“The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and often painless, with many victims not realizing they have been envenomated until respiratory depression and paralysis start to set in.[8] No blue-ringed octopus antivenom is available yet, making it one of the deadliest reef inhabitants in the ocean.”
Holy shit
And this is why I don’t go in the ocean anymore
Also the blue rings literally only show up when it is distressed so this person has angered it!!! You are in danger friend!!!
Actually this guy keeps them as pets they’re on his instagram (william_exotique) and he frequently holds then and I just? Don’t know why? And also every picture or video he posts of them shows the blue rings so they’re always in distress I just do not understand why he’s doing this
I mean OP pretty much covered it. A blue ringed octopus is almost on the level of CONE SNAIL on the list of things you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PICK UP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
But ask and you shall receive, On this episode of “Fun Facts With Cuckoo,” DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. EVERYTHING IS DEAD AND YOU SHOULD NEVER TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE OCEAN EVER AGAIN.
There are many things that will kill you.
[citation needed]
There are fewer, but still many things that will kill you FAST.
There are yet fewer things that kill you fast and by such an overwhelming margin of overkill that nervous laughter is our only solace in the dark of this terrible, surprisingly Lovecraftian world of unearthly horrors that we live in.
Of the things that I know about which will kill you fast via just plain insultingly potent venom, which is a not insignificant number of things because I know a not insignificant number of things, there are about 3 things in the ocean – IN THE WHOLE OCEAN – which are so insanely, mind-bogglingly deadly that there is pretty much no possible hope for survival (I mean you CAN, but god help you if you’re ever in that situation, because god’s just about damn near the only thing that CAN help you). THE. WHOLE. OCEAN.
Those three things are the Irukandji (a tiny (1cm) species of box jellyfish, which has stingers not only on its tentacles but on its BELL, for reasons no one has definitively figured out, and is so toxic despite its size its sting can cause a severe brain hemorrhage), the cone snail (a group of carnivorous sea snails that is accepted to be the most venomous animals on earth, with a STUPIDLY fast acting and extremely powerful neurotoxin that has in at least one case killed a human ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY, because the swimmer who found two beautiful shells (unfortunately cone snails tend to have very pretty shells which makes people want to pick them up) was holding them up for a picture and ended up being stabbed in the neck by not one but TWO cone snails at the same time, and it is believed that she was literally dead before she hit the ground, I mean LITERALLY in a 100% non-fictional and non-exaggerated way, in between the time the two cone snails stabbed her and the time her limp body hit the sand, she was not alive anymore), and the blue ringed octopus.
It is POSSIBLE to survive any of these. But not without immediate medical attention. Of these three, the Irukandji is by far the most treatable, because Australia and other coastal regions (including Florida and other parts of the US) are kind of experienced in dealing with box jellyfish.
The blue ringed octopus will fucking kill you. There’s no antidote for their venom, ONE COMPONENT OF WHICH (tetrodotoxin) is 1200 times deadlier than cyanide. It’s a powerful neurotoxin (most of the worst venoms are because the species that produce them need to kill or at least paralyze their prey quickly, like jellyfish whose fragile tentacles could be damaged if their food doesn’t stop struggling) that attacks the sodium channels and causes muscle paralysis. It doesn’t necessarily kill you quickly. It PARALYZES you quickly, so that you can’t really call for help or describe the problem, and you will probably end up slowly suffocating from a paralyzed diaphragm. Tetrodotoxin can be metabolized by the body in a matter of hours, but it can also kill you in a matter of minutes if you get a lethal dose (which isn’t much, the
LD50
or median lethal dose, the dose at which you have a 50% chance of survival, is only 8 MICROGRAMS per kilogram of body weight (as tested in mice)). This is, by venom standards, not a large amount, which means the animal that is capable of putting this venom inside your body is very very good at killing the absolute shit out of you.
DON’T TOUCH THE BLUE RINGED OCTOPUS.
Now, because overkill is my motto, let me briefly explain why Conus geographus is the undisputed champion of YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE, AND FURTHERMORE FUCK YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE.
A cone snail walks into a bar. You’d expect the bartender to ask, “what’s your poison,” but they were paralyzed before they could ask and OH LOOK they’re already FUCKING DEAD ON THE GROUND.
Conus geographus is about 4-6 inches long and nature’s equivalent of Avada Kedavra. Cone snails literally have their own KIND of toxins named after them: conotoxin. Not only is there no antidote, but their venom AGGRESSIVELY RESISTS our ability to find a cure, because we barely understand how it works AND conotoxins are so internally varied, even within a single species, that any one antidote isn’t going to help because they’re constantly mutating and evolving their venom to prevent their prey from evolving a resistance to it. Plus their venom is like, a bunch of different venoms all at once JUST IN CASE any one of them wasn’t good enough.
I want you to read these two sentences from the wiki page on conotoxin:
“Conotoxins have a variety of mechanisms of actions, most of which have not been determined.”
Remember how the
LD50 of tetrodotoxin is 8μg/kg? Conotoxin is 160 times more potent. FIFTY NANOGRAMS PER KILOGRAM HAS A 50% CHANCE OF KILLING YOU. A 220-POUND HUMAN HAS A 50% CHANCE OF SURVIVAL AGAINST JUST 5 MICROGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN.
I DID SOME MATH.
IT WOULD TAKE 7-9 MILLIGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN TO KILL A BLUE WHALE, THE HEAVIEST ANIMAL TO EVER LIVE. (based on weight estimates from 300-400,000 lbs.)
Conus geographus is so fucking deadly that “In two cases of envenomation, only 0.0002-0.0005 mg resulted in severe paralysis.”
THIS THING KILLS STUFF SO HARD THAT BEFORE YOU HEAR THE FIRST “MORTAL KOMBAT” IN THE MORTAL KOMBAT THEME, THERE’S PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN A FATALITY.
And guess what? Cone snails don’t do that NOOB SHIT with the superficial biting or stinging. Your wetsuit or gloves won’t protect you. Because homeboy didn’t bring teeth to evolution’s knife fight. Oh no. It brought a motherfucking radula POISON HARPOON. It’s lightning fast and has way more piercing power than some silly little cnidocytes or salivary bacteria.
Another component of their venom is being researched for its potential as a pain reliever. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT????” you might reasonably ask. And you would be right to do so, because science has gone too far and has surely sinned against the very image of Mollusca Kedavra. Well, it turns out the answer is “Research shows that certain component proteins of the venom target specific human pain receptors and can be up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine without morphine’s addictive properties and side-effects.” That’s right, the part of their venom that SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T HURT YOU is up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
Also, Conus geographus (along with one other cone snail species, C. tulipa) is the only known non-human animal to weaponize insulin. In addition to the normal insulin that the snails produce for their own use, their bodies manufacture an ADDITIONAL insulin molecule that is similar to the kind produced in fish (which they eat) for the sole purpose of stunning their prey through hypoglycemic shock. BECAUSE APPARENTLY THEY DON’T FEEL LIKE THEY’D KILL YOU HARD ENOUGH OTHERWISE.
IF you are going to survive the ALMIGHTY CONE SNAIL, WHO KNOWS NO FEAR, TRIUMPHANT HEDGEMON OF THE MOLECULAR ARMS RACE, TRUE BORN HEIR TO THE SCYTHE OF DEATH ITSELF, FISHSLAYER, GOD AMONG MOLLUSKS, WHOSE WRATH IS MERCIFUL ONLY IN ITS BREVITY, ADMIRABLE IN ITS BEAUTY AND UNSULLIED BY THE UNWORTHY TOUCH OF MORTAL HANDS OR SCALES OR REALLY ANYTHING IN RANGE OF ITS RADULA HARPOON, then literally the only thing that’s going to save you is for you to be kept alive artificially (externalizing your respiratory functions to force your body to continue breathing, basically) until the effects of the venom wear off. And because of how quickly this venom acts, you need to get that medical attention VERY, VERY FAST.
And if you don’t get it, you will still be conscious while the paralysis slowly suffocates you to death.
Don’t touch the pretty shells.
Please write a whole book.
I went to look at this guys instagram and he basically says that he has no fear of death (because he is already dying- I think he has a form of liver cancer but im not sure) : i read in the comments that the ones he has either 1) used up all their venom (i dont know how true a claim like that is but i know very little about the species) and 2) he lets them climb on him at their own pace and therefore dont feel threatened but idk kids dont touch them leave them be and dont be this guy.
That’s nonsense.
They can’t “use up” their venom. Tetrodotoxin is actually produced by bacteria that live in their salivary glands in a symbiotic relationship (which is why tetrodotoxin is such a common type of poison among a wide variety of unrelated organisms, including pufferfish, snails, newts, frogs, sea squirts, flat worms, and more). It is so potent that a bite may not even be required; it may be possible for prolonged contact to produce symptoms just from being absorbed through the skin. It may even be so potent that it can be spread through the water. (Source) The Blue Ringed Octopus has exceptionally dense colonies of these bacteria living in special glands. It provides a safe environment for them, they produce the best means of self defense the octopus could ever ask for.
It may be possible, through careful and limited exposure over a prolonged period of time, that the person who handles these could have developed antibodies to the toxin, as with any other type of venom (except probably cone snails, because conotoxin is BULLSHIT and attacks nearly every part of the nerve cell at once and would therefore require an unbelievable variety of antibodies that, frankly, would never have time to be produced because the lethal dose for the venom is so tiny that it would be virtually impossible to develop a resistance to it).
In fact, that’s how antidotes to venom are manufactured: you introduce a non-lethal dose into the bloodstream and let the body recover naturally. Do this repeatedly over time, with increasing exposure, and the body will eventually just have antibodies for that toxin to the point that it would take far more than a typical dose to be lethal. I’m not sure off the top of my head, but I think this is usually done (at least with snake venom) on horses, because horses are much larger than humans and can therefore be exposed to more venom more safely more quickly and then produce enough antibodies that they can be extracted and used medically.
With something as deadly as tetrodotoxin, that would be a hard resistance to develop naturally. It’s theoretically possible, especially if you were very careful and very slow in how much exposure you had (e.g. by exposing yourself to the water that contains those salivary bacteria long before you ever touched the octopus directly), but still … strongly strongly discouraged.
And never in a million years do this with a cone snail because you would need 50 different kinds of antibodies (more likely an UNDERSTATEMENT than an exaggeration, at least with C. geographus) that you would probably never be able to develop because there’s almost no dose of conotoxin that you can safely expose yourself to.
And at any rate, if his instagram is not making ABUNDANTLY CLEAR on every single picture that this should NEVER be attempted, then he’s being extremely irresponsible not just with his own life, but with everyone else who is viewing the pictures without proper education.
Also, there’s no way that can be safe because the blue rings on a blue ringed octopus are a threat display. If you can see the blue rings, it does not feel comfortable. This is very unsafe animal handling and I will not stand for it.
The rings do get MUCH brighter than that, though. They basically GLOW blue and, unfortunately for the humans who then want to pick them up, they are very pretty animals:
TL;DR the Blue Ringed Octopus is proof that evolution has utterly failed to give humans the correct response to brightly colored animals. Bright colors mean stay away, not ooh it’s pretty and I need to touch it.
Do not touch the brightly colored animals.
This is the most fascinating thing I’ve read all week. . @thebyrchentwigges - relevant to your interests!
if you include a flashback to your protagonist’s childhood, make sure you timestamp it AND have the narration clearly state they are a child AND have the character say, “i am a child in this part because it is set before the rest of the story”, otherwise your readers will be so confused they will throw up
As someone from the rural south, I actually don’t mind evil Republican Californian transplants. It’s kind of funny to witness them crash out after realizing there are no sidewalks and the nearest hospital is an hour and a half away. Maybe if enough of them vacate the state, the cost of living will go down and I can move there.
I used to live in an area that was somewhat scenic and had an undercurrent of tourism but was still extremely rural and poor. It was so funny to see transplants in the regional Facebook group making posts like “Does anyone know any good jogging paths in the area?” only to be met with a unanimous “No.”
There was someone who was like “I’m thinking of retiring to [AREA]. How quickly could the ambulance reach [AREA] in an emergency?” and everyone was like “It would take an hour or more. Do not retire here if you plan on ever getting sick.”
The funniest part was that the locals were not being dicks, there was a huge culture shock from these people who had lived in wealthy urban/suburban areas and were now trying to survive in the middle of nowhere. If you wanted resources and things to do and a decent quality of life, you should have stayed where you were. We’re living the libertarian unpaved road no emergency services dream over here.
“Does anybody know of any good restaurants in the area?” “There are two. Two restaurants in a 50 mile radius. One is pretty good but it is only open on Wednesdays and Fridays. The other is fucking disgusting but it is cheap and always open. Hope this helps.”
Or they move here but they don’t want to live without those amenities and bothered asking their real estate agent about it, so they do move to the city, or just outside the city, and are horrified and disgusted to learn that the cities are fucking blue, and full of immigrants and nonwhite people and you sometimes hear languages that aren’t English.
Idjits. You don’t like it? You can go back where you came from. Around here a lot of the time it’s technically that the border crossed my neighbors, rather than vice versa.
My ex moved down to Texas from Massachussetts. In Mass, she’d considered herself somewhat moderate. She agreed with some conservstive positions.
Then she got down here. And encountered Texas conservatives. And just… veered HARD left. Just “Oh, no, fuck these assholes.”
I really hate that we let the fucking tea party alt-right neofash get away with calling themselves conservatives, because the old coalition of “Texas conservatives” aren’t into 98% of what this administration’s up to, and could be a useful component of a resistance coalition, but a lot of them don’t know it because part of the conservative identity is hating politics and wanting to have as little to do with it as possible, especially when anyone they don’t like is in power (which might surprise people but includes TFG.) In other words they act a lot like liberals. They’re not reliable, but they’re useful.
Texas went for this regime at a rate 10% less than the national average, and driving a wedge between conservatism and this - big government overreach, even tyranny - would be enough to split the GOP here. But we’d get further if we stopped lumping them together from the left.
my dad has this crazy ass huge camera lens so we went out during the eclipse last night and got maybe one of my favorite photos i’ve ever had a hand in taking
Holy fucking shit y'all, I went to my most recent HRT appointment yesterday and my doctor doubled my E dose again and I think it fixed me???
Like, I went to bed early last night. Just because I was tired. And then woke up early fully refreshed and ready to go?? I did tasks in the morning? I reached out to my parents without feeling guilty?!?
I was making lunch and mildly embarrassed myself by dropping something in front of my wife and I felt myself starting to spiral a little about it, and then I just…didn’t. Like, I didn’t even expend any mental/emotional effort to actively try and stop it, I just felt this warm comfortable “everything is going to be ok” wash over me and just…stopped. I completely froze up for a second to try and process what just happened because I outright shocked myself by coping well with stress.
I’m fucking shook.
Cis people have it this easy all the fucking time?!?
my little brother tried to show me a “cool trick” where he entered my name and hometown into chatgpt and tried to get it to pull up my personal info like it did on all of his friends, then was absolutely shocked when it couldn’t find anything on me
so. keep practicing basic internet safety, guys. it still works. don’t put your personal info on social media, keep all your accounts on private, turn off ai scraping on every site that you can, enable all privacy features on social media apps. our info still can be protected, we have to keep fighting for control
Hey y'all in the notes, typing your personal info into google/chatGPT to “check” whether its been leaked online somewhere counts as leaking it online somewhere, hope this helps!
I’m doing a periodic maintenance task for work, where I have to rebuild the container environment that our materials science computations get run in to update the versions of some software that we use, and I’m struck by just how much scientific knowledge is packed into this singularity image file that represents the container.
It takes like an hour to compile on modern hardware, from an Ubuntu (ha! the built in spell check in Ubuntu insists on capitalizing itself) base image with dozens of computational materials science simulation packages and supporting dependencies. These all have to be downloaded, compiled, linked, and installed in such a way that they can mutually interface, and take data and return results in the formats we use.
Once the whole thing is built, the final image is something like a gigabyte in size–5x that if we also install CUDA. I know that 1 Gb doesn’t sound like that much data these days, some internet connections can download that in less than a second, but think about it:
This isn’t a move or an image or a song. This archive contains almost no actual data. That gigabyte of space is pretty much entirely code instead; much of it compiled, executable code at that.
A gigabyte of materials science simulation Code, a billion characters worth of instructions, specifying the very best established practices for modeling the behavior of materials at the atomic level.
I know the digital age is old news, but I can’t get over that level of cumulative effort. It represents tens of thousands of person-months of effort collectively, but I’m just sitting here watching my computer assemble it from a recipe that’s short enough for me to read and sensibly edit, and distill that down into a finely-tuned piece of precision apparatus that fits on a flash drive.
And that isn’t even the important part of our research! That’s just all the shit we need installed on the system as background dependencies to be able to run our custom simulation code on top of that! Its so complex that at this point, its easier to run an entire (limited) virtual machine with our stuff installed in it than to try and convince every supercomputer cluster we work with to install every package separately and keep up with updates.
In case you’re wondering what a day in the life of a computational materials physicist looks like: trying to do upgrades on incredibly complex machinery that you cannot touch or see. At least this time it doesn’t also have to stay running while I do it…
you should write regularly.yeah, regularly, why are you - oh. i mean, yeah, i guess once a decade IS regularly if you’re doing it on the same day each time. hm. well, you got me there
just saw a post that accused someone of using generative ai to write an essay because ‘no one uses — instead of commas or semicolons’ and i’ve never been more offended in my life
ALT
i’m not as offended as i was when i read the ai thing, but i Am offended
you show me the pictures of your baby on your phone. i take out my phone and show you dozens of pictures of my OCs. i start to tell you all about them. you try to make an excuse to leave, but i keep going. you try to leave but the door is locked
I approve of powerscaling discourse only in utterly senseless contexts. I don’t give a shit about which shōnen protagonists could beat up which other shōnen protagonists, but I will 100% read your five thousand word essay exploring the subtle nuances of establishing a tiered ranking of the Smurfs.
“Could Batman beat Captain America” trite, tedious, bullshit. “Could Deadpool beat Roger Rabbit” now you have my attention.
im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says ‘this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"
You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.
Adding to this:
This is why it is not assimilationist for gay/queer people to want to enshrine marriage rights in their country/region
Similarly, this is why polyamorous people are fighting for the right to have their relationships recognised by their states through marriage and/or similar agreements
Oh, and because on top of those aforementioned financial and medical protections, these laws also help you maintain connection to any kids you have and/or raise together!
I would go further and say, this is why we really should be looking to expand some of these rights so that marriage is NOT the only way they should be enshrined. (e.g. Why could I get married tonight to a guy I met this morning, and get him on my health insurance, but I cannot do the same for a sibling?)
Remember the fight for same sex marriage was never “we feel left out”, it was “we’re sick and not allowed to see each other. We’re dying and not allowed at the funeral. Someone who kicked me out at 14 just showed up for the first time 24 years later to tell the doctor to pull the plug, and they did.”
Marriage is a legal documentation of rights. Fully agree with prev that those rights should be divested from the concept of monogamy entirely, but for now we have to at least understand what they are
I need the tumblr kiddos to understand that when my wife and I got married in 2013 we had to plan our vacations to ensure we only visited states where our marriage was legal, because otherwise if my wife got sick (not unlikely, she has multiple chronic conditions) I might not even be allowed to visit her in the hospital.
Every older queer you know who is in a longterm relationship will have similar stories of how we planned our whole lives to protect what would have been granted nigh automatically if we were heterosexual.
Marriage is a legal status that confers certain protections and rights, and until societies introduce other ways to get those protections and rights, we need it even if we hate it as an institution.
There’s a fantastic book about platonic partnerships by Rhaina Cohen called The Other Significant Others, and it has a really interesting chapter about marriage. There is a truly mind-boggling number of legal rights and protections attached to marriage, and Cohen examines how attaching all these rights to a single legal relationship really fails large swaths of people.
I can’t remember many of the details because it’s been a bit since I read it, but I’d highly recommend requesting this book from your local libraries if you can.
I have one hell of an irl story in relation to this: My wife and I are both trans. Currently, I’m legally recognized as F and her as M on our documents, which is probably why we could get married so easily. The issue is I look like a cis guy with F on my documents and soon she’s gonna look like a cis woman with M on her documents. The problem is, she’s from Brazil and I’m from Canada. That’s fine in theory, but in legal practice, it’s an obstacle. We want to travel between Brazil and Canada to see our families and friends ofc, but first of all, the US is in the way and potentially landing there for any reason is so scary to us as trans people. Second, we wanted to wait to marry, or maybe even not marry at all and just live together, but in order for us to not be separated, we had to marry.
instagram folk complaining about how a dresser they thrifted was painted white for that bougie minimalist look everyone hates now and they have to strip the paint and fix it and then they show the dresser and it’s the same Ikea dresser i’ve had since i was 8 that comes in white from the factory
I lost weight when I went on my medication initially because it made me very sick and when I told people that was why, more than a couple would say stuff like “I wish I could get some of that” like you want a weird disorder that is awful and to be violently ill? just to be skinnier?
“After I got the biopsies, they did another mammogram. And I had to have my shirt off. And I was standing there at the machine. And the technician said, oh my gosh, you have such a flat stomach. What is your secret? And I was like, oh, I’m dying.“
-Tig Notaro
More proof that the ideal of thinness never had anything to do with health.
You don’t have to represent the entire ace/aro community. You’re still allowed to talk about your experiences, even if they’re not typical of most other aces/aros.
especially if they’re not typical
feels important to put this here. this is meant to be a silly way to encourage people to feel comfortable calling their experiences aromantic experiences, not a checklist or representation of every a-spec group.
For as popular as the idea of a “hivemind” is we never talk about how it doesn’t exist in nature. There’s no animal colony that connects and controls all its members through a psychic connection. Even bees, the eponimous hivemind, communicate by pheremones and, more importantly, interpretive dance. My point is when are we going to get a movie about an intensely organized alien race that mainly communicates via sick dance moves, why are we sleeping on this.
I’m referring to the way a lot of people seem to treat “unconditional hatred for Generative AI” as a signifier by which someone reaffirms their belonging or allegiance to the category of Artist (imagined as a special category of people wholly separate from the category of Non-Artist) based on the conception that the only reason why someone might not hate GenAI (or might hate it but think some criticisms of it are unprincipled) is because they 1) aren’t an Artist themselves, and thus 2) they either don’t understand what being an Artist is like or they categorically hate and oppose Artists.
To name a concrete example:
Just a couple weeks ago I got an anon message pretty much along the lines of “I get it, you don’t have a creative bone in your body and have to pretend that art theft is fine because you’re incapable of creating art yourself” (despite pretty clear evidence of me being an Artist™, such as the fact that at the moment that anon was sent to me, you could scroll down like two posts on my blog and find me showing off how some of my music was featured in a doom metal compilation album).
This anon was sent in response to me saying that, while I have problems with the GenAI industry, I think “it’s art theft” is not one of them because (by virtue of being a copyright abolitionist) I think describing any situation where a copy of something is made without affecting the original as “theft” is patently ridiculous. Like, that’s a pretty clear example of how performing enough unconditional hatred of AI art is treated as a signifier of belonging to the Artist™ in-group, and failure to perform it is treated as a sign that you can only possibly be a ignorant and/or malicious Non-Artist.
Copyright is a bad tool but it’s the only one we have right now for ensuring artists get paid. A copyright abolitionist in the current environment is taking an “only rich people should be able to make art full time” stand that I find somewhat disagreeable. Sure there is often beauty in the work of an amateur, but there are things you can only master through a lifetime of work and trained skill.
There’s another thing here that feels like a fundamental unfairness. Generative AI is a tool designed to make money for the companies running it and drive down the price professionals can charge for the categories of work that it generates. If OpenAI scrape my online work without my consent and use it to train their models and then a) people who used to pay me instead pay them to generate art in my style or b) clients use the threat of that to pay me less than I would normally earn then they are benefiting from my labour and I am not. I made the thing. They used my years of work and learning to make money - money they would not earn without my work - and only I lose out as a consequence. That still feels kinda thefty to me.
Copyright fundamentally does not ensure that artists get paid. In fact the way copyright works in actual fact almost without fail serves to deny artists profits while making sure that corporations (who are the ones that hold copyrights most of the time) make money off of the work of artists.
And significantly it’s not the only tool we have for ensuring that artists get paid. There is a tendency to reduce the whole category of “artists” into this image of artisans who create individual pieces on commission, when most artists do rote wage labor (the people who work on animated films are artists). The majority of artists do not get their wages thanks to copyright law, but through labor laws.
So like, not only is copyright a bad tool for ensuring that artists get paid (because in a vast majority of cases it all but ensures that copyrights actually do not get held by artists but by corporations) there are other tools we have for making sure artists do get paid.
Exactly like. The vast majority of people who actually make art as a full time job don’t do it as independent artists, they’re working as writers, animators, illustrators, composers, color artists, background artists, etc etc etc in a variety of media projects like TV shows, videogames, and movies, and the vast majority of them (i.e. those who aren’t big enough industry household names to be able to demand it) do not actually own the copyright to any of the things they create for these projects at the end of the day.
So the assertion that copyright is the “only tool” we have for ensuring that artists get paid is kinda revelatory of a very “petit-bourgeois artisan” conceptualization of the idea of Artist that ends up actually excluding the vast majority of working artists.
Also, no matter how much the situation described sucks, the assertion that it “feels thefty” is one that only makes sense if you subscribe to the mindset that the loss of potential profits that exist only in theory constitutes theft. And that’s a mindset that has led to A LOT of really bad shit.
Yeah, and also the idea that copyright abolition would somehow end up disproportionately benefiting the rich is ludicrous. Like, corporations that make a select few people ludicrous amounts of money are some of the fiercest protectors of copyright. They are not doing so out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want to look out for the interests of poor artists. The rich too have class interests and if copyright abolition were seriously something that would benefit the rich you could bet there would be an international campaign promoted by the richest people alive trying to get governments to overturn copyright law.
I’m referring to the way a lot of people seem to treat “unconditional hatred for Generative AI” as a signifier by which someone reaffirms their belonging or allegiance to the category of Artist (imagined as a special category of people wholly separate from the category of Non-Artist) based on the conception that the only reason why someone might not hate GenAI (or might hate it but think some criticisms of it are unprincipled) is because they 1) aren’t an Artist themselves, and thus 2) they either don’t understand what being an Artist is like or they categorically hate and oppose Artists.
To name a concrete example:
Just a couple weeks ago I got an anon message pretty much along the lines of “I get it, you don’t have a creative bone in your body and have to pretend that art theft is fine because you’re incapable of creating art yourself” (despite pretty clear evidence of me being an Artist™, such as the fact that at the moment that anon was sent to me, you could scroll down like two posts on my blog and find me showing off how some of my music was featured in a doom metal compilation album).
This anon was sent in response to me saying that, while I have problems with the GenAI industry, I think “it’s art theft” is not one of them because (by virtue of being a copyright abolitionist) I think describing any situation where a copy of something is made without affecting the original as “theft” is patently ridiculous. Like, that’s a pretty clear example of how performing enough unconditional hatred of AI art is treated as a signifier of belonging to the Artist™ in-group, and failure to perform it is treated as a sign that you can only possibly be a ignorant and/or malicious Non-Artist.
Copyright is a bad tool but it’s the only one we have right now for ensuring artists get paid. A copyright abolitionist in the current environment is taking an “only rich people should be able to make art full time” stand that I find somewhat disagreeable. Sure there is often beauty in the work of an amateur, but there are things you can only master through a lifetime of work and trained skill.
There’s another thing here that feels like a fundamental unfairness. Generative AI is a tool designed to make money for the companies running it and drive down the price professionals can charge for the categories of work that it generates. If OpenAI scrape my online work without my consent and use it to train their models and then a) people who used to pay me instead pay them to generate art in my style or b) clients use the threat of that to pay me less than I would normally earn then they are benefiting from my labour and I am not. I made the thing. They used my years of work and learning to make money - money they would not earn without my work - and only I lose out as a consequence. That still feels kinda thefty to me.
Copyright fundamentally does not ensure that artists get paid. In fact the way copyright works in actual fact almost without fail serves to deny artists profits while making sure that corporations (who are the ones that hold copyrights most of the time) make money off of the work of artists.
And significantly it’s not the only tool we have for ensuring that artists get paid. There is a tendency to reduce the whole category of “artists” into this image of artisans who create individual pieces on commission, when most artists do rote wage labor (the people who work on animated films are artists). The majority of artists do not get their wages thanks to copyright law, but through labor laws.
So like, not only is copyright a bad tool for ensuring that artists get paid (because in a vast majority of cases it all but ensures that copyrights actually do not get held by artists but by corporations) there are other tools we have for making sure artists do get paid.
Exactly like. The vast majority of people who actually make art as a full time job don’t do it as independent artists, they’re working as writers, animators, illustrators, composers, color artists, background artists, etc etc etc in a variety of media projects like TV shows, videogames, and movies, and the vast majority of them (i.e. those who aren’t big enough industry household names to be able to demand it) do not actually own the copyright to any of the things they create for these projects at the end of the day.
So the assertion that copyright is the “only tool” we have for ensuring that artists get paid is kinda revelatory of a very “petit-bourgeois artisan” conceptualization of the idea of Artist that ends up actually excluding the vast majority of working artists.
Also, no matter how much the situation described sucks, the assertion that it “feels thefty” is one that only makes sense if you subscribe to the mindset that the loss of potential profits that exist only in theory constitutes theft. And that’s a mindset that has led to A LOT of really bad shit.
Yeah, and also the idea that copyright abolition would somehow end up disproportionately benefiting the rich is ludicrous. Like, corporations that make a select few people ludicrous amounts of money are some of the fiercest protectors of copyright. They are not doing so out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want to look out for the interests of poor artists. The rich too have class interests and if copyright abolition were seriously something that would benefit the rich you could bet there would be an international campaign promoted by the richest people alive trying to get governments to overturn copyright law.
The soft eyes! The forward facing ears! The question mark tail! Not to mention the poise and control! This little dude is having a blast and is SO good at it!!
what I love about those timid handwringing “am I allowed to breathe air???” types is sometimes a miracle will happen and something in their brains will snap and you can watch them kill the hall monitor in their heads with a shovel
