#me @ my whole deviantart

[fedoraspooky]

What if I revived this comic idea just to have them both look like this in it

[florshedworf]

im sorry to say but im a scratch defender. yes people got banned for stupid ass reasons but i’ll tell you that shit kept me from getting actually harassed

[milfbrainrot]

sorry i just remembered wolf's rain as another one of those "formative shows where there's a Science Experiment Girl held inside a Facility" examples

[galactaknightyaoi]

honse…,

Honse indeed ❤️

That's Judith. Or just Jude, for short.

She was my first ever OC, and the only one out of my OCs with a November birthday like me. So I figured she was a good choice for a birthday profile picture lol.

That's her. Isn't she sweet? :)

[flamboyant-king]

Wow fellas, I was going through my blog for something and realized I have almost 500 posts tagged #comic. Almost been here 10 years posting shitpost nonsense. I've got over 5600+ posts on this here blog. Maybe 80% is all drawing.

Look at me. Still going. One day, it will all amount to something big. But for now, stick around and enjoy the show.

Love yall.

[shevr]

thinkin back to that post a while ago i'd tagged w/ "sorry for not being hornier" actually; like i know this stacks on top of my general issue with failing to draw more in general but sometimes i somehow feel bad or inadequate for not indulging in drawing nsfw things. never been a thing i feel like ive ever rly naturally left like doing so much

idk if that's me wishing i could feel like it, or wanting to do what the other cool artists do, or just another extension of wishing to do anything

but. monday 2am rambles, nothin serious. i can draw dicks whenever, whatever, no rush

[verawhisk]

injury body horror kidnapping tw all that stuff sorry god!!

[simonpetrilove]

2014 me would have LOVED all of this simon content

[wikagirl]

when the hyperfixation from when you were 11 comes back kicking almost 13 years later and you gotta completely relearn the artstyle

[foone]

Your posts are in an AI model

and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.

Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.

but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.

Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?

They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.

It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.

I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.

They only ever pay for this shit because either:

they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying

They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.

ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...

but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"

Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. * I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[tricksterlatte]

ngl this is just a silly post I made while goofing around, but finding out the two sides to this newfound issue are either "Akechi is a Norse mythology nerd and goes online to write essays on how badly Marvel messed everything up" or "Akechi actually kins MCU Loki due to his own relationship with Shido and his mother versus MCU Loki with Odin and Frigga" is actually hilarious.

If Persona 5 begins during 2016, this would mean Akechi previously awakened to Loki during the prime time of MCU Loki being a tumblr sexyman. Do whatever you’d like with that information

[xxxnightcorequeenxxx]

PSA To the Phantom, we have a Troll/Stalker!

Those who know me know this is somthing I won't typically resort to this, but today, I've reached the end of my long patience. ( one and half a year of patience) There is a Stalker/ Troll whose whole stick is trying to get people to draw Dani and Danny fan art. Thir asks will look like this. They will delete them as soon as you answer. I mod on a few Discord servers, so when I informed people on Discord that I had a digital stalker, someone reached out to me to ask me if this was them, as they didn't want to deal with what I had to put up with. That's how I got a hold of this:

On Deviantart, they try to get into people's good graces by subscribing and donating a dollar. (it's a tip you can do on DA, not required) They ask you to do art, and if you bite, They won't stop pestering you about it. Like you didn't do it fast enough, or you didn't do it. And if you do, they have a new request lined up the minute you post the last. So it's never good enough. They will try to monopolize your time, and you never get time to draw what you want to if you try being kind at first. One telltale sign that it's them is that if you reply to them, they will delete all their messages with you after your reply to avoid detection by moderators.

So here are the usernames I know them by; Usernames of them on DA; DanielFentonPhantom DannyFenton2 DannyFenton3 DannyPhantom11 JacobFritzsching1 JacobFritzsching2 JacobPhantom1 JakeFritzsching JakeFritzsching1 The username of the stalker on Tumblr: JacobFritzsching1 & JacobPhantom

I've tried to block them multiple times, And I suspect DA staff have banned some of their accounts.

They don't understand no and stay away or that people have boundaries. I've reported them multiple times. They have been suspended multiple times (I was lucky enough to get this screenshot for a suspended account)

They have been bothering me since Aug 28, 2023 and the latest block for this person was today.

This is me reaching out to others in my discord communities over time for help, showing what it did to me mentally and why I no longer take art requests. (For the privacy of the other users, I've only included what needed to go in there with their usernames hidden.) The only other user by name than me is the stalker.

I lay myself bare to you phandom community so that you may not suffer silently by JacobFritzsching1 hand. I know I'm not his only target. I've stayed quiet and done what I could for a year and a half. They have not let up, and I fear they are driving good people out of the community through their behavior. I will confess to thoughts of wanting to permanently delete my stuff just to escape this stalker. But I'm not letting them win. I am a Phandom elder, I have been a phan since the show since it aired back in the day; some of you may know me by my old username Jeanette9a, some of you will know I'm sited as one of the earlier ones to keep DP ship names list that now exisits on Ao3, and I have to use my every connection and pull to see this troll/stalker not mess with more of my fellow Phandom community. That so be it. I will pull out my megaphone and scram their misdeeds to heaves, so they may never walk anywhere without people knowing who JacobFritzsching1 is in regards to the phandom. You wanted attention well, here you go may I hope you enjoy what you have sown.

---- If anyone else has more receipts about this person feel free to reblog with a me too and show the phandom just who JacobFritzsching1 / JacobPhantom is. Because I'm just one person finally speaking up. I don't expect people to believe me outright. Not without more people who can attest to their character. Here is another post about the same user that is by someone other than me:

[cdr-vallieris]

“Duality”

My fanart of the one and only Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3 💖

Honestly, this piece took so long, with many revisions, but it’s finally done! The original idea changed a bit along the way, but the broken mirror and its reflection stayed because, to me, it just fits his whole complicated story so well.

And honestly? I’m actually happy with how it turned out. For once!

Will post a step-by-step video soon :)

Check my Instagram or DeviantArt for more

[bogleech]

That whole deranged situation with the "gossip blogs" and the roadkill stalker and their obsession with "jade" is eerily similar to a stalker I used to have about 15 years ago. A Deviantart subcommunity of right wing weirdos decided I was the most annoying liberal they knew of so they made me their go-to scapegoat and in-joke, which is no big deal, except that they let someone into their social circle who, by my estimation, was only twelve years old at the time. That kid got so riled up about every single thing those guys said about me, he devoted almost all of his energy to trying to destroy me until nearly his 20's. Tons of "dirt" you might find on me to this day is all him or rumors he started, he'd post huge rants about how I'm the most vile putrid evil demonic abomination ever to walk the earth (flattering!) and that I needed to be driven to suicide or at least to quit the internet at all possible costs. One day maybe a little over half a decade ago he just very suddenly stopped, I think once he was about 21, and the last thing I ever heard - from one of the older guys who started it all - was that he was volunteering as a wildlife rehabber. I dunno what he's done since, but what he's NOT done since is any sign of e-stalking me. He literally got a life. I wonder if he even has the same politics at all by now or would ever do that stuff if he could go back in time.

[angrykittybarbarian]

A list of things that bother me about Dragon Age: The Veilguard Part 2

I already touched on a few things that caught my attention and personally irked me about the game. After getting through some more of it naturally a few more points have come up. Though I think they are not really new aspects but more concrete examples of what I had touched on last time.

Without further ado, let's get into it.

!Spoilers below the cut!

The dialogue is repetetive and at times contradictory

Like I already discussed last time the dialogue is bad, to express it in the simplest of terms. As I progressed through the game I stumbled upon a glaring example for what I mean.

In the questline where you infiltrate a Venatori meeting there is a part where Neve in disguise and in company of Rook and another companion gets a Venatori to admit that Elgar'nan was present but not Ghilan'nain. For some inexplicable reason Neve turns around and repeats this twice as if Rook wasn't present.

I stated in my last post that the game feels the need to state the obvious. This is what I mean. It makes the dialogue feel like a rough draft that was incorporated into the game without further polish.

As of its contradictory nature two examples come to mind.

In Harding's companion quest you meet this dwarf of Kal Sharok. His dialogue is stoic, no bullshit straight to the point and passionless. Which was fine. But after several minutes of him being that way they get to stone statue Valta who speaks in these misteryous riddles and suddenly he switches to this unserious tone of "Oh that weird statue, we never know what she's saying, ain't she funny." (I'm paraphrasing here). I was confused for half a minute because of his sudden change in attitude and left wondering what his characterization is supposed to be now: serious or quirky?

Same thing with Taash's whole story. This is especially upsetting because I feel like they could have done such great work with it.

Instead it suffers so much from several inconsistencies that I felt sorry for the VA because they actually did a great acting job.

Taash has a coming out scene with their mother where they reveal they're non-binary. Ignoring the usage of modern terms in a medieval-ish setting, the conflict about their gender makes no sense.

The writing wants you to believe Shathann is not okay with her child being non-binary but she never actually expresses such a thing. Actually Shathann sort of had an inkling that Taash was no ordinary woman ("Behaves more like a man...") and she never passed any negative judgement on it. When Taash told her this she even tried to understand by categorizing their identity into qunari vocabulary she knew (remember the term aqun-athlok?).

I get how hard it is to have an overly critical mother and the feeling of not being good enough but that was not what Shathann was about in that scene and it did Taash so dirty because they looked more like an entitled teenager than someone suffering from trauma and perfectionism.

But moving on.

Some old characters are mischaracterized

It's Scout Harding. I mean Harding.

I was really excited to have her as a companion in the new installment but they sort of butchered her character that I found myself annoyed everytime she opened her mouth.

And this is because they make her sound so immature. Really think about it. DATV somehow makes Scout Harding sound younger and more childish than she was in DAI despite the fact that she is supposed to be a whole decade older in DATV than in DAI.

I don't know what direction her VA recieved while recording but everything was pronounced so slowly and extra clear that it seemed at times that Harding was either talking to a confused elderly person or a child.

She herself uses expressions not fit for her age. The most jarring moment was when she called the Blight in D'meta's Crossing 'weird' and sounded like a teenager who has stumbled upon furry art for the first time on deviantArt. This pattern pretty much continues throughout the game. And it hurts so much.

Also Morrigan. She at least still uses her even for DA setting standards antiquated vocabulary but she is too happy and cheery and friendly.

Morrigan is not a nice person to those she does not know and like personally. But to Rook she was so nice despite having met them for the first time.

The Morrigan we have come to know love/hate should have been more snarky or at least more neutral in her demeanor.

The Venatori

I don't know why they are still a thing honestly. I was under the impression they have lost all footing after the death of Corypheus. Why would they follow the Gods of the people their country systemically abuses anyway?

Bonus: Why would the Antaam for that matter, as the qunari are so notoriously arcanophobic that they leash their mages, sew their mouths shut and literally call them "dangerous thing"?

Solas' spy network and agents

What happened to them? Where are they? Shouldn't he have a small army? Why weren't they used as the gods' agents instead of the Venatori? Surely, Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain would have an easier time simply controlling Fen'Harels elven army after imprisoning him in the fade.

The Chantry

It is just not present. Sure there are some Chantry buildings but there is no discussion of faith. In all previous DA games the Chantry has had a constant influence that could be felt everywhere. Faith was discussed and explored from various angles and perspectives, ranging from ultra conservative to progressive. But in Veilguard it's not there.

Why are we not exploring the Tevinter Chantry more? Why doesn't Emmrich discuss the nevarran Chantry, who follows the Sunburst Throne in Orlais, in regards to the Mournwatch, their necromancy practices and magic? Why was he not affected by the mage uprising that started in Kirkwall? How does he deal with faith and the Chantry? It is simply never mentioned.

By all accounts, this game avoids delving into the world like the plague.

Part 3