Art of the Machine

jeweler and graphic designer here. most stuff here will be art and jewelry related or whatever floats my boat. especially squids. im also into self suficency, tool making, and will share what i consider some kick ass use/reuse of materials.

[thedesigndome]

[culturenlifestyle]

Bamboo Insect Sculptures Brought to Life by Noriyuki Saitoh

Noriyuki Saitoh stays true to his Japanese culture when he crafts byzantine depictions of various insect species using bamboo.

Keep reading

[ayeforscotland]

Artists begin to use a tool called Nightshade to inject “poisoned” data into their art so it absolutely fucks up the AI datasets their stolen art is being trained on.

Very fucking cool.

[ayeforscotland]

Full article:

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. 

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Ruby bracelet by Van Cleef & Arpels, 1937.

[bluekraken]

Made a set of super long fingerless gloves. It's a good excuse to still wear a tshirt and still keep your arms warm this fall. These are my first set. I may sell the pattern later if i iron it out more. The yarn is stretchy and sort of elastic too, mostly viscose and polyester. These come up well past the elbow.

Listing link

[pusheen]

[bluekraken]

Yeaa that last one is a constant threat

[important-animal-images]

I think it was put 10 million years ago just for cats

[bluekraken]

The perfect thing thats lasted so long

[bluekraken]

I've liked making this piece. Its a light soft cotton and the colors blend nicely. Shells and flowers. It should also become more soft as it's washed.

Shop

[bluekraken]

All cotton lace trim. Its taken me a long time to finish a trim this fine. I personally like the jewel toned colors. This is produced using a more modern soft cotton i don't often use. The thread is very fine. Most of the threads i use are from vintage spools or i find in places like hospice or other thrift stores. Older thread is manufactured to a different standard. Its not common for me to use more modern threads but some forms of heavier quilting threads have come back in production. They are not the same weight as older threads but makes a soft lace that feels nice

UnderELMtree - Etsy

Shop items by UnderELMtree located in Shelby, North Carolina.

[rosalarian]

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

[rosalarian]

As Twitter empties out, I am once again a digital nomad, trying to rebuild a following on yet another site I don’t own (Bluesky, which is nice and you should follow me but also I am just so tired.) Every single time I move to a new site, maybe only 10% of old followers keep following me to the new place. Having done this several times, I barely have anything anymore.

YU+ME, at its peak in 2007, had 250,000 regular readers that came to my own personal website. Today, I have 450 followers on Bluesky. To say that I feel absolute existential despair is an understatement. I am making the best work of my life and nobody is seeing it.

[lillhappycloud]

I feel this viscerally in my soul.

I want to make body positive erotic art but there’s just not much room for me anymore. It’s an absolute fight on twitter and while there’s other options it’s just near impossible to pull in the same numbers. Everything needs to be content, it needs to be sexy, but not too sexy and it needs to be in a video format. I am SO TIRED.

Right now it feels like I’m being cornered into a small, safe, santized version of myself where I can’t do any nudity, even anything risque because a bunch of puritanical people have decided that’s wrong. I want to make art that inspires people, that makes people feel good about themselves but that’s just not possible anymore.

And the reality is that tumblr could suddenly change again, so could bluesky and so could webtoon and so could all of them and each one has less reach then before because of algorithms and each one may be bought at some point and be scrubbed of my content. They all may be blown up by Muskrat tomorrow and you have no control over it. Patreon may suddenly decide to ban NSFW, a social media site may stop working in Europe. Who even knows? It feels right now social media wise that you need a scatter shot approach and just hoping you land on the next big thing. 🤷‍♀️ At this point I’m just hoping that Patreon doesn’t fall over and pray people like my work enough to support me and actually seek me out.

And thank you to those that do seriously. ❤️❤️

[helixel]

Yeah. All of this. I could and DO actively try to move to new sites. But man, my energy and drive to actually make it work after all this time is just gone. It was already a slog to get to where I was on twitter where I’m hovering at almost 117k. But it doesn’t matter anymore, no one sees my posts there, and starting over somewhere new is daunting. I already did the slog, you’re saying I have to do it again? And again? Why does my livelihood have to be at the mercy of someone else’s whims.

Im just so tired, and the “what’s the point” thought comes to me multiple times a day. I keep trying though. But the internet is unrecognizable these days.

[bluekraken]

I think this is a large portion of what created my frustration and ultimate abandonment of my own work for the last 6 years internet wise. That with the cyclical nature of retail business and some other presures it got to be too much. I couldn't keep up with so many new algorithm changes and more. It's not just the censorship of certain risque things but art in general too.

I had to find a job that was bearable instead of supporting myself. I want to create again though. I want this avenue open again but it was hard when i left and i know it will be even harder now. Social media used to be a great tool for driving the livleyhood of some art. Censorship on line has become real and algorithms used now make people invisible. Talent doesn't matter much anymore so much as whatever message you are trying to sell. I want to hope i can make this work again. I want to hope there will be a change but that takes work and standing up for rights that seem currently out of vouge.

[tanuki-kimono]

modern Japanese embroidery by Yamazaki Ayako advertised by Rumi Rock (1/2) for this obi depicting a crow in flight

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

no swimming sign at 虎跳峡hutiaoxia by 如果我叫桥子

[bluekraken]

This seems typical. In america there are labels on chainsaws that tell you not to start the saw with the blade between your legs. This sign is also made for guy who took a dump on the floor in the Louvre 6 feet from a public rest room. I kind of feel like we should just remove signs and see if the human race improves after a generation of letting dumb people kill themselves in special ways.

[bluekraken]

It's been a few years. I stopped doing jewelry for a while. Some of it was that i felt stuck and had not time for other things. There were a lot of other reasons im not going to go deep into.. I am not a one trick pony. There are lots of things i like doing, jewelry making was one, wood work, growing mushrooms, sewing and crochet. Some of that is collecting and making lace and crochet work. Ive decided to sell some of it finally and get back into the whole making things i actually enjoy doing. I dont want to be pinned down to one thing again with no flexibility or personal time. The hooks i use are all custom hooks ive made myself for me since i have carpel tunnel. I like hand carving tools that fit my own hand but i may consider selling custom hooks too.

Its slow going but I'll have more here soon. https://underelmtree.etsy.com

[laundryandtaxes]

Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds

Thirty-one percent of respondents believed that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and 41 percent didn’t know what Auschwitz was.

For seven decades, “never forget” has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.

But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.

Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millenials, believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. 41% of Americans, and 66% of millenials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52% of Americans wrongly think that Hitler came to power through force.

[bluekraken]

I havent posted anything in a while so here is something i just made :).

it’s a 1:4th scale pedestal table / plant stand. or it could be a 1:3 scale end table. its all made from mahogany and walnut salvaged from construction and flooring scraps. Really nice wood and it came out really pretty. The finish is tung oil instead if urethane. Nice little prop stand for photography, and BJDs. lots of hours that went into cutting all the parts. It took 19 parts total to make this thing. 

The Blue Kraken - Etsy  

[bluekraken]

A little honeycreeper bird brooch. i wished i had a lighter blue for him but close enough. his face mask and beak are horn inlay. the flowers are nickel silver with silver settings and rubies. his legs and wings are silver and the rest is made of circuit board

theBlueKraken

[bluekraken]

a little batch of earrings with designs mostly inspired by engravers patterns. the metal work is all sterling and the rest is circuit board and resin. 

The Blue Kraken -shop

[afrorevolution]

[kandykurves]

They’re going to try and kill him.

[kingnycjohnson-deactivated20170]

He’s probably already dead

[sloppyslimyeggss]

BOOOOOST THIS

[rlyhigh]

YOOOOO

[rlyhigh]

seriously guys boost this

I don’t care if it looks ugly on your blogs THIS COULD POSSIBLY SAVE LIVES

[africanaquarian]

Nigerians are about to save the world

[jukadiie]

[worldwide-revolution-deactivate]

Governments are gonna kill this guy.

[i-partied-with-gatsby-deactivat]

his name is Maduike Ezeibe, a professor at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike, Abia State. this is huge

[nonwhiteteethteens]

The world won’t get serious about this unless a post goes viral and that’s sad af You rather talk about a vine video or popular culture ok that’s fine and all but there’s a cure for HIV/Aids and america is lying There is a cure for HIV/Aids and no one will spread the news for those who are diagnosed with it, so that THE WORLD COULD WAKE TF UP There is hope for those who have been diagnosed with a disease that may have given them 20 or so years to live For the first time in the history of the world there’s is a possible preventative cure for one of the most deadliest viral diseases

[a-guest-of-slumberland]

https://www.google.com/amp/www.vanguardngr.com/2017/02/breakthrough-michael-okpara-varsity-discovers-cure-hivaids/amp/

Accurate

[bluekraken]

NOT accurate actually LOL  “ went into detail over the flaws in Ezeibe’s research, which apparently were abundant.”

http://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurenigerias-hiv-breakthrough-separating-truth-from-hope-5743177/

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/02/naca-dismisses-hiv-cure-claim-michael-okpara-university-prof/