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ellievsbear

pixel skylines
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Peter Solarz
Show & Tell

#extradirty
KIROKAZE
I'd rather be in outer space đž
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
sheepfilms
i don't do bad sauce passes
Three Goblin Art
trying on a metaphor

â
Today's Document
Game of Thrones Daily

Love Begins
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@eldritch-squirrel
however you show it, happy pride! stay colorful đâšđđłïžâđ
Necklace by Lalique, 1898-1900, France.
Can i rant? I had hair down to my butt. Like 30 inches. I chopped it all off. And i really am ambivalent to the style it is now (basic boy band) but i HATE what chopping it all off has shown me about 90% of the men in my life. Only 1 man has been supportive the whole time. In my head i knew i was hiding behind my hair but now, experiencing life this way, im furious at what the men in my life believe is acceptable to say to me. Idk. Sry for the venting but i feel like you'd understand. Ty!
So in 2015 I was in my friendâs wedding and it was all like ooh, ah, very pretty, yay look how nice and feminine
And I went home from that wedding and *that night* I did this to my hair:
And Iâm pretty sure my dad is still disappointed in me.
I actually got more of it from the women in my life; a whole lot of âoh, youâre so brave I could never cut my hair offâ or âarenât you worried about what people will sayâ or âWHAT DOES YOUR HUSBAND THINK?!?!â but. Yeah.
For my own wedding I had the big curly poofy mane down to my butt and it gave me fucking headaches. It was so heavy and hot and miserable. I cut a foot off of it the week after the wedding.
I.
Fucking. Like.
Stylists.
âOh my god you want me to cut this off?! I have clients who would kill for hair like yours?!â Cool, hand me your fucking scissors and Iâll sell it to them then.
Ahem.
So. Yes. You Can Rant.
I donât know why people seem to think that anyoneâs appearance is any of their business. That goes for haircuts and makeup and tattoos and birthmarks and visible disabilities and whatever the fuck else. People can stay in their own fucking lanes and let you do you.
Anyway, I hope youâre enjoying the new haircut. Mine was like taking off a beanie I didnât realize Iâd been wearing for over 20 years and Iâm never letting it grow back in.
Can we talk about about hair and being a fat chick too? Because if I cut my hair I am âuglyâ and clearly not ever attracted or attractive to men. I am told Iâm too fat to have short hair. âPixie cuts just donât look good on your faceâ because apparently âshort hair emphasizes a double chinâ. But if I have long hair then itâs my âbest featureâ and makes me âattractive even thoughâ Iâm fat. This extends to how Iâm treated in job interviews, how people perceive my levels of aggression in confrontations in public (and Iâm blond and white, Iâve got that privilege, but Iâm still apparently six times scarier with short hair than with long hair), and generally impacts such small things such as whether or not someone will smile back at me in a public place or not. Iâm just so soft, and womanly/motherly, warm, sweet, non threatening with long hair. This is also effected by when/how I wear my hair up or down as well when itâs long. I got tired of this at about 21 when I first chopped my hair off mind you, and my hair is only long now because hair stylists are expensive and Iâm poor (and admittedly too picky to cut my own hair). But yeah, in total agreement with all of the above. Ugh. Perfomative femininity and the hair effect really piss me off. Sorry, your rant was very rant inspiringâŠ
RANT AWAY FRIEND.
This is a fantastic addition.
Rant: So Iâve been well and over the BS about long vs. short hair. For like⊠decades. Iâm talking since mushroom cuts were stylish, and the woman with the scissors damned near refused to cut it because âit will make you look like a boyâ. So I went home and took scissors to it myself, then went back, because even as a child I was going to get my way DAMMIT. (Also, the manager saw me come back in the second time with horribly choppy terrible hair and asked what happened. Never saw the other stylist again.) But⊠BUT⊠Thatâs never stopped people from having opinions about my hair. Color, styles, length, amount of curl (or lack thereof), etc. I finally found a place that - once I convinced ONE PERSON that she could pretty much do anything she wanted with my hair - will take me seriously when I walk in. A Hair Cuttery, of all places. Cheap cuts, factory mill type place, but this oneâs got good people in it. And they know my attitude is âeh⊠itâs hair. Itâll grow back.â So they have fun with it. BUT Shitâs gone sideways at work, worse than usual. And Iâm trying to get OUT. Like now if not sooner. I have multiple friends who say I would be a great teacher (ok, if you say so??) but have flat told me that I have to grow my hair out to even have the tiniest chance of getting hired. Iâve had an undercut for a few years now. Itâs saved my ass. I grew up on the plains in Colorado, and Florida⊠is not remotely the same climate. Iâve had medical professionals tell me on more than one occasion that the only reason I didnât overheat and cause damage to myself was the fact that half my head is shaved and the rest of my hair was up in a ponytail. AND these friends have told me that with my facial structure and body shape, I still may not get hired, because a pixie cut might be considered too masculine and âedgyâ on me. Itâs beyond frustrating. It passed infuriating. This crap needs to change.
Bumblebees/humlor photographed at KoppÄngen Nature Reserve in Dalarna, Sweden.
There are some very angry people in my notes and inbox this week. Apparently, I am âtoxicâ and âevilâ because I reported the results of 50 years of weight-loss research. They are mad because the research definitively and conclusively demonstrates that long-term maintenance of weight loss is virtually impossible. They also think I am âdelusionalâ because I criticize the medical establishment for keeping this fact a secret from the general public.
The truth is that the ineffectiveness and harmful nature of intentional weight-loss is well known within the scientific and medical communities. If pressed, most doctors will affirm that their clinical experience conforms to the scientific results: Basically everyone who loses weight will go on to regain that weight within 3-5 years. In 75% of cases, they will regain more weight than they lost.Â
This knowledge is why doctors became so desperate that they resorted to amputating parts of the digestive tract in the hopes that it might finally result in long-term weight-loss. Except oops, that doesnât work either. Oh, and it causes death, addiction, malnutrition, and suicide. Whoopsie daisy.
Diet culture is fucking toxic. And people deserve to know the truth.
by Matthew Studebaker
Time...
A.I.nktober: A neural net creates drawing prompts
Thereâs a game called Inktober where people post one drawing for every day in October. To help inspire people, the people behind Inktober post an official list of daily prompts, a word or phrase like Thunder, Fierce, Tired, or Friend. Thereâs no requirement to use the official lists, though, so people make their own. The other day, blog reader Kail Antonio posed the following question to me:
What would a neural networkâs Inktober prompts be like?
Training a neural net on Inktober prompts is tricky, since thereâs only been 4 yearsâ worth of prompts so far. A text-generating neural netâs job is to predict what letter comes next in its training data, and if it can memorize its entire training dataset, thatâs technically a perfect solution to the problem. Sure enough, when I trained the neural net GPT-2 345-M on the existing examples, it memorized them in just a few seconds. In fact, it was rather like melting an M&M with a flamethrower.
My strategy for getting around this was to increase the sampling temperature, which means that I forced the neural net to go not with its best prediction (which would just be something plagiarized from the existing list), but something it thought was a bit less likely.
Temperature 1.0
At a temperature setting of 1.0 (already relatively high), the algorithm tends to cycle through the same few copied words from the dataset, or else it fills the screen with dots, or with the repeated words like âdigâ. Occasionally it generates what looked like tables of D&D stats, or a political article with lots of extra line breaks. Once it generated a sequence of other prompts, as if it had somehow made the connection to the overall concept of prompts.
The theme is: horror. Please submit a Horror graphic This can either be either a hit or a miss monster. Please spread horror where it counts. Let the horror begin⊠Please write a well described monster. Please submit a monster with unique or special qualities. Please submit a tall or thin punctuated or soft monster. Please stay the same height or look like a tall or thin Flying monster. Please submit a lynx she runs
This is strange behavior, but training a huge neural net on a tiny dataset does weird stuff to its performance apparently.
Where did these new words come from? GPT-2 is pretrained on a huge amount of text from the internet, so itâs drawing on words and letter combinations that are still somewhere in its neural connections, and which seem to match the Inktober prompts.
In this manner I eventually collected a list of newly-generated prompts, but It took a LONG time to sample these because I kept having to check which were copies and which were the neural netâs additions.
Temperature 1.2
So, I tried an even higher sampling temperature, to try to nudge the neural net farther away from copying its training data. One unintended effect of this was that the phrases it generated started becoming longer, as the high temperature setting made it veer away from the frequent line breaks it had seen in the training data.
Temperature 1.4
At an even higher sampling temperature the neural net would tend to skip the line breaks altogether, churning out run-on chains of words rather than a list of names:
easily lowered very faint smeared pots anatomically modern proposed braided robe dust fleeting caveless few flee furious blasts competing angrily throws unauthorized age forming Light dwelling adventurous stubborn monster
It helped when I prompted it with the beginning of a list:
Computer Weirdness Thing
but still, I had to search through long stretches of AI garble for lines that werenât ridiculously long.
So, now I know what you get when you give a ridiculously powerful neural net a ridiculously small training dataset. This is why I often rely on prompting a general purpose neural net rather than attempting to retrain one when Iâve got a dataset size of less than a few thousand items - itâs tough to thread that line between memorization and glitchy irrelevance.
One of these days Iâm hoping for a neural net that can participate in Inktober itself. AttnGAN doesnât quiiite have the vocabulary range.
Bonus content: An extra list of 31 prompts sampled at temperature 1.4. Iâm also including the full lists of prompts in list/text-only format so you can copy/print them more easily (and for those using screen readers). Enter your email here to get them!
And if you end up using these prompts for Inktober, please please let me know! I hereby give you permission to mix and match from the lists.
Update: My US and UK publishers are letting me give away some copies of my book to people who draw the AInktober prompts - tag your drawings with AInktober and every week Iâll choose a few people based on *handwaves* criteria to get an advance copy of my book. (US, UK, and Canada only, sorry)
In the meantime, you can order my book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You! Itâs out November 5 2019.
Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powellâs
Errances #23 by Fabienne Bonnet https://www.artlimited.net/fabienne.bonnet/art/photographie-errances-23-numerique-transport-route-voiture-cycle/en/11735061 https://www.artlimited.net/fabienne.bonnet/art/photographie-errances-23-numerique-transport-route-voiture-cycle/en/11735061
Camilla Pongiglione
©wano
Something I think we tend to tend to forget, when talking about closed religions, is to think about why theyâre closed. Because there is ALWAYS a reason for it; no community just shuts itself off from others just because it feels like it.
Some religions are closed because theyâre based on cultural values and beliefs that outsiders, who werenât raised with and immersed in those beliefs, wouldnât be able to ever truly understand. BrujerĂa is an example of this, as far as I know.
Some religions are closed because theyâre based on location, with their beliefs centered around local things that donât make sense outside of that location. There are some small Shinto sects that are closed for this reason.
Some religions are closed based on race, because people of a specific race banded together under terrible circumstances and formed beliefs based on their shared experiences. Hoodoo, for example, was created by African slaves so itâs only open to Black people (mainly African diaspora).
Some religions are closed because you have to be born into them, usually because itâs part of the religionâs tenants and foundation. Modern Zoroastrianism almost never recognizes converts.
Some religions are closed because, historically, they were mistreated and often criminalized, with sacred practices being stolen and bastardized by outsiders who were allowed to witness them. Those religions ended up closing to outsiders in order to protect themselves and survive. This is why the majority of indigenous religions are closed.
Itâs important to understand the reasons behind religions being closed, not only so that we can learn to accept that decision, but also so that we have a better understanding of history and other people.
kenmarten.com
SPECTRA 1 & 2
im reading about cowboy phrases and sayings and like 95% of them are just solid life advice
like idk how accurate these are but somehow they manage to be both peak shitposting humor and genuinely helpful suggestions
fuck self-help books and therapy, all i need to make it in life is my trusty Cowboy Tipsâą