#check suit

[moonfirebrides]

Ladene Clark

[monkeyssalad-blog]

CONSUL - 1910s by jim goodyear Via Flickr: Cycles Consul Monkey Riding German a poster by Adolph Friedlander. 1910s

[kensatou]

[heph]

Enlightenment - Devastation

[hurlyburlytopsyturvy]

jane’s blue cigar

[mysterycitrus]

the fanon that dick was awful to his successors — being abusive to jason or mean to tim — is very funny to me because he categorically handled being replaced better than either of them did

[rizzem-w-the-tism]

Yeah I'll see myself out

[eye-merely-jest]

hrrghgghbmnnmm x-men evolution nightcrawler….

i actually didn't care for him when i first started watching evo 'cause i thought him annoying as shit but now that is PRECISELY why i'm obsessed with him. Weird Kid™ kurt is just such an endearing concept and it's like he's just like me and I FUCKING LOVE THIS GUY SO MUCH

[ashotasfireandasdeepastheocean1]

...inStyle

.

[necrotic-nephilim]

Tim's unternet suit really is the most glaringly obvious hero worship/crush for Dick thing he ever has. in the unternet, where Tim's subconscious creates what he is. that's the suit his brain comes up with? something so clearly derivative of Nightwing? down to the *finger stripes*?

red robin #19

this is gay as hell. the reason Tim can't wear this soul irl is bc the first thing he would do is jerk off in it. and he couldn't handle the embarrassment of Dick seeing how similar it is. if DC ever made this Tim's official suit the first thing they would have to do is make Tim and Dick fuck in it. i'm so close to writing that fic i won't lie.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

As a Crewel lover, I must confess they botched his age kind of. Like When was he supposed to have this illustrious fashion career? Now that there's apparently higher education in Twisted Wonderland, like does he have like a bachelors? His masters? Did he get a PhD? Which in theory he could do in like 6 years in a UK system, but like then she started at NRC at 26? Or is he teaching at NRC with just his NRC education. And then went right into fashion for a few years and then continued his education. Like I love him but idk if it make sense why he's so young.

There has always been higher level education alluded to in Twst. For example, Riddle’s parents are both medical mages and Azul’s stepfather is an attorney, and NRC is said to employ counselors, a school nurse, and former five star chefs. I doubt these particular careers could be carried out effectively with only a high school level education. I also doubt that private arcane academies as illustrious as NRC or RSA would hire instructors that only had a high school education and no formal teaching degree or even work experience. We learn in Trein’s Strict Suit vignettes that he, even with his many years of teaching and teaching at THE Night Raven College, his job applications to RSA were repeatedly rejected. If the bar is set that high (assumedly for both schools), then there is absolutely no chance in hell Crewel would be even looked at without the proper credentials to be leading a classroom.

According to Crewel’s official in-game profile, he is currently 32 years old. In the main story, we’re currently on Silver’s birthday (May 15), meaning that Crewel, born April 20th, is technically 33 since the ages on their profiles were the characters’ ages at the start of the school year in September.

We learn in Crewel’s Rich Fur Coat vignettes that this school year makes it his 6th year teaching at NRC. This means he would have started teaching around 26-27 years of age.

Since we know Crewel was a NRC graduate, he was 19-20 at the end of his 4th year. It would take him another 4 years to get his bachelor’s (I assume perhaps in fashion?), or perhaps he immediately went into a fashion apprenticeship using connections + experience from his 4th year internships. This would give him anywhere from 2-7 years’ worth of time in the fashion industry, which would grant him time to work on a number of collections (a single one takes roughly 6-12 months to complete). Then it would take Crewel another 2 years for his master’s, which would be required for teaching. A PhD (which would take 4-7 more years) is NOT necessary for the vocational high school level, only for like… tenured university professors. I know the terminology is a little confusing since NRC is called a “college” in both EN and JP (it’s actually more of a high school according to Yana’s own words) and instructors are called “professors” in EN only (the original JP text calls the instructors 先生/sensei/teacher and not 教授/kyōju/professor), but I don’t believe Crewel has a doctorate/PhD. He does mention that students are only allowed to brew potions under the supervision of a “licensed professional”, but this “license” could have been earned while on his master level educator’s track (licenses are sometimes already “built in” to the studies) and not necessarily require additional time after earning his teaching degree. He’d be 26-27 by then, at which point he’d start teaching at NRC (assuming he got hired immediately).

Of course, this is assuming that Crewel did not take any accelerated tracks. There are programs out there which would allow him to graduate with a teaching degree in less time, albeit at the tradeoff of a more intensive workload. It’s possible that he took this route!

There’s also another possible direction we could take: that Crewel never had a formal or extensive career in fashion. He states in his vignettes that fashion is something he considers “a hobby” (though this could just refer to him remaining a consultant to brands in his free time). His referring to “working for an apparel brand” is also vague enough to mean an internship he held in the past or working part time while studying for his teaching degree. There’s many different ways to interpret his words!

In conclusion, I do think it could (plausibly) make sense that Crewel is “so young” yet he still has had experience in the fashion industry and earned a teaching degree in the time between graduating from NRC to now.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[buttercupshands]

Siffrin in a Stardust Cookie event outfit because the name speaks for itself now if you excuse me, I need to sleep

[superbat-love]

Since DC is too cowardly to ever make superbat canon, I’ve decided to be delulu and pretend that Matthew x Jin from Under the Green Light is a superbat AU. I mean, come on, you’ve got the same vibes—a cynical man with a rough past + a loner who finds beauty in everything around him. Bonus points, they’re both orphans.

Mob Boss Jin: On the surface, he seems ruthless, but he’s actually fiercely loyal to those he cares about. He’s deeply conflicted about the path his life has taken, so he constantly seeks ways to dull the guilt and pain. A recovering junkie who sluts around with his subordinates (to the dismay of his higher-ups), Jin finally finds himself addickted to the lost soul that won’t stop following him around.

Art Student Matthew: Glasses? Check. Tall, well-built guy who hides his physique under baggy shirts? Double check. Constantly underestimated and pushed around by the people around him? Triple check. But beneath that innocent puppy demeanor lies someone who will go feral the second his lover is in danger.

The ‘Older Power Bottom x Younger Devoted Top’ dynamic is *chef’s kiss*

[5-pp-man]

Here's all the 10 years later designs I nabbed from the website under the 2025ver. tab

Unfortunately all they've got for En on there is his homeless design, and not the one after he gets a cleanup

[perhaps-only-a-mirage]

some simple (but plentiful!!!) sprites for you all today. just some outfit swaps! the alpha kids did not get nearly enough cool outfits, so i decided to see what they'd look like with some modified beta kid outfits. some look decent, but others look very nice! i also did it the other way around too, because whynot.

(sorry i think i'll stop with the colored text thing in default text, it was So Cool but it was also really time consuming @_@)

JANE

ROXY

DIRK

JAKE

JOHN

JADE

ROSE

DAVE