Apparently I do AI Art Now

this was going to be a cybersecurity blog but I got distracted

[our-queer-experience]

My transmasculine experience is a bit controversial, I don't share it off anon.. but, I was AMAB. I am intersex, and have always been viewed femininely for a boy.. I have boobs and curves, I pass as a woman and I don't want to. I don't want femininity forced onto me, but it has been by my puberty and even by the world around me. I've shared pictures of my body online and even had people tell me to just "give up and be a woman at that point". The only support I get from cis people is pity, and only if I try to call my intersex variation a disease in need of a cure.. but I don't think it's a disease. I just wish I looked more masculine, (but testosterone would have little effect on me, so I don't even bother). I hope someone like me would be welcomed into the transmasc community, despite not being ftm.. I don't want to be a failed cis man. Being transmasculine but not ftm is the only way I've found I can take pride in myself. I generally don't share my AGAB or my intersexuality with other trans people because I'm afraid of being excluded from my only community for being "a cis man pretending to be trans", I don't want people to think that of me.

your experience is so similar to mine and other transmascs, as well as the experiences of other intersex people i’ve heard from, and honestly i can think of no real reason you shouldn’t be welcomed here

[rebellum]

As someone on the edge of the trans masc community, who's relation to transmasculinity is "i mean sort of? I guess? Idk man, but I fit in this community best", I can tell you the trans masc community (or at least, how i experience it) would ABSOLUTELY accept you. You aren't a cis man pretending to be trans, if you want to identify as trans masc then that's absolutely okay. Do what makes you feel comfortable and confident in yourself, and we will welcome you with open arms.

[queerautism]

You're absolutely welcome here 💜

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

I was literally just thinking about how this kind of experience needs more representation, and how people's perception of the trans experience needs to include more than just mtf and ftm contexts. Thank you for sharing this, I know this probably means a lot for some folks to see it.

[rslashrats]

new fun trend: take this quiz and tell me your score

[apolladay]

If you have seen fiction with polyamorous characters, which medium was the most recent one you saw in?

The characters must be CANONICALLY established as polyamorous: subtext, no matter how obvious, doesn't count.

A book

A movie

A TV show

A podcast

A video game

A webcomic

A comic book/graphic novel/manga

A play or musical

Fiction music*

Something else

I've never seen a a polyamorous character in fiction

*songs that tell a fictional story with characters, but which are Not part of a stage musical.

If you have seen fiction with polyamorous characters, which medium was the most recent one you saw in? The characters must be CANONICALLY established as polyamorous: subtext, no matter how obvious, doesn't count.

A book

A movie

A TV show

A podcast

A video game

A webcomic

A comic book/graphic novel/manga

A play or musical

Fiction music*

Something else

I've never seen a a polyamorous character in fiction

Voting ended onOct 19, 2024

*songs that tell a fictional story with characters, but which are Not part of a stage musical.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

The most commonly represented poly dynamic in most media is probably a noble or king with a harem, but I don't think most people will think of that on first read.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Hi, may I use your ai generated Armsmaster picture for my avatar? I would add a link to your post in my bio. Have an amazing day!

Sure, feel free to use it for any non-commercial purpose.

[victoriadallonfan]

The neatest thing about “Rational” Wormfanfic is that it really makes the mask the author wears slip off and reveal some of things they think are “rational”, which can range from stupidly entertaining to outright horrific, and the audience response to that is equally dumb and or horrifying.

If someone like that wrote a “Rational” Wardfic, it would unironically be Victoria just joining Goddess and taking over that small country to live a life of luxury (and enslaving people of course, but don’t worry it’s good slavery like Shield Hero- *vomits out blood*).

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Yknow, from a really, extremely charitable reading, a highly rational protagonist working with flawed assumptions and dubious moral principles is a genuinely interesting premise. Having the character actually have rock solid good reasons why they're doing messed up stuff, and knowing with dramatic irony that if they knew "x" piece of information they totally wouldn't do the same things is tragic and beautiful. But then there will be an author's note that just utterly destroys any and all granted charity by being like... "Yeah obviously Cauldron were the unambiguous good guys. Saint did nothing wrong. From a consequentialist standpoint any bad that Amy did is totally justified. Purity isn't a flying trash fire."

[artbyblastweave]

opinion on scion, poor little meow meow

Three thoughts about Scion. More to follow.

I think that Scion is underexplored as a character in the fandom because it’s very easy to fall into to the same trap that the characters did in Canon. His status as a cipher, idiot-god, and engineered anglerfish lure all serve to elide the fact that he is, in fact, Actually A Character Who Inhabits The World. Cauldron thinks they’re they’re in a Jean Jacket sorta situation, but they aren’t! He’s agentic, he has emotions, he’s got a sense of self. He’s metaphorically literate. He hears Kevin Norton talking about religion and he’s able to draw coherent connections to his own sense of identity. Stuff is capable of catching his interest; he didn’t have to answer that reporter’s question. He’s not solely a humanoid time bomb, floating around mindlessly dispensing good deeds until the big finish; he is mostly that, in practice, but there’s other stories to be told with this guy!

On that note, something I’ve thought for a long time is that his relationship with Kevin Norton- and he does have one- is weirdly underexplored in the fandom given the canon particulars. Kevin is gay, and Scion is using him as a replacement goldfish for his dead wife, and both of them meet while they’re spiraling in the aftermath of their previous relationships ending. Kevin shows up, tries to fill the void for a while, but then stops making himself available to provide further guidance. I’m describing a dynamic that should have hundreds of pages of shipfic on AO3, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone consider the prospect seriously. I think I’ve seen one fic, ever, in which something Kevin says to Scion that prompts Scions emotional growth in a novel direction. That’s a whole genre of AU fic right there! Completely untapped!

Scion is very important, to the overall deconstructive project of Worm. There’s a whole post to be written (not right now, but eventually) about the sheer number of ways in which Scion is riffing on Superman’s mythos and publication history, and I think he does so in genuinely novel ways. Doing a comprehensive examination of the superhero genre was always going to require some integration of the archetype, or it wouldn’t be comprehensive. But beyond that project, he is such a good final boss for the narrative of Worm specifically. In a book about a young woman struggling against broken systems run by traumatized people carrying big sticks, he’s the worst possible system, the biggest possible stick, doing what he does because he’s traumatized at a cosmic level. I see people complain about Scion and his role in the endgame, and I’ve counter-kvetched about that line of thought before; escalation is only bad if you aren’t writing a story about escalation. But Worm scales up! It rhymes at every level! It’s so cool!

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

I mean, I read scion as the cosmic mirror of Daniel Hebert. I think it's no accident that they're effectively introduced together. And have a sort of metaphorically related set of goals and trauma. Because of that, any reading I would make for Scion includes metatextual comparison with Danny. And yeah, it is about escalation, from a depressed father figure who can't take care of his kid who's getting bullied by 3 teenage girls, up to a depressed god figure who can't take care of the world that's getting bullied by 3 ancient horrors beyond our comprehension. Like, the ferry's never getting fixed, and entropy is never getting reversed. Annette and Eden are never coming back. There's no stopping the pain train. But Danny is small. He has peers. Friends. A support network. Scion is all alone. He's desperate for the kind of support that he literally doesn't have because he is what he is. And the sad/poetic thing is that understanding humanity is the thing that could have saved scion is the thing that kills him. As he becomes more able to relate to human perspectives, which could have let him build a rapport and community and defused the whole cauldron thing, the perspective he winds up landing on is that mirror of Danny. And with literally everyone against him and nothing to anchor on... that tells me that the only that ever stopped Danny from eating a gun were his friends... and Taylor. Honestly I think it's clever that even Scion gets to have a secret identity if you look at the symbolic narrative.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Jurassic Susie

[cpericardium]

After Gold Morning, Contessa just enrolled Khepri at college on a random earth and dropped her off without cleaning her up, disabling her powers, or otherwise fixing her

[sathona]

wait this would mean that the people around her are controlled by her power! asdffhfgjgl shes making her very own post canon college fic happen all around her and everyone is too terrified of her to stop her, im screaming

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Laughed at this until I imagined the sad/dark version where QA is desperately trying to put Taylor's brain back together by playing out scenes it pulled from the shard internet using nearby students as puppets/actors. And then I imagined it as a halping fic and I laughed again. QA: You're not humaning right. Please... just... do the humaning. See, just like this. Taylor: Sort of lumbers about making grunting noises QA: Ooh, that's progress. So close. I'm definitely halping.

[heyitschartic]

Master as a category is very funny to me. Why would you put the girl who can twist your emotions into a Gordian knot in the same classification as the guy who makes clones of himself.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Honestly, from a purely watsonian perspective, this is solved with multiple classification as long as they're consistent about it. Just, yup you gotta worry about dick slicing hypnosis so the cape also counts as a stranger. Of course by this logic, Othala counts as a master in the same way as Bitch, and really, strategically, she should.

This gets pretty interesting when a capes tactics, rather than powers are more defining of their threat rating. Like, Parian could almost certainly have been a shaker rather than master if she chose whips and nets and balls and other abstract forms to control with her power. Skitter is so versatile in the way she uses her power she gets a laundry list of subclasses.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Eidolon preparing to shield the bay.

The face glow got a little out of hand, but I kinda like the green lightning halo effect so I left it in. For reference this is after 184 txt/img to image generations, with 9 manual editing layers, and 46 inpaints. Final image was processed through img to image at low denoising strength to blend the manual edits in. If anyone wants a copy of most of my setup (not including paid software that I use for manual edits, like SAI) to try it out themselves, or wants to see a tutorial on the process I'm using (won't claim it's the best one) let me know and I'll be happy to provide.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Have an Alexandria posing for a propaganda photoshoot. I know that implies I have to do the rest of the triumvirate in the same shoot now, but I'm not gauranteeing anything.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Have a grumpy, exhausted and done with this shit Karkat

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

I would be willing to pay a reasonable licensing fee for good, fine tuned, stable-diffusion models that can verify in writing and with associated licensing agreements that all of their training data was sourced ethically (training data was licensed explicitly for AI training, or they owned a license to create transformative commercial works from the training data).

While I ethically source my own fine-tuning data, the ability to use weight mixing in models is extremely useful and I would like to be able to find more ethically sourced models to merge. I think that in making ethically sourced models available for use, there is an opportunity to protect artists, enhance AI art, and turn a profit.

[j33zits]

It doesn’t matter if you use a data set trained on your own art. If all you do is type a prompt, you’ve haven’t made anything. The very nature of making art requires you to, ya know Make It. AI “art” is antithetical to the entire concept of creation regardless of its source material, and no amount of gish gallop about how it AWKSHUALLY works will change that.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

I normally wouldn't engage in what appears to be a bad faith argument, but you just handed me a soapbox to stand on. AI art should should be held to the same standard as photography and film. Yeah pointing and clicking isn't much creativity, but the prep work on the lighting, model, camera settings, costumes make-up, etc results in a photograph/film. The fact that the camera made the picture for you is true, but the fact the picture is able to be made is because of a human doing real creative work to put that image in front of the camera. The same thing is true of AI art. Especially the bit where you take a crapton of pictures and only pick out and finely edit the best ones.

And just like photography and film, we shouldn't film or take pictures of things that the owners of those things don't want in films or pictures. The same is true of putting something in your AI training data. I mean if you fundamentally disagree that film and photography can be art, then nothing is going to convince you one way or the other. But this EXACT same rhetoric was being shouted to the rooftops when cameras were invented.

If you want to effect real change, then find the part of the process that actually bothers you and work to change specifically that. If it's intellectual property theft, then you should demand rigor in training data licensing. If it's worry about artist jobs, then you should put training for how to use AI and how to make the things AI can't in the hands of artists. I mean programmers are super hype for AI that can help them program, but artists are terrified, and that gets solved the same way as it did for... photoshop, cameras, drawing tablets, pre-mixed paints, the printing press, or any other technology, with knowledge and practice.

[spaghettiandart]

Noelle and Noelle except they're from very two different forms of media

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

This is a common in-joke amongst my IRL friend group because of multiple entire conversations that had to be re-routed because someone had to go, "OH! I was thinking of the other Noelle". The punchline is Krouse: Proceed.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Colin without dragon is just... no chill. He needs that Canadian girlfriend that nobody has ever seen in person, but he swears she's real and totally isn't catfishing him.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

I'm interested in seeing what artists would use AI tools for if there weren't a stigma against it. Anyone want to try a collab? Use a fake name if you want. Maybe use AI to make a rough then reference it? Draw a compositional sketch and have AI try to render it? Draw one piece and then variations with AI? Design a character then train an AI to render it for you? (actually seems not much different than vector animation at that point, though most AI is pretty crap at composition). Maybe get an AI to ink your pencils, or color your inks?

Just spitballing. I'm mostly a coder, and only draw at the level of the deviant art profile we have at home. My current strategy is doodling a rough to get composition in place and then image-to-image AI generation to actually make the finished thing.

[oopsallvulnerabilities]

Shadowstalker filtered through slasher horror anime. Wanted to play with different style filtering, and I figure Sophia would hate weeb shit. So... spite image.

It couldn't draw an assembled crossbow after 120 attempts, but I like the idea of being able to disassemble it for storage/carrying and then put it back together before go time.