Ink Tides

Fiona: SCAD SEQA grad, historical reenactor, musician. Comics, music, costuming, writing. Drawing a lot of Critical Role right now.

[unhelpfultarot]

Queen of Cups and The Tower

Your most concentrated and intense worry isn't enough to either cause or prevent the disaster.

[cryptotheism]

Teleporting does kill you but it also launches your soul through samsara in a sort of geostationary orbit velocity, so you reincarnate instantly.

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 2 days 3 hours

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 2 days 3 hours

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 2 days 3 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[mammalianmammals]

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services

[valeriapryanikova]

i spy with my everything eye

[omegasmileyface]

Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling

The ruling will have enormous impacts for transgender residents in the state.

HOLY SHIT

[definite-human]

"The Montana court separately declared that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. In legal terms, a suspect class is a group that has historically faced such severe discrimination that any law targeting them must meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive—the same standard applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race. [...] The practical effect is sweeping: any Montana law that singles out transgender people will now face strict scrutiny, meaning the state must prove the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve it—a standard that laws almost never survive.

"Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. [...] What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions."

(emphases mine)

[aropride]

[unhelpfultarot]

Eight of Pentacles and The High Priestess

Doing the skilled work is clearly valuable. Less obvious, but extremely important, is that someone should also be doing documentation.

[quiddie]

*deep breath* If the antifascist (esp. American-centered) art you make or consume refuses to acknowledge the truth that framing this time period as the "sudden rise of fascism" along with its supposed volatility (i.e. "it can't last; that's not how its built") is just a comforting construct to keep white Americans from reckoning with their literal centuries of active and passive participation in this country's fascist, genocidal violence against Indigenous and Black people, your art isn't just wrong...it's worthless. How can you imagine dismantling unjust systems without seeing the blood on your own hands? How do you comprehend the size of the fight for mutual liberation without seeing that the scale of the threat is exponentially larger than your personal experience of the danger of state violence; or is your envisioned win condition only as shallow as the return to your previous sense of safety?

Ignoring the complexities and well-established enmeshment of fascism in Western culture for the sake of simpler stories to inspire rising to this moment in history only builds fair-weather fighters ill-prepared for the rigors of revolutionary action. It also widens the rift between those newly awakened to the struggle and their neighbors that have lived it for generations (and have built and maintained systems of community support and resistance that have protected them for just as long).

If antifascist art doesn't first demand you turn the eye inward, it is only escapist fluff.

[apolladay]

How do you pronounce the name of hit experimental webcomic "17776"?

One seven seven seven six

Seventeen seven seventy-six

One seventy-seven seventy-six

Seventeen seventy-seven six

Something else

I don't??????????????????????

How do you pronounce the name of hit experimental webcomic "17776"?

One seven seven seven six

Seventeen seven seventy-six

One seventy-seven seventy-six

Seventeen seventy-seven six

Something else

I don't??????????????????????

Voting ended onApr 26

[yesornopolls]

Do you currently have an earworm (a piece of music or a song playing in your mind)? If so, what is it?

Do you currently have an earworm (a piece of music or a song playing in your mind)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onApr 24

[de-activated-offical]

I need to do this. (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't do it) (Doesn't d

[charliemack]

[occasionallysubtle]

some monday reminders :) these are up on my shop in various forms

[ariaste]

Hey! I love your books and I think you're brilliant and I wanted to say (to my shame, no shade) that the first few times I saw the post about the newest book, I thought it was a tumblr ad? Like, I'm not sure what about the pic said tumblr ad, but I skipped it a few times. I thought I would mention it in case this is something that other people are experiencing, and you might offer up another post about it as well as the current one, so more people click and read. Also, feel free to ignore this, it might come across rude and that is absolutely not my intention. Wishing you the best of luck and looking forward to the kickstarter... starting!

Thanks for the feedback, good to know! :) It might be because I got advice from a professional marketing design friend, so it's quite funny that "i will try hard to make this as professional and good-looking as possible" is perhaps having the OPPOSITE of the intended effect for some folks on this particular platform 😂 Sincerely i will take this under advisement and perhaps make the next one look Slightly Worse bahahaha

[ariaste]

WELP i have three more weeks to scream "WAIT HOLD ON I'M A REAL AUTHOR WITH A REAL BOOK AND IT'S REAL COOL AND I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT, DO YOU LIKE ANCIENT HISTORY AND QUEER SHIT AND BOOKS WITH FOOTNOTES????" until All Of Tumblr pays attention for the five seconds it will take to make my pitch

TUMBLR!!! HEY!!! Hi, it's me, Very Professional And Serious Fantasy Author Alexandra Rowland. I've decided to make the terribly inadvisable move of doing a Kickstarter for my next book, partially because I love all that fancy shit like gold foil and sprayed edges and merch, and partially because the publishing industry only wants books that "aren't necessarily making readers think" (direct quote I was told). So, you know. A Spite Kickstarter. Kickstarting my spite project. They can't keep a bad bitch down.

Anyway here is the book cover:

It is set in the same world as all my other books, and it's Queer Fantasy Academia -- so it's a fantasy book but it's written like an in-world nonfiction book, with footnotes and Explanatory Essays on the Fantasy Ancient Romans and how amazingly fucked up they were, and about how many different ways toxic masculinity can ruin a man's life. It's inspired by the real-life Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous.

Basically it is a nerd book for nerds and if you think that sounds cool as shit (because excuse me IT IS), then you can go read the full summary on Kickstarter. I had THEEEEE most fun researching and writing this book. Hollywood has been lying to you about how fucked up the Romans are. Please come into my little hovel so I can tell you the truth that Hollywood executives have hiding from you, on account of it's too gay.

......how was that, is that better. is this effective. you fuckers have to signal boost the hell out of this one so everybody who thought the other post was an ad and scrolled past without reading gets to see this explanation that This One's My Bad for approaching tumblr with a vibe of anything but "i'm wearing sweatpants and eating pizza with my other hand while i tell you this".

That was my fault. I put on a clean shirt and brushed my hair and y'all did not even recognize me. I have learned my lesson and I am sorry to everyone who had to be inflicted with something that looked too much like a Real Ad, I am distraught at my own horrific wrongs. Please be interested in my book and join me in my incandescent rage and spite about the state of the publishing industry. On Kickstarter. thank u

[raisincouncil]

Oh I LOVE the book cover! Way more than the image on your previous post 🫣

Can't wait to get THISSSSS

[ariaste]

LISTENING! AND! LEARNING!!!!

[thebookewyrme]

Hi, I’m super excited to back this book and followed the link to Kickstarter, but Kickstarter is telling me the campaign hasn’t launched yet? (It also says it has seven backers. So. I think Kickstarter is lying to me about something). Just wondering if there’s a different secret link or…something? I dunno. I am baffled lol.

[ariaste]

@thebookewyrme No no, it's the right link -- the campaign officially goes live on May 5th at 4:00pm EST! It's just that a lot of the current best-practice tips for Kickstarters is to have a couple weeks of pre-launch promotion so that you can build up a bunch of people who have clicked the "Notify me on launch" button, who are presumably inclined towards backing on day 1 :) Faster funding drives more attention to the project, etc etc.

Odd that it's telling you there's only 7 backers-- OHHHH no wait you're looking at my lil profile tab! 7 is the number of projects *I* have backed. The campaign (look under the "notify" button) so far has 543 followers. Which is pretty good!!!

[melongifts]

Hey anyone notice how google translate is being pretty liberal with their translations as of late? Takin some real liberties to infer tone.

[melongifts]

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings? I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this. I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.

[melongifts]

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

I AM SO SICK OF DEFAULT AI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fionawdunn]

"Hello, mother..."

Inspired by all the gorgeous photos that have been coming back to us from the Artemis II mission.

[ateazure]

"and the universe said i love you."