Technical Nonsense

Blog.

[transfemininomenon]

good god when the onions and garlic hit the olive oil..........

[clubpenguin2005]

Panties hit the FLOOR

[transfemininomenon]

you know it sister

[somnanana]

[sobcat]

tomorrow I'll do the possible

[immaplatypus]

“so this week my town made the news for—” nope

“there’s a restaurant two miles from my house called—” nope

“today I learned [celeb] went to my high school—” nope nope nope nope nope

these are all real posts I’ve seen on the internet that allowed me to identify a user’s hometown instantly. if it’s a small town, that’s doubly dangerous, because a bad actor could trace you just by a unique first name or selfie you once posted. in an age where doxxing and stalking are some of the worst I’ve ever seen it, you HAVE to think twice about what you’re posting online.

i once saw a 13-year old post an image they noted as being “a few miles from their house.” it had a theater in the shot with a unique enough name to be local. one google maps search, now everyone knew not only what city they lived in, but the possible neighborhoods in that radius too. and they had a HUGE following…who all knew this was a 13-year-old child.

so yeah. not to sound like a 90s internet safety PSA…but I’m gonna be that PSA for a minute.

if you’re posting an image, there is NO need to say that you live there. you could just be traveling. “saw this in Montana” is better than “saw this by my house!”

before you post about a venue, especially a restaurant or small store, check and see if it’s local—CRUCIALLY if it has only one or two locations. people might travel to arenas or convention centers, but they’re far less likely to be traveling to Bartleby’s Fish and Chips. if it’s an anecdote and you still live nearby, you can honestly just leave the name out entirely.

if you’re sharing a news story, it can just be a story you found and wanted to share. you don’t have to clarify “it happened in my town,” because even if you don’t mention your town name, an easily-googled news article will.

if you’re seeing a concert or meeting a celebrity on a tour that’s stopped locally, wait until they’ve hit a few more venues before you post about it, or at the very least wait until you get home. this is honestly a smart move for any event you attend: unless you’re marketing yourself, there’s no need to advertise your location in real time.

check your selfie backgrounds for anything identifying. this includes city names on venues, school names, street signs, and house numbers.

this stuff is flexible if you no longer live in your hometown, or if your city is particularly big, but there’s STILL no reason to tie yourself to your school, your workplace, or your street. you can call it paranoid, but as someone who’s seen my friends get literal death threats over fictional characters before, the last thing I want is someone willing to act on those threats finding out where they live.

anyway. PSA over. does a kickflip or whatever

[averyterrible]

The children's show villain is a figure who sadly is not seen outside the children's show. There are few stock characters who as succinctly declare, from sheer stage presence, "the world is unloveable and it is painful to live here; that which delights mankind is like ash on my tongue" without being too fucking whiny about it.

[averyterrible]

maladaptive suicidal ideation: "i'm going to kill myself"

productive, growth mindset: "i'm going to steal all the instruments from Musictown!"

[aropride]

some birds are very intuitively named. looked up a sparrow going chipchipchip in my yard, it was a chipping sparrow. saw a black bird with red wings, it was a red winged blackbird. gray bird that sounds like a cat? gray catbird. the first time i saw a house finch it was perched on a windowsill. However, some birds are the red-bellied woodpecker

[someofusarequeer]

I gotta google something real quick

[someofusarequeer]

who named this bird

[official-ornithology-posts]

Official ornithology post

[rohirric-hunter]

"We're gonna achieve immortality by turning ourselves into machines" buddy I want you to find yourself a 15 year old laptop and try to run a 10 year old piece of software on it please. Connect to the internet, if you can, and attempt to log into any of your online accounts

[just-a-nowhere-giirl]

A series of greatest hits from possibly one of my favorite parody accounts on anything ever.

[i-fuck-audis]

MY FUCKING CAR

[never-obsolete]

Storage Wizard MacWorld - November 1997

[phorusrhacidae-lesbian]

occasionally i will see a post about how saber's absence of a penis in certain f/sn scenes means she doesn't have one when the vn has already clearly established what invisible air is and does

[tainbocuailnge]

arguments opposing generative AI based on the artistic merit of its output are not very useful or actionable because art is simply too subjective to base any legislation on and also most of these arguments devolve into some bullshit about the human soul or the importance of toiling or whatever.

setting aside all the actionable reasons to object to the technology for a moment, I think image generation had a lot of potential for the kind of art where you just kind of see where the medium takes you and curate the most interesting results. the unpredictable and surrealist quality of the output was a lot of the appeal of the early models back when it was just a novelty and we were generating "bloodborne horses" and stuff

it also saves a lot of time when making images of which its presence matters more than its contents anyway, such as background decals in video games or whatever, but that's not really what this post is about.

this "see where the medium takes you" approach is particularly suited to abstract art, and the more abstract the style the harder it becomes to distinguish the computer generated from the human-made. there comes a point where the computer's inability to actually understand what it is depicting becomes a strength as it allows for abstractions that are counterintuitive to a human pattern-seeking brain. this is something where I genuinely think the technology could bring something new and unique to the table.

this medium-first approach to art has existed for as long as unpredictable mediums have existed and curation is also a legitimate and extremely undervalued skill, so self-proclaimed AI artists are not completely full of shit when claiming this stuff takes legitimate skill. the reason a lot of AI generated art that gets posted is mediocre anyway is because a lot of self-proclaimed AI artists have a poor eye for art and are therefore not actually very good curators. a lot of self-proclaimed AI artists are more interested in the speed and quantity of the output than its artistic merit, and because they care little for the merits of artistry to begin with, they lack the eye for art to be able to see the ways in which the image they have curated is kinda ass to anyone who does have a more developed eye for art.

this is how you get people who are deeply wrong about what images are just filler and which ones actually matter too, but that's still not really what this post is about.

I think it's interesting that one of the more common arguments for the effort that goes into AI generated art is that it's difficult to get the model to actually understand your vision. the biggest artistic strength of the medium of generative AI is the unpredictability of its output, so the clearer your vision the less useful the technology is to executing that vision. the computer cannot actually take the image in your brain and make it real unless the image in your brain wasn't that clear to begin with. generative AI in general is strongly marketed as a tool for people with no ideas for this reason, which is very self-damning in my opinion.

I think this is particularly interesting as an argument coming from self-proclaimed AI artists because it shows they don't understand the actual skills they are employing in this process. they do not recognise curation as a skill, they do not recognise the value of having a good eye for art when trying to get worthwhile pieces out of an unpredictable medium. the unpredictability and lack of human understanding is a flaw they have to fight against rather than the whole point of working with this technology. they are wrong about the potential merit of the thing which merits they are trying to defend, which is even more self-damning.

these people with an underdeveloped eye for art are the majority of the actual users of generative image technology, because most people with enough of an eye for art to be able to curate interesting results were getting up in arms about it instead, or simply have too clear a vision for the technology to be of use to them. as a result a lot of that interesting surrealist unpredictability has been trained out of the models to accommodate these majority users that are mistaken about the actual artistic potential of image generation. which is also rather self-damning.

and ultimately it's rather self-damning as well that the most straightforwardly useful application of a tool which people will insist has artistic value is to mass produce images of which the contents don't really matter anyway.

[weepingchoir]

huh

[contemptible-scoundrel]

[transgenderization]

[natural-blogarithm]

maybe if tumblr allowed you to typeset your posts in LaTeX it would have succeeded in becoming the next pdf

[gracefuldisasters]

you are so right

Conversations in Italian, circa 1996 - 🍄🍄36

Well, this was a wild ride. Cheers, guys

[natequarter]

the grim reality for a lot of nonbinary people is that their options are closet themselves and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large or be out and proud and be perpetually misunderstood by the world at large