#making

[lavb-b]

Just a little something to celebrate 1k on twitter !!

Nothing better than mashing two of my favourite indies and completely obsessing over them.

If you’re wondering why chara’s there its because of this other little celebratory art i made for 100 twitter followers

And i love tradition 🔥

[binomech]

tags via @sageshouldknowbetter:

so much of this show is about love (even the grief that seeps through every frame is an extension of love.) there are four people who live in a corporate basement and have never seen the sun. they don't have parents, they don't have hobbies, they don't have houses or beach visits or summers and falls, but they have each other. the others with them, who become by necessity their entire world in a more than literal sense. and we have to ask why Lumon would do this. They didn't need to put MDR together. They could isolate every innie, have them live in their own cubicles, never see the face or hear the voice of anyone besides their managers or animatronic Kier. but they don't. and you could say it was because they wanted them to be a self-governing oppressed class… or you could say it was because they knew without any opportunity for human bonding a person really does become nonfunctional. raving. broken enough to be barely a person at all. the funny thing is that Lumon shot themselves in the foot: the company's downfall… if it truly does come… will be because of the sheer love their corporate tools cannot help but having for each other and honestly? I think that's beautiful

i think about mark s' first minutes alive consisting of petey k asking "who are you" 19 times and mark vowing to find and kill him on instinct, cornered and afraid like a newborn foal in a locked room. mark s, who wakes up every day in the same underground, windowless office choking on grief and anger he can't explain and tries to escape, even if that escape is by definition a suicide, and fails. petey k, who greeted him upon arrival under their jailers' eyes so he couldn't offer words of reassurance (or did he, just like mark s who broke protocol for helly, and they both got punished for it in the same way?), who watches and worries and takes care of mark s by mapping the floor despite the express forbidding of it in search of a way out while mark s is tortured into ataraxic resignation. petey k, who finds a way to reintegrate (mark scout reintegrated without asking mark s because he wanted to see gemma alive, did petey k reintegrate without asking peter kilmer because he wanted mark s to live?) and goes to his very good friend's outie and shows him a recording of mark s, exhausted and begging in the break room. i think about mark scout, who let this stranger crash in his basement for a few days, who watches him collapse even as his relieved eyes meet his, thinking of someone else, and scrolls past a headline of his death, and attends his funeral out of duty for a version of himself that was loved enough to die for. i think about june kilmer, whom peter kilmer loved and petey k never met in his two reintegrated weeks before death, who was so loved that in a chaos of memories and tangled lifespans, she was a certainty: june is my daughter, and one hell of a guitar player.

i think about helly r, who was seen and loved by mark, dylan and irving (let me out, give me a reason to stay, what is my reason to be as i am) as she respectfully penned requests for her outie to quit, as she got told she was not a person and, like mark s, saw suicide as the only way to get out for so long. as she was brought to the shrine to the family that made the only existence she gets a living hell, unbeknownst to her, by irving, who was being swallowed by the absence of a family himself, both inside and outside of the severed floor. i think about a suicidal irving b in front of that fire escape, standing alone and away from dylan's worried looks, having to break the first hug he's initiated in his whole life as dylan gets dragged away to the promise of a "real" family in dylan george's wife, away from irving (who is dylan g's family only, not dylan george's, who loves him so dearly, this dylan who knows that leaving is dying, who noticed irving was sweet on burt, who encouraged the courtship - who, alongside felicia, voiced the only positive acknowledgement of burt g and irving b's relationship as romantic with kindness). irving b who, unlike mark s and helly r upon their arrival, was told that he would not be dragged back if he chose to quit during that workday in particular, as if it was an act of mercy. irving b who came back anyway, because they killed his burt but that's not his helly, and he's dylan's favorite perk, and mark is being used by every single person inside and outside of the severed floor. mark with the weird sense of humor that only petey enjoyed, who hid petey's photo before irving was ready to say goodbye, and who mocked his greeting but still found out what was for dinner. mark, who took them all to O&D under the threat of torture the second he saw irving berate himself for wanting to visit burt. and he figures it out! and he gets their helly back, helly who was never cruel, whom his capacity for cruelty touched for a few seconds that he will never stop being sorry for. he doesn't get a permission slip to kill himself, but he gets to hold helly close and comfort her one last time in the way he had wanted to and never dared to, using this body that is also his to hug her like she did dylan, to tell him and mark that they are forgiven, that he's at peace with this choice. that he's feeling the warmth of the sun on his face for the first and last time in his life and that all three of them are loved enough to die for.

i think about burt goodman, who lost his job because a part of him he condemned to a life of forced labor as atonement fell in love with a man he will never meet, that his husband will never be, a version of himself with a love he believes he could never have after what he's done for lumon. i think about him recording a video for the formal execution of what he thought of as an innocent version of himself telling everyone at O&D that despite the conspicuous absence of their memories, he feels burt g's fulfillment from working there, and their love. i think about how he assumed that burt g's lover would be there, even if irving b's presence was a clerical error that would lead to a crack in lumon's image so large it would set the foundation of its downfall as a company but not before getting irving b killed. burt goodman, who heard a desperate stranger at his door screaming his name and followed him for weeks, who invited him for dinner to facillitate the breaking and entering of a company higher up into his house in search for excuses to kill him, who saw his own complicity in the death machine of lumon pencilled carefully alongside all the names of people irving bailiff was trying to help, and heard him say "i know now that you're not with them" even as he tensed in fear, even as he found his home violated (this time knowingly, unlike the night of the dinner), because his service dog (the only one that takes care of irving bailiff, the only one that irving bailiff can take care of) was at ease. burt goodman, who was asked to take irving bailiff to his death, and irving bailiff, who knew this and still got in burt's car. burt goodman, who would give up his life so that this innocent love a part of him had with this stranger lives in some way, even if he burns, even if it's tucked away safely in the corner of a chip, unknown and unknowable to the both of them, in irving bailiff's brain. that those versions of them and irving bailiff, who isn't afraid of muggers or knaves, who knew what he'd done and still went on a ride with him, are loved enough to die for.

i think about dylan george's "stop being nice [to me]" to his wife because he didn't get the door salesman job. i think about dylan george, who forgot about the cookies but remembered to ask gretchen if the time with his innie was nice. i think about gretchen saying she kissed his innie because he reminded her of the way dylan used to be, and dylan referencing his (precarious, so precarious) financial contribution to the household in the same breath he threatens to quit so that this version of him (that he was, at some point, that he isn't anymore) won't take gretchen from him. i think about dylan g talking to gretchen george about her life with his outie and their children with ms. huang watching and listening and growing quieter on the other side of a CCTV system, and proposing to her because there's nothing to be had inside the severed floor anymore (mark has barely been down there since the ORTBO and might not come back at all, they took helly and he didn't even notice or listen to irving's suspicions that he was trusted with. how is he supposed to separate the guilt from the fear? what if it's helena again? how will he ever find the elevator now that irving's dead? does he really have the strength of two men? is he dumb? is he a dick? is he an asshole down here too?). i think about gretchen saying no to the proposal and to the visiting hours altogether if it means he gets to live, but about how she knows that she's not all he has. how dylan g must have told her about irving b, about the funeral, about helly and mark, about petey and their jokes. how gretchen must've told dylan george about all this, dylan george who writes to dylan g after he tried to quit without his prompting, to tell him both fuck you and that he gets it, both the suicide and the love: gretchen and their children outside are loved enough to die for, and so is dylan g's family in equal measure, and so he won't take the choice to quit from him, but he reminds himself and his innie that all of them are loved enough to live and fight for as well.

i think about irving bailiff and his single bed, his wardrobe mostly full of dress shirts for irving b, maritime signal flags and whispered conspiracies from an anonymized phone booth as cryptographically sound ways to show love without necessarily getting it in return. tall walls that need a watchdog and matching uniforms with a father buried in the same trunk that holds years of violence from him, to him, to people like him, to people more vulnerable than him, and ways to use the evidence of harm to get all of them out. i think about irving bailiff existing in dusty medal displays and out of focus trinkets and the soft presses of hands against fur and paint and cheekbones with such longing that they can't be looked at directly for too long without them catching on fire and disappearing without a trace, only fleeting glimpses in the dark. did he also come out of the elevator feeling loved, like burt goodman, and put a comb in his pocket instead of a key card? did he pick up marcus aurelius the evening after burt g's retirement party without knowing why? did his eyes wander to that lone vulture and was he pricked by suspicion, or is the loneliness such an expected fixture that it was the good days that felt like a fluke? when he apologized to burt goodman for showing up and startling him and his husband, did he think it was an act of love for burt that got his innie killed in the end? or did he imagine a man with burt goodman's face holding irving b with recognition, respect and care in a hell neither of them wanted to be in, and found this hell to be the same in their lives outside? i know that he did not think of helly r, dylan g and mark s. i know that he didn't think of felicia welcoming his innie with a hug and sharing one of her precious two daily vending machine snacks, reminiscing about the burt they both loved. i know he didn't think of ms. casey, in her longest time awake (alive!), whose first action outside of her instructed behavior as an unilateral therapeutic mouthpiece was telling irving b that burt g was in an unauthorized location instead of their bosses. i know he didn't think of them because he doesn't even know they exist, much less that his innie loved them all (not just burt g) enough to die for.

i understand why romantic love was put at the forefront of season two in contrast to the ensemble approach to season one. mark scout's and gemma's, mark s' and helly r's, both dylans and gretchen, both irvings and burt (and fields), in all their awkward, gangly, teenaged glory (including helena's abuse coming from a profound lack of agency over her own life and a concerning amount of power over the employees', cobel and hampton's cynical revisiting of a teenage crush that was never allowed to exist, the glimpses into devon and ricken's very genuine love being based on his intense earnestness and how it crumbles when his own insecurities put him in a position to perform). but i still hope that all of these relationships outside of monogamous love and the various successes and failures of the nuclear family are at the core of the story that severance will end up telling. there is so much love in all of their lives, and severance is the reason all of them don't know about most of it. they're denied the possibility of mourning their dead, and the possibility of loving and being loved, because it makes them easier to exploit, because it's harder to fight back if you're doing it alone. there's a petey-shaped hole in season two and i want all this love (that the heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous, white supremacist ideal of family doesn't have room for) to burst through it and burn lumon and the eagan legacy to the ground.

[lexamakes]

Cat bed continues to be a raging success!

[pepsichel]

[copperbadge]

When I do cross-stitch I wax my thread, which makes it easier to get onto the needle and in my opinion causes fewer tangles. I use plain beeswax, and I've had the same puck (bought from Yankee Candle) for years because you don't need much wax for thread. But the puck was finally getting a little fragile and I wanted to have separate pucks for separate projects anyway. So I busted out my wax sealing kit and melted the puck into three separate round molds, then when they were cool I sealed the top of each with a different stamp.

The sealing wax is the new "supple" wax which is mostly vinyl polymer (think hot glue, but nicer) so it can't be used to wax the thread, but it's a good reinforcement for the beeswax, which tends to get deep grooves and then crumble. And I think they look quite nice, too.

[talenlee]

Life With Generative Tools

In 2023, back when my posts were still being shared to Twitter because the API wasn’t paid-only, I wrote an article about the potential ramifications of generative art media going forward. My concern in the immediate was that the tools weren’t going to go away, but also the potential harm to artists was as much about general economic precarity and not people using fanart to make their D&D characters. I further added to this with a consideration of how I wanted to avoid using generative art in my game development because I didn’t want what people would say about it. That is, a social pressure about the art is what keeps me from using it, not a personal philosophical disposition. I’m an artist who already works with collage and constraints, this feels like a handy way to have something I can play with.

Well, it’s been a year and change and a sort of AI Art Apocalypse has happened, and if you’re not aware of it, it’s because you’re someone who avoids all of the pools that have been so thoroughly pissed in that they are now just piss. If you’re at all related to any part of the internet where people share a bunch of images – which is to say a lot of social media – then you’re already dealing with the place crawling with generative images. Whether it’s a fanart booru, or big sites like facebook and twitter, or god help you deviantart, there is a pretty clear sign that anywhere that opened the door to generative art became a space overwhelmingly for generative art.

I teach about this subject now and I have had some time with it in a situation away from the internet, and I’d like to give you some insights into what this stuff is for, what it does, why you shouldn’t use it, and ways it can be useful.

Content Warning: I’m going to be talking about these tools as tools that exist and leaving the philosophical/ethical arguments about ‘art theft’ and their genesis aside. I’m not including any examples. No shrimp jesus jumpscare.

You might notice I’m saying ‘generative art’ and not ‘AI art.’ Part of this is because I don’t want to buy into the idea that these tools are ‘artificial intelligence.’ Ironically, ‘AI art’ now has less of an implication of being ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and is much more of an implication of ‘it’s ugly shiny art of shrimp jesus with badly spelled signs.’

I want to focus for this conversation on generative graphical tools, and I want to do that because I don’t have much experience with the other types. The textual generators offer me something I don’t really need? I already make a ton of words of dubious quality. Those are actually the things that concern me because their natural aesthetic is authoritive and comprehensive and that’s why it’s a problem that they’re being used to present any old nonsense that may just be straight up wrong. I don’t use those tools and I avoid the platforms that use them so I’m not familiar with them.

Things Generative Art Is Good For

I already use art I don’t own, a lot, for playing. Every day for the past three years I’ve shared a custom Magic: The Gathering playing card, a game I don’t own the rights to, using a card face I don’t own the rights to, and artwork from an artist on Artstation whose artwork I did not pay for or even ask for. This is generally seen as a totally reasonable and acceptable form of playful, transformative media generation and I at no point pretend I have any rights to the material. If I take a picture of someone famous and put a speech bubble over their mouth saying ‘I drink farts,’ if I, as tumblr says, play with jpgs like dolls, that is by no means being done with rights and permission.

Which means we’re already aware that there’s a way of playing with images that both violates copyright but is generally okay to do.

The metric I use for this is if the thing you’re using generative art for doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to try and claim money, if you’re not going to put it on a marketplace, if you aren’t going to try and claim ownership and profit off generative material, I think you’re probably fine. I mean probably, if you’re using it to say, generate revenge porn of a classmate that’s an asshole move, but the thing is that’s a bad thing regardless of the tool you’re using. If you’re using it to bulk flood a space, like how Deviantart is full of accounts with tens of thousands of pictures made in a week, then that’s an asshole move because, again, it’s an asshole move regardless of the tool.

If you’re a roleplayer and you want a picture of your Dragonborn dude with glasses and a mohawk? That’s fine, you’re using it to give your imagination a pump, you’re using it to help your friends visualise what matters to you about your stuff. That’s fine! It’s not like you’re not making artistic choices when you do this, cycling through choices and seeing the one that works best for you. That’s not an action deprived of artistic choice!

There are also some things that are being labelled as ‘AI’ which seem to be more like something else to me. Particularly, there are software packages that resize images now, which are often calling it ‘AI upscaling,’ which it may be using some variety of these Midjourney style models to work, but which serves a purpose similar to sequences of resizes and selective blurs. There are also tools that can do things like remove people from the background of images, which is… good? It should be good and easy to get people out of pictures they didn’t consent to be in.

Things Generative Art Is Bad For

Did you know you don’t own copyright on generated art? This is pretty well established. If you generated the image, it’s not yours, because you didn’t make it. It was made by an algorithm, and algorithms aren’t people. This isn’t a complicated issue, this just means that straight up, any art you make at work that’s meant to be used for work, shouldn’t be used because people can just straight up use it. Logo design, branding, all that stuff is just immediately open for bootlegging or worse, impersonation.

Now you might think that’s a bit of a strange thing to bring up but remember, I’m dealing with students a lot. Students who want to position themselves as future prompt engineers or social media managers need to understand full well that whatever they make with these tools are not things that will have an enduring useful application. Maybe you can use it for a meme you post on an account, but it’s not something you can build branding off, because you don’t own it. Everyone owns it.

From that we get a secondary problem, because if you didn’t own it, its only use is what people say or think when they look at it, and thing is, people are already sick and tired of the aesthetics of generated art. You’re going to get people who don’t care glossing over it, and people who do care hating it. Generative art as a way of presenting your business or foregrounding your ‘vibes’ are going to think that your work is, primarily, ‘more AI art’ and not about what it’s trying to communicate. When the internet is already full of Slop, if you use these tools to represent your work, you are going to be turning your own work and media presence into slop.

What’s more, you need to be good at seeing mistakes if you’re using these tools. If you put some art out there that’s got an extra thumb or someone’s not holding a sword right, people will notice. That means you need to start developing the toolset above for fine-tuning and redrawing sections of artwork. Now, that’s not a bad thing! That’s a skill you can develop! But it means that the primary draw of these tools is going to be something that you then have to do your own original work over the top of.

The biggest reason though I recommend students not treat this work like it’s a simple tool for universal application is that it devalues you as a worker. If you’re trying to get hired for a job at a company and you can show them a bunch of generative art you’ve made to convince them that you’re available, all you are really telling them is that you can be replaced by a small script that someone else can make. Your prompts are not unique enough, your use of the tool not refined enough that you can’t just be replaced by anyone else who gets paid less. You are trying to sell yourself as a product to employers, and generative art replaces what you bring with what everyone brings.

They make you lazy! People include typos in the generative media because they’re not even looking at them or caring about what they say! And that brings me to the next point that there are just things these tools don’t do a good job doing, and that’s stuff I want to address next in…

Things That Are Interesting

Because the tools of generative art create a very impressive-seeming artistic output, they are doing it in a way that people want to accept. They want to accept them and that means accepting the problems, or finding a way to be okay with those problems. People who don’t care that much about typos and weird fingers and so on, because you know, it gets me a lot of what I want, but it doesn’t get me everything, and I don’t know how to get the everything.

If you generate an image and want to move something in it a little bit, your best way to do that is to edit the image directly. Telling the software to do that, again, but change this bit, this much, is in fact really hard because it doesn’t know what those parts are. It doesn’t have an idea of where they are, it’s all running on an alien understanding of nightmare horror imagery.

What that means is that people start to negotiate with themselves about what they want, getting to ‘good enough’ and learning how to negotiate with the software. My experiments with these tools led to me making a spreadsheet so I could isolate the terms I use that cause problems, and sometimes those results are very, very funny. In this, the tool teaches you how to use it (which most tools do), but the teaching results in a use that is wildly inappropriate to what the tool promises it’s for.

One of my earliest experiments was to take four passages from One Stone that described a character and just put that text straight into midjourney to see what it generated based on that plain text description. Turns out? Nothing like what I wanted. But when I treated it like say, I was searching for a set of tags on a booru system like danbooru or safebooru… then it was pretty good at that. Which is what brings me to the next stage of things, which is like…

These things were trained on porn sites right?

Like, you can take some very specific tags from some of the larger boorus and type them into these prompt sites and get a very reasonable representation of what it is you asked for, even if that term is a part of an idiolect, a term that’s specific to that one person in one space that’s become a repeated form of tag. Just type in an artist name and see if it can replicate their style and then check to see what kind of art that artist makes a lot of. This is why you can get a thing that can give you police batons and mirrored sunglasses just fine but if you ask for ‘police uniform’ you get some truly Tom of Finland kind of bulging stuff.

Conclusion

Nobody who dislikes generative art is wrong. I think there are definitely uses of it that are flat out bad, and I think it’s totally okay and even good to say so. Make fun of people who are using it, mock the shrimp jesuses, make it very clear you’re aware of what’s going on and why. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I do think that these tools are useful as toys, and I think that examining the art that they produce, and the art that the community around them are exalting and venerating tells us stuff. Of course, what they tell us is that there are a lot of people out there who really want porn, and there are just as many people who want the legitimisation of impressive seeming images that they don’t care about what those images are doing or what they’re for.

Now part of this defensiveness is also the risk of me being bitten. If I buy stock art that isn’t correctly disclosed as being generative art, then I might make and sell something using generative art and now I look like an asshole for not being properly good at detecting and hating ‘AI art,’ and when I’ve say, made a game using generative art that then is integrated into things like worldbuilding and the card faces, then it gets a lot harder to tear it out at the roots and render myself properly morally clean. I’m sure a bunch of the stock art I used before 2020 was made algorithmically, just pumped out slop that was reprocessing other formula or technical objects to fill up a free stock art site like Freepik.

Which is full of generative art now.

You won’t hurt yourself by understanding these things, and people who are using them for fun or to learn or explore are by no means doing something morally ill. There are every good reason to keep these things separated from anything that involves presenting yourself seriously, or using them to make money, though. If nothing else, people will look at you and go ‘oh, you’re one of those shrimp jesus assholes.’

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[behemotthedog]

He's trying hard just to let us get some good tea from a cute teapot!!😭🤍

Commission for arelhyhahaha on Twitter!🍵

[getamovieon]

[sanlad]

[kirbyfigure]

૮ ｡ˊᯅˋ ა

[binomech]

he can't keep a job. he hasn't found his thing yet. his only point of pride is earning enough to put food on the table and buy baby wipes. he asks his wife to stop being nice to him. his wife kissed his innie because he reminds her of how he used to be. he threatens to kill his innie. he stopped believing in perks when he was hugged by his son. he stayed behind to give his family a chance to see the world he saw. he spotted irving's suicidal ideation, ran after him, and kept him alive for a little longer. it's his outie's wife, not his. he didn't listen to irving's warnings about helly. he apologizes at irving's funeral for letting him down when he's the only one left. he made a ring out of a fingertrap. he can give her a life. he doesn't have anything else. if he didn't have fingertraps, he'd kill himself. he won't find the black hallway. he killed himself.

[lexamakes]

I made the cat bed in to a macaron, it continues to be a fav spot.

[hawkeyefan911]

I don’t know who the original is but I came across the post on TikTok through @ endlessandnameless

[copperbadge]

Last year I got into imprint and letterpress in a hobbyist kind of way, and after visiting the Hatch Show Print shop in Nashville (well worth the ticket if you're going to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where the press lives) I decided I wanted to learn more about how printing worked from a mechanical point of view.

I'd like to buy a real letterpress, but I found a "build your own" kit on eBay and -- I have to say it doesn't work well but it is a functional press and I learned a lot about press construction while building it!

[ID: Three images; top left is the kit box with the parts and manual inside, while the top right is the half-built press. Bottom image is the press fully built, with a lever at the top, the inkpad inverted over the base, and a "press" plate between inkpad and base. It prints, kinda. I may be able to improve it.]