Out of the Formless Void I Come @ravennycto - Tumblr Blog

Posts

outregeneration

I know you probably forgot about Cthulu, but Cthulu didn't forget about you. Grab him from my shop!

Pattern via https://craftyintentions.com/

wobblydev

Why do we say that capitalism must be “dismantled”?

You’ll hear phrases like “Smash the state!” “Eat the rich!” and “Smash capitalism!”

And, yes, of course, but… :)

However relevant those sayings are, our work must be careful, highly organized and above all planned.

Because capitalism and all of its associated systems are not discrete, abstracted entities we can attack independently.

It is a structure, like a complicated machine with many thousands of working parts…

And right now it is connected to absolutely everything.

If we do this… [picks up huge hammer and smashes the machine]

Then a lot of vulnerable people will die.

The machine was built and improved and redesigned and patched over the course of generations. It is very good at its intended purpose, which is ultimately to generate profit.

Every human being alive today relies on the byproducts of the machine to survive, without exception.

The machine’s engineers want it to keep working like it does. In fact, they want to optimise it.

That will kill all remaining life on Earth.

So, we must destroy the machine, quickly and carefully

We must examine its deadly programs and mechanics and replace them with alternatives we built together.

The engineers don’t want us tampering with the machine.

However, we make it run…

So we can make it STOP. Together.

How will YOU help us to safely dismantle the machine?

iww.org

p.s. My computer is on its last legs. If you would like me to draw you a little cartoon and help me get a new computer, learn more at this post.

thispreciousthing

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

anotherdayforchaosfay

Seeing as Twitter is gonna legally steal your work now, please use glaze to protect what you make.

chromatocloo

Guys did you hear about Nightshade?

Using both Glaze and Nightshade would corrupt the generation of pictures mimicking artist AND mess with the AI's recognition of what everything is. Like it would generate a dog when you ask for a cat.

And it would be hell for AI bros to remove the cloaked pictures from their database ʕ 👀人ʔ

ravennycto

STRONGLY recommend you go see the comments on MystWolven because there's a ton of info there about the process. Protect artists' works. And please, someone figure something out for writers too?

thegaymertrainer

“Do you see me as cattle to milk whenever you grow thirsty” was really something

nativenews

fesenjan-deactivated20231206

“Copper was Africa's chief mineral export. Being an excellent conductor of electricity, it became an indispensable part of the capitalist electrical industry. It is an essential component of generators, motors, electrical locomotives, telephones, telegraphs, light and power lines, motor cars, buildings, ammunition, radios, refrigerators and a host of other things. A technological era tends to be defined by the principal source of power. Today, we speak of a Nuclear Age, since the potential of nuclear power is shown to be immense. The Industrial Revolution in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries was the Age of Steam. In a parallel manner, the colonial epoch was the Age of Electricity. Therefore, the vital copper exports from Congo, Northern Rhodesia and other parts of Africa were contributing to the leading sector of European technology. From that strategic position, its multiplier effects were innumerable and were of incalculable benefit to capitalist development.

In the context of a discussion of raw materials, special reference must again be made to the military. African minerals played a decisive role both with regard to conventional weapons and with regard to the breakthrough to atomic and nuclear weapons. It was from the Belgian Congo during the second world war that the U.S.A. began getting the uranium, which was a pre-requisite to the making of the first atomic bomb. In any case, by the end of the colonial period, industry and the war-machine in the colonising nations had become so intertwined and inseparable that any contribution to one was a contribution to the other. Therefore, Africa's massive contribution to what initially appears as peaceful pursuits such as the making of copper wire and steel alloys ultimately took the shape of explosive devices, aircraft-carriers, and so on.”

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

jermare

Well now that the Halloween nonsense is over with… 😂🎄🥰 love this!

accidental-muse

@grogusmom89 😄

whatareyoureallyafraidof

OK; I seriously just snorted! LOL!

howlingheretic

From the march on Washington, D.C. on 11/04/2023.

Sources: [X] [X] [X]

raychelsnr

Are storm chasers adrenaline junkies?

Not really. We’re really just giant nerds. #weather #stormchasing #stormchasers #science #nerds #nerdsunite #stem

only-tiktoks

huffylemon

headspace-hotel

i don't think chess sets be like

slightlydraconic

I'm so sorry but

yeah

dkpsyhog

Chess piece designers: I don’t remember what a human looks like but I can carve the fuck out of a horse

staticnoisesss

guys. anytime you see someone call what’s happening to palestine a “war” or “conflict”…

please politely educate them and explain that a war cannot happen when the other side has no means to defend themselves. when refugee camps are being bombed. when entire areas of living are inhabitable.

there cannot be a war when the people you’re “fighting” with bullets and bombs are children, women, and men in jeans and flip flops.

there cannot be a war when the people you’re “fighting” are the very ones your government is starving, the ones who don’t even have clean water. the ones who, if not being killed, are dying from diseases because of these poor conditions.

there cannot be a war when one state holds so much power while the other has been oppressed for decades. where 120 countries voting for there to be a ceasefire is meaningless.

there cannot be self defense when you are the one doubling down and trying to wipe out an entire nation because of one day of a group of people from their state retaliating.

there are no excuses when your officials have openly said they consider every palestinian a terrorist. when they have made their racist and genocidal stance clear.

you are most welcome to support palestine and advocate for peace, but don’t you call it a war.

THIS IS GENOCIDE. THIS IS NOT WAR.

educate yourselves and educate others. i have compiled a list of palestinian literature you should read. and i will keep adding more as time goes by.

brightlotusmoon

Giraffe Party on Facebook:

And yes, this is still the situation with ABA in January 2022.

More information about ABA is available at: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1640064006204333&id=330649957145751

[Image Description - Screenshot of a blog post. Background is white, text is black sans-serif font. Text reads:

"I babysit a 7 year-old who attends an ABA school. Parents described it to me as 'the good kind' of ABA. Today I was in pain, and I guess it showed on my face. The child kept trying to use their hands to push the corners of my mouth up, while saying 'can you make a happy face?' They would say 'what's wrong with your face? Let's make it happy' and then try to move my mouth into a smile. I kept telling them I don't like the way that feels, I don't like it when people touch my face like that. They took my hands and put them on their face to show me what to do, to push on their face and force a smile. I said I didn't want to make them smile that way either. I asked why would you make someone's face smile with your hands? They said it was a game. I asked them where they played the game, they said 'at school'. I asked who plays the game? They said, 'my teachers'.

Imagine being 7 and being taught that you should always look happy, even when you're not. Imagine being taught this not just through example or reinforcement, but by being PHYSICALLY MANIPULATED.

ABA is still just about compliance. And this isn't the 70s or the 90s, it's January 2020. #YesAllABA"]

Source: intentionally anonymous

countesspetofi

So ABA is copying the old-fashioned religious abuse from my childhood.

brightlotusmoon

I got this from the Wikipedia entry for Ivar Lovaas:

"He was a forced farm worker during the 1940s Nazi occupation of Norway, and often said that observing the Nazis had sparked his interest in human behavior.[5]"

autistics-speak

To be clear, Ole Ivar Lovaas is the guy who developed ABA, and also conversion therapy.

Sometimes people claim that ABA is “good” when it doesn’t punish (“use aversives”) to train autistic children into compliance. Punishment is not the only problem with ABA, though.

Even when you use only “positive reinforcement” (which often includes talking to the child or acknowledging the child’s existence only when the child is compliant, only letting them play or have access to things they enjoy when they comply, etc.), the whole goal of ABA is to train children to comply with adults’ demands, no matter how much suffering that compliance causes.

ABA also usually trains young autistic children out of beneficial self-regulating behaviors like stimming, and out of expressing their emotions. It is a compliance-based protocol that does not help children develop healthy emotional or social skills. For more perspectives on ABA, check out our ABA tag here: http://autistics-speak.tumblr.com/tagged/ABA

heavensickness

Magnolias are so ancient plants that almost every other plant and insect who came to being around the same time as them has gone extinct by now. They are the loneliest plants in this world. Does anybody understand how much grief it gives me that the symbolic flower of Kuras is magnolia.

blairwitchapologist

may i please direct your attention to the poem dinosaurs smelled magnolias by dalton day!!!!!

idiopathicsmile

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't life about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.