Spyder's Web

I'm Ivyna J. Spyder and I mainly post about Kirby and reptiles. Tags of Interest My Art OTP Character Analysis and Theorizing (mostly Crocodile) My Cosplay Comic Translations My Pets Other Sites: Kirby Fansub Blog Art Twitter Cosplay.com/ACP Props

[de2]

[consume-teeth]

HAPPY (EARLY) PRIDE MONTH

So glad nintendo made all these characters queer

theyre on their way to jump every homophobe and transphobe, sorry not sorry guys🤷‍♀️

[decarabiandivorce]

he got found familied and hates it

[torstherapy]

[tinsnip]

Per @spoonstrek

[sparrowlucero]

its kind of distressing how you can tell a lot of people see popular indie artists and writers and such as like "a Celebrity but one which i stand a half decent chance of bullying to death"

[wordcubed]

[grimogretricks]

And they hold them to much MUCH higher standards as well. They expect them to be perfect paragons in every regard and never slip up in the tamest mildest way even once, while faceless multi-million dollar conglomerate productions get a pass for all kinds of heinous stuff, and mainstream celebrities (especially straight white cis male ones) are applauded for showing the most basic glimmers of decency.

I have been reflecting lately on the standards of 'professionalism' that people expect from indie creators, and realising that really, no matter how you try and dress it up, it's not actually reasonable to expect any human to be able to sustain being viscerally hated by that many people at once. That level of vitriol and dislike is difficult for anyone to handle. The only solution for creators is to basically withdraw from where they have unfiltered access to fan reactions, and have someone else moderate all that for them to limit their direct access.

There's a lot of talk about whether or not it's reasonable to hold them to this standard and that standard, of course, and what should get a free pass and what should not, yet when it comes down to it, I think the most important thing to remember is very simple: it's never acceptable to pile on and send hate and insults and threats.

People conducting themselves respectfully and actually remembering there's another person on the other end of things, and not gleefully jumping onto a hate bandwagon would solve most of these issues.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[depsidase]

[hypermediagirl]

HTML for People

HTML isn't only for people working in the tech field. It's for everyone. Learn how to make a website from scratch in this beginner friendly

if you're learning HTML for any reason, i can't recommend HTML for people highly enough. it's a fantastic introduction to HTML and CSS targeted towards beginners who aren't technically inclined, and it isn't patronizing towards the reader for that. it's a very relaxed and kind (but informative) resource that even i reference from time to time (and i consider myself pretty good with semantic HTML).

definitely check it out if you're interested in making a personal site, or working with HTML at all.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[soulpups]

Legit just saw someone say that their dog is in pain but it was "normal and to be expected with her age" so they aren't doing any pain management. So this your reminder that age is not a disease. Pets deserve comfort in their last years too.

[passionpeachy]

The way adult fandom people hold indie online creators and cartoons to a much higher standard than their actual local politicians. You could be putting that energy into terrorizing and protesting conservatives at your town hall and actually make a good material impact on the world but instead you're background checking everything the trans woman who made the amazing digital circus has ever said

[passionpeachy]

The point isn't "stop criticizing indie artists" or "defend your favorite show under this post". I don't even watch Digital Circus and no one is above criticism. Literally every indie show is getting torn to shreds on twitter right now and I'm not saying this to defend anyone I don't know. The point is "someone who actually has the power to kill us all and get away with it deserves way more ire and accountability than a cartoonist and I expect grown adults to understand this"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??

[emotional-support-husband]

As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.

[chekhovs-raygun]

i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.

[lizardlicks]

this is one of those "no actually this regulation exists for a reason" laws much like work place safety and building fire codes (that Republicans keep trying to roll back) and is written in blood just like them as well. it's just not human blood this time, and the fact that people actually cared enough about long term future over short term profit to get it put in place is nothing short of astonishing. That it didn't get put in place in time to save several species is heart breaking.

[hapalopus]

And yes, it's still needed today, despite no one wearing hats. People will go to crazy lengths to acquire rare feathers

Dead Exotic Bird Thief | Field Ethos

By Andrew Court In 2009, a college kid named Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History museum…

[ivynajspyder]

RIP AND TEAR!!

[herocraftman643]

I drew Tiff from that one anime

You may have heard of it

Also some doodles

[asterjeje]

Got more colored pens!!

Which means more drawings!!

[bobbins-patchland]

So there's this really cool spider here in our real world that is easily mistakable for a spider corpse being puppeteered by parasites. Naturally, I needed to play with this concept for my weavers.

This is Enoki, and she is what is known as a Deathweaver Demonbeast. Her species is meant to mimic the Deathwoven, which are other Weaver and Demonbeast corpses that are under the control of Nightmare and his Deathweavers. Deathweavers are responsible for collecting fallen monsters (and on rare occasions, warriors), and manipulating their forms to keep fighting after death.

Enoki looks perpetually exhausted and close to the grave, but don't be fooled, she's very sharp and alive. She's got a dark sense of humor and mostly keeps to herself, quiet and calculated. I look forward to seeing what her dynamic is with her fellow weavers of other subclasses.

[somethinginworl]

The spectrum of Kirby gijinka AUs

(Baby Kirby AU by Marquinhos)