Game of Thrones Daily
The Bowery Presents
hello vonnie
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
official daine visual archive
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Origami Around
Interview Vampire Daily
No title available
shark vs the universe
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
ellievsbear
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Fai_Ryy
@theartofmadeline
bliss lane
taylor price
titsay
seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from France
seen from Brazil
seen from Iraq
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia
seen from Nepal
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from South Korea
seen from Canada
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from Austria
@thatfriendyoualreadyhave
🌈HAPPY YAOI DAY!
It's officially 801 day & I've been working hard to get you all my new BL merch in time!
🎉Trinkets & Goodies
acggoods.com/store/rainystudios
👕Apparel & More
etsy.com/shop/RainyStudiosArt
More to come( >ω6)!
Well got new charms for my Cinnamoroll bag 😂
Happy Yaoi Day! 8/01
'GUARDS GET THAT MAN PREGNANT,'
'Is This BL?,' 'Yaoi Aibou,' Keychains, Charms, Pillows
and more at
▶️Etsy: RainyStudiosArt
▶️ACGgoods: Rainystudios
under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.
14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."
and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.
so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.
on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.
probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.
@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??
As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.
so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.
i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.
the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.
these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.
this is one of those "no actually this regulation exists for a reason" laws much like work place safety and building fire codes (that Republicans keep trying to roll back) and is written in blood just like them as well. it's just not human blood this time, and the fact that people actually cared enough about long term future over short term profit to get it put in place is nothing short of astonishing. That it didn't get put in place in time to save several species is heart breaking.
Ecco the Dolphin: Complete announced - Gematsu
A&R Atelier has announced Ecco the Dolphin: Complete, a remaster collection including all versions of Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time, as well as a new Ecco game that “extends the journey into the modern era.” Platforms and a release date were not announced.
Here is an overview of the game, via A&R Atelier:
About
Ecco the Dolphin: Complete is a comprehensive new package that takes players on a journey through time and through the history of one of gaming’s most iconic franchises. In Ecco the Dolphin: Complete, Ecco swims through time itself, from the 8-bit Master System era through the 16-bit Genesis / Mega Drive generation and into a brand-new contemporary game built for the modern era. This is the complete, definitive Ecco the Dolphin experience, created by the people who made the originals. A remaster done as it should be.
Early Preview Access and Community
Ecco the Dolphin invites you for the Earth Day celebration at the official website. To participate in early access, preview Ecco content, and connect directly with the development team, visit the official website—the singular source of information and access to the team building the future of Ecco the Dolphin.
Made by the People Who Made Ecco
Ecco the Dolphin: Complete is built by original members of the Ecco development team, reunited after more than 30 years, and includes original creator Ed Annunziata along with members of the original composition, art, and programming teams. No one else can make this game. The people who created Ecco‘s world, its music, its atmosphere, and its mysteries are the ones bringing it forward. This is not an outside studio’s interpretation. This is Ecco as it was always meant to be—realized by the minds that dreamed it into existence.
Every Version. Every Era. Every Ocean.
The package includes all versions of Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time, the original, immutable games from the early ’90s, preserved and freely explorable. Alongside the classics, a brand-new contemporary Ecco game extends the journey into the modern era, weaving the history of the franchise together into a single, unified experience.
Built for Players, Streamers, and Speedrunners
Ecco the Dolphin: Complete features built-in speedrunning support, achievements, and leaderboards. Meta quests span across the original games and the new contemporary title, creating challenges that thread through the entire Ecco universe. Custom courses let players and creators chart their own path through any combination of levels from any game in the franchise and share them with the community.
💐😊I was so inspired from all the artists @ Citrus Con and all the nostalgic panels I had to go back to my origins of 💯% indulgent angelic nekomimi cat boys 🐾. It's been a nice weekend💝
If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.
Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn't said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.
Get more from Rainy Studios on Patreon
Find out how Akiko & Cen became friends! ( ⸝⸝´꒳`⸝⸝)
🎁Free to Read!
🎄Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!🎄
This guy is completely right in his breakdown. One reason I hate people worrying too much about "AI Tells" is because experimentation IS how you build your style & improve. If I'd grown up today I'm sure someone would've accused me of AI because starting out I tried SO many different things in art🎨
This is just a small bit of what I drew around 2006-2009. But this was when I used DA & had a collection of favorite artists who made me wanna try a ton of new things. I got BIG into experimenting with digital art & traditional media. It's ok if your work is all over the place. Some of these things I know I could have drawn within the same month, maybe even week (especially during summer breaks). I was all over the place and I had the /best/ time of my fucking life lol.
I've seen too many people go by mild inconsistencies to claim someone uses AI & I absolutely know this is making new people afraid of experimentation and just doing "Whatever" to have fun. I hope you can overcome that fear and go for it. But if you're genuinely worried save consistent progress shots or do a screen record. I hope this video is able to help some of you who may be struggling. I hate seeing 'AI fraud' posts when someone's style is somewhat inconsistent. It's one thing if they're outputting fully rendered pieces every day or two but another completely when people are genuinely learning & trying new things.
But never stop creating because a handful of fuckers are trying to ruin it for everyone. Hang in there, have fun.
Finding my way back to my roots 🦌👾
Post Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nsfw-bonus-141526564
I am still mildly flabbergasted that a whole article came out, where the reporter dug into how the modern terf movement has been infiltrated by neonazis and how happy said nazis are about the infighting in both feminism and queer spaces.
And people refuse to look at the infighting and question who set up the argument?
The source of organized opposition to trans rights in the USA can be whittled down to less than a hundred people. It’s the same names in the same orgs writing the same papers, petitioning government representatives. The same handful pushing for conflict.
We have one guy who said out loud that he had put his media power to focus the entire culture war on CRT and we watched it work. We watched everyone get focused in on something that wasn’t even being taught in public schools because it’s a uni level topic.
Who’s starting the fight?
Who’s telling you that this person doesn’t belong under the umbrella?
Who’s telling you to kick your siblings out?
Who’s telling you to gatekeep and exclude when we’re all under fire internationally?
Where did the story start?
Who benefits?
Cause it’s not us. We don’t benefit.
A 2020 article from Radix Journal, a far-right publication founded by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, lays out a strategy for doing just that. In the article, entitled “The TERF to Dissident Right Pipeline,” author Kat S. notes that TERFs’ insistence on “biological sex” as an immutable binary—all “men” depraved and violent, all “women” fragile victims—may make it easier to convince them of other biological hierarchies. Their insistence on seeing trans women as “violent men,” in particular, can be weaponized against men of colour and turned into overt white supremacy. “It doesn’t take any thinking woman long to see exactly which men are committing violent crime and the majority of partner violence, and race realism is a natural next step.” Ultimately, the article reasons, it should be easy to convince TERFs that supporting the rights of “biological women” means rejecting “the mid-to-late 20th century Jewish-led feminist theory,” particularly the “corporate slavery” of work outside the home, in favour of accepting their biologically ordained role as wives and mothers. “A pro family, pro natalist movement requires some degree of female participation,” Kat S. writes, “and reframing the patriarchy paradigm is essential.” Ultimately, TERFs must be led to see patriarchy as “a system where men’s urges and strengths are allowed to flourish and channeled into healthy outlets, and women are protected and respected for their material reality and the gifts our unique biology affords.” [......]
I spoke to researchers in multiple countries for this piece and all of them agreed that anti-trans activists were becoming increasingly comfortable with presenting their arguments in a white supremacist framework, presenting transition care as an attack on white fertility and white birth rates specifically. Sometimes, this is subtle: Irreversible Damage, a 2020 book in which author Abigail Shrier portrays youth transition as an imminent threat to the fertility of “our daughters,” infamously uses a cover illustration of a young white girl with her uterus scooped out of her body. At the extremes, things get more overt. Alix Aharon, the “GenderMapper” organizer who has led the charge against Planned Parenthood as the “apex of the trans lobby,” also insists transition is only a threat to white children; “Black youth are not transitioning,” she writes. This obsessive focus on white fertility is of a piece with fascist propaganda about being overrun or replaced by people of colour. “There is a growing body of propaganda about ‘white genocide,’” says Mallory Moore of the U.K.-based Trans Safety Network. “We queer and trans people, and feminists for that matter, are refusing to do our national duty to breed.” Schevers says that the conspiratorial thinking that dominates TERF circles easily extends to incorporate other civil rights movements—whereas trans people might be framed as a plan to weaken the white race through “sexual degeneracy,” movements like Black Lives Matter are suspected of being unwitting tools of the trans. “They’re talking about Black Lives Matter [being] co-opted by the trans lobby,” she says. “Again, it’s very similar to Nazi propaganda. ‘This Jewish elite has captured this Black civil rights movement and it’s actually just an attack on white people.’” At this point, “transphobia” no longer seems like an adequate description of the problem. “Transphobia” implies hating trans people. Believing that the existence of trans people is a Jewish plot to destroy the white race by lowering white AFAB people’s fertility is, to be crude, a whole new level of fucked up. Yet these ideas are reaching the mainstream, laundered through a sympathetic commentariat that scrubs off their far-right associations. For instance, as researcher Christa Peterson has documented, Helen Joyce’s recent book Trans repeats Bilek’s “Jewish billionaires” theory without citing her by name. Joyce was then reviewed by anti-trans commentator Jesse Singal in the New York Times,and Singal—while calling Joyce’s book “an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight”—neglected to mention Jewish billionaires at all. Dig two inches down, and you’ll find the Nazis, but on the surface, it looks like reasonable “debate.”
ANALYSIS: The terrifying confluence of anti-trans thinkers, American evangelicals, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and global purveyors of
Nice summary of the people involved in the anti-trans political push in the US:
The biggest voice back in 2021 to put Critical Race Theory in the news was a man named Christopher Rufo.
“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
The right’s leading culture warrior has invented a leftist takeover of America to justify his very real power grabs.
Told my doctor and therapist about how the AI "trying to determine my age" will expose all the HIPPA covered private information that has passed through gmail and all the medical advice youtube videos they had linked over the years and the response was instantly I will contact the other doctors here and lodge a formal complaint about it to HIPPA Try this, tell your local librarians, teachers, doctors. Most people have not heard about this yet, that's how it is passing
omg I forget the US has actual institutions that work for the good of the people
They do exist and we have to use them the next 1,246 days.
A good example of the problem with what YouTube is doing by pushing "an experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning".
It fundamentally changes how the artwork actually looks and makes it's own decisions on how to "improve" it.
bonus for a laugh
A brief list of fun things YouTube has done in the past for their users:
Make videos harder to monetize,
make videos easier to get demonetized for saying certain "adult" words (like suicide, rape, or pedophilia, making legitimate videos discussing these topics into a clown show because they have to censor the words or god forbid say "grape" and "unalive"),
make it easy for false companies to instigate copyright takedowns of things they don't own,
censoring (just refusing to post/show) comments that mention certain topics like 'feminism' or other 'hot topics' even if it's a serious and legitimate discussion,
don't allow people to block channels or users,
demonetizing and unlisting videos posting LGBTQIA+ topics [https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-censorship-877919/],
forcefully change how media is categorized (Someone's video was changed to 'for kids' simply when it has 'mickey mouse' in it and youtube would not let them change it back),
most recently the AI AGE VERIFICATION
auto dubbing
This AI "upscaling" horseshit
Rolling out a whole gen AI shorts program that will flood youtube with garbage.
I can't imagine that all of these changes they keep making that NO one can opt out of that use even more resources are somehow more efficient or improve quality of life. I have zero faith that YouTube is doing this as an 'oopsie my bad' when their track record has been garbage for about 10 years.
I loved this era of Steven universe discourse
Reblogging again with tags a follower added because they are correct. No you are not insane for reading that deeply into the overall reaction to SU and im glad you said it.
This sort of problem runs deep and i see it fucking everywhere.
💯No exaggeration this is HANDS DOWN, the BEST, ABSOLUTE BEST talk/video/coverage of the censorship issue I HAVE EVER SEEN. 5 minutes in I knew it was going to be amazing, and EVERY point she made had me going 'YES, THIS EXACTLY!' Please watch this, share it everywhere, & send it to everyone you know.
Everything she talks about is something EVERYONE will have to reckon with, you don't get to opt out because it's affecting us all. So once again, everyone needs to watch this.
"Youtube is applying post-processing to all shorts so they look more like Al. this is intentional & malicious. when their generative Al shorts feature launches users will be less likely to discern what's Al-slop and what's not, and the audience will think Al video is just as good"
Please be aware.
If everything starts to look a little off and a little fake, it's much easier for bad actors to not only push through actual disinformation, but also attempt to discredit factual video sources.
Additionally, Youtube has been pushing out an auto-translating AI dub, which I haven't seen people mention yet, but have experienced myself and I've seen lots of comments from non-English speaking natives a lot on various videos. This AI dub overlaps over creators English speaking videos with an AI dub that the creator can't even turn off, and the viewer can't turn it off either.
I just want to point out that in the first video, he doesn't say that he thinks this is "intentional & malicious" like the other one does.
What he DOES say is "I'm not totally sure why youtube is doing this... I don't particularly think that it's something nefarious right off the bat... Of all the theories I've seen so far, I think the most plausible one is that they are using it to save data, save space on servers... Some kind of performance related issue where they're trying to downscale the data and then upscale with AI and thinking no one is going to notice. But as a YouTube creator I have a huge problem with this."
I'm not entirely sold on the idea that this is a plot by YouTube to make AI more indistinguishable from real content, even though that is absolutely an effect of this dgmw, it's a very bad thing they're doing. But I'm hesitant to frame this as a malicious action. Either way, this shit sucks and we need to make YouTube aware that this is unacceptable. Stay vigilant friends.
One of the core problems with YouTube though that it's had for a LONG time is that they're actively hostile towards their userbase. Make videos harder to monetize, make videos easier to get demonetized for saying certain "adult" words (like suicide, rape, or pedophilia, making legitimate videos discussing these topics into a clown show because they have to censor the words or god forbid say "grape" and "unalive"), make it easy for false companies to instigate copyright takedowns of things they don't own, censoring (just refusing to post/show) comments that mention certain topics like 'feminism' or other 'hot topics' even if it's a serious and legitimate discussion, don't allow people to block channels or users, demonetizing and unlisting videos posting LGBTQIA+ topics [https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-youtube-lawsuit-censorship-877919/], forcefully change how media is categorized (Someone's video was changed to 'for kids' simply when it has 'mickey mouse' in it and youtube would not let them change it back), and of course most recently the AI AGE VERIFICATION, and now auto dubbing and AI "upscaling"! I can't imagine that all of these changes they keep making that NO one can opt out of that use even more resources are somehow more efficient or improve quality of life. Don't forget YouTube is owned by Google. Google has had employees leave because their warnings about AI/tech were ignored [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-dangers-of-machine-learning]. I have zero faith that YouTube is doing this as an 'oopsie my bad' when their track record has been garbage for about 10 years.
EDIT: OH HOW COULD I FORGET 💀They're rolling out a whole program for users to make generative AI video shorts soon lmao. It's going to be flooded with garbage
