blackwwatch

[blackwwatch]

[ID: a screenshot of the “Almost Christmas” Ace Attorney meme behind a slightly transparent stock image of an ice cube. End ID.]

it’s defrosting

[blackwwatch]

bronzong for @robotjuice, snom for @ophanimon and galarian ziggy for @oculae :) thank you for commissioning me!

[blackwwatch]

anybody else feel that being human is like being a long-time syndicated cartoon character watching the world get more complex while your own design stays the same until youre incongruous with the reality around you??

[blackwwatch]

southern china in winter snow

[blackwwatch]

A few more from that frozen fog morning in 2015. I wonder if I'll ever see anything like it again!

[blackwwatch]

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

[blackwwatch]

Free, non-AI art reference images: female African lions.

Sourced from the Exotic Animal Photo Reference Repository

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use these photos as references, including works that will/may be sold. Go forth and make lions!

Want more lion reference images? Find them here.

** Patreon ** -- *Ko-Fi**

[blackwwatch]

Вставай, скоро молоко раздавать будут!…

[blackwwatch]

Kacheek

A lot of the patients who come to the hospital are so worn, that their people opt to recover them (like Pojo a few weeks ago). But sometimes the humans love the well worn look and just want to reinforce their stuffed friend. So then, we line them in new fabric to reinforce them from the inside, and stitch their wounds shut to the lining. This was the case for Kacheek.

Kacheek is tiny! 4x4x1.5 inches. Here are his diagnosis photos:

For lining, stuffing has to come out, which means it needs to be replaced because it won't go back in the same, so usually lining patients have a spa too, since they're already unstuffed.

Kacheek was so small, his bubble bath photo ended up too blurry to share, but he did get a bath! Then he was lined, and got restuffed. Of course, he got a heart of original stuffing too. :-)

You can see his lining peaking through there.

And here he is all better! Fully lined and wounds repaired

You can see the lining shows where he had larger holes, but it is a texture match to his original fabric, and a color match to the original color, so will age to blend very well.

He put his shirt back on before he went home:

His person wrote:

Looks fantastic! I'm happy to see him all better and still smiling like I remember.

Kacheek's family was local, so he got picked up and went home in their arms.

[blackwwatch]

You've got your balls tied to the stock price like a cinderblock.

Totally normal dialogue to include 24 minutes into your pilot episode

[blackwwatch]

it's a shame you can't Cool, Silent, and Mysterious your way to being very close to people. we are unfortunately going to have to embarrass ourselves for this

[blackwwatch]

regular day in elysium

[blackwwatch]

Undertale - enjoying holiday Sans and papyrus

[blackwwatch]

The coolest thing about Undertale imo is that it’s not done with realistic graphics and so much of it is charming to your imagination and your sense of whimsy. You have to interpret and minds-eye a lot of the stuff in the game. The sprites themselves are of course, well made and adorable, but that you have to extrapolate the visuals yourself engages you in a creative and emotional way. 

You do get emotive visuals, like the Toriel hug, the angryface mannequin hopping around, but there���s a lot you get drawn into… conceptually, not because you’re seeing a literal tangible sadness. The shadowed statue being dripped on, and you can give it an umbrella. Blooky calling Mettaton’s show on the air because there’s no other way to reach him. The patch of yellow flowers near the garbage dump. Papyrus’s home-made rickety sentry station. “Sn… o… wy?”

The environments are so clean and the characters so simply drawn, it makes all of this emotional charge so obvious. 

This’s so, so well done through the fights. You’re just a heart in a box, but you’re creating an entire scene in your head according to how the attacks are drawn. You can sense the idea of Undyne whipping a spear at you forcing you to duck, or Sans throwing you bodily around the room as you jump back to evade a wall of bones shattering your body, or Mettaton dancing so fast his legs nearly hit you, or the inversion of Papyrus’s gravity magic where you leap over an immense bone at the end, the reality-defying height of the jump communicated through the UI having to change around you. 

Realistic fanart of Undertale’s fights is one of my fave things because of the realisation of the merely implied action we all saw and collectively dreamed a movie out of.

[blackwwatch]

I was working on another pic, but Ultimate Human came in the mail today and suddenly everything was Tony and Bruce and everything hurt.

[blackwwatch]

Please don’t cry… I love you.

[blackwwatch]

The rest under the cut:

Keep reading