#When I was in single digit ages

[michdoodles]

Eighty plus year old science experiment finally loses his damn virginity

started as a silly sketch based on that one twitter meme earlier this year (that narrows it down a lot, I know /s), ended up coloring it too, although Hailey is missing her highlights here cuz they're made of hair dye and she went back to her natural all black look for the wedding and I wanted to see how she'd look without them

[thesummerstorms]

Okay, but I do have an AU version of that AU in my head where Dick Grayson returns to earth and manages to find Annabeth (and Thalia and Luke) living in the streets before they make it all the way to Camp Halfblood.

We can explore the implications of that for Thalia and Luke in a different post, but basically Annabeth still has to go to CHB for large portions of the year, she attracts too many monsters, but when she isn't there, Dick Grayson has unofficial custody for quite awhile while Bruce gets his shit together.

The crack fic version of that AU of an AU has Annabeth trying to manipulate her way into arranging a meeting between Chiron and Roy Harper because her brother's friends have been kind to her and if one of them is going to be an archer, they should be the BEST archer so that they can keep Dick alive longer.

No one is more surprised than Chiron when he actually agreed to give Roy some "pointers", although he trained fully human heroes in the Ancient Days.

And to be fair to Roy his brain is stuck trying to work its way around fact that his friend's little sister staged an emergency to introduce him to a man who's half horse. He's kind of mad, which, fair. That said, once the actual archery lesson starts and he realizes that Chiron really is that much of an expert, he immediately gets into it.

Which is how a panicked Dick Grayson bursts into the scene a few hours later, expecting something terrible has happened to Anna & Roy because Roy isn't responding to comms.

Only to find his best friend arguing with a centaur about some obscure fact of aerodynamics while Annabeth is perched nearby watching, legs swinging, eating way too many popsicles and occasionally calling out questions when her curiosity gets the better of her.

Dick isn't sure whether to be pissed, relieved, or just plain confused, but he for sure isn't letting Anna OR Roy live that one down for years.

And if he also gets distracted and listens in to some of Chiron's archery explanations, well, it's always good to know your teammates' full potential.

[bumpscosity]

my karate teacher from when i was a kid would sometimes come in half sick and justify it by claiming that you only really spread germs before you even know you're sick so it was fine

[viscerasmoothie]

Guys I did it

I wanted to edit it a bit more but I'm lazy and my fingers suck

fyi I traced the og for the Miku thingy because it's literally 5 am for me and I'm lazy and also I'm literally drawing shit on my phone give me a break :( /lh

Also no alt text sorry

[thebirdandhersong]

this is super random, but I remember how we first met bc of your post about finding songs to sing to your sister, and may I recommend “they were you” from the fantasticks? my mom was singing it last night and I was like “oh this is perfect”

Reporting back to say: this is such a gorgeous song and I LOVE the melody line (it is SO beautiful and simple!!!!) My sister is on a plane to another continent right now alas (not on her own... with my parents lol) but I am anticipating singing it to her when she gets back >:))) Thank you for the recommendation! I'd never heard of the musical or the song, and it's on the rotation playlist now!!

[lyriumsings]

sad bc i can’t really pin down which oc was my first oc bc ive literally been making them for as long as i can remember ive had them for every interest ive ever watched, played or read. but if i had to choose i think the title of My First Ever Oc would have to go to my percy jackson one tbh who honestly should probably be completely revamped SHSJ

[jitteryjive]

listen i love going against self deprecating but i dislike that any personal criticism is seen as violently hating yourself. like i’ll find art i drew when i was 10 and be like ‘Ooh maybe ill redraw this.. it’s cute and the anatomy needs some reworking’ and everyone around me will freak out like NOO!!!! YOUR ART LOOKS BEAUTIFUL NEVER SAY TERRIBLE AWFUL THINGS LIKE THAT!!!!!!! ITS PERFECT AND NEVER BAD!!!!!!! and i look at them with my eyes

[showfallmediacameracrew]

Do you know what happened to the others? (Besides Marvin, of course.)

some were brutally murdered before they could jump out a broken window. others might have escaped, but will never escape how screwed up Showfall left them. there is no happiness to be seen here, past the smoke and mirrors.

[gena-rowlands]

my friends still try to talk to me about ‘attractive’ men all the time which is like… babe we patched that issue in the 2020 update when i realised that not only am i not and have never been attracted to 99.9% of men and quite literally only assumed i was because it was an identity that was forced onto me before i even knew what the concept of identity and cognition was, but i’m also not a man myself!

[malcombtheteadragon]

Friendly reminder, you don't have to be good at something to have fun doing it. And, the act of being bad at something doesn't mean it's a valueless activity. Trying new things, entertaining one self, and striving for improvement are always priceless activities.

[leadendeath]

Sometimes i think about my very large bottle of mixed perler beads and wonder if I could substitute them as pony beads for kandi… I don’t often use them but do not want to buy lots of pony beads , I am already in the swamp of art supplice as it is 0_0

[rewritingcanon]

U mentioned early 2010s ... how old were u back then? 5 or 6...?

ok so basically when i was growing up my mum banned me and my siblings from watching a lot of kids shows. i have never watched spongebob or adventure time or victorious or icarly or tawog or even DORA because my mum didnt approve of it so… i ended up watching Other Stuff that was from the 2010s. the popular shit i could get my hands on. this was around 2012 when my mum finally bought my brother an ipad and i shit you not i learned how to watch things my parents had on their plex account (which obviously didnt include kids stuff). so YES actually i started REALLY (concerningly) young

tbf though my brain was underdeveloped and most of watching merlin and sherlock holmes and supernatural slipped right by me but i do remember thinking merlin and arthur should have kissed and being mad when they never did.

merthur introduced me to gay people and it wasnt even its intention.

[chrismcshell]

made myself some eggs for lunch but had to do so with tears streaming down my face because i looked out the window while waiting for the pan to heat up and i saw that it was snowing and i remembered how winter was my favourite season when i was a little kid because i loved playing in the snow. so that's where i'm at right now. if anyone was wondering

[sirfrogsworth]

I think in this new age of A.I. the general public is going to need to increase their photography and lighting literacy. The response to this photo has just been a shit show.

There are people pointing out perfectly normal edge lighting and misunderstanding how reflections work.

First the plane is parked at an angle. The tail is farther back than the nose. But also that is a curved surface and it tapers. It's reflecting the area to the right of the photo.

And the bottom of the plane is reflecting what is directly underneath. Which is the tarmac, not the crowd.

It should also be noted that photo was shot with a very telephoto lens and everything is super compressed. The crowd appears much closer to the airplane than they actually are.

But then someone who should have good understanding of lighting said this...

And now I'm worried for her clients. Because that's very... wrong.

Well, wrong-ish.

First, let's try to understand why this photo is setting off some alarm bells.

The crowd toward the rear is in shadow, but they are still very well exposed. But then there is also a bright light source creating a strong edge light on them. Looking at this photo with just the context of what is in it, there are some things that seem uncanny.

The information we do not have is the people in the shadow area are inside a very brightly lit airplane hangar.

So they have artificial light blasting them from the top.

But that light is still much dimmer than the sunlit areas outside so they appear in shade. But we are used to shade being much darker than areas in direct sun. So the balance seems off in our brain. We expect the people to be darker because we don't have the context of the bright hangar lights above them.

But the other issue is that the photo was post processed. It wasn't manipulated. The pixels weren't changed. But the exposure balance was altered.

If I were to guess, the original photo looked more like this...

But newer digital cameras can have 13 to 15 stops of dynamic range. And if you shoot in RAW, you can easily lift shadows and bring down highlights. You can balance the exposure so the dark parts aren't as dark and the bright parts aren't as bright. This photographer might have overdone it a bit in this case, but this is a fairly standard edit used to bring balance to photos.

And lastly, where does the edge light come from?

Edge lighting or backlighting or rim lighting (all the same) should probably be called wrap-around lighting if you want to be more accurate.

It comes from a homogenous light source that is larger than the subject being lit. So with my knife photo, I placed it on a large LED panel light.

The light source was bigger than the subject so it wrapped around the edges.

And I'm afraid the airplane is not nearly large enough to create a light source to wrap around everyone in the crowd. It isn't even reflecting direct sunlight. So I'm sorry to say that lighting designer was mostly mistaken despite the confidence.

The light source is... everything.

That entire red area I highlighted is the light source.

As well as everything above and everything to the sides.

And the biggest aspect of that light source would be the sky above. I think people always forget the sky is a light source. If you are seeing blue, you are seeing light. And I guess the plane is included in that, but that entire highlighted red area is so bright, and so filled with sunlight bouncing around, that it creates basically a giant softbox. It becomes a huge single light source for the people in the hangar.

If you look at footage taken from way inside the hangar, you can see the camera adjusting exposure for the crowd inside, but look at what happens to the sunlit area outside.

What does that look like?

A giant softbox.

A single homogenous light source blasting light inside the hangar.

The sun is so incredibly bright that even when it is not directly lighting something, the light just bouncing around outside is enough to overpower the very bright hangar lights.

So, what have we learned from this?

Perhaps people should hire me to be their lighting designer.

Though I'm sure she is actually very talented. She seems to work with stage lights and this is more physics and photography.

Phystography.

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[me-a-mess-morelikelythanyouthink]

god sometimes I’m literally just a little girl again and it makes me sick