Most critical thing to hammer into your head and the heads of everyone around you: information is the most powerful weapon in the world. You can't hit a target if you don't make a target.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were finely-tuning America's intelligence infrastructure to generate as many targets at possible, collecting any scrap of information they possibly could. As far back as 2011, I remember seeing veterans talk about how terrified they were to witness Afghan civilians being rounded up and biometrically catalogued to build an indexed database to exploit even the tiniest crumbs of DNA or hearsay. This war was fought by raiding people's homes in the dead of the night, to kidnap or kill these people turned into targets through the accumulation of intelligence. Scraps of information. DNA signatures on bomb fragments. "HUMINT." Chains of acquaintance. Family. Wrong place, wrong time.
We now know ICE is extensively using Palantir software -- ELITE -- in their field operations. Just as we know Palantir's Gotham software was used extensively in the Gaza genocide to generate "hundreds" of targets per day, where, previously, Israeli intelligence would generate "ten in a year." This, too, was put to use in the so-called Global War on Terror. Honed by the brutalization of the Middle East. CEO Alex Karp has identified Palantir's role in expediting the "kill chain," the decision-making process to identify targets.
This software is being fed more information than you can imagine. Any video, any photograph, any post that has been put on any social media website has been scraped up -- legally or not -- and fed into this system. Flock cameras have been placed in many, many cities across the US to track the movement of individuals via their vehicles. Ring cameras are now a part of the Flock network. ICE is using Flock's system.
Ice agents have said there is a database of protestors being generated. For years, Trump has talked about targeting the "enemy within." His administration has declared the amorphous "Antifa" to be a formal terrorist organization, opening the gates to the full might of post-9/11 counter-terror laws which empower the US government to, essentially, do whatever they want to anyone labeled "terrorist."
Anonymize yourself as much as you can. Exposure is vulnerability. Threats will be taken seriously. Once attention has been drawn to yourself, it has been drawn to everyone around you. Admit to nothing. Camouflage yourself. Feed the system as little information as possible. Generate deniability. Do not incriminate yourself. Do not make yourself or your people into targets.
i will preface this by saying that im not an it guy, i dont code or anything but i do read a lot of tutorials and love linux. after i found a distribution that i liked i found that finding open source alternatives and trouble shooting stuff etc became pretty satisfying. linux is like a puzzle that you can make into whatever you want if you have the right pieces. but i will apologize in advance to it peeps if i dont use the right technical term for something.
to start off with some technical stuff you have the linux kernel, then you have all the distributions based on said kernel that are customized to suit different needs.
"A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components."
tbh i think of it like ice cream flavors. each distro is a different flavor but theyre all ice cream. so while anything that i say here is geared towards my distro of choice, cachyos, it would work on other distros, you would just want to find a tutorial to see the differences.
i have tried other linux distros, but cachy has blown me away by how well and fast everything works. i honestly think that if youre gaming or doing any kind of content creation its the way to go. for the sake of this post not getting stupid long im going to assume you have linux installed. if not here is a general tutorial: "How to Install Linux."
here’s the wiki that walks you through installing cachyos specifically, it goes over everything, personally i used grub as my boot manager and kde plasma as my desktop environment, everything else default: LINK
starting out
thinking of content creators you would usually go to streamers, digital artists, photographers, gamers etc. so thats what this post (kind of guide?) is geared towards. so. if youre on your fresh cachyos install you can navigate to cachyos hello.
i have cachyos hello launch at start.
go to apps/tweaks and click install gaming packages. thatll prompt it to download stuff that makes gaming easier on linux. also in cachyos hello go to install apps, which will open the gui (graphical user interface) of the package manager and you can install the heavy hitters, discord, obs and steam, pretty close to how you would on windows by clicking through the prompts. i also downloaded krita, libreoffice (awesome microsoft office alternative), and vlc (my preferred media player). theres also some cool stuff like opentoonz (2d animation), blender and darktable (RAW photo editing) in there.
when you download programs from your package manager (through the terminal or with the gui), youre installing them natively. there is something called a flatpak, which runs a sandboxed version of the program. its in the name of security so its sectioned off from the other stuff on your computer and so that a company can make one version, the flatpak, and it should work on all linux distros without issue. well get more into flatpaks later.
discord: the json files
once you have all of that installed these are some tweaks that i did. sometimes the cachyos update of discord is a little behind the official discord update (usually less than a day tbh but if youre planning to log into a call not being able to before a collab stream would be bad) so you can navigate to the json of discord (basically just the settings txt file) and turn off that discord checks for updates before launching.
you will want to go here: ~/.config/discord/settings.json
and add this line somewhere in the file: "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
it should look something like this. you can still update whenever its rolled out but youll be able to use discord uninterrupted while youre waiting.
obs: git, the aur and yay
obs almost works the same as on windows. the plugin structure is a little different but its not too bad once you know what to look for. you have the easy ones like this closed captions plugin. where all you have to do is download the linux zip, extract it and put it in this folder in your file directory: ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins.
then there are the harder ones like the move plugin. where you have to clone and build the plugin yourself from github. or the aitum multistream plugin where cloning and building it myself resulted in a cmake error so the best bet is to navigate to the aur and download it that way.
which sounds like A LOT. so let me explain.
something that makes linux so cool is how easy it is to just grab cool shit from github. but to do that well need to start talking about the terminal which seems to scare people.
so background, cachyos is based on another flavor of linux, arch. its super lightweight and customizable! but when you dont know what youre doing it can be scary. since cachyos is based on arch it used the same package manager and the same commands to navigate through the terminal.
you can follow this tutorial here: "How to Install Git on Arch," and just follow to first steps to install and verify that you installed it. ill be honest i havent actually needed to configure it as it works just fine without doing so.
after youve done that you can install all the cool stuff youve seen on github. going back to the obs move plugin you would type the following in the terminal to clone (download all the necessary files from github): git clone <repository link>
which is https://github.com/exeldro/obs-move-transition
still in the terminal, you want to navigate to where it downloaded by typing: cd <folder name in file directory>
which is usually the name of the program obs-move-transition
most github pages have instructions on how to actually build the thing. for the move plugin you would type: cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_OUT_OF_TREE=On && cmake --build build
(i realized that i already had cmake installed when i wrote this but if you dont youll want to before you try to set up the move plugin. you can install it with the command “sudo pacman -S cmake” then check that it’s installed with “cmake —version”)
youll see a bunch of stuff pop up in the terminal and once its done, you should be able to see the folder for it in your file directory.
youll navigate to /home/*your username*/obs-move-transition/build/ and there should be the actual plugin move-transition.so. thats what youll put in your obs plugin folder from earlier. youll might have to make a few new folders but it should be nested like this: /home/*your username*/.config/obs-studio/plugins/move-transition/bin/64bit/
git is cool but theres another really cool thing that cachy has because of being based on arch. and thats the aur, the arch user repository. it hosts packages made by the community. in order to install these packages i personally use yay. and heres a tutorial for how to install it here, i followed option 1: "How to Install yay on Arch Linux."
but going back up to the obs plugin example, its similar to what we did earlier. first youd have to find the aur version of the aitum multistream plugin then you would type: git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-aitum-multistream-bin
then: cd obs-aitum-multistream-bin
the difference is that someone already built the plugin for us so you just have to type: makepkg -si
it should once again appear in your home directory and you can go digging for the .so. for me it was in /home/*your username*/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/pkg/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/usr/lib/obs-plugins/. and youll nest it the same way we did earlier with the move plugin.
since i linked what we needed for the multistream plugin we didnt need to use yay very much but the tutorial i linked earlier shows the other ways that you can use it!
once youre done collecting all the plugins you want you can start obs, connect your twitch/youtube account and start streaming the same way you would on windows.
steam: proton, wine and flatpaks
moving onto steam... honestly... a lot of steam games should just work. steam comes with proton, which is basically a compatibility layer that lets window games run on linux. its something that we actually downloaded earlier when we installed the gaming packages. if you want to check before hand what games work you can visit ProtonDB. what is pretty much a guarantee NOT to work are games that use kernel level anticheat, like apex legends, sorry. i dont play any games like that anyways because that seems like an invasion of privacy. but you do you.
if theres something that you want to play that isnt on steam you can use wine instead, or the wine manager bottles to do so. wine is another compatibility layer, its actually partially what proton is based off of. if you want to check and see if something specific runs through wine you can check WineHQ.
if you want to use bottles (which is my preference it keeps everything neat), well be rounding back to flatpaks! to get flatpaks set up youll need to install it by typing in the terminal: sudo pacman -S flatpak
sudo means your acting as the "superuser," itll prompt you to type in your password to verify that you actually want to do what youre doing and that your authorized to do it. you wont see your password as your typing. it looks blank for security purposes but if you type your password and hit enter it will work as long as it was typed correctly. pacman is the name of the package manager for arch. heres some more about the commands you can use in pacman: "pacman."
now with flatpak installed you can install anything from the flathub! but were specifically looking for bottles right now. if you go to the bottles page on flathub the install button will give you what to put into the terminal: "Flathub- Bottles"
getting started with veadotube
veadotube is a good place to start if you want to try out streaming. its an easy to learn program for pngtubers specifically. mini is available for free and once the full version is released i can only imagine that it would be installed the same way.
honestly this is the easiest thing to install out of everything weve talked about. all you need to do is go to the veadotube website and download the zip file for mini. you extract it and inside is an exe file like youd be familiar with if you use windows.
i moved the extracted veadotube mini folder to my home folder for easy access. i will admit im not sure if theres a better place but this works for me. once you launch it, veadotube should work pretty much the same as how it does on windows. i havent run into an issues yet but just in case ill leave the docs for veadotube here: LINK
closing thoughts and links
those are honestly the biggest things that i can think of right now. just walking through how to setup/tweak discord, obs, steam and bottles walks you through everything that ive needed to learn in order to get streaming working comparably to how i used to stream and game with windows. everything that i use can be installed with once you know how to use pacman, git or yay.
something that might be helpful is wget... but honestly i wouldnt worry about it unless its needed for something you want. theres no need to have it if you dont use it.
some other useful things:
a general how to doc for streaming on linux, with a bunch of programs i didnt mention: LINK
streamer.bot for managing streams: LINK
what i used to get csp working. my fiance noticed lag while drawing, but its worth a try if you dont want to use krita or other drawing programs with linux versions: LINK
or you can set csp up in a bottle: LINK
opendeck, to use the elgato streamdeck: LINK
this is a plugin for opendeck to use the fifine steam deck, which is what i have: LINK
slime2 is just a neat chatbox for obs, it doesnt say anything about linux but because of how its built it works: LINK
the obspluginbuilding page for if you want to look more into how plugins work: LINK
prism launcher, to play minecraft, i just used pacman but theres other ways to install it listed on the downloads page: LINK
cachyos wiki: LINK
arch linux wiki, if you run into problems that you cant find in the cachyos wiki the solution is probably somewhere in here: LINK
ill sign this off by saying linux, especially distributions like cachyos, are constantly improving. make sure you update often (the easiest way to do so imo is using cachyos hello) and keep your files clean so you know where everything is if you run into problems!
pre-linux i didnt have a super extravagant streaming set up so theres not too too much here but i hope it at least gets you started and gives you resources to figure out the rest!
** edit- i think that the obs multi rtmp plugin works better than the aitum multistream plugin. at least for my setup. but it's also available from the aur and installed the same way. you can get it here: LINK
Hi! Can I ask you how you made your last short animation from plasticine? I am sorry if this is stupid question, I don't really know much about the animation process, but I am really curious. Thank you 🌟🌟🌟
Hi! Usually I just make a form out of clay, then attempt to photograph it with contrasting light and later cut it out from the background and play around with contrasts to make the clay texture more visible. Most of the clay I have at home is either gray or black, so it's a really important part of the process for me haha. The animation in my pinned post was made with black clay, for example.
(Sorry for this weird picture, I dont have a cleaned up file for this anymore )
Sometimes the form I get is very close to the final result I want
And sometimes it really isn't....
The point is - you can recolor and clean up and edit a lot of stuff in any drawing app you use. Copy pasting some elements of your photos or drawing on top of them with soft enough brush will be enough. Just don't forget to throw a bit of noise on top of your digitally drawn layers, photography usually has some, if you look up close, and this creates a big difference.
In case of animation - fly my scarab, you can do whatever. The animation in my pinned post was fully made with photographs, I molded and photographed and edited every frame of it. In case of this animation I just saved every body part as a separate layer and moved them in different directions in Premier pro (you can do this in any editing software that allows you to make timeline keys). You can also just cut away and move parts of your photos to create movement. This is how the devil moves his leg here, for example
It is so deeply, deeply funny every time some tech guy says that AI is going to replace accountants soon because like.
First, you mean bookkeepers. You genuinely just mean bookkeepers. The role of accountant is 90% based on applied expertise, which AI is demonstrably terrible at (see: every time a lawyer tries using it).
Second, a number of the softwares I use for bookkeeping tasks have inbuilt AI and they need to be corrected around 80% of the time. Because bookkeeping also requires a fair amount of judgement. Plus, anything handwritten or poorly photographed is a writeoff and requires manual processing anyway.
Thirdly, even if full automation of bookkeeping tasks was possible... software developers, please consider who invented the concept of the audit trail, and why they may not be on board with the concept of an agent which cannot be held accountable posting transactions to the accounts.
AI writing has become somewhat of a bogeyman in the writing community—and for good reason. With how prevalent AI is nowadays, how can we cope with its presence? What can individual authors do?
First, let's talk about what writing is—then what AI really is under the hood.
Today, there are 150 million unique books in the world—and 3 million books are printed and published every single year. Archiveofourown.org has over 15 million fanfics published. If you sat down and read every fanfic 24/7 (without stopping), it would take you 8,500 years to read them all. And those were written for free.
Writing is how we humans express ourselves. It's how we communicate, love, breathe, and cry. Open any book written in the last year, or a hundred years ago, and you'll see everything the author did, as if you were right there next to them. Even if the author's been dead for 200 years. Writing connects us across space and time.
Unfortunately, companies like OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) threaten that sacred connection. The threat? Stealing our work.
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials."
—OpenAI
And not only are they stealing our work—but they bastardize it. Despite a net worth of $500 billion, and despite combing through incomprehensible amounts of data, their AI can only churn out bland, soulless word salad. In online communities, anything written or drawn by AI is known as "AI slop". Although, calling its process "writing" or "drawing" is a stretch—those are things humans do.
But I digress; as much as we dislike AI, it's here to stay. And some believe it poses a threat to us creatives. So, how do you cope when AI seems… undefeatable?
First of all, let's make one thing crystal clear:
AI is not as smart as you think.
We are not living in a sci-fi movie right now. We might not see anything like Skynet in our lifetime, if that's even a possibility. What we're up against isn't even real "AI". That's just a trendy keyword the AI-bros use to attract investors. Large Language Model isn't quite as sexy.
So what is a Large Language Model (LLM)? It's an algorithm that absorbs a ton of data and calculates which words are most likely to come next. It's like your iPhone's autocorrect—on steroids. And that's not to say ChatGPT isn't a powerful tool; just that it's not a smart one. So stop worrying about a Skynet-esque takeover. AI won't come up with the next Harry Potter any more than your iPhone's autocorrect can.
So to make my first point: ChatGPT isn't as smart as you think it is.
Now my second point: Humans prefer human connection.
It only makes sense. I mean, really think about it.
Writing is a reflection of our thoughts, our desires, and our suffering. These aren't just concepts; these are things we actually feel. Even if (and that's a big "if") AI was smart enough to write for us, it wouldn't hit as hard. AI simply cannot express what a human experiences because it cannot feel, think, or mourn.
And again, we're not dealing with "real" AI. We're dealing with LLMs (fancy autocorrect, remember?) so all that doom-and-gloom is for nothing. Real AI isn't here. We might not even live to see real AI.
Now let's look at the cold hard facts. Not theories, but actual statistics.
Do people actually care about human writing?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Very much so, yes.
I've been asking questions and running polls in many writing communities—Tumblr, Reddit, Substack, Discord, etc—and the results were shockingly identical. Across the board, readers and writers prefer human-written content. They don't like AI, and they really don't like being tricked into reading it.
My first poll asked: "If you found our your favorite fanfiction was AI-generated, what would you do?" The poll received 140 anonymous votes.
Disclaimer: I will be rounding to the nearest whole person since I can't use this analogy in decimals. Let's go with 138 people.
Out of 138 people, 60 of them would be not just be disappointed, but angry. 66 of them would be silently disappointed, enough to where they'd stop reading. Even if the fanfiction was good. That's a huge win—readers have standards.
Out of 138 people, only 7—yes, 7—would continue reading an AI-generated fanfic.
And of course, reblogs were quite vocal about their decision.
Agreed, my friend.
My second poll turned to writers now, asking;" Do you use AI in your writing?"
Out of 110 votes, these were the results:
Out of 110 writers, 83 of them were not using AI and never would. 7 writers admitted to using AI as a technical tool for fixing grammar, punctuation, etc—but most of the fanfic was human-made. 4 voters use AI for some creative brainstorming; however, most of the work was theirs.
None of these writers use AI to do any writing for them. The fanfiction they write and post is proudly theirs, and more power to them. This is what we should be doing.
And to note, I did not post these polls in a biased community. This is the writers community of Tumblr. 100% anonymous, so there was no backlash if they did use AI.
And I'll admit that 250 votes is a small pool. However, it can't be discredited. AI enjoyers appear to be the minority. They still exist, of course, but they don't speak for us writers. Writing at its core is about people, and I'm glad we seem to understand that.
And this is only the beginning; AI is still in its infancy. As it invades more of our treasured spaces, the anti-AI sentiment will only grow. Look at subreddits like r/AntiAI, with over 71k active members and 200k visitors a week. Medium, one of the largest publishing platforms in America, have recently banned AI-articles from its Partner Program.
Subreddit forums have started banning AI content because it's spammy and unoriginal. Some of these subreddits have hundreds of thousands of members, and when an AI ban is announced, the comments are overwhelmingly supportive.
All of this to say: humans prefer real writing. This is never going to change no matter how big AI gets.
In conclusion:
How do you cope with AI writing?
You write.
Write for your own sanity. Write to help others laugh. Write because it's fun.
Since the dawn of time, lazy people have lurked in the background—people who are lazy, shallow, and validation-seeking. They're the type of person to trace your art and claim it as their own. Or the type of person who copes your fanfic, word-for-word, but they change the setting and names.
AI is just another way for these people to keep being lazy.
Do not waste your time with them. Spend that precious time writing, drawing, and doing what you do best: being human.
This post was proudly written without AI assistance.
Heyyy I'm Brainstreams (AKA: Adrian). If you like this article, feel free to follow and support me! My mission is to create consistent, authentic writing without burnout!
Im really curious about your process! Digital signage software?? Would you be willing to share some about how you make your art?
I already have shared roughly what my process is, in the post you’re referencing in this ask. I don’t feel comfortable sharing screenshots of my works in progress for several reasons - one, because I am doing most of it out of hours on my work computer, and I have sensitive information stored on it, and two, because I hate my work. Especially during the halfway mark, because it doesn’t look anything like what I want it to yet.
I was the same way when I was doing physical art. There is a very small amount people who I don’t mind showing things to because I know them well enough to know their judgements.
It’s basically. You know how you can play with contrast and lighting and colour balance? I do a lot of that. I use the signage software equivalent of the Magic Wand to select colours and put gradients and masks over them. I “cut” the figures out of the photograph and remove the backgrounds, and I play with layers and textures from stock images.
It’s all trial and error and I keep going until I don’t hate it anymore, at which point I share it on here and hope that it resonates with people (and that they don’t accuse me of using AI).
(I use signage design software because I am a sign writer by trade. In case anyone was wondering)
May I ask what scanners / equipment / software you're using in the utena art book project? I'm an artist and half the reason I rarely do traditional art is because I'm never happy with the artwork after it's scanned in. But the level of detail even in the blacks of Utena's uniform were all captured so beautifully! And even the very light colors are showing up so well! I'd love to know how you manage!
You know what's really fun? This used to be something you put in your site information section, the software and tools used! Not something that's as normal anymore, but let's give it a go, sorry it's long because I don't know what's new information and what's not! Herein: VANNA'S 'THIS IS AS SPECIFIC AS MY BREAK IS LONG' GUIDE/AIMLESS UNEDITED RAMBLE ABOUT SCANNING IMAGES
Scanning:
Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for?
The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)
Post-processing:
Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how.
NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand!
The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person.
From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.
My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.
As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:
If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.
What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:
Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:
In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.
For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.
Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)
Ahem. I hope that helps, and or was interesting to someone!!!
i do actually think adding a Tumblr content label for AI generated images would be useful for everyone, wouldn't fuck up anyone's day that actually wanted to post or look at ai pics, and I doubt the corpos that are paying tumblr for ai dataset feeding would care either. maybe it's just the verification process putting more stress on the already-failing content checking infrastructure that's the holdup. it's not like labeling something "mature" or "drugs" or something you can just look at and see whether it is or not, unless they made it a fully community-based vote they would be showing increasingly-realistic AI slop to moderators and asking them to determine whether they were AI or not to trigger the label and I don't think it's possible. we're already at a point where the average gen alpha doesn't know the difference between "Photoshop" and "AI" and uses the terms interchangeably. edit: and, I forgot to add but meant to, we are already at a point where grizzled old fake picture-spotters like myself cannot always 100% accurately determine if something is AI. the realism gap is going to close almost completely within a year for anyone using generative software that has current updates and a prompter that is careful about picking which output to post. the realism gap is already closed for careful prompters, anyone who gets lucky and doesn't get weird hands or text, and any image which is of subject matter niche enough to fly under most people's radars.
the label could be phrased to accommodate this, as in, "XXXX out of XXXX users (let's say enough reports trigger a voting mechanism, idk) believe this media is AI-generated, photoshopped, or otherwise tampered with" but who knows how helpful it would actually be.
they did some research a while back on the effect of knowing photos of women had been retouched in Photoshop on the audience's self-image. they found that contrary to expectations, Photoshop labels made the test subjects feel worse about their own self image than they did when shown Photoshopped images of models that did not have a disclaimer on them. I've been mulling that one over for a while now. and since this is the dipshit idiot moron website no this last anecdote is not me saying "labeling fake media is useless", I still think fake media should be labeled. it just raises questions about the assumed benefits of the labeling. "knowing a picture is fake" is not a benefit that needs to be tested in the case of, for example, fake historical photographs.
