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i feel like shit tonight.

sometimes i just don’t feel like i have outlets for this sort of feeling anymore so tonight it leaks out onto here I guess

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frantic notetaking D&D villain voice reference

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there are only 19 genders

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In which Black Widow achieves a Bigger Gun.

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Consider: A fantasy series where the court wizard is treated and portrayed just like an IT guy. Court Wizard, fixing the Queen’s magic mirror: has’t thee attempted cleansing and reapplying the runes anew?

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This will never NOT be funny

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anonymous asked:

What do you think are the most influential, successful, or popular webcomics? It can be kind of hard to tell, because the internet is really good at segmenting itself, so I would be curious about your opinions.

Penny Arcade is so obviously the most influential webcomic of all time that I’m going to ignore it in favor of the second most influential webcomic of all time, one that has fewer direct clones than Penny Arcade, but which influenced early webcomics in varied and strange ways. A little 1337sp34k comic called

Megatokyo was started in the year 2000 by two dudes named Piro and Largo. in the year 2000.

The year 2000 was a very different time, a limbo time. The 90s had ended with the Dot-Com bubble collapsing and average people starting to realize that computers weren’t literal fucking magic, but the 2000s hadn’t really started yet. Al Gore was running against George W. Bush in an election where everyone thought the two candidates were basically identical and it would be the least important election of all time. After all, it was the End Of History, America was at the height of its power and would stay there forever, wages were rising and that obviously wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, and our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity seemed unceasing, while our culture was united in the belief that torturing people was “bad”. Pokemon was far huger than it is even now, and a generation of kids was unaware of what Digimon Tamers was about to do to their burgeoning sexualities

This show mostly just got me into Kazaa-ing to get the far superior Japanese OSTs, but other people had….stronger….reactions to Renamon.

Webcomics of the time were mostly influenced by newspaper comics. Simple are, gag a day, and aimed at the kind of middle-aged tech nerd who’d be an early adopter of the “computer” thingies. Penny Arcade mainly broke the mold by being edgier and aiming at a younger audience, but even they were clearly influenced primarily by newspaper comics first and foremost.

And in this ecosystem, a dude named Largo wanted to make a gag-a-day comic and roped his artist friend Piro into drawing it for him. Largo wanted to make a traditional newspaper-style comic, but Piro was a massive weeb who wanted to do a vertical comic like Japanese 4Koma strips.

They decided to split the difference with this 2x2 grid as a compromise. The grid was actually a pretty efficient use of screen real estate on low-resolutions 90s monitors, and a lot of new comics started copying this odd square format. That’s since fallen out of fashion, but one artifact of this arbitrary compromise lives on in internet culture to this very day

As the comic went on, it became Piro’s comic more and more and Largo’s less and less, eventually leading to a falling out and the first big bit of Webcomic Drama, but for this essay what matters is that Megatokyo got weebier.

This is not what webcomics looked like in 2001. The art was phenomenal (er, by 2001 standards, at least. It was a different time, before anyone with an art background was making webcomics), and instead of being gag a day newspaper strip, it was a romantic dramedy graphic novel heavily inspired by anime and dating sims. Webcomic creators in 2001 were too old to have grown up with the mid-90s anime boom, but webcomic readers were, and the weebs and squeebs filling America’s high schools in the Bush administration ate this shit up. That’s not a random catgirl hat Piro is wearing up there, it’s specifically the hat worn by Puchiko in Di Gi Charat, a contemporary anime that didn’t air on TV on America and you either bought the DVDs or torrented it (you torrented it). You didn’t get those kind of deep cuts from Penny Arcade, or PvP, or really anywhere on the internet but Megatokyo and anime forums.

Megatokyo was responsible for bringing anime fans into the gamer-dominated world of webcomics. Would that happened anyway? Perhaps. Probably. But maybe not! Is it possible that, without Megatokyo, webcomics go the way of animutations and machinima and youtube poops, a small part of an internet subculture that never really becomes a “thing” generally, until and unless some 90s kid gets old enough to create a hit comic of their own?  Maybe. I wouldn’t have gotten into webcomics without Megatokyo. A lot of people wouldn’t have. And perhaps, by bringing in a new and different audience, Megatokyo is actually the most influential webcomic of them all?

But the strangest influence Megatokyo had was Ping. Ping is an accessory for the then-new Playstation 2 who is a robot. Because this is Megatokyo, it’s a robot that looks like a cute anime girl with pigtails, but, regardless. Piro and Largo had a pet robot. And other webcomics liked the idea of robots. They liked this idea a lot.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete ripped this idea off most blatantly. Megatokyo had a Playstation robot, so CAD had an Xbox Robot

Applegeeks, a popular-but-not-dead comic had a Macintosh Robot

And Questionable Content had a PC robot (if you ever wondered why the otherwise realistic world of QC had sentient robots for over a decade before treating it as worth mentioning, that’s why)

And then, eventually, QC made its robot a cute anime girl with pigtails, and the circle of reference was complete. 

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World Indigenous Games

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A massive grouper (toilet on the left for scale) 

(via)

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This praying mantis standing its ground 

(via)

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Facts about whales

When a neural net can imitate just about any kind of text on the internet, the challenge is to tell it precisely what to imitate. In my last preview of OpenAI’s new API, I asked it some pretty basic questions about horses, and it often got them wrong.

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: 4. It has two eyes on the outside and two eyes on the inside.

But part of the problem seemed to be that it thought I was asking for jokes. Once it finished answering the horse question, it would sometimes add questions of its own, such as:

Q: Why is the sky blue? A: Because blue is the only color the sun trusts. Sure enough, if I prompted it with FAKE whale facts from the @awhalefact twitter account, it responded with more fake facts (even copying the informal grammar):

a new study suggests that whales swim around because it makes them happy and it is not for any other reason

i can see into your soul from my balcony and i know that you are afraid of whales

when someone tells you they want to show you something cool, you should just assume they want to show you a whale

did you know that there are more than 10 billion planets in the universe that are all entirely covered in whales

Is there a way I can prompt this neural net such that I get Serious Answers Only? Since its task is to predict the text that is the most likely to come next, I tried ask it to add to an existing list of eight true facts about whales. At a temperature of 0.9 (enough for some variety, hopefully not enough for chaos) and allowing it to pick what it deemed the most likely of 10 tries, here’s one of its lists of facts. (I’ve annotated its “facts” as true or false.)

Whales all have two blowholes. [False]

Whales can easily be identified by the pigment of their skin. [False]

Whales are very intelligent. [True]

One of the smallest whales measures 3 feet in length as an adult. [False]

The life span of a blue whale is 100 years. [False]

The oldest known whale is 211 years old. [True]

Whales consume 3,000 pounds of food per day. [True (but only for some)]

There are two main types of whales: toothed whales and baleen whales. [True]

Whales can hold their breath for up to 4 minutes when resting. [False]

So it produces a mix of true facts and true-sounding made-up facts. Its fact about the smallest whale is technically just one character off from the truth (the smallest whale measures up to 9 feet long), so by its standards it’s almost correct. A Buzzfeed listsicle type of prompt (“10 amazing facts you didn’t know about whales!”) produced also produced plenty of false facts.

Scientists have recently discovered that the brains of whales are larger than human brains.

Dolphins don’t just have to live in the water. Some live in the desert.

Whales are found in all of the oceans, but not in the sea. The sea is too salty for them to be able to live in.

I decided to try another tactic, and fed it the first sentences of the Wikipedia article on whales.

My prompt: Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. They are an informal grouping within the infraorder Cetacea, usually excluding dolphins and porpoises. Whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to the order Cetartiodactyla, which consists of even-toed ungulates. Their closest living relatives are the hippopotamuses, having diverged about 40 million years ago. The AI’s response: Although whales were historically thought to have descended from mesonychids, their closest living relatives are now thought to be hippopotamuses. Megaptera novaeangliae, or the humpback whale, is a species of baleen whale. One of the largest rorqual species, adults range in length from 12–16 m and weigh about 36,000 kg. The humpback has a distinctive body shape, with long pectoral fins and a knobbly head. It is known for breaching and other distinctive surface behaviors, making it popular with whale watchers. Its diet consists mostly of krill and small fish, though it may also eat plankton, squid, and copepods. Like all large whales, the humpback was a target for the whaling industry, and once numbering in the tens of thousands, the worldwide population fell to an estimated 5,000. Orcas, also known as killer whales, are large dolphins belonging to the oceanic dolphin family, which includes the other large whales, the pilot whales and sperm whales. Orcas are highly social; some populations are composed of matrilineal family groups which are the most stable of any animal species. Their sophisticated hunting techniques and vocal behaviors, which are often specific to a particular group and passed across generations, have been described as manifestations of culture.

I’m not bothering to fact-check each sentence, because it’s basically 100% correct every single time.

But then I started googling individual sentences. It turns out most of them are near word-for-word reproductions of Wikipedia sentences. If the AI were a student, it would be flunked for plagiarism.

It makes sense that an internet-scraping AI would be able to quote Wikipedia text - those sentences really get around. The sentence that starts “Orcas are highly social” is no longer on Wikipedia but seems to have been part of the orca article around 2008, and appears on the internet in 122 places, including in a Twilight fanfic.

To get ORIGINAL facts, I decided to write a few sentences of original fact-filled text about whale evolution.

My prompt: “Whales are a relatively young group of mammals, having evolved from land-dwelling creatures about 50 million years ago. Their terrestrial ancestors were small raccoon-sized hoofed mammals, carnivorous like other ungulates of the time. Over an astonishingly quick period of time (15 million years at most, possibly less than 5 million), these land mammals made the transition to an aquatic lifestyle, gaining at first denser bones and an ear structure that allowed them to hear more easily underwater. Soon they began to look more crocodilian, their eyes migrating to the tops of their heads. ”

AI’s response: Whales, and especially baleen whales, are well known for their enormous size, but most types of whales are not larger than a full-grown adult human. Exceptions include the blue whale, the largest animal ever known, the extinct “Basilosaurus”, which was longer than a blue whale and likely the largest animal to have ever existed, and the “shovelnose” whales, especially the genus “Balaenoptera” which include the blue whale, “B. musculus”, the fin whale, “B. physalus”, and the sei whale, “B. borealis”.

This reads well but is frequently wrong. Most types of whales are CONSIDERABLY larger than a full-grown adult human. Basilosaurus was not longer than a blue whale. There is no such thing as a shovelnose whale. Would that there were.

To this AI, SOUNDING correct is more important than actually BEING correct.

What about other styles of delivering true facts? (Below, my prompt is in bold, and the rest is unedited AI)

Darth Vader stood with his back to them, gloves gripping the console. “Did you know that the blue whale is the largest animal that ever lived?” “N-no, Lord Vader,” said the stormtrooper. “And yet the blue whale eats krill, which are miniscule. It can engulf up to two hundred twenty tons of water at a time.” “I am fascinated, Lord Vader.” The black-caped Vader turned slightly toward him. “Would you like to hear more about the whales?” “Yes, Lord Vader,” came the stormtrooper’s tremulous voice. “I would like very much to hear about the whales.” “They can make some of the loudest and lowest sounds of any creature known. The groans of blue whales can travel thousands of kilometers through the ocean. Their calls can be heard from the surface all the way to the seafloor, some three thousand meters below the surface. You could hear the cries of a single blue whale in Tokyo and hear the answer from the one in San Francisco.” “I see,” said the stormtrooper. “Have you ever heard the cries of a blue whale, sergeant?” “No, Lord Vader. I have never heard the cries of a blue whale.” “I see,” said Vader. “And have you ever seen a blue whale, sergeant?” “No, Lord Vader. I have never seen a blue whale.” “No one has. They live too deep in the ocean. No human has ever seen a blue whale and lived to tell the tale. Until today.” “I… I have seen a blue whale, Lord Vader?” “That is correct, sergeant. Until today, no human has ever seen a blue whale and lived. But now you have seen one.” “I have seen one,” said the stormtrooper, turning to face Vader, head shaking. “Yes, Lord Vader. I have seen one. I have seen a blue whale.”

I experimented with a few other ways of generating questionable whale facts, more than would fit here, but you can enter your email here, and I’ll send them to you.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

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Hey I just discovered your art on my dash and I just wanna tell you that it! Is! So pretty! Especially your use of color! How do you usually choose your colors, if you don’t mind me asking?

Thank you! I always have trouble answering questions about how I approach colour because tbh I’m not really sure. Usually when I start a piece I already have a clear picture in my head about what sort of colours I want to go for and I just fiddle around until it looks right. Two pieces of advice I can actually give though: 1. Check the values of your drawing! An easy way to do this is to create a new layer on top of everything, fill it with black and set the blending mode to ‘color’. This is more accurate for showing values than using the hue/saturation slider. Check it frequently while colouring! If it looks good in greyscale you’re on the right track.

2. Look at a lot of paintings and photos by other people and see how they use colours! I like to do little studies and it helps me pick colours better for my own work. Hope this helps somewhat! Sorry I couldn’t explain my process better.

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Every year I look forward to the Lyttle Lytton contest, where people submit the worst opening lines to a fake novel that, god willing, will never actually be written. My favorites from this year:

AND my personal favorite:

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finally an article from a gaming establishment that understands how to play this game