#Design Ethics

[mangotalkies]

currently reading (at snail’s pace)

i’ve never juggled between such vastly different, yet equally heavy genres before. one boggles my mind with yet another unexplored aspect of indian history, another makes me realise how little i know about the world, and the last one could’ve just been a twitter thread.

“we said goodbye to our mothers. they’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. they’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. it was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them."

- we, the drowned by carsten jensen

[lylyke25]

This is a very good read on racial inequity - with great examples

“Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti-Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur. 

The system not only brings into view the hidden but no less deadly crimes of capitalism and the wealthy’s hoarding of resources, but includes an app that alerts users when they enter high-risk areas to encourage “citizen policing and awareness.” Taking it one step further, the development team is working on a facial recognition program meant to flag individuals who are likely perpetrators, and the training set used to design the algorithm includes the profile photos of 7,000 corporate executives downloaded from the popular professional networking site LinkedIn. Not surprisingly, the “averaged” face of a criminal is White and male. In this sense, the narrative of what we consider to be a crime and of whom we consider to be a criminal is being challenged. But it remains to be seen whether such initiatives can help generate a different social order when it comes to criminalization. And creative exercises like this one are comical only if we ignore that all their features are drawn directly from actually existing proposals and practices “in the real world,” including the use of facial images to predict criminality – all, techniques that tend to target racialized groups.“

[xntrek]

Web3 and the Dark Patterns of Design

Understanding Design Ethic choices as a way forward. Preface With the recent wave of “new” technologies that are becoming popular as part of the “web3” surge that is being promoted as societally transformative, the questions of ethics and design should once again be at the forefront of our minds. To be clear, when I speak of design, I don’t mean a constrained definition of graphics, visuals or…

[mizaruwu]

it's complicated and ethically questionable

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more dungeon meshi x linked universe shenanigans featuring communication fairies (and the creation of one for the image below, tw blood)

welcome to the world

[bruhstation]

can't it even be more obvious thomas. why are you surprised that a sudrian historical site filled to the brim with armor and weaponry that dates back to the middle ages has old people afflicted with the gold dust working around the castle

[frozen-mars]

Tis been awhile, but I return with offerings of ZombieCleo!

[maxer-blaster]

If Izzy could see Auntie's methodically plotted out ship board and see her filing system, I think she'd become his platonic soul mate.

[high-cloud]

Enchanted Objects" by Hanne Zaruma

High-Cloud

[loquatic]

Pk dragon design yay

still learning how to draw object characters

they're my favorite atm. Also the tags are out of order idk why trying to fix that darn.

[shiresome]

I love the way you draw lex so bad. do u have any lex headcanons question mark….

THANK YOU THATS SO SWEET!! Yes I have one Lex headcanon: he is my best friend forever and ever

[clownery-and-fuckery]

BTW I played mouthwashing and. ohmygod. absolutely beating the shit out of Jimmy. the symbolism and camera work, the motifs and the dialogue. everything about it was so horrific and so brilliant. Mouthwashing my beloved.

[zazikels]

worst downgrade in the history of downgrades

[beartitled]

so after the new content any thought on the opportunist?

He was, currently is and always will be a sleazy littol bird butt 🪶

[pluckyredhead]

ur post abt the green lantern’s political leanings was so interesting!! can you do one for the bat family? (but only if u wanna!!)

Honestly, I can't, because their politics are so incoherent.

Like, take Bruce. (And again, like with the Lanterns, I'm talking about canon here, not how I wish things were.) On the one hand, you would imagine he's pretty progressive, right? He's almost certainly a single issue voter and that single issue is gun control. He believes in rehabilitating criminals and in fact a lot of Wayne Enterprises hires are formerly incarcerated people. He is an active philanthropist who pours money into schools, orphanages, hospitals, public spaces, and the arts. These are all leftist values!

And yet the modern Batman is also a completely unrestrained violent anarchic-libertarian power fantasy. Bruce has invented his own law, which he enacts and enforces completely arbitrarily, however he feels like doing so. He obeys the laws he wants to obey and ignores the ones he doesn't care about, while insisting he is law-abiding. He tortures people literally constantly and considers it righteous. He uses the profits from his publicly traded company to become a one-man military industrial complex. (The emissions from the fucking Batmobile alone...!) He illegally surveils the entire city and sometimes the entire planet (Brother Eye, anyone?) because he has decided that his moral authority overrides literally anyone's right to privacy, anywhere. He allows his defeated foes to be locked up indefinitely regardless of their mental state in an institution that would make any qualified mental health professional run screaming in the opposite direction. He's sexist. All of these things sit on the right of the political spectrum, but imagine me pointing to the right like Charlie from It's Always Sunny pointing to his murder board.

And none of the Batfamily is any better. Some of them are honestly worse in certain aspects. Dick was a cop. Jason loves guns. Babs and Tim are even more in love with surveillance than Bruce is. Remember when Tim wanted to replace the police with, like, a Bat-army??? BECAUSE I DO.

It's not really "their fault," as much as anything can be a fictional character's fault. It's the result of being written by writers who are, for the most part, consciously trying to write the Bats as good Samaritans, but are also living in a world where we have had our brains warped by all of our blockbusters being funded by the US military, in a medium where badassery is prized above everything else, and so all this really problematic shit spills out onto the comics page without being questioned. It's also kind of a boiling frog situation: i.e. Batman has always had a cool car, so as he got tougher and tougher, of course that car would eventually become a tank, and no one stopped to go "Wait, what the fuck? What the fuck? How is this billionaire driving a tank around helping anyone???" I guess god bless Zack Snyder for inadvertently highlighting how fucking stupid and counterproductive a Batman taken to his worst extremes is.

To be clear, I don't think this is what most writers are trying to do with Batman (some of them are, but fuck those guys). But it's what happens when all you care about is rule of cool, and the more I think about it the more I'm like...shit, maybe Alan Moore was right and superheroes are just stupid.

Anyway in conclusion, comic book writers should consider the ramifications of what they're writing occasionally. But Bruce Wayne probably still votes blue, at least.

[mayakern]

our cropped polo sweaters are the perfect addition to your fall closet! they're super cute and super versatile, meaning they'll make ANY outfit look great! 🥰

(and don't they look cute with our ramen skirt too..? 🤭)

[selemina]

Cool unique game spotted!

(Please disregard my ability to mis-remember a name, it is FOREVER Winter! ^^')