#This is made for a niche market

[chronically-ghosted]

day before a 5 day holiday weekend. office empty. got me thinking thoughts.

[perfectly-clear-from-here]

tranquility base hotel + casino concept ads because i love this album more than anything and i have an incurable urge to create:

inspired by!!: x - x - x

[j-esbian]

i lost the post but i saw someone talking about how some of y’all act like being weird is a choice and like. YEAHHHHHHH.

that’s fine, it might be for you. but i just live like this and don’t know any other way. like yeah i’ve worked customer service, i can do innocuous small talk, but anything beyond that, i don’t understand what i’m missing. and it’s frustrating to see the tonal disconnect especially from people who are like “uwu embrace weirdness!!” where they’re like. dressing quirky and talking about bugs and listening to obscure music and eschewing small talk to ask Deep Questions on the first date and unlearning their tendency to not infodump. and generally have an idea of what Weirdness is supposed to look like. idk man some of us wake up and get out of bed and can’t figure out why the rest of their coworkers chitchat with each other but when they join the conversation it dies.

weirdness is value neutral. let’s stop trying to turn it into a badge because quite frankly, it’s not a choice for everyone. it’s fucking exhausting to never be on the same wavelength as other people and they’re going to react the way they do and label you the way they will without any conscious actions on your end. it’s difficult to talk about this without feeling like you’ll be dismissed as immature, a teenager whining “no one understands me” but the thing is. sometimes you don’t grow out of feeling alone and different, and there’s no good way to talk about it without feeling like people will think you’re just fishing for pity.

[crystalskyz]

I wanna work on my first print soon- what should I do it of?

[crimeronan]

earlier today i realized i have a weird complex about how i have to reply to all the comments on a chapter (or oneshot) on ao3 all in one sitting. and i realized the reason for this was that somehow i was envisioning people sitting there endlessly refreshing the comments page specifically for some godforsaken reason literal months after leaving a comment and if they saw that i had replied to other comments but not theirs bc i'd spaced out replies over a few days, this random ao3 refresher would think i was spurning them and did not care about what they had to say and

in conclusion. probably gonna start hacking away at replies to the big popular longfic tonight.

[sunnylaurels]

do you ever develop a sudden hyperfixation on something so random and disconnected from all of your other hyperfixations it messes up your search history and now you get recommended seemingly random things because the algorithm freaked out about this sudden interest in a very niche topic

or is this just a me thing

[nicknederson]

shoutout to everyone criticizing the ‘new game’ and marketing tactics surrounding it it’s in your rights and best interest to be a critical consumer and even if you get a lot of annoying pushback from people who “just want to be excited about a new game!!” know that i’m on your side besties

[an-enigmatic-mind]

Zoo keeper. Or wildlife rehabber. Maybe wildlife photographer.

I'm curious. what job would you do if money was no object (you just automatically had an income you could live comfortably on)? including work like volunteering, studying etc. please share in the tags :)

[vamptastic]

i love when somebody correctly identifies a problem (boxers marketed towards transmascs and butches are stupidly overpriced and often identical to those designed for cis men) and does so in the most meanspirited way possible (dumb afab bitches think they need special boxers for their vaginas) and then somebody responds to the meanspiritedness with outright bigotry (you must be transfem and therefore jealous of my natural feminine body). thus allowing the op to score a dunk on the responder and completely ignore any criticism of their unnecessarily scathing tone. truly astounding failure of communication on all fronts. let's just all be as horrible as possible about every incredibly unimportant problem we see 👍

[melis-hellis]

suddenly remembered those old disney junior promos where the mickey heads for each show interacted with each other and. i like to think they didn't have the budget or something to actually animate the individual characters interacting so they just used the mickey heads. but in my deranged mind i think of it as the CONCEPTS of the shows interacting with each other rather than the characters. like. like an object show. except with TV shows. which is a concept i came up with wayyyyy back in 2007-ish before object shows even existed

[swiggityswell]

don't guillotine me but...

[honeybeeofficial]

plenty of people have said this better than I will but I love it (read: it's very annoying) when people suggest turning a craft hobby into a side business. There is no succinct way to explain to non-crafters, in a casual conversation, that for high-quality handmade goods, the amount of physical labor required already puts the cost of those goods far beyond what regular people would be willing or able to pay for those items. the cost of materials alone is sometimes more than what people would be willing to pay. not to mention the labor required to market yourself, especially if it's a fairly niche thing.

I told a friend about the horseshoe crab backpack I'm making and he made this comment about turning it into a side business. and. I know it's intended to be encouraging and supportive, but like.

Including materials, and given a very optimistic assumption that I will finish this project in another ~3 hours of work,

Charging at the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 for my labor, this backpack would cost approximately $203.

Charging at the somewhat more "acceptable" $15 hourly wage, it would cost $395.

Charging at $25/hr for a wage that actually values my labor beyond simple survival, it would cost $615 or more.

I'm not going to finish it in another 3 hours. And I am undeniably an amateur– the finished product isn't going to be perfect and crisp the way something "should" be to cost that much, so it won't be "worth" the amount it's technically worth.

Projects like this that I do for fun I am absolutely willing to replicate for close friends at a significantly lower price as a "gift" (asking for cost of materials and/or only a partial cost of labor). But there's no reasonable way to actually monetize a hobby like this.

Anyway, look at my crab.

[ultravioart]

Actually now that I think about it, this makes me realize crochet goods are going to loose selling value when 3d printing becomes a norm for certain levels of textile production.

Robotic looms cannot crochet on an industrial scale from what I know, only able to knit in ways that imitates the look of certain stitching. With 3d printing you can make any crochet design faster than human hands. Oof.

Tbh I wonder what the impact will be when polyjet 3d printers become as wide spread as 2d ink printers. With the convenience factor alone, I can see people shopping online for fashion design files, punching in thier dimensions, and printing out a perfectly tailored outfit. Or shoes. Or replacement parts, dishes, tools, toys, trinkets, you name it.

And that would certainly disrupt large portions of cargo/shipping and shopping business. Fads would be the only thing to sell in stores, which is mostly done online now anyhow so in theory it could just be printed at home... it's weird to think about.

From in game 3d model to direct marketable no-seam plushie pipeline... a bit dystopian tbh lol.

[handlewithcharacter]

@qqueenofhades I'm sorry to tag you because I know this isn't your area of expertise, but I figured as a niche academic yourself you might know someone who knows someone?

with all due respect WHAT is going on with the swifties

okay so sincere answer: a lot of people who have spent YEARS convincing themselves that Taylor Swift is a closeted queer woman who's been sending coded messages through her lyrics, Instagram posts, imagery in her concerts, and pretty much everything else. this *is* conspiracy thought, complete with a thought terminating cliche: when pressed, Gaylors fall back on the insistence that Taylor CAN'T come out. their offered reasons seldom make much sense or hold up to scrutiny, but as long as they've been able to hold onto the refrain that Swift simply can't come out, it's possible to maintain the belief that she is signaling queerness but may never be able to confirm it. every boyfriend can be excused as a beard, every denial that she's dating a female friend can be understood as a lie, every insta post can be analyzed qanon-style for clues that only you and your in-group understand.

Gaylors have, obviously, been certain that these clues were being deliberately planted and thus that Swift was encouraging them and WANTED to be understood as queer in some kind of transparent closet situation; the fact that Swift has embraced the aesthetics of allyship with things like her unbelievably tacky video for You Need to Calm Down has been read as approval. receiving even a very mild admonishment - in this case, Swift expressing disappointment that rabid speculation about her romantic life didn't end when she decided to prioritize friendships with other women over dating men - is thus seen as a betrayal, as Swift breaking a contract that, in reality, she never knew about or agrees to. the ensuing social media tantrums we're seeing are what happens when someone has dedicated considerable time and energy to justifying a conspiracy, including building significant social networks around it, only to have that belief challenged by a source that they never thought would contradict them even a little.

in fairness I also never thought she'd do it; I really thought she'd play both sides and keep collecting that Gaylor money forever.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[swampdrive]

Specific gripe but hwrow capitalism really crushes art