#and alter the signals

[fantastic-mr-corvid]

"i need to write less stuff with triggering content bc i want ppl to read my writing and i completely understand that often its not what people want to read"

...welp i am working on that Conficcare story i mentioned last week. and he gets fucking hate crimed. objective failed.

its shaping up so well tho- i think ive got his voice, petty and bitchy then cold and angry, all to cover the fear. also smart- externally he acts stupid but internally he blends swearing and petty insults with fancy words and psychoanalysis.

[flamebunnyy]

one day I will make a game, and one day I will put some blaseball characters in it because I can.

[evichuart]

so yesterday i went out and red signal started playing

and i just find very funny that i was smiling calmly while jonny was going HAM

[bigassbowlingballhead]

Is Spock… is Spock the red angel?

[coochiequeens]

An old article but relevant with some moid musician turned activist attacking women on the basis that sometimes their views line up with conservatives

https://unherd.com/2023/10/does-billy-bragg-have-a-woman-problem/

Julie Bindel OCTOBER 3, 2023   

Louise Distras was once a darling of the anti-establishment Left. An underground punk singer whose hits include “Dreams From the Factory Floor”, this working-class woman is unafraid to speak her mind. Five years ago, she was being invited onstage by Billy Bragg, the folk singer and progressive activist — but since then, a lot has changed. Recently, Bragg has publicly and repeatedly condemned Distras, because she had done what she has always done: speak out against misogyny. This time, though, she was criticising the backlash against women who refuse to recite the “trans women are women” mantra.

Distras has been expressing concern about gender ideology in private since late 2021, but the first time she went public with her opinions was in May of this year. “I’m a woman, and a woman is an adult human female,” she said in an interview with Louder than War, a music website. “I’m a woman that’s experienced domestic abuse.” She later made comments, on Twitter, about how women are silenced for questioning gender ideology: “No amount of rainbows and ‘kindness’ can hide the authoritarianism and misogyny and homophobia that’s on display here, especially in the arts.”

Born in Wakefield in 1987, Distras ran away from home in her teens and, she told me, “stayed with a lot of dangerous people who took advantage of me”. She turned to song writing as a form of escape. Her bravery is remarkable. But as soon as her straightforward resistance to gender ideology became known, she was met with horrendous abuse. Distras has been called every name under the sun, including anti-trans, Nazi, scum, prostitute, grifter, child serial killer, and witch. She soon realised that she had been “marked for life” as a “disgusting terf” — that no redemption would ever be possible. She was told she deserves to be chucked out of the music industry. Her booking agency has said that her attitude towards transwomen could “have detrimental effects on [her] musical career”. Radio stations have stopped playing her songs and venues cancelled her gigs. “If I go back to the industry as it stands,” she says, “if someone had the balls to book me for a gig, I would likely be physically attacked. It’s not safe.”

Having been rejected by the majority of her contacts in the music industry, Distras decided she might as well use her voice to speak out. Alongside five other women, her testimony featured in the Daily Mail about the experience of being ostracised for daring to question gender ideology. One of the first derogatory reactions was from Bragg. “What??”, he tweeted, linking to the feature, which included a photograph of Distras — who usually wears black and leather on stage — wearing a formal dress. “Louise Distras hates trans people so much that she’s willing to dress in a style acceptable to Daily Mail readers in order to have a go at them. What does this have to do with feminism Louise? Or punk rock?”

Bragg fancies himself a bit of a trans ally. And prides himself on being an all-round anti-sexist bloke. In 2014, he posed with a sign, “I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about men’s violence against women in all its forms,” as part of the White Ribbon campaign.

Back in the early days of her career, Bragg championed Distras as one of a “new breed” of singers, tweeting in 2013 that her song Love Me The Way I Am should be our next Eurovision entry. Another of her songs, The Hand You Hold, is about how what women say and do should matter more than how we look, and she tells me that “Billy for some reason loved that song and that’s why he invited me to go play on his stage” — which she did that year, at Glastonbury, and again in 2017. “So for him to now take a pop at me and start criticising what I look like instead of actually listening to what I have to say means he is the biggest hypocrite.”

But it is not only men who have gone after Distras. In a recent interview with Kerrang!, Phoebe Lunny of the Lambrini Girls reacted to Distras speaking out against trans ideology and the silencing of women: “I will scrap any Terf, any day, in person, with my fists.” In a tweet, Distras pointed to the hypocrisy of claiming to be progressive while “inciting violence against women”. She also condemned Kerrang! for publishing the remarks, saying she is “ashamed my face was printed on its pages. Vile!”

Spoken word poet Amelia Vandergast also responded angrily to Distras’s public statements about being cancelled by trans activists. In a feature entitled, “Wipe away the terf tears: freedom of expression was never permission to perpetuate hate in the music industry”, published in A&R Factory website, she wrote:

“In the recent Daily Mail article, which attempted to portray women as the victims of their transphobic hate, Louise Distras bemoaned the journalists, radio stations, and her booking agency who rightly refuse to have anything to do with her for the self-piteous bile spewed across her social media platforms (anyone got a tiny little violin I can borrow?)”

For Distras, the hypocrisy within the so-called radical music scene is appalling. While the misogyny of trans activists is ignored, women are viciously attacked for daring to defend their sex-based rights. She is one of a growing list of female artists criticising cancel culture — a phenomenon of which Bragg denies the existence.

But Bragg has form. He has dismissed feminist concerns about self-identification and argued that, owing to our incompatible “hardware”, lesbians are biologically ill-equipped for sex with other women and should therefore understand the plight of men claiming to be female. When Maya Forstater was harassed by trans activists in the street, Bragg suggested that she could not possibly have been scared or upset, because she appeared to be smiling. This is a classic sexist trope. Too often, women are told by men to “Give us a smile” when we complain about being sexually harassed by them, and yet women are informed we must have enjoyed the harassment if we attempt to laugh it off.

“I think he’s a misogynist,” Distras says, of Bragg. “I think it’s just plain to see for everybody and the way he is — the way that so many men are in the music industry.” She talks about how uncomfortable she has felt with him, describing him as “creepy”. “He’s everything he says he’s not. His words and his actions just don’t match up for me… The way he goes after women over the trans issue has made it really clear to me that he’s just a misogynist, and that he just doesn’t care about women”. She says what many feminists have said of many men in recent years: “The trans thing is just an excuse for him to bully women with impunity and do it publicly and get applauded for it.”

Bragg also showed no sympathy for Róisín Murphy, another female singer-songwriter who has faced the wrath of trans activists. After a private Facebook conversation in which she criticised the policy of giving children puberty blockers was leaked, she was admonished by Bragg for holding the wrong opinion. “Them’s the breaks,” Bragg tweeted when it was suggested that Murphy was being punished by having BBC coverage and concerts cancelled. “Think before you post is my advice, especially on issues that are contentious.” This is cowardice.

Distras strongly feels that the music industry used to be about “freedom of expression and freedom of speech”, but is currently in thrall to gender ideology and “totally monotheistic”. “There’s an urgent need to build a new one, with a proper counterculture that isn’t dominated by misogynists like Billy Bragg, where women have actually got a proper say,” she says, telling me she has had numerous messages from female musicians who are too scared to speak out — especially after seeing what happened to Murphy. “It’s well established that violence towards women is a massive problem in the music industry,” says Distras, “and here they are inciting more violence, and the rest of the music industry just applauds them for it and tells them they are stunning and brave.”

“We need more musicians to come forward courageously and without apology. There’s been so much support for me, and there will be for the other women. And the more of us that stand up, the more these men like Billy Bragg will not be so dominant.”

[digirainebow]

guess what, me? your hope did, in fact, manifest into reality 💛

[girlonthelasttrain]

I think one problem is that they often don't teach students that the electric guitar is not an instrument on its own but it's just half of one. The other half is the amplifier. And how the two halves of the instrument interact is how the electric guitar gained its deserved fame of being an extremely versatile instrument. Except very few guitar lessons are actually about how an amplifier works (or even how the amplifier isn't just the speaker cone!) or how a little thing like turning the volume knob on your guitar or dig into the strings a little more while you pick can dramatically alter the tonal characteristics of the sound coming out of the speaker because the different electric signal is elaborated differently by the amp

[poedameronthighs]

we're reaching critical mass of horny levels folks

[cjoatprehn]

Sorry if I’m kinda….on and off today..

Current;y trying to calm down from a mistake I made—I don’t deal with making mistakes well—

So Ask Box is open…i may not exactly doodle every answer because I still struggle with making doodles, um.

I-I’m just trying not to cry, I’ve cried enough. panic is stuffing my trunk.

—CJ

[kavehater]

Lord give me energy today eueueue

[nothingnowherenow]

really wild to me how important music is to my system

[anarchivalsystem]

Hello, I hope you and your family are well. Can you please help me recycle the post on my account? 🌺 And help rescue my family from the war in Gaza? 🙏 Thank you.

https://gofund.me/198b6d57

Boosting, don't have many followers here but hopefully it helps.

[anonynewsroom]

Me and friend sys' host, watching one particular alters that we have each other, interacting as friends: "....Why do they look like an old elderly couple. Why do they have the philosophical quiet talks on 3AM?"

[voltas-do-mar]

bring me home / bring me home thoughts of you will bring me home as the sun may rise with crashing tides oh, you will bring me home

oh, at home there's my darling [The name here is muffled. Two syllables.] and i miss him all day long he has strange style / but he makes me smile and for him i will stay strong

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I promised you some lions! Let's talk about manes, males, and management.

This is Tandie, the current male lion at the Woodland Park Zoo.

Notice anything odd about him? He's got one of those hilarious awkward teenager manes. Except... this cat is nine years old.

I was, of course, immediately curious.

Manes serve a lot of purposes for male lions, including being an indicator of health and fitness - it's actually a sexually selected trait and a social signal. Mane texture / hair quality / length is dependent on nutrition and the body having energy to grow (and carry around!) that much hair! The color is also a signal: males with darker manes have been found to have higher testosterone levels.

In one research report, wild males were much more likely to avoid a lion decoy when it had a longer or darker mane - but the girls really loved a dark mane. It's thought this is because a long, dark mane is an indicator of mate quality. Males with longer, darker manes have higher testosterone and were pretty healthy: meaning they had more energy for fighting, had a better chance of recovering if they got injured, and generally had a higher rate of offspring survival. Manes matter!

So, back to Tandie. He was actually born at the Woodland Park Zoo in 2014 alongside two brothers, to dad Xerxes and mother Adia.

This was Xerxes (rip).

Obviously, a very large, dark, lush mane on Xerxes here. So where did these blond muttonchops come from on his son?

I asked the zoo docents and got an answer that didn't make a lot of sense. They told me that after the three cubs grew into adolescents, they were moved to the Oakland Zoo together. But living together suppressed his testosterone, and he never grew a mane.

Hmmmm.

Here's a photo from 2016, when the brothers debuted at Oakland. They're a year and a half old in this photo.

(Photo Credit: Oakland Zoo)

And here's from an announcement for their third birthday.

(Photo credit: Oakland Zoo)

Okay, so these dudes obviously all were growing manes as of 2017. I think Tandie is the one on the left in the first photo, and laying down in the middle on the second. What happened?

I was just in the Bay Area for a zoo road trip, of course I went to Oakland and tracked down a docent to ask some questions.

It turns out that shortly after the brothers turned three, they started acting like adult male lions: they started scuffling regularly. It's a normal social thing for male lions to live in groups, called coalitions, but according to my lion experts there's generally a baseline level of some social jostling within them. It wasn't quite clear from what the docent said if they couldn't manage the boys together, or if they just wanted to avoid the scratches and small wounds that result from normal lion behavior. Regardless, they put all three of the boys on testosterone blockers in order to be able to keep them together as a social group.

Now, I don't know a lot about the use of hormone alteration as a form of captive animal management, except in the case of birth control. I don't think it's something that's unethical - there was just a webinar on it that I saw go by - but I don't think it's commonly done with big cats. Lions have kind of complicated reproductive cycles, and for instance, we've been learning that female lions can take much longer to come into estrus again than expected after coming off hormonal birth control.

In males, testosterone blockers (or being neutered) means they lose their manes. This is why a lot of rescues will do a vasectomy on their males instead of a neuter - it allows them to keep their mane and the social signals that accompany it.

Tandie returned home to Woodland Park Zoo after Xerxes passed in early 2022, and the docent told me all of the lions had been off their blockers "for while." I'd guess those things happened around the same time, since bringing the trio down to a duo at Oakland would reduce some of the social tensions.

Hormones are such interesting things, though. One of Tandie's brothers has a full mane again, and the other is still totally mane-less.

As for Tandie, his mane is growing back in, and it looks like he might rival his dad for length and coloration.

He started here, in February:

Yesterday:

What a difference four months (and maybe proximity to a girl) makes!

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)