grumpyoldsnake

[grumpyoldsnake]

Hopping on the Vine compilation bandwagon, part 1/?

[grumpyoldsnake]

It wasn't meant to be.

[grumpyoldsnake]

When you're a kid/teenager everyone expects you to base your career around your passions and interests and that works for a lot of people but it's not the full story. I wish they would also teach students to consider the lifestyle that career would require.

Like... if I had to choose a passion and work a career around it, I would probably work at a zoo or aquarium. But those jobs require a lot of schooling with STEM classes (which I hate) and a lot of early mornings (which make me feel ill) and an obligation to work in person with no flexibility to move (which makes me depressed). So even if I'd enjoy caring for animals all day, it's not a good career path for me.

My current job is travel writing, which is not my passion. I like it, but it's not my passion. But I work a flexible schedule, I can live anywhere, I get a travel stipend, and my team is really chill. So it works for me.

Rather than solely focusing on "What topics do you like?" I think we should ask students "Of the careers that suit your preferred lifestyle, which are the most interesting?"

[grumpyoldsnake]

How I made the puppets for Nobody’s Wolf Child’s “Selkie” music video.

Full Video

Follow me on Patreon for tutorials!

[grumpyoldsnake]

The Leech is a powerful and dangerous animal, not to be trusted

ID: 20 second video of a dark brown leech slowly sniffing my hand underwater, then gently swimming away and burrowing into the mud. "Mountain Village" from Pikuniku is playing. end ID.

[grumpyoldsnake]

Illustration commission for @krtart of Piper and Lis working out how to make Creme Brulee! Don't we love a comfy 80's futuristic kitchen filled with plants? 🥣 🥣Commission info here!🥣

[grumpyoldsnake]

three point tether

the reason art with ai at the creative helm will never get traction in any long term or meaningful trot is because art is more than what is in the text of the book, or notes of the song, or runtime of the movie. art is whats OUTSIDE of the medium, a performance piece between creator and experiencer

i say this all the time and i think most buckaroos think im off in the clouds as eccentric ART WEIRDO (theyre NOT WRONG) but in a practical BUSINESS sense what i am saying is true. folks want to pretend art is in some lab where art and artist and viewer are separate things. but they never will be

art exists outside of a vacuum. it is not static. it grows and lives and evolves based on culture its in and who is experiencing it. whether you know it or not, what you LIKE or DISLIKE has just as much to do with the story AROUND the art than the art itself.

you carry what you know about me to my tinglers, you carry what you know about the beatles to the beatles, you even carry what you DONT KNOW to artists and THAT changes your experience. the STORY outside of the art is unavoidable because the lack of a story is still a story

so what does this have to do with ai art? my point is, the STORY of ai generated art is potentially interesting when it FIRST happens, or when its a one of one, but when it is co-opted by corporations to make slop, or when you consider the ethics of data scraping and theft, the story becomes sour

in other words, REGARDLESS OF WHAT AI GENERATED ART ‘MAKES’, the STORY outside of the story is derivative and unethical. what is even more important, and the greatest problem of all, is that its very very BORING. ‘oh wonderful someone made a painting from a prompt CANT WAIT to dive into this world’

so fundamentally these projects from tech goofs only serve to show that they have absolutely no understanding of art in the first place. the starry night is not just a painting, it is a three point tether between van gogh, the painting and us, which is constantly breathing and moving and living

if i was to give advice to any artist about how to stand out in their field i would say this: figure out what YOUR STORY is, not just within your chosen medium, but OUTSIDE of any medium. THAT STORY is your art, and it is infinitely cosmically unique. USE IT. EMBRACE IT. that is your power buckaroo

[grumpyoldsnake]

You'll have to turn sound on for this one

[grumpyoldsnake]

From the article:

Any common face mask provides significant protection against the virus that causes COVID-19, but N95 masks are most effective at slashing the amount emitted by infected people, according to a University of Maryland-led study released Wednesday. So-called “duckbill” N95 masks scored highest in the study, which measured the exhaled breath of participants who were tested both masked and unmasked to measure comparative outputs of SARS-CoV-2. The inexpensive masks, which have two head straps and a horizontal seam, captured 98% of exhaled virus, according to the study published in eBioMedicine. The researchers also found that—in what might come as a surprise to many—cloth masks outperformed the specific brand of KN95 mask that was tested. Surgical masks brought up the rear in performance out of the four types, but even they blocked 70% of the virus, the tests showed. (To reflect the general public's use of masks, study volunteers were not fit-tested for their masks or trained how to properly wear them.) “The research shows that any mask is much better than no mask, and an N95 is significantly better than the other options. That’s the No. 1 message,” says the study’s senior author, Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health and a global expert on how viruses spread through the air.

[grumpyoldsnake]

Avala Tower, Belgrade, Serbia.

[grumpyoldsnake]

Emergency Preparedness On A Budget

Hey all, just a reminder that even though many of us are looking at a warmer-than-average winter this year, warm on average does not mean we won't see winter storms! In fact, warm winters can produce some really unusual weather patterns that are even more likely to produce severe storms. The best time to prepare for a winter storm, or any other natural disaster, is well before it happens, ie, right now.

"But wait," you might say, "the economy is stupid and everything is expensive! I'm afraid my survival bunker is just going to have to wait until my lottery numbers come up, which will take awhile because I also can't afford to play the lottery." First off, good job not playing the lottery, and second, preparing for a disaster does not have to be expensive. In fact, if you start early enough, disaster preparedness can be done a few dollars at a time without much of anything in the way of special supplies.

In order to not make a single post that is a billion lines long, I am dividing my advice into a few different posts and will link them together when I am done. The links will be right here:

Food and Water Preparedness

FIrst and most important: food and water. The motto of disaster preparedness is "The first 72 is on you." In a major disaster situation, if the situation has not resolved itself within three days, that's about the amount of time it takes for outside help to get itself organized and start arriving in a meaningful way to a disaster area. Objectively three days is a pretty short period of time, subjectively it is a small eternity if you are not prepared.

Preppers (people who do disaster preparedness as a hobby, to greater and lesser levels of unhingedness) spend a lot of time discussing the best types of food and water prep for long-term storage and/or end of the world scenarios. We are not going to do that. We want cheap, easy, effective preparations that we can ideally do while grocery shopping in a Walmart. The easiest, simplest and cheapest way to do your food prep is this: Buy one or two canned, jarred or tetrapacked (that waxed cardboard box pack) meal items every time you can afford it, then set them aside. Find a little space in a closet, a cupboard, a shelf, whatever, and just keep those foods there until you have three days worth for everyone in your household, including the pets.

"Fine," you might say as you look skeptically at the back of your cupboards, "but that doesn't seem very specific. There are a lot of canned goods out there!" And that is fair! The basic rule of thumb is "Buy something you will eat, ideally without heating it up if necessary, that doesn't require much prep or cleaning." For example, my family is two adults and one adolescent, none of us with major food allergens or aversions. If I were trying for a 72-hour food prep for us on the cheap with no cooking available I'd probably go with six cans of chunky soup, which I get for a dollar each on sale, three small jars of applesauce (smaller jars are better if you have no way to cool food), a box of saltine crackers, three cans of tuna, and a big box of granola bars if I could keep them out of reach of the kiddo long enough.

It's not fancy and it may not provide great long-term nutrition, but it's enough food to keep us alive for three days in a form that will hold in storage for 1-2 years without needing to rotate. Even on a very tight budget you can probably accumulate this much food in a pretty reasonable amount of time (and a lot of it is the sort of thing you might get from a food bank anyway!) For pet food, pack up three days worth of your pet's food, ideally in a glass jar but any sealed container will do, and add any cans of wet food they'd get as well.

Water is another big prepping topic that we're going to go easy-peasy on. You need, at minimum, a gallon of clean water per person per day, plus extra for cleaning and washing. Water is annoying to store and takes a lot of room, so for a quickie 3-day prep, minimizing water use is ideal. If you can scare up enough paper plates, cups and utensils to last you three days, you save ever having to wash dishes. If you can get hold of a pack of wet wipes, you reduce the amount of water for washing your body. If you can bring yourself to pee in the woods or at the very least let urine sit in the toilet unflushed, you save a HUGE amount of water on flushing.

For your water prep, you can use the bit-at-a-time strategy again. Every time you get groceries, try to bring home a gallon or two of purified drinking water. They should be very cheap, usually around 1.25 in my neck of the woods, and they last for awhile. If you have a few extra dollars, buy a flat of bottled water until you have at least three gallon containers and one 12-pack for each human member of your household Tuck them away somewhere out of direct sunlight, and rotate them regularly, taking out an old gallon and flat and replacing them with new every couple of months.

Once you have your basic setup, you can start thinking about getting fancier. There are ways to find things like camp stoves and water filters fairly cheaply, usually by hitting up garage sales or looking in the clearance sporting goods section when camping season is over, but that's basically gravy when compared to just having something to eat.

Next Time: Light, Heat and Medicine

[grumpyoldsnake]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[grumpyoldsnake]

evening dress

c. 1912

Girolamo Giuseffi, Newfields

[grumpyoldsnake]

Lives and Lives and Lives From Now - submitted by meowstic-seer-of-the-future

#E9D1A1 #F4E9CD #F4F3EE #3A5566 #243C54

[grumpyoldsnake]

art club: expression studies 17/09/24

[grumpyoldsnake]

I’m not sure how many people realize that there’s a way in which hurt/comfort is actually very kinky, because at its core you’ve got this emotional power exchange fantasy where one character is vulnerable and helpless and the other takes care of them. In the case of stories involving grievous injuries, where someone is bedridden for a long time, you often end up with two characters in a 24/7 total power exchange relationship without a safeword. It just doesn’t involve as many whips and dog collars.

[grumpyoldsnake]

characters have to be a little bit awful in ways that you cant defend. its good for the ecosystem. your honor he did do that. He did in fact do that