Atlas. Self Proclaimed Digital Artist. Here for the fandoms. tryna get into the vintage aesthetic. She/her. 24. Demisexual. left leaning. Neurodivergent. Moderator of some ask blogs. I take any requests and questions. 🇵🇱🇬🇧🇨🇾
so funny to me when white american christians are like “ooh i incorporate my religious trauma into my art and thats why i draw these stained glass gothic church gold multi eyed reneissance sculpture angels agnus dei” like i know your protestant southern california ass didnt have any of that. go make some art about this
this may be my age showing but I am a passionate supporter of wires. earbuds? put a leash on those things. wireless keyboard? no, it needs to hold hands with the computer. the ps5 controller I forgot to charge has the staying power of a wealthy nonagenarian with a much younger wife and 14 life insurance policies, but the controller plugged into my pc? that baby will outlive my bloodline. my ethernet cable is like a son to me.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
these are different things btw. actual adaptability means not dealing with being miserable long term. and being constantly mildly annoyed/frustrated with a situation but being “able to deal with it” counts as ambient misery. btw.
let this be your sign to make your life just a little more livable. get a dollar store trash can for your bedside so Cup City’s invasion plans fall through. block a tag or post that makes you grind your teeth every time you see it. get some grip pads so your bed stops sliding across the hardwood a little bit every time you get in it. tell that person you need a little more support. if you get annoyed at a situation more than a couple times, change it. don’t be content with being miserable.
and the more that you start doing this, the better you will get at detecting your own feelings and advocating for yourself! This is an important start to being more of a person in the world if you struggle with that
For those who don't know, recently this Bill was proposed in Parliament in Aotearoa New Zealand by an MP from New Zealand First, a right-wing party that makes up part of our current coalition government:
This Bill proposes adding definitions of "woman", "female", "man" and "male" to the Legislation Act 2019, making these the new legal definitions of these terms that apply across all New Zealand Legislation.
This Bill ignores the fact that trans people in Aotearoa have been able to legally amend their gender markers since 1995, and that people can register their legal gender as non-binary. It also fails to account for the existence of intersex people and general variations of sex characteristics that make this binary impractical (and ironic given the use of the term "biological reality"). AND it does not take into account the fact that Māori (the indigenous people of Aotearoa) recognise multiple genders and did not follow gender roles as westerners see them until colonialism happened.
On top of all that, the claims of protecting the integrity of sex-based rights fall short when you realise that the ambiguity of what "adult" refers to here will actually potentially remove rights, especially around reproductive rights of young people.
The Bill was read at Parliament, and the other parties making up the coalition voted to allow the Bill to pass on to a select committee to review the Bill, gather information, and make a formal report for the House with their recommendations. A part of this process is accepting public submissions.
People can make submissions in support of or in opposition to the proposed bill. You can make your submission online here:
If you need support with drafting your bill, there is a guide on the Parliament website, and some helpful folks have put together a site of resources including a submission generator. (If people have more resources for support, please feel free to add them in reblogs or comments)
Submissions close on Thursday, 02 July 2026 at 23:59 New Zealand Time.
Rhetoric like this is often pushed on the message of a "silent majority" who secretly agree with it. The best way to show that isn't the case is by showing up and making our voices heard. If you are in Aotearoa, I strongly urge you to make a submission and let the Select Committee know you do not support this bill, and you do not support legal discrimination of trans, intersex, takatāpui and non-binary people in our country.
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on
this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏
BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos
the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise
ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!
Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹
we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos
the 16th is looming in the distance so i'm trying to get thru these as quickly as i can so i can have as much time for the GBH as possible. i still need to do the names next to all of them so i've got about a week and a half to finish everything which is GREAT because i have adhd and nothing gets my ass in gear like a fuckin deadline, let me tell you
power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,
the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis
and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.
Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp
thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.
Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?
From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.
From what I remember of back when Millennials were outpacing Boomers at internet and tech stuff in general, this is going to cause a lot of issues for companies angling to use slop in marketing because the younger set are always going to be better at spotting it than the older, but the older are going to be the ones approving marketing campaigns and ads and etc. Meaning, the older people will not ever be able to tell what might actually convince the younger.
The good news is that if it persists and Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to scoff at the generated stuff, then marketing departments aiming at them will just have to give up on using it because they won't be able to figure out how to fool their targets with it.
The bad news is that this won't apply to scams and campaigns aimed at older people, so once again we're going to have a situation where the kids will be the ones lunging across the coffee table to stop Mom from giving her financial info to that really obvious fake scam mom oh my god do NOT buy that it isn't even a real thing.
it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, events, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵
Two of my friends and I have taken over the local guild that runs a large portion of charity events in our town. We’re changing bylaws and setting new policies and coordinating with other groups. All we did was volunteer, and they practically strongarmed us into accepting the president, vice president (me) and treasurer positions. VOLUNTEER, KIDS. YOU TOO CAN LET THE SMALLEST AMOUNT OF POWER GO TO YOUR HEADS.
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
pixelskylines
dededos
discoholicmusic
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
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