Mercat Studio @mercatstudio - Tumblr Blog

Making our return to our true home, tumblr.

jk neither of us ever left but our personal tumblr accounts are nothing but cursed reblogs and bad tag commentary anyway hi I'm Aussie and the mermaid up top is Cheri and with our powers combined we're Mercat Studio :^) we make things sometimes

#tumblr return #artists on tumblr #art #original art #illustration #cute art #digital art #certified aussie post #is what I will tag things when I am posting #dunno what cheri will tag hers as #maybe I should tag mine as ausshole actually #or is that too much

sennedjem

Delighted with both of my con purchases! Thank you @louisasknitknacks and @mercatstudio

mercatstudio

It's our Gale print out in the wild!!! Thank you for stopping by!!

#gale dekarios #gale of waterdeep #connecticon #bg3 gale

copperbadge

AI Scraping Isn't Just Art And Fanfic

Something I haven't really seen mentioned and I think people may want to bear in mind is that while artists are the most heavily impacted by AI visual medium scraping, it's not like the machine knows or cares to differentiate between original art and a photograph of your child.

AI visual media scrapers take everything, and that includes screengrabs, photographs, and memes. Selfies, pictures of your pets and children, pictures of your home, screengrabs of images posted to other sites -- all of the comic book imagery I've posted that I screengrabbed from digital comics, images of tweets (including the icons of peoples' faces in those tweets) and instas and screengrabs from tiktoks. I've posted x-ray images of my teeth. All of that will go into the machine.

That's why, at least I think, Midjourney wants Tumblr -- after Instagram we are potentially the most image-heavy social media site, and like Instagram we tag our content, which is metadata that the scraper can use.

So even if you aren't an artist, unless you want to Glaze every image of any kind that you post, you probably want to opt out of being scraped. I'm gonna go ahead and say we've probably already been scraped anyway, so I don't think there's a ton of point in taking down your tumblr or locking down specific images, but I mean...especially if it's stuff like pictures of children or say, a fundraising photo that involves your medical data, it maybe can't hurt.

If you do want to officially opt out, which may help if there's a class-action lawsuit later, you're going to want to go to the gear in the upper-right corner on the Tumblr desktop site, select each of your blogs from the list on the right-hand side, and scroll down to "Visibility". Select "Prevent third party sharing for [username]" to flip that bad boy on.

(If someone wants to post a link in notes to instructions for doing it on the app, I haven't updated mine so the option doesn't appear and I don't know where to find it.)

Oh boy oh boy oh boy, can you believe it's already December?

We sure can't :')

For those who don't know, Aussie and I started tabling at cons in July of 2022. That means that July of 2023 was the end of our first official con cycle!! We've had such an amazing time learning more about what it means to be content creators. We've legitimately changed our booth setup multiple times in just a year, and our products have all but tripled in quantity (and quality!)

At the end of our last Heroescon, we were riding the waves of motivation to create more of everything. We have videos edited, more designs that are ready to go to manufacturers, and also some original stuff that we want to start sharing.

The only problem? Day jobs.

The last few months have been especially rough on us, and so we've had to prioritize recharging our batteries over producing anything during our very limited free time. It's not our ideal way of juggling a non-creative job and our artistic pursuits, but it's what we're currently dealing with!

To everyone who's stuck around during this intermission of inactivity, we're super grateful 🧡

Starting in 2024, our schedules are going to be changing drastically. We'll still be working, but we're hoping that some changes in our personal life will allow us to invest more time into Mercat! Our most immediate goal is to table at more cons, but our long-term goal is to make Mercat Studio our full-time job. This is truly a passion project of ours, and we have so much more we want to do. We can't wait to have the chance to do so :)

Cheers from the both of us!

- Cherimsy

#blog #Catch both of us rattling the bars of our cages like the feral artists we are #it's okay though we're gonna be GREAT. We're gonna make it happen!!!!#Also big shoutout to BG3 and Neopets for getting us through these trying times. They're the real MVPs...

It's a little empty right now, but we'll be uploading content throughout this month, so maybe go check it out?? Or at least look at our commissions page where we have $10 pet comms :3c