An Ace Place

Nope.

[tesnick-k]

Hey everyone, I’m opening my commissions for the summer! I’ve mostly been drawing characters from a LARP I’m involved in, so I’m very happy to draw peoples OCs from fantasy to horror. Anything from quick, silly memes to full renders. I charge £13 an hour so I’ll consult for each commission and give you a quote based on how long I think it will take. The quote will represent the maximum free, if I do it faster than my estimate, the comm will be discounted!

[crimethinc]

A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security

Fighting Back, Staying Free

https://crimethinc.com/opsec

How do police and federal agents identify and target those who participate in demonstrations? What countermeasures can we take to hinder this kind of repression? In this anonymously submitted text, one affinity group explores how they address these questions.

Once upon a time, only those who intended to engage in high-risk confrontational protest activity had to concern themselves with surveillance and security. Today, surveillance and policing are becoming much more invasive and arbitrary. Even if you never violate any law, the state may nonetheless seek to make an example of you. Everyone who might participate in a demonstration at some point should familiarize themselves with the security protocols that radicals have developed over the years.

[lesbianshepard]

if an archaeologist says an artifact was probably for “ritual purposes” it means “i have no fuckin clue”

but if they say it was for “fertility rituals” they mean “i know exactly what it was for but i dont want to say ‘ancient dildo’”

[thecringeandwincefactory-deacti]

Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.

Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.

Some examples:

Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness. 

I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like, 

A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.

Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it. 

I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase. 

Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.

[workfornow]

This is absolutely the MOST unusual reblog I have ever tagged with what is probably my second-favorite tag, “talk to me about your work.”

Plus it’s hilarious.

[cloudfreed]

I love ancient art history !!!!!

[clockshunddachshund]

@lowercasetrashwriter

[scrimblobimblobadimbo-deactivat]

Museums should have sections dedicated to artifacts like these with a warning that says “There’s a lot of private parts in here but we’re dedicated to displaying history so we won’t censor these. Enter at your own risk” or something. It’s prudish to deliberately hide history because of some ding dongs.

[dovewithscales]

Fucking Puritanism.

Unpopular opinion: Sex exists. Making body parts taboo is both psychologically bad for us and kinda stupid.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Do you got any "how to get away with shit" guides for the young and stupid

No Trace Project

No trace, no case. A collection of tools to help anarchists and other rebels understand the capabilities of their enemies, undermine surveil

[azspot]

Magic Arena developers say they were told to relocate or effectively lose their jobs

It's one of many reasons that workers tell Polygon they are eager to unionize.

Employees and developers working on Magic: The Gathering Arena say they were hired with promises of remote flexibility, so they bought homes and built lives around those assurances. But they say they are now being told they may need to relocate to Washington state — or effectively lose their jobs.

Those concerns are a major reason why a supermajority of workers on the Arena team are attempting to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, under the banner United Wizards of the Coast. The group publicly launched its campaign on April 27, calling on Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the union by May 1.

[apricops]

These employees are doing important and laudable work in response to being forced into a bad situation but I’m glad they still took the opportunity to call themselves “United Wizards”

[basic-bamboo]

WotC has still refused to recognize the union and has escalated to sending organizers letters directly to their homes about how unionizing is a bad idea. Luckily, our United Wizards are educated, organized, and agitated and the form letter from Hasbro was as laughable as it was threatening.

If you want to help out the United Wizards you can sign this petition

cwa.org/uwotcletter

Solidarity baby!

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[imanwithoutbowie-deactivated202]

Continue✨ Keep going✨

[tartrazeen]

Thank you, lady 🤗

[kukoyi-deactivated20210512]

The Nigerian accent. God. She reminds me of home…

[everybodywantstorueltheworld-de]

Always grateful when this makes the rounds

[mamawolfsmith87]

In case anyone needs this today or ever.

[vault-of-amber]

discussing horrible old men with mutual 🫶

[tesnick-k]

@lynurnur

[elbiotipo]

Also I am asking all of you, once again, to learn about ecosystem conservation and restoration instead of wallowing in "we are already past the point of no return" or that it will take "millennia" to restore ecosystems.

You have to understand that nature does not work in the same timeframe as ours. Protecting and restoring ecosystems is RIDICULOUSLY inexpensive and requires very little industrial technology; shovels and saplings are not exactly high-tech. But it takes time and long-term projects with people determined to do it. Maybe we are too focused in our "we want it now" thinking, but what you see today is not what you may see in 10, 20, 50, even 80 years if you live that long.

But it works. It's working right now, and when capitalism is replaced by socialism and we stop thinking on short-term gain, when our societies are focused into the common welfare instead of accumulation, it will even work better. Again I could point out to individual examples but instead, I encourage you to learn about ecology. We are well past from the catastrophic "Earth will die and there's nothing we can do" predictions from the 80s. We know what to do, we know it can work.

[elbiotipo]

First-of-its-kind study definitively shows that conservation actions are effective at halting and reversing biodiversity loss

A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat

This article talks about this very much in the "see? ecology can help the economy too!" tone that unfortunately is sort of necessary to convince people in the current capitalist system. But I don't want you to focus on this right now.

I want you to KNOW how doable this is. How inexpensive this is, how POSSIBLE THIS IS. That people working and loving the land and nature they live in is possible. That these projects WORK, THEY DO restore and preserve ecosystems. That humanity is neither a plague that destroys everything or a passive bystander on its own destruction but that these are actual things that can be, are, and will be implemented, backed by actual science and results. This is not empty #hopecore #hopepunk feel good stuff, these are things you can learn about, even work towards, and you can most certainly demand they are part of our society.

Are you listening to me?

[solarpunkcast]

"I'm just losing hope." Then get some fucking conviction. Millions of people around the globe are working their asses off and seeing results. What they are doing IS WORKING.

This orange peel story was huge years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/a-fruitful-experiment-in-land-conservation/

Beavers reintroduced to historic wetlands improve them at such a level that we can see the improvements from space: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/nasa-satellites-reveal-restoration-power-of-beavers/

Africa is successfully slowing desertification and restoring historic farming soil with their Green Wall project: https://welcomeafrica.org/en/africa-combats-desertification-with-a-belt-of-life/

There has even been success at regrowing coral reefs--something which I am old enough to be told was impossible. But people have been hard at work for decades since then, and this is one of the results: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308123248.htm

REPAIRING THE DAMAGE IS ENTIRELY WITHIN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY.

THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE IF YOU HAVE THE CONVICTION TO BACK IT UP.

[headspace-hotel]

whenever you have problems with writing and worldbuilding for stories, just remember COCK

C- Does it have Creatures?

O- Does it Offend the church?

C-Is it Completely unhinged?

K- Does it Kick ass?

[jinxedbabbles]

Help you I will

C - Creatures, does it have?

O - Offend the church, does it?

C - Completely unhinged, is it?

K - Kick ass, does it?

Welcome you are - Yoda

[headspace-hotel]

You have, somehow, made this post more perfect. Thank you.

[i-cant-think-of-anything-to-say]

hunting down tumblr posts i see on pinterest part 148

[headspace-hotel]

pinterest still doing good work i see

[love-ardour-anarchism]

Trans manhood and transmasculinity shouldn't have to DO anything for you as a transfem, transfemme or trans woman in order for it to be a beautiful and irreplacable part of our trans community BUT even if you put that aside... there's masculinity in each and every one of us.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: as a transfeminine butch it took viewing my masculinity from a transmasculine perspective to emotionally divorce myself from the toxic notions of societal normativity.

I was never an effeminate kid but I was SEEN as one. My masculinity was butchness even going that far back and all my peers did look at me and said "that kid's a sissy". I wore a suit and tie to school the first couple years of primary and I wrote cringy poetry for girls that I had crushes on and all my peers would look at me and say "that kid's a faggot".

And when I then came out and began transitioning, it was like shedding falser skin that never was me to begin with. But then the idea that I was now to conform to normative notions of "womanhood" hit me like a stack of bricks.

And it took trans men. It took transmasculinity. It took seeing the biggest, butchest dykes, it took looking at women, men and nonbinary people so UNLIKE EVERYTHING society broadly views as attractive who looked similar to me to learn to LOVE ME.

To learn to love the soft fur on my body, the coarse hair on my legs and arms and hands. The pits, the rolls, the bulging stomach, the small boobs, bigger upper pubic area. The stubble on my face, the way my nose hooks just so slightly. The shadow cast by hair upon my face, the way I smell when I do exercise.

It took being around people, LOVING people to whom all these things I was conditioned to believe to be fundamentally at odds with my closeness to womanhood were DESIRED traits that they STRUGGLED for. It took surrounding myself with people to whom the way I was and wanted to be wasn't things to be erased.

I'm butch. I love my body hair, I love my masculinity. I love all that. I'm not on estrogen to be less of me, myself. I'm on estrogen to be MORE of me, myself. Surrounding myself with people who love their masculinity, who STRIVE for masculinity. To whom testosterone is NOT a poison. To whom the way I am is not a state that's to be shunned or overcome.

It brought me peace. It brought self love. It brought serenity. I feel more at ease inside this body I inhibit and I have now to thank for that: trans men, transmasculine people, transmasculinity. Manhood.

I have to thank for all the love that I have found for my own self.

[ note ] Posting this while on the go so phrasing, semantics and spelling errors may remain to be fixed.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

@thatgarden

and that's the thing: I know that the very binary and transmedicalist leaning focus on "womanhood first, trans second (or never, if stealth)" and "manhood first, trans second (or never, if stealth)" is very big because its a narrative that gets validation from a cissexist and horrifically normative society but the way I see it I will always have more in common with a trans man than with a cis woman without any of the non-normativity on her part.

My womanhood, my gender, my identity is shaped and molded by my experience of it being considered transgressive.

I wasn't a woman until I forced my way out of the norms that I was raised in and I couldn't BE a woman until I asserted MYSELF as that.

A trans man or even a cis woman whose womanhood exists on other intersecting axes of societal marginalization will ALWAYS exist in a way that is more closely related to how I experience the world than a binary, societally conforming cis woman.

And let me be very clear here: this is me saying that ANY aversion, divergence and anti-normativity in a societal sense is what connects and unites me as a nonbinary transfeminine butch dyke with others.

A cis person can 100% be transgressive against societally enforced gender norms and I will always be in solidarity and unity with that person.

We are one. We are the pines swaying in the breeze of yearning for something that society will not allow. We are the children shamed for how they WERE and we're adults who assert our existence against the permission and acceptance of a hateful society. Our very existence is beautiful transgression against normativity and I will not let one or many divide me from my kin.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

Another go around while I’ve got your attention.

[the-bedheaded-league]

It’s 2025. BBC Sherlock ended 8 years ago. The last season was so bad the fans didn’t even want to talk about it when it came out. Occasionally a post resurfaces where we all laugh at struggling to plug our phones in and being called alcoholics. Every time, there are more and more people in the comments who don’t get the joke. There are two currently airing Sherlock Holmes audio dramas that both portray a queer Holmes (as well as several other excellent queer characters), and one of them now has Holmes and Watson in a canonical romantic relationship. There’s an adorable crowdfunded short film where Watson plans Holmes’ birthday party and they flirt with each other, share a bed, plan their retirement, and kiss on the mouth. A video game about retired beekeeper Holmes just released where he arranges a romantic picnic so he can finally tell Watson how he feels. A popular graphic novelist just released the first part of a queer comic book retelling of the complete Holmes canon and had to do several rounds of preorders because she kept selling out too fast. Sherlock is garbage and here’s why has 15 million views on YouTube. Nature is healing. ❤️🐝

Edit bc I forgot to drop the names: The podcasts are Sherlock & Co and Fawx & Stallion aka @224bbaker (the one with the canon gay relationship.) The short film is called The Adventure of the Furtive Festivity and it's on youtube. The video game is @beekeeperspicnic and it's on Steam. The graphic novel series is by Molly Knox Ostertag, aka @contact-guy) Please feel free to drop any other queer Holmes adaptations I may be missing.

[victorianbeanbag]

There will also be a short movie releasing in June with trans Sherlock Holmes, Johnlock and Mystrade!! You can see the news in Imagination By John on Instagram.

(I'm not even part of the project, I just think it's a cool project)

[thegeekstressart]

I’ve been slowly working on illustrating my own Tarot deck about black cats.

I have a long way to go, but I’m nearly done with the major arcana.

Here are some of my favorites:

I set myself a design challenge (as I often do). I wanted to limit the color palette and the brush styles to create a very consistent look.

And since each card focuses on black cats, it forces me to think deeply about symbolism and design to make sure the meaning of each card is clear and each design is unique.

But there’s still a lot of variety coming through. It’s not all class, or all silliness - just like cats

I have a forearm tattoo of the cats in this one ☝️

I’m so happy with how both of these two managed to feel dark, but adorable at the same time.

And then there’s this one absolute diva:

Most of these used my own feline friends for reference.

There are more but I don’t know yet how many I want to share online. If I can actually complete the entire deck I would love to have it made. But I have a ways to go, so for now I continue to chip away, one card at a time.

[sartorialadventure]

Viking dresses by Savelyeva Ekaterina

[petermorwood]

Another visual demonstration that historical clothing wasn’t dingy and monochrome.

All of these colours can be obtained from vegetable dyes, producing different shades depending on what mordant (colour fixative - alum, different metal filings, different vinegars) was used. See here and here for examples.

[willowofthehearth]

BRING THIS FASHION BACK.

[thevagueambition]

Not clothes, but this was a palette developed by the National Museum of Denmark based on paint residue from archaeological finds for the purpose of painting a reconstructed hall.

Apparently, they can tell from the chemical composition that the colours wouldn’t be mixed with black or white to mute them, but be used in their brightest form. Bright yellow and red was achieved with expensive dyes (orpiment and cinnabar) and was thus fashionable. (Source in Danish)

[kalessinsdaughter]

@athingofvikings

[cicadianrhythm]

What is a man? An ecstatic little pile of pigments.

[sartorialadventure]

^reblogging for that comment

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Forever reminder that the ancient world was colorful everywhere, and every attempt to brownwash it in modern fiction is sheer laziness.

[misselaney]

Natural Black Hair Tutorial! Usually Black hair is excluded in the hair tutorials which I have seen so I have gone through it in depth because it’s really not enough to tell someone simply, “Black hair is really curly, draw it really curly.” 

The next part of Black Hair In Depth will feature styles and ideas for designing characters and I will release it around February. If you would like to see certain styles, please shoot me a message!

[anglaised]

ayo imma block u if u follow me and u a trans guy and post about how ull never be male btw like if thats ur belief okay sorry for u i guess hope u find therapy but 9/10 yall immediately start talking like 4channers and tbfh i just assume ur racist on top of that too…..donot say “foid” in my house….u r banned from my property

[oliviarampaige]

“Borealis”

Day 25 - Dangerous

The ol’ North Wind starts to howl.