Volt Siren's Art Corner

Art blog for my art stuff :D

[plaguedperson]

that's how the ship goes right

also couldn't find the meme template so went off of memory one hundred emoji

[chickenburgergmod]

what if spy had a built in emot-

[bixels]

MLP x 1920s, The Grand Galloping 20s.

I went back and touched up some proportions and lines in these models. Hard to believe it's been another year! Thanks for everyone's support.

[depsidase]

[theperksofneurodivergency]

The mental gymnastics required to say that effort doesn’t require effort is fucking insane

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[rockergiirl]

[cracklewink]

god’s honest truth 🍎

[voidsentprinces]

[directactionforhope]

Delighted to be able to source this.

Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot

Google's Gemini is on pace to push Copilot into third place.

"Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft's substantial AI investment.

Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it's not making much money from its AI products. That's because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports."

-via Extreme Tech, December 10, 2025

[adonischildsupportcase]

[thevoltsiren]

Mijo mantra

[escuerzoresucitado]

[doberbutts]

Anyway with anti-sodomy laws back on the discussion table I'm going to repeat that you can personally be squicked out by the consensual sex someone else has, but saying that their consensual sex between willing, active, adult participants should be illegal and is indicative of some sort of moral failing is L I T E R A L L Y a major facet in extreme homophobia and absolutely has gotten people killed.

You don't have to like their business but as long as everyone involved in the encounter is saying yes, it's also really not your business.

This is the precident you are helping further by digging your heels in and saying 'but I think it's gross and makes them bad people'. This is what happened last time that was the reasoning for law, and what is being threatened to happen again.

[doberbutts]

"but Jaz, how would they enforce it"

Easily.

People would report you to the police for any hint of it. Whether real or imagined. You held hands with someone of the same sex. Someone started a rumor that they saw you kissing. You bought a sex toy and the vendor automatically reported you. You clicked a web page or picked up a magazine that had a different suspected deviant on it and the shop owner or internet service provider automatically reported you. You had certain mannerisms. You hung out to much with a specific friend. You seemed too close to a family member. Literally anything.

In some cases people would literally peep through windows, listen at the door, even wait across the street for your guest to come over and then call the police to kick the door down and catch the two of you in the act.

Never forget that the Stonewall riot was started by one such raid where police stormed a gay bar looking to arrest as many "sodomy" and "public indecency" suspects as possible.

That's how. By encouraging people to barge into other people's private, consensual sex lives and make reports to the authorities. By encouraging people to lay traps so unsuspecting gay people could stumble into them. By encouraging people to stalk and harass anyone who showed any sign of 'being a pervert' in the name of 'protecting neighborhoods from predators'. By weaponizing the real concern for predatory behavior against people who were engaging in consensual intimacy in a way they happened to not like.

By doing exactly what I've been continuously saying is bad behavior that has gotten countless LGBT people jailed and killed.

We're not turning this against our own community. Homophobes and transphobes have already made it plenty clear they don't care how good or respectable we are, they just want us all dead.

[graceofgosh]

"how would they enforce it"

well in 2012 a guy named snowden let us know they're basically wiretapping us at all times and have gigantic collections of all our metadata and we have been living in a nice little surveillance state since 2001's patriot act

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

My uncle used to hang out in those public parks after dark where gay men would solicit sex - from each other, from sex workers, and (when they were particularly unlucky) from undercover cops.

Having sex with a partner in your home was dangerous because it was too identifiable. Your neighbors, your landlord, your family, your friends, any one of them could happen to notice if you brought a boyfriend or a one night stand home, and this was before we had any right to privacy in our homes.

So anonymous sex in the park was SAFER for gay men. As long as you didn't draw the short stick and snag a cop. A cop who would, just as they often do today with sex workers, happily have sex with you before cuffing you, walking you into the station through every reporter in town, and splashing your name and face across the morning paper with a sodomy charge. Then your life was effectively over. And they would leverage that to make you tell them names, give up others to have their lives ruined in the hopes of salvaging what was left of your own.

My uncle came a little too close one day, nearly got caught up in a raid at the park he was at with some friends. He illustrated children's books for a living. If he was caught he would never work again. So he fled. Borrowed some money from my mother and *fled the country*. He only came back once a year, long enough to fulfill visa requirements. He only came back with his boyfriend in 2005 when my mother assured him that things were safer.

If the enforcement of these laws could ruin lives like that back then, how badly do you think it could go for us in the era of unprecedented near total surveillance? Our memories need to be long enough to remember that these laws and the methods used to enforce them are not hypothetical. They have already happened and ARE already happening. There is precedent, there are known mechanisms, and there are known ways to gum up the works too.

[lynati]

You also don't have to be doing anything at all to tip people off; all it takes is someone REPORTING that you have. I assure you, if the cops are looking to arrest people for being queer, most aren't going to care if the report is true or not- just whether it is actionable. You could be completely straight and still wind up with your name splashed across the local papers for "breaking sodomy laws".

You wonder how they can prove you did; I wonder how you expect to prove you *didn't*, in the court of social opinion if not the court of actual law. (I'm sure everyone in town will both notice and believe the retraction you get the paper to print six months later.)

[mybigfatgaylife]

My husband and I grew up under the anti-sodomy laws. They are the reason why we "straighten up" in public: we don't hold hands, we don't hug, we don't use pet names, we don't even look at each other very much. We do such a good job of it the straights regularly mistake us for brothers.

Newspapers used to have "Police Blotter" sections, which were the favorite places to name people who had been caught in anti-sodomy raids. I know men who lost their jobs and families because of this, and had to move far away. Later, when sex offender registries became a thing, moving didn't help.

I missed getting caught in a bar raid by about an hour, just because my friends and I had left to go get dinner. When we went back after dinner, we saw all the cops and at first we thought the bar had been attacked somehow, but then we figured out that no, the cops were just there to arrest everyone for the hideous crime of Being Gay In Public. (The Denver DA at the time had a hardon for closing gay bars; his public excuse was "drugs" but her office was more than happy to charge everyone under the sodomy laws and publish their names in the Denver Post's Police Blotter. The drug charges were clearly incidental.)

[guerrillatech]

imagine simping for capitalism this badly

[arsonsara]

[sailor-arashi]

A Christmas Carol never even says that Scrooge gives up anything at all, or even somehow stops being super-rich.  He just stops being a dick about it and starts using his wealth to help people.  Scrooge isn’t even written as an indictment of rich people, since plenty others appear in the story and are presented as perfectly nice people.  Scrooge is a miser.  He doesn’t even use his money to help himself, which is called out as the reason he dies within the year.  Learning to care for himself is just as much part of the Ghosts’ lessons as learning to care for other people.

[marzipanandminutiae]

how dare Charles Dickens, a man once sent to work in a factory at age 12 while his father was in debtors’ prison, inflict such Wokery upon us as “caring about the poor”

[beggars-opera]

I also love the implication in this headline that the whole point of the story sailed straight over the heads of like six generations until it hit ours and this is our fault for some reason

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[artyphex]

I don’t know how to explain to some of you that it’s okay for creators to make money

Like yes capitalism sucks the endless stream of sequels and marvel movies and rehash after rehash is exhausting but when we’re talking about indie studios, even the larger ones like Critical Role, some of you are just so quick to jump to “soulless cash grab” at the slightest hint that there may be a profit based motive behind a project. Which. There literally always is

The idea of the starving artist has given us the concept they “good” creators never think about money even when they’ve managed to pull off the miracle of being a full time creator. That’s rare, and precarious. Sometimes they will have no choice to put profit before creativity because that’s literally what they need to survive. If they give a shit, which it’s incredibly bad faith to assume they don’t, they’ll still try to make that profit-motivated project good and enjoyable. Because they know putting out a bad product won’t generate that oh so evil profit and they just CARE and want to put good art in the world regardless of the motive

Some of y’all just straight up hate when creators are successful or put any thought towards profit. I’m not saying you’re doing that purposefully, you’re jaded, I get it, but you’ve got to start allowing some nuance because even the most original, anti-establishment creator needs to fucking eat

So many of the people I see saying this are aspiring creators themselves. What do you think you’re going to have to do? Do you think you’ll just magically be an exception? We all live in the same world. If you want to be a creative professionally, always remember what you said and what your subject did in situations like this, because it will happen to you

[astershock]

everstones don’t work on tandemaus lmao

[weeaboo-god]

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[tiktoksijustthinkareneat]

[dominonary]

me: time to doodle! hm i wonder that the last thing open in my art program is

last thing open in my art program:

ok yug fair enough

[katrinageist]

When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  

It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.  

There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.

When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.

[jumpingjacktrash]

what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.

[kelseyridge13]

There’s an interesting level here in that Jack tried to understand Christmas town. He could see the magic while he was there, and he did try to explain it that way to citizens of Halloween town.  But they weren’t interested in the kind of life he was describing, so he started “rebranding” Christmas so that it was not like Christmas but was like Halloween. The people of Halloween town, never having actually encountered Christmas, have no way of knowing that what they’re being told about Christmas and “Sandy Claws” is inaccurate. Jack also tried to study Christmas and its culture, though he couldn’t quite get it; eventually, he literally decides to take it for himself, even as he knows it’s not really for him.  He started out feeling sad the others in Halloween town didn’t ‘get it,’ but he then decided it’s not important to fully ‘get it’ but instead to have it.

So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.

[calamitycons]

This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”