is such a funny concept to me because it’s never used for stuff like Birth of a Nation or A Serbian Film. It’s always The Owl House or My Hero Academia because these people only watch things for children and can’t stand any conflict more complex than Super Mario Brothers.
When I’m in a missing the point competition and my oppenent is a tumblr user
believe it or not some female characters don’t have to be mothers. some female characters shouldn’t be mothers. some female characters have a history of expressed disinterest in being mothers. some female characters would have to do a complete 180 in characterization in order to be mothers.
This is one of those works of art that sticks with you forever. My partner and I first saw this comic years ago and quote the “okay, but like…” in our dogs’ voice several times a week.
I do love that every dog owner who has ever seen this just immediately goes “using that forever”
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
— Karl Marx, opening lines to “Rent of Land” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (via lexaproletariat)
executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.
& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”. it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it.
i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks.
