For the Love of Comics!

Formerly AlienComicInvasion Please let me know if you need/want certain tags! A blog full of comics, art, Doctor Who, and Discworld A little bit of knitting and sewing too.

[rainformation]

formative years? aren’t they all?

[absolutejamer]

show me a permanent self and i will show you a facade or a corpse

[sludgebitch]

"🥪" is shorthand for "🍞🧀🍅🥬🍞"

[sludgebitch]

can you people stop reblogging this my notes look like lunchtime

[3artho]

He’s leaky and old, like pick a struggle (part 1)

[penny-anna]

no but im thinking about the videos diaries now bcos for like 20 years Grace and the other astronauts were all remembered as the heroes who went on a suicide mission to save the sun? which is impressive on its own but once the beetles come back and some of the videos get released everyone is like :O :O :O bcos not ONLY did Ryland Grace nobly volunteer to go on a suicide mission to save the sun, he did the whole mission by himself after the other astronauts died and made first contact with an alien species while he was at it?? he's basically the best guy in history??

but then someone leaks the Full Unadultered Ryland Grace diaries and there's gonna be various Realisations along the lines of

oh my god he didn't volunteer. oh god he was so angry & miserable and lonely up there. they just sent this sweet man to die in space against his will. oh we're all alive because they killed this poor man. okay.

oh my god he was so stupid he was such a stupid dork he nearly got us all killed so many times

[folklorespring]

I love when people post photo dumps and just random mundane things and their pets and sunsets and their meals and spotify links !! I'm the target audience for your blurry vertical pictures of your morning cup of coffee

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

I just need a beautiful woman to tell me that my bizarre imitation of human social skills is alluring and sexy

[hellenhighwater]

there are draculas everywhere for those with eyes to see them

[chillyfeetsteak]

from this article, which is well worth the read, if only for the fun of seeing zuck get dunked on

[undomielregina]

Let’s be clear, AI models are extremely good at the specific tasks they have been trained to do. It’s not just medicine and scientific research, a well-trained machine learning model now better at weather prediction (which is incredibly complicated and involves stupendous numbers of variables) than the gigantic supercomupters that are the current standard. If you have a single complex task with more variables than a human can effectively hold in their head, training a neural network is very likely a good answer, because what they do is basically produce results using weighted averages affected by a number of variables way beyond what humans can consciously track. The problem is that LLMs are not this.

It turns out you can only train a neural net to do one thing, and if you try to train them to do a second thing, they forget the first one. Which means that LLMs, specifically, are very, very expensive toys, because what they’re trained to do is produce coherent text as part of a dialogue with a human user. They’re not trained to produce facts or anything else except human-readable text that generally accounts for the context of the prompts that preceded it, and because they’re able to track so many variables, they’re usually pretty good at staying on topic (this is part of why they tend to break down so stupendously on edge cases: the places they fail are usually the ones where they don’t have enough data to produce high-confidence predictions.) The art models work the same way: the reason humans so often have weird numbers of fingers and all the details are in soft-focus is that the model is averaging information from its training model, all of which has slightly different poses, and using that to predict the most likely pixel colors based on the nearby pixels it’s already generated. So both sets of major user-facing models right now are trained to do something that does not involve meaning, only the appearance of coherence, and you can’t re-train them to produce meaning without having them forget to be coherent.

The interesting thing is that we got here because we don’t actually understand intelligence or sapience very well at all. We don’t know anything about how it develops or why it works. And LLMs, in particular, were very much an experiment testing a thesis about the nature of these, that being fed information and being given the ability to speak coherently on topic was the same as understanding the information and so would naturally lead to a general intelligence that could function like a human mind and process multiple types of information multiple ways. And instead we got ChatGPT, which just proves that Derrida was right and language doesn’t inherently contain information, something that is difficult to grasp as a human because for us, language is inherently tied to its information content. And that’s why it’s so hard to believe that an LLM doesn’t think: for us, for humans, the distinction between the symbol and the actual, the signifier and the signified, is so small that we can’t really understand that it exists, if something is speaking sense it must understand what it’s saying. And instead an LLM is purely operating on the symbols/signifiers, it’s sense totally divorced from meaning, and we’re simply not equipped to cope with that.

And that’s why I think everyone needs to learn about Deconstruction, which is the critical theory that actually explains what’s happening here.

[lasagnaforem]

The real solution to MB needing at least one thing on its public id

[blackpyrefly]

I heard another video game is coming out soon

this has to stop

[rederiswrites]

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

[transformativeworks]

The TikTok Team is back again with a Tag Wrangler Hear Me Out Cake.

(YouTube link)

[transformativeworks]

Did you want the recipe? Bc now this exists

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86327351

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

Copyright governs who has the "right" to produce and distribute "copies" of books/music/movies/creative works. This is where fair use doctrine applies, because most creative works are referential by nature.

Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.

Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.

A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.

A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.

Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.

Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.

What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).

Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.

In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.

Yes, Pattie's legal fees to fight this will cost more than the $1 she's being sued for. Pattie could also not fight this, withdraw her trademark application, not spend any money, and carry on being an environmental activist drag queen named Pattie Gonia. She would probably be better off making nice with Patagonia in the hopes of a Jan Sport-esque deal where Pattie designs an exclusive fabric and Patagonia maintains the trademark, but apparently Pattie's legal team has been sassing off to Patagonia in their communications for years, has applied for a trademark they should 100% know they'll never get, and has now decided to play the victim on social media just in time for Pride month, so I don't know how likely that is. I guess we'll see!

[sexshopshenanigans]

This is mostly correct, but I’d like to offer a small correction. The product deal with Hydroflask and North Face apparently occurred in 2022, and HydroFlask got Patagonia involved to make sure everything was in the clear. It seems like Patagonia was very agreeable about everything at the time, and only asked that Pattie Gonia and her partners avoid using the Patagonia logo and font or similar images, and to avoid putting the words “Pattie Gonia” on any products. This is the email exchange from 2022, from the recent Patagonia trademark complaint, including Pattie Gonia apparently agreeing to the limitations.

The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.

Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?

It’s possible that Patagonia understood the terms from 2022 to be a good-faith ongoing agreement about keeping the brands separate, and Pattie interpreted it as an agreement limited to the now-ended North Face and Hydroflask collaboration. It’s also possible that Pattie Gonia didn’t believe she was actually agreeing to anything at all, since her responses were very neutral, though positive in tone, up until 2025. The email chain does, however, show what I think is a very clear effort on Patagonia’s part to protect their trademark while also showing support and goodwill towards Pattie in her use of the Pattie Gonia stage persona.

[scarlet-rosepetals]

Reblogging this because I think it provides an interesting explanation of the legal side of this whole mess, but to be clear the Only Correct Reaction here is to understand that copyright and trademark are Fucking Stupid, not to get out your torches and pitchforks to defend teh poor innocent cowpowation from a scawy yucky-wucky dwag queen.

Pattie selling shit with her stage name on it Really Obviously isn’t going to have any negative effect on the continued lining of Patagonia CEO pockets, as if that even fucking matters, and no amount of waxing poetic about “well they have to 🥺🥺🥺” is going to make me say anything other than “fucking stupid if true then”.

Y’all gotta stop jumping to defend corpos just because blah blah trademarks blah blah copyrights. As the famous post implies y’all are not temporarily embarrassed vivzipops.

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

You will struggle to defend Pattie Gonia with the argument that "trademarks are fucking stupid" when this all started because Pattie applied for a trademark of her own.

In terms of whose pockets are being lined:

Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.

At the same time, Mr. Chouinard’s relinquishment of the family fortune is in keeping with his longstanding disregard for business norms, and his lifelong love for the environment.

(NYT Gift Link)

Since 2022, 100% of Patagonia's profits have gone to climate and environmental causes. They have completely restructured the ownership of the company so that this will continue in perpetuity.

I like Pattie Gonia and I admire her environmental activism, but Patagonia's $100 million toward climate causes every year forever has orders of magnitude more impact. I support Patagonia maintaining its trademark however necessary to continue this work, and it is actually deeply distasteful to me that Pattie is willing to spin this routine trademark suit as "a corporation trying to erase an activist" when there is very obviously no path to legal victory and the only possible outcome is reputational damage to the only major corporation literally ever that has been singularly, intentionally, innovatively, and against all odds structured to give a fuck. Patagonia is a unicorn among corporations and we are starting a smear campaign against it for what. Selling slightly different t-shirts? Crab bucket ass activism.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

957 days left

[athelind]

Source

[daysleftofsecondterm]

listen to Granny on 957 days left

[gimmefics]

@isdonaldtrumpdeadyet

[isdonaldtrumpdeadyet]

this is true

[bakwaaas]

there is so much love in friendship, people forget that

[ravioliet]

never kill yourself. you have to fill your mutuals dash with shit they don't care about forever, okay?

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite Young Book Heroines

Final

Cassie (Animorphs) VS Daenerys Targaryen (A Song of Ice and Fire)

Cassie

Daenerys

Show results

Voting ended onMar 8

NO ANTIPROPAGANDA PLEASE

Propaganda under the cut

Cassie:

Hugs trees, heals animals, pacifist forced into a war. She's beauty, she's grace, turns into a wolf to eat your face.

[goodgrammaritan]

@thejakeformerlyknownasprince Can we make Cassie win the whole thing????

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

We certainly must try!

@hugintheraven's propaganda:

Cassie is a fat black girl who is the moral center of the group and is often deeply unpopular both in and out of universe for it. She argues for peace with a mouth red with the lifeblood of her enemies, because she may hate violence, but she understands that keeping her own hands clean is not the same as doing the right thing. Vote Cassie.

My Propaganda:

Attempted to talk up her best friend to a Hollywood heartthrob by saying “that’s not all she can do! She also had a house fall on her.”

Ended the alien invasion of Earth by coming up with a way that the invaders didn’t have to steal Earth’s resources and could live in peace.

Forgets to gender half the time.

Not scared of: venomous snakes, giant spiders, polar bears, eels, maggots, alien centipedes the size of school buses, 7-headed monsters the size of buildings. Is scared of: skunks.

Once gave her phone number as 123-45678.

Likes Nine Inch Nails, dislikes Megadeth.

Responded to Marco asking if “girls get all weird about bugs and snakes” by dropping a live garter snake into his hair.

Even her parents canonically think she’s cool.

“One-woman army” who single-handedly fought 20 human-controllers and won to save her friends from a trap she warned them not to walk into.

Favorite channel is Animal Planet.

Has a side gig in ecoterrorism. Is implied to keep this up even after the war ends and she becomes a government rep.

Deserves kudos for the brain surgery on her friend, but ALSO did leg surgery on a random Australian man while in hork-bajir morph.

Short queen.

[turbro]

Turned into a polar bear when confronted with a racist after saying "You want me to be white? I can be white."