Spectrum System

Back again Bitches. 32, plural, somewhat human, always owchin, often 📯y They/Them, Disabled Spicy Queer Blog. 21+ Only. Age in Bio or BLOCKED

[nosimpincurly]

[nattousan]

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' >:)

[nattousan]

and now, the birds

Birds 1 and 2/14: Red Winged Blackbird, Male and female, Agelaius phoeniceus

[nattousan]

Bird 3/14, American Robin, Turdus migratorius

[nattousan]

hoo boy, ok *out of breath*

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

this guy took me about 4 days to completely finish, all of those freakingk coverts were a bear to render

[nattousan]

speaking of obnoxious coverts:

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

the friggin stripes almost got me chat, i may not make it

[nattousan]

Madam....

[nattousan]

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

pleasantly simple to paint! next is the flickerrrrr

[nattousan]

*melts into goo*

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

nothing but pain and suffering, i'm sure hope the next bird will be much easier and with FAR less barring :)

[nattousan]

in other news, I am losing my mind hairline

[nattousan]

SHE'S DONE!!

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

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 🙏

[nattousan]

*does a little jig*

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 🥹

[nattousan]

aaaand another one bites the duck,

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

[nattousan]

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

[nattousan]

thanks for the reminder, kid

[nattousan]

at long last, we've reached the end...

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

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.

i'll see y'all soon :')

[snommelp]

[punkrorschach]

“As a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh who uses a power wheelchair, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frustrating face-off on a narrow sidewalk. What I didn’t realize was how dangerous, and dehumanizing, that scenario might be.

The robot was sitting motionless on the curb cut on the other side of Forbes Avenue. It wasn’t crossing with the rest of the pedestrians, and when I reached the curb, it didn’t move as the walk signal was ending. I found myself sitting in the street as the traffic light turned green, blocked by a non-sentient being incapable of understanding the consequences of its actions.”

-Emily Ackerman

[zeldahime]

The article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-19/why-tech-needs-more-designers-with-disabilities

Lessons From My Standoff With an Autonomous Sidewalk Robot

A life-threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our auton

[mosscrab]

[ID: three screenshots. The first is a perspective article by CityLab. It’s headline reads “My fight with a sidewalk robot.” The paragraph below reads “A life threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.” Below the paragraph is a picture of a small rectangular sidewalk robot moving along a sidewalk.

The second screenshot is a tweeted picture by an unknown user of six sidewalk robots going down the side of the street, with a car trying to pull between two of them. There are two replies below it, the first reply is by Adrian Lopez @PaladinZilch and reads “Wow. Imagine being in a wheelchair and seeing that.” The second reply is by I [flaming heart emoji] You @IAm444x and reads “oh god the tech bros made car traffic for sidewalks [crying emoji].”

The third screenshot is a reply tweet by Will Jackson @geologywill that reads “A few weeks ago… it took 5 minutes for their sensors to figure out how to get out of the standoff… Enjoyed every second of it.” Below is a picture of three sidewalk robots caught in a circle at an outdoor bus stop, presumably stuck in their circle. End ID.]

[snommelp]

@a-square-6-28-496 here's a reblog with image IDs

[transhumanisticpanspermia]

The logic of these devices being "allowed" on the sidewalk, whether they've found a technical legal loophole for it or not, is complete nonsense.

Motorized vehicles aren't allowed on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is for pedestrians. Power chair users are considered pedestrians by specific exemption (and for good reason - that is a single human, using the most minimally disruptive means of locomotion available to them.)

This thing isn't a pedestrian. It's a miniaturized delivery van. They should be banned from the sidewalk. They might already be in most places under existing laws, and nobody is enforcing it.

[traumaticemphaticfantastic]

If you hate Israel and then act like Canada and the USA are somehow good, salvageable, or in any way morally better than Israel I think you’re just as bad as the Zionists btw.

“Israel bought out the USA” as if the USA is somehow an innocent victim of Israeli influence, like it would somehow be a good settler-colony if the evil Israeli settler colony didn’t exist. lol. lmao even. The USA and Israel are just two settler-colonial countries built on imperialism and hatred, they love working together towards the same interests, actually.

Same for Canada, which committed a genocide against its indigenous peoples and still hasn’t given back most of the land that was illegally taken from them in clear violation of every “treaty” they ever made, treaties which they *continue to violate to this day* btw. They claim truth and reconciliation and hide behind their land acknowledgments, but really the only thing separating Israel from Canada is a time difference and normalization.

So yeah, if you’re a Canadian or USAmerican who thinks that you’re settler-colony is somehow better or more legitimate than Israel, I distrust you heavily and would suggest doing some more research into your country’s founding and continued existence through marginalized and indigenous perspectives, cause you aren’t so hot.

[ashes2caches]

trans girls kissing is a highly important phenomenon.

[elexecution]

if i was born 500 years ago i would have been speculating that the two dudes who went to get firewood together were fucking

[neaborealis]

chat, how long do y’all think 500 years is. Romeo and Juliet was written in the 1500s. 500 years is not the Stone Age.

[elexecution]

why do u think people stopped collecting firewood after caveman times

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Many such cases

[shadowen]

This is an anti-despair checkpoint! You must share something you're looking forward to before scrolling on.

[transfaguette]

learning that constantly thinking about and analyzing and interpreting my traumas isn’t actually healing . and don’t get me wrong its made me a very effective communicator and emotionally intelligent person. but actually im supposed to be moving on and experiencing new things and happiness and stuff and not just compulsively reliving and recontextualizing the past. oops!

[ineffectualdemon]

Best therapist I ever had helped me unpack my trauma and then, crucially, helped me pack it away again

Except this time it's all correctly labeled so when I start experiencing issues related to them I'm not just drowning in undefined pain.

I'm like: "ah shit the Childhood Neglect container is leaking all over everything! I better mop it up and put it in a new container"

And sometimes something comes up and I'm like: "ah. This belongs in the religious trauma box. Let me put it away and then I can do art until I feel better"

You unpack your trauma to organise it and correctly label it do you know how to handle it. But you still pack it away so you can live your actual life

[stillfuckingtired]

Brain fog is not an adequate descriptor, actually. Fog can be kinda nice and beautiful and ethereal and refreshing. The thing we’re describing is more like a brain BOG; everything moves slow like you’re wading through water, it’s clunky and heavy and you keep getting stuck in the mud. It’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and everything takes so much effort. You lost a shoe, probably.

[leatherfag]

i want to see more fat people in rope literally always. fat rope bunnies i love you i hope you’re having a good day you’re carrying this fucking website

[ramadebuzunar]

my apologies to everyone at Pride this weekend for actually putting a top on over this instead of going out as is

they/them

[gumi-megpoidd]

brat x brat yuri where theyre both just annoying and nothing actually happens

[gumi-megpoidd]

this is really funny

[lesbomancers]

whoever those two are they should kiss

[stardial]

that’s weird. why would you say that. i don’t know you

[heather-moss]

people with energy-limiting disabilities should be immune to greasy hair

[intactics]

my reaction to hank green getting #canceled for using AI and having to announce a youtube hiatus is that I forgot there were two of them and that john is the other guy, so for about half an hour I was wandering around thinking "damn it's like this guy was born to get harassed off websites"

[intactics]

learning that he didn't just piss off the entire transfem community by suggesting taking t blockers with nothing else (bye bye bones) he also pissed off the whole knitting community with his dumbass takes on textiles... so I think this guy has been intellectually lazy and overconfident and most importantly running his mouth for years. sorry john for confusing you with your worse brother

[estro-boi]

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

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

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.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.

[boybeetles]

You know technology literacy is dying because I saw this meme with 76k likes

F11 the full screen button? You’re scared of the full screen button? F10?? It opens the menu bar???

[boybeetles]

Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖

[yetanothergreyjedi]

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you

[headspace-hotel]

Never stop learning+ Never stop sharing what you learned

[rabbitkinglune777]

Paws Crossed chapter 2: Starved and the Starving

ch 1