I have brainworms named Jadzia and Ezri @mossdftba - Tumblr Blog

IDK I think if cis men are being told that being fat will lower their testosterone and make them Insufficiently Masculine, and cis women are being told that being fat will raise their testosterone and make them Excessively Masculine, and fat trans people are being denied the right to medically transition if they're fat, and thin trans people are warned against HRT because it will make them fat (and this is said about both testosterone and estrogen HRT), and androgynous-presenting people are told that only thin people count as androgynous...

Then maybe...

Maybe...

Maybe the weight loss industry is just using Gender to enforce fatphobia.

innovadesexual

sob emoji is up there with the period and the comma

captain-price-returns

As the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires raged last year, people placed bets on how how many acres the fires would consume, which locations

Ok time to ban predictions markets.

#i hate living in capitalism

righthandarm-man

can you remember the name of every person you’ve kissed?

yes, I remember all their names

I could name most of them but there are few I can’t remember

if you put all of them in a room I could put a name to at least half the faces

i’m not confident I could name a quarter of them, let alone half

I can’t remember more than one or two names

I’ve never kissed a soul and want to see the results

Remaining time: 3 days 16 hours

#I've kissed 3 people but I am SHIT at remembering people's names

analog-autistic

we've definitely posted about this before but if i see one more person act like the only forms of childhood trauma that exist are abuse from family or sexual assault i will actually start crying and it will be so so so loud everyone will hear it from every corner of the earth

THE SCHOOL SYSTEM !!! PEER ABUSE !!!!! ISOLATION !!!!!!!! RACISM !!! SEXISM !!!!!! MEDICAL ABUSE !!!!!! NONCONSENSUAL SURGERY !!!! POVERTY !!!! SO MUCH MORE !!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

analog-autistic

!!!!!

virtuevistavalley

Natural disasters! I never see anyone talk about that one and as a result I spent years thinking that watching my hometown get destroyed on the news and subsequently having to uproot my entire life at the age of seven wasn't Real Trauma because there was no Abuser™

shu-of-the-wind

even MOVING too many times can cause trauma. source: my therapist whose eyes bugged out of her head when i told her i'd moved thirty times by the time i turned 18 and talked for half an hour about how destabilizing even one move can be for a child, let alone thirty

hellenhighwater

I have made a wall hanger vase... shelf....thing.

hellenhighwater

It can actually be filled with water to hold live flowers

hellenhighwater

Wheee more wall hangers

#neat #grabby hands #art #sculpture

miss-wizard

how cis people look at you when its your turn in the pronoun circle

comicaurora

First time asker. How or where did you learn to write? I’m perpetually stuck and your work feels like what I’d want my work to look and feel like. If you respond, thanks so much!

Fascinating question. I really appreciate the implication that I'm not still learning to write.

The short answer is by reading and watching and overall consuming stories written by other people. The stories that move you are also the stories that inspire you, and inspiration is direction that helps you figure out what you want to pursue. When a story hits you with a moment that cuts right to your core, you might want to figure out why that moment hit you so hard, what parts of it worked, what parts of the rest of the story built up to it, how it's doing that. Possibly even more vitally, when a story is absolutely losing you, chase down what's broken about it and why that might be happening. Once you start seeing how stories are put together, it becomes a lot easier to build your own.

It's not enough just to read. Writing can't be done in a vacuum. You have to read what other people write in order to write your own works, but you have to also go out into the world and experience it in order to build worlds of your own. Writing is an act of creation, but it's also an act of consumption; you the writer are consuming the things that you've learned and experienced and turning them into something new. You can't do that on an empty stomach. Step zero of writing is touching grass.

Writing makes you hungry, and hunger gives you direction. If fantasy inspires you, that might give you the direction of researching folklore and mythology and the other pillars that inspired the great works in the fantasy genre. A love of battle anime might turn into a pursuit of martial arts. Mystery novels might lead you into forensics or psychology or anatomical study. The things you love reading about are connected to other things you'll probably love learning, and once you learn them they'll become foundational substrate in your mind from which your own stories can grow.

Sometimes the harder question isn't how to write, it's how to stop writing. Storytelling is a hard habit to break, arguably impossible. The majority of us do it mostly unconsciously or in times of stress - catastrophizing, fears, anxieties are us telling ourselves scary stories about worst case scenarios. What if the worst possible thing happened, or this nightmare played out; what if I fell here, what if this killed me, what if they hate me, what if they gave me reason to hate them, what if I woke up and a scary guy was there? Our minds concoct stories constantly and compulsively, usually unprompted. Learning to recognize this for what it is is a very useful first step in the pursuit of writing on purpose.

It's easy for these stories to compel us when we spin them, because we're our own captive audience. The hard part of writing is figuring out how to take that story out of our heads and get it into someone else's instead. This is where the craft of writing comes into play, and it's again best learned by reading. How do the stories you experience influence your thoughts and feelings? What methods of phrasing and framing do they use to comfort you, intrigue you, gutpunch you? What matters to the writer to communicate with specificity, and what are they leaving up to you, their audience? Why did the writer choose to do it like that? How would you do it?

Once the story is out of your brain and into a first draft, editing and constructive criticism become possible. Step one was "make it exist", steps two through forever are "make it good." You intend your story to impact in a certain way, but you won't know how well you've succeeded until you see how other people take it. Not all critiques are equally useful, so at this stage it's mostly good to find people whose perspectives you trust and value and listen to them. Once the story exists in its final form, disregard this step and stay out of your story's reviews. Those aren't criticism of your writing process, they're buyer testimonials for readers. They're not useful for you.

Coffee also.

#writing

comicaurora

AAAHH I LOVE THE FIRE in the ch 8 cover! HOW IS THE TEXT ALSO ON FIRE please put this in the shop so i can stare at it on my wall PLEASE

ask and ye shall receive

#comic aurora

lesbianshepard

waaaay back when I was a cashier in retail we would talk about dumb shit while unloading the truck, and we got to the "what would you do in a zombie apocalypse" me and another worker were like yeah we would just die. End it all, we can't fight or run or shit. I refuse to put that much effort into survival.

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

Anyway, random shout out to that guy. You were too kind for retail management, Devin.

lesbianshepard

also afterwards everyone who was talking about their cool bunker fantasies were like "Damn, Devin's right, we should also be considering helping people around us." which is the only recorded instance of a retail shift making people better human beings.

arqueete

obsessed with this sign i saw taped up outside the bat room at the zoo yesterday. the enthusiasm, the hand-written note, the bat drawing.

olitheolive

@yourstargazing

yourstargazing

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources researchers say they’ve discovered a new species of bat living in Wisconsin. The so-called evening

That’s this

Goes to show how little I know

evilvillain123456789

The really crazy part is the Twitter post is the original and the tumblr post is the one that's plagiarized

teathattast

Net zero info ass post

cats2019forthenintendoswitch

We literally can see in both the screenshots that the tumblr post was posted first (also evilvillain123456789 lies recreationally, constantly) why are y'all so bad at fact-checking literally anything

evilvillain123456789

Stop

theshitpostcalligrapher

Hi! Can you write “No shrimp posture!” (And if you feel like it. With a little drawing of a shrimp?)

drewed the best shramp i could

#shrimp check

ot3

it’s been long enough i’m making an executive decision that we all need to go reread the tgi fridays infinite mozzarella sticks article

ot3

still just as good as i remember it

bladesofaura13

The link is broken nooooo

ot3

burning of the fucking library of alexandria right here. anyway everyone say thank you wayback machine

ot3

Happy ten years of Caity weavers infinite mozzarella sticks article

ms-demeanor

To have a computer reliably recognize a picture of a red-winged blackbird the computer must first imagine the universe.

ms-demeanor

I am having complicated and frustrating thoughts on AI again (as always).

ms-demeanor

I don't know if I've expressed this but part of the thing that has been making me bugfuck insane about discussions around AI image generation is knowing people who have worked with computer vision for decades.

ms-demeanor

I should fire up my 2005 macbook with CS2 installed on it and edit a photo entirely with "AI tools."

ms-demeanor

This is a 1980 computer science master's thesis by Ellen Hildreth on computer image recognition and creation. (Link downloads PDF)

The paper demonstrates the development, training, and testing of the Marr-Hildreth algorithm for edge detection in digital images.

ms-demeanor

Every time I'm gearing up for a good academic rant on this subject I further entrench my hatred of copyright.

ms-demeanor

Look. I understand that people are concerned about training models. I really do get that, that people have intense feelings about their photos or drawings or image being used to train AI. I even kind of get wanting to weaponize copyright against that because you don't know what else to do with those feelings.

I am currently building a multi-decade chain of papers on computer vision and image generation to have this discussion, and I would like to do so in a moderately calm manner.

Unfortunately if I want to cite a journal article from 1983 in a tumblr post, the copyright holders of this article about image restoration and pixel randomization want $248 per section of excerpted text (<500 words).

So the calm has now gone away.

ms-demeanor

Anyway. The flesh pit guy appears to be an asshole but I'm very frustrated seeing people react to photoshop compositing tools as an unethical use of AI tools that undermines the craft or artistry of a project.

This is a 2024 paper by one of the Adobe developers who worked on those compositing tools going over how the tools work. For the record, this model was trained on licensed and public domain images only and the tools are run on device, so the copyright and environmental complaints that people frequently make about AI don't apply to these specific tools.

That paper uses research from this 2015 paper on AI detection of composited images. That paper uses the ImageNet dataset.

ImageNet's dataset is a combination of images sourced from image searches starting in 2009 and description tags generated by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. The images are not owned by ImageNet, but were scraped from various internet sources in the late 2000s.

That project uses algorithms and processes described in this 2007 paper on the utility of a general image database and image segmentation.

This 2000 paper on image segmentation developed some of the models used in the later paper, based on a collection of 1000 Corel stock images.

That segmentation was based on statistical models in this paper from 1994, which used a small training dataset collected by the researchers.

That 1994 paper made use of the model in this foundational paper from 1984 on predictive pixel selection for algorithm-based image restoration.

That paper helped to refine the boundary-finding methods used in this 1986 paper, which was an improvement on methods from the 1980 Hildreth paper.

Both Hildreth and Canny cite this 1971 memo from the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, which describes the process of using a computer to find lines in an image.

Personally I like this note from a revised version of that 1971 memo that shows that we are still currently dealing with some of the same problems in computer vision that people were 50 years ago.

"This program has no idea what a reasonable line-drawing should look like when it represents an image of polyhedra. Instead it is very general and will find arbitrary line-drawings. Observing the particular way in which things sometimes go wrong, one quickly comes to the conclusion that higher-level understanding of the scene being analysed could greatly improve the line and vertex creating phase of this program. As thing stand now this understanding comes only after the line-finder has done its work."

Okay so what's my point?

My point is that there is a long chain of models, statistics, and research that, stretching back to the beginning of computer vision, has been centered around figuring out the likelihood that one pixel next to another pixel is black instead of white. The computers have never been very smart, they have never understood context, and the improvements we have made from the line finder in 1971 to "harmonize" in photoshop in 2026 is a very traceable chain of refining how the statistics are calculated.

They hallucinate extra elements, they don't know what shadows are.

Computers are still stupid, they just do math a lot faster than they did in the seventies.

Harmonize is apparently a new "AI" tool available in photoshop that is capable of matching lighting, texture, and other qualities in photos that are composited together. One of the things that the flesh pit guy is currently being dragged for (aside from really seeming to be a pretty tremendous asshole) is using this particular type of AI tool as a time saver on his ongoing art project.

I want to have a conversation about this, by which I mean I want to make some arguments about this.

I'm writing this specifically about the harmonize compositing tool in photoshop (and similar tools like upscaling). This is not about using grok or generating whole images or whole elements of images, this is not about whether or not the flesh pit guy is an asshole. I will grant that he is an asshole and I personally find whole images generated with AI tools like grok to just kind of look bad and be really boring.

Work with me on this, and let's accept the premise that adobe's Firefly is an ethically trained model (up to 5% of the images used to train firefly may be midjourney images that were licensed to adobe as stock images after being generated by midjourney, but adobe pays creators standard licensing fees to train data and does not train on client data), and that the tools are run on-device and do not consume any more resources than creating a 20-layer document in photoshop would.

(Also I acknowledge that training a model uses a lot of power and resources but creating a video game or an animated movie uses power at a much higher level than playing the game or watching the movie on your own machine; i've got to limit the scope somewhere so I can actually ask the question I've got)

Again, we are granting the following before you respond to the poll:

If the model was trained on ethical data and

If the tool runs locally and does not use more power than your computer uses and

The art the tool is used on is a personal, individual project and does not lead to poor treatment of workers

With that context I think those AI Tools

Are unethical and reduce the artistry of a work

Are unethical but do not reduce the artistry of a work

Are ethical but reduce the artistry of a work

Are ethical and do not reduce the artistry of a work

Remaining time: 1 day 13 hours

ms-demeanor

Reblogging with corrected final question on poll.

ms-demeanor

Editing a photo with only the AI tools (predictive image processing tools developed from models trained on large imagesets) included as a part of the 2012 CS6 license (and the autofocus on my phone camera from 2020).

Direct from cellphone, Autofocus

Posterize (edge-finding like the tools in the original linked master’s thesis)

HDR Toning (photorealistic high contrast preset)

Selective Color Adjustment

Glowing Edges (again, another edge-finding tool)

Rendered lighting effects (spot, high intensity, high angle)

Color halftone

Gaussian Blur applied to the color halftone (similar to how AI upscaling works, and is based on the 1986 paper listed above)

Selective color replacement

Cutting backgrounds 100% with tools that use the AI included in my 2012 CS6 license

I think the last two images here and the edge-finding images do a really good job of demonstrating how AI/Machine Learning image processing tools are statistical tools.

The cut-out on the left was done hastily with a magic wand selection tool with a color selection threshold of 20. What that means is that you click on the image and the tool picks all of the pixels that are contiguous with the pixel you clicked on and are within the tolerance. If you broke down the image pixel by pixel you'd be able to get the exact count of what percentage of the image is what color, you could, in theory, remake the image as a barcode of just the proportions of each color using this kind of image analysis. The image is math, the computer sees it as math, the algorithms see it as math, the models see it as math.

The cut-out on the right demonstrates how the "AI computer vision" makes educated guesses (predictions) about the image. That was cut out using a magnetic lasso tool, which you guide around the vague shape of the image with your mouse. The program creates a selection line that follows color variations in the edges of the image that you're cutting out. On a very high contrast background (so if I was standing against a white wall) this can be very accurate. On a lower contrast background, there's more variation as the program guess wrong about which way to move the selection line.

The program doesn't see the photo as a picture of a person being cut out, it sees a collection of pixels of various colors and calculates what the probability is that a pixel of one color is likely to be next to a pixel of another color based on the the difference in color of the pixels.

There are very, very accurate selection tools in modern editions of creative suite - when I used the sky selection tool in my photography class in 2023 I was *stunned* by how accurate it was and how much time it saved. But all of that is just a more complicated form of the line finder in the 1971 memo that had trouble distinguishing between solids and shadows in areas of reduced contrast.

#analysis #to read

killhitleragain

PBS and NPR were never beholden to the US government.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created so that the US government could fund public media without public media being influenced by the government. It was a private non-profit funded by the government, not a part of the government itself. This is by design. This was a good thing. It meant that even small local TV and radio stations, could afford to create media for the public good, without government influence.

This meant TV and radio stations for poor communities. For non-english speaking communities. For rural communities. For minorities. It meant that free and accessible media could be created for everyone, even if the government didn't like it.

That's why conservatives defunded it.

Because if they couldn't control it, and if it helped the people they hated, then they would have to destroy it. Do you really think that a fascist government would defund their own propaganda machine?

Not only is the idea that PBS before being defunded was propaganda wrong, but ignores the fact that defunding it is going to have long-term negative effects on vulnerable communities.

OP of the post in the screenshot called me an idiot and blocked me for pointing this out. So I'm setting the record straight. The CPB was never our enemy.

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I have brainworms named Jadzia and Ezri