#operation lost cause

[just-a-lil-otter]

My hear me out cake except i might have a few problems/silly

[lynniezdoodles]

Idk who wants to hear this- but I personally hc that McCoy’s parents in OLC are like Clay and Blobertta from Morel Orel- idk if that’s what they intended or not but they give those vibes

[random-tickle-stuff]

Hello everyone! :D

no kink/fetish/nsfw/18+ only blogs! This blog is run by a MINOR.

My name is River, and some of you may know me from my other blogs or my most active one ( @just-a-lil-otter )! This is kinda just a sfw blog I made outta boredom and to show off my tickle related art, fics, ideas, and just like general tickle stuff since my main blog is about my art and thoughts and stuff

I really like the sfw tickle community and it is a big comfort to me so I'm glad to be here

Posting will be slow and random! I don't make a whole lot of tickle art/fics anymore so this'll mainly just be me ranting and reblogging stuff but I will make fics and art occasionally!!

Current hyperfixations: Eddsworld, OLC, SIGV, spooky month

Requests are open! :D

[see-arcane]

After this entry, you know what’s now making me pull my hair out? Other than last year’s frustration over the refusal of any hints from Van Helsing or allowing any sort of aid from anyone but him and Jack? It’s the idea that none of them have pointed out the element of time when Lucy loses blood.

Why always at night, doctors? Why does post-sundown sleep = blood loss? We know Van Helsing has guessed why, but Jack—who has already connected dots with Renfield’s mood swings and their odd hours—hasn’t bothered to truly poke at the situation. How much of a difference might be made if they just suggested a temporary change of sleep schedule (ala Jonathan’s unbitten nocturnal months)?

It wouldn’t be a fix, but it’d be better than just having everyone lose sleep or forcing Lucy to run out the clock every night waiting to doze into a Mystery Hemorrhage.

[decepti-geek]

tbh an important part of my take on the 'don't be like Sentinel' question is that hours earlier D16 had very decidedly assumed leadership of the High Guard, after which any attempt at resolving his very understandable personal trauma via murder was also, on a wider affects-everyone/your-new-power-means-something scale, inherently going to count as a military coup.

yknow. the thing Sentinel did to assume power/hand it over to the quintessons in the first place

[badjohnspeakeasy]

A like-minded friend made this as an obvservation.

...It's not inaccurate.

[quaranmine]

One of my favorite small things from Jet Lag Tag 3 is just the existence of terrible Trenitalia ticket machines causing them to miss trains, because this was my exact experience as a tourist in 2019 that set off a train of events that landed me stranded in Pisa at midnight and splitting a cab to Florence with strangers

[hyp3rfixation-h3ll]

sibing manslaughter . bottom text (chap 5 of "OPERATION: Steak Cuts!" is underway !!! I'm no longer busy with birthday obligations, so i'm more than free to continue developing the story!!!! stay tuned! 🧡⚔💚

[ajaxgb]

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

[latestnews69]

Prince Andrew says he 'ceased all contact' with alleged Chinese spy

Read more click here

[lynniezdoodles]

Y’all don’t know how much I’ve been tweeking rn through everthing

exams suck ass

You can read it @oplostcause or on either website here

[random-tickle-stuff]

I am absolutely obsessed with this mf rn and I HAD to make some content of him istg

If you don't know who General McCoy is I HIGHLY recommend checking out both the Operation Lost Cause tumblr blog and website!

General McCoy tickle hcs

Ler

Not really ticklish, but is kinda ticklish on his sides and behind his ears

Depsite his age and cold exterior he can be a very sweet and playful ler

Teases relentlessly

I think he'd make dumb puns to make the Lee laugh more

"What's wrong, Kiddo? Something tickling your funny bone? Awww, you're all giggly!"

He gives off intimidating but sweet father figure energy

Has a soft and sweet grandpa laugh that's very heartwarming

He's rarely a lee since he's able to hear the person coming and tickle them first, plus he doesn't trust easily

But if you're able to sneak up on him and get him good he'll probably squirm quite a bit

but expect some revenge later

Always makes sure the Lee is ok after and is actually pretty good at comforting

[thatdemiboymess]

Both my computers have given up on life and I am so sad and so very bored. Couldn't even do my full Gaia dailies, today. 😞

[makeitpoppy]

being a very brave, big girl today

(27 yo grown ass woman is organizing her health check docs, blood test results, mental health diagnosis comprobation and vaccination cards)

[alaa8alseer8]

🚨🚨Help us and donate to us, you are our hope and lifeline🚨🚨

If you feel freedom and some humanity, help us and donate to us, you are our last hope. Please, please, my father is begging you to donate for an operation that will help him walk again.

https://gofund.me/c7cef174

I trust you and your humanity. Your donations, no matter how small or large, whether small or large, will save my family from the war zone.

My father needs treatment to relieve pain, and other treatments and visits to doctors, and all of them have a price.. Honestly, I cannot bear to see my father in pain. From the pain, he does not sleep. He needs medicines and painkillers. All of that is expensive and requires $200 per week. Your donation, even if it is small, is increasing.. Please save what The rest of us 🙏🏻🙏🏻🍉🍉

https://gofund.me/c7cef174

My heroic friends who support the Palestinian cause... After we have lost hope in this world, I ask you to help us and stand with us. 🙏🏻

Share and Donate!!

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters , my number verified on the list is ( #262 )✅️

@90-ghost @el-shazam @nabulsi @sar-soor @sayruq @queerstudiesnatural @appsa @communistchameleon @fairuzfakhira @neptunerings @just-browsings-world @appsa @akajustmerry @feluka @marnotrawna @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @tortiefrancis @flower-tea-fairies @tsaricides @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf @belleandsaintsebastian @ear-motif @kordeliiius @kordeliiius @brutalitybaby @raelyn-dreams @troythecatfish @violetly @the-bastard-king @tamaytka @4ft10tvlandfangirl @northgazaupdates2 @skatehani @awetistic-things @nightowlssleep @baby-girl-aaron-dessner @friendshapedplant @mangocheesecakes @commissions4aid-international

@rwuffles @mogai-sunflowers

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

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

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

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

'depleting the global power and water supply'

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

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

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

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

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

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

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

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

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

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

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

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

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

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

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

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

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

plagiarizing human artists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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