Whats the opposite of a girlboss. Im like a girlfailure
You're all fucking welcome
"gaining eight notes in two years" is devastating
Stranger Things
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

ellievsbear
we're not kids anymore.

#extradirty
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
🪼

⁂
will byers stan first human second
One Nice Bug Per Day
Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du

Andulka
trying on a metaphor
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
$LAYYYTER
seen from Switzerland

seen from United States
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seen from Switzerland
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@mccosby
Whats the opposite of a girlboss. Im like a girlfailure
You're all fucking welcome
"gaining eight notes in two years" is devastating
New Spring hat in the park
(Nina Leen. 1948)
Thinking about him (the soldier in Poynter’s Faithful Until Death painting watching an apocalypse unfold around him with horror in his eyes as he tries to keep himself standing beneath a doorway, based on an actual 19th century archeological find of a man in full soldier’s garb under a doorway at Pompeii)
We see you, fictionalized version of a man who died nearly 2,000 years ago in Pompeii. And we grieve for you still.
I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable
oh shit i almost missed it!
delivery
“Wait if I sheath my sword will he not attac-DID THIS TWINK JUST SLAP ME?!”
Penguin Random House, AI, and writers’ rights
NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.
But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.
That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.
If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.
The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.
But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.
Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing
In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.
It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.
This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.
But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.
This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-random-house-underscores-copyright-protection-in-ai-rebuff
The copyright page now includes this phrase:
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.
But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.
tl;dr do not trust the book publishers to defend our rights from AI; they will try to replace us with AI. They will sell our work to AI.
DO support laws that make AI uncopyrightable.
We need to organize and increase our bargaining power, and that helps increase our bargaining power.
Watching the "I respect retail workers" leave your bodies as soon as it's time to put back an item you don't want anymore
GOOD OMENS "The Book"
part of what makes tragedies tragic is the story being preventable from the outside but unpreventable from the inside
If they had done things differently they could have been happy, but to do things differently would require them to be someone else.
The Powerpuff Girls S04E07