speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.
i'm no good at painting sorry. i have excessive line work instead

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AnasAbdin

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Misplaced Lens Cap
occasionally subtle
DEAR READER
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@gosh-dm-it
speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.
i'm no good at painting sorry. i have excessive line work instead
Koi inspired water genasi! Comms are still open, just send me a DM <3 trying to catch up on bills.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Spanish, 1852 - 1934)
Neural Drawings, circa 1900 - 1908
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.
Further, some authors may never even find out the lawsuit is happening. The court's suggested notification scheme "would require class claimants to themselves notify other potential rightsholders," groups said, overlooking the fact that it cost Google $34.5 million "to set up a 'Books Rights Registry' to identify owners for payouts under the proposed settlement" in one of the largest cases involving book authors prior to the AI avalanche of lawsuits.
If you're an author, please use this database to see if you could qualify for that sweet GenAI lawsuit money.
Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.
I have never ever ever in my life asked someone to blaze my posts.
But if you want to throw me some pennies blaze this. I want ALL OF THE AUTHORS to know that they have the opportunities to get some sweet sweet GenAI lawsuit money.
Like to charge. Reblog to cast that Anthropic will have to pay out the ass.
-fae
Oh look, my book is in there. GIVE ME MONEY.
Interestingly, I reblogged this thinking it might be interesting for my followers - but as I’m not an author I didn’t think further.
Then I did think for a second. I realised I had fallen into the classic tumblr trap of believing that Authorship Equals Fantasy Fiction Writer. It’s amazing how that gets into your own head.
I went back and found a clutch of my scientific papers on there.
Not something that’s worth me pursuing any farther - and a lot of those works are very openly open access, and so they are honestly the exact sort of content that SHOULD be used to train responsible models. But worth remembering that it’s very common on tumblr to think of all writing as, like, genre fiction, and there are other types of writing too.
Settlement shows AI companies can face consequences for pirated training data.
Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models. In a press release provided to Ars, the authors confirmed that the settlement is "believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation." Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author will receive $3,000 per work that Anthropic stole. "Depending on the number of claims submitted, the final figure per work could be higher," the press release noted.
each author will receive $3,000 per work
Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.
It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.
Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.
Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.
Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)
Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!
You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!
If you want it in a simple phrase:
You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.
Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!
mama and her little guy
They are a peculiar species that thrive in the arid plains. Telepathic and featureless, they often wear masks to facilitate interaction with humans, and scavenge gear from those who don’t survive the heat.
I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.
The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.
Ooooh you reminded me of that protocol I wrote about how to reinvent penicilin with only alchemical tools. You know. Just in case I did end up dumped in the past and needed a stable income.
w
what's the protocol?
I am so glad you asked! I unfortunately lost the protocol because it was probably on my laptop, but I remember the broad strokes. So! In case anyone does end up stuck in the middle ages and can find a kindly old alchemist willing to lend you his gear, here's the revamped Penicilin (Re)Discovery Protocol!
0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.
We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.
Find some Penicillium mushrooms!
Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.
First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.
Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?
So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:
Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.
2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms
Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.
First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:
Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)
1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)
1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)
If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)
3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)
Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.
Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.
When you're done, you should have something like this:
Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.
Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!
You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).
3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms
If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:
Well, realistically, it will look something like this:
We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.
IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.
Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.
Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.
The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.
4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom
We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.
(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)
You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.
Ideally you get something like this.
This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.
Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.
Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:
This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.
So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.
The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.
Since I lost the original protocol I'm going to need to do research all over again how to do that with alchemy equipment (or at least a microbrewery), so that will be in the next installment.
Fascinating.
Concept: generic fantasy adventure where the wizard has a crackpot assistant and he explains sadly that while Hreithbert is an excellent person for keeping the wizard tower tidy and the homonculi fed they're obsessed with cooking like ten million plates of inedible goop but it makes them happy so he permits it
And at the end of the story the big reveal is Hreithbert is a time displaced biochemist who has finally fucking refined their process for penicillin.
Don’t lie, any wizard would love having ten million plates of inedible goop from their apprentice. The fact that he won’t let you lick them is the problem.
Pyritized fossils
Realmonte Salt Mine in Sicily, Italy
i feel like if you stabbed an angel the blood trail would look like this
Official Phyrexian Post
A scrib for Prosperity
Do you hear it? Do you hear it? Can you hear it?
A stunning iridescent ammonite fossil. [source]
Luis Xertu (Mexican, b. 1985, Mexico City, Mexico, based Rotterdam, Netherlands) - Two Men on a Branch, 2024, Paintings: Plants, Acrylics on Canvas