#posting at the ideal time for the algorithm

[suburbanbonfire]

our lady of flame

[drysauce]

okay i think i actually need advice about this

what should i do when there's something i rather have filtered but when i do filter it then quite big percentage of the posts on my dash is hidden because i have mutuals with that phrase in their urls, and when i take back filtering i can see their posts again but then when there's a post with that phrase it's not hidden for me as i would prefer it to be

[taffywabbit]

"why not just make your own website?"

with the announcement of cohost's death and amidst all the other tumultuous shit currently going on with social media as a concept (i am AMAZED twitter has survived this long given the circumstances), one suggestion that i've been hearing a lot is "we should just go back to the good old days of personal websites. let's all just make neocities pages!!"

(this is gonna be a long one sorry)

and like. idk! it's certainly something i've considered, i think it would be a fun thing to have, but it also feels like the equivalent of "capitalism sucks so let's all just run off into the woods and live in a cabin outside of society" to me. like it would be nice, it would be fun, but it doesn't ultimately solve the actual problems that are present with the modern internet, it just evades them. more importantly in my case and many others, it does not really help people who rely on the modern internet and the connections they're able to make there for their income. sure i can make a website and host my art and blog posts there, but who's going to see it? i can't build a consistent audience and make a living off of random passersby who peek at my website once, say "huh, neat!" and MAYBE add it to an RSS feed or whatever if they really like it. there's minimal potential for meeting and impressing new people outside my existing circles if i don't ALSO still have some manner of social media platform to promote the website on.

a lot of the "solutions" i see people proposing for the slow, painful decline of social media as a user experience keep coming back to old-fashioned, more isolated/insular systems. we miss forums, we miss personal webpages, we miss newsletters, etc etc. but like... those things were ideal in the "old web" because the old web was more about sharing hobbies and interests with whoever happened to pass by and check them out, and even just USING the internet was a niche hobby in and of itself for a lot of people. if you wanna be kinda cynical about it (and not unjustifiably so), web 2.0 is much more blatantly business-oriented, and its algorithms and carefully crafted UX's are primarily meant to funnel you towards viewing ads and spending money on products. looking at it that way, it sure does suck and Everything Was Better Before! but the modern web is ALSO more powerful than anything before it for just like. connecting people. spreading information and news. showing your art/music/writing/thoughts/etc to strangers who never knew you existed an hour ago. putting the tools to reach out to someone and tell them you think they're cool right there on the same website where their art is hosted, just a comment or a message away.

if you're able to avoid patterns of engagement-bait and obsessing over follower counts as a measure of self-worth (a big "if", i realize, but i view it like installing an adblocker - it's just kind of a basic prerequisite for modern internet safety and survival), a lot of these systems can genuinely be really positive and life-changing in ways that were simply not possible 20 years ago! almost all of my current closest friends are people I met through sharing our art on platforms like Twitter who were complete strangers at the time. all of the art clients that regularly pay my bills and support my work came from places like that too! the "social" part of "social media" is really what makes it ultimately worth keeping around in any form, and makes the pursuit of a Good social media platform still valuable.

there's a lot to love about the old web - its aesthetics, simplicity and freedom for personal expression - but every time someone says "just delete your socials and make a personal website" i am forced to confront the fact that i could never do what i currently do or be the person i am on the old web. if i was stuck hanging out in my own little space and only ever interacting with people who openly and loudly share my interests, i couldn't support myself with art full-time, i probably would never have met the kind and quiet strangers who are now my best friends and have made me who i am, and i'd just generally get a lot less insight into the vast range of experiences and perspectives that exist outside of my own. my life would be on a fundamentally different trajectory in countless ways without the advent of web 2.0.

and that's not to say "well twitter and facebook and tumblr all suck but you kinda still have to hand it to them" cuz you don't, obviously. they're corporations, and their job is to take the personalities and thoughts and art of the people who use their products and try to scrunch it all into something uninform and marketable that generates profit and pleases their shareholders. but like, you CAN still make a good thing out of them! these websites are tools just as much as geocities or myspace or IRC used to be. and the one thing these newer tools are pretty much all REALLY good at is discoverability. if you're just a hobbyist at the things you wanna share on the internet, then you likely don't have a lot of use for those tools, and perhaps you WOULD genuinely be happier just keeping a personal blog site or hanging out in private groupchats or sticking to specialized federated Mastodon instances or whatever. it just isn't feasible for me, and there are a LOT of people in my same situation. my entire industry of online freelance artists barely existed 20 years ago, and the web culture of that era is largely incompatible with my continued survival in the mid-2020s. i would LOVE to run off and live in the woods in concept, but all my survival skills are adapted for city living and i would just eat the wrong berry and die out there. i want- i NEED people to try and improve the spaces we're in, and support better forms of social media (like what cohost was trying and largely succeeding to do!) instead of just complaining that it all sucks, everything was better when we were kids, and digging ourselves little holes to hide in. much like all the other problems and frustrations and systemic issues of the world we live in, the modern web isn't going to go away if you just ignore it, so we may as well try to make it better for everyone.

anyways tl;dr i probably WILL make a neocities at some point. it could be fun, even if it doesn't help my career stability or whatever. but i do also need ALL THE SOCIAL PLATFORMS I USE FOR MY JOB TO STOP EXPLODING PRETTY PLEASE, and failing that, some actual half-decent alternatives that aren't going to fizzle out in a month would also be great thanks ✌

[deoidesign]

I hate you social media. I hate you "content creation" I hate you algorithms I hate you ideal posting times I hate you posting 5 times a day I hate you unavoidable engagement statistics. I hate you art advice that's to simplify, consider how well it will sell, make it a product, get on trends, trends trends trends! I hate the advice to go viral!

I'm sick of the grind I'm sick of "content creation" I'm sick of side hustles and small business! I'm sick of being profitable!!! I just want to post my art and talk to people about art!!!!!!!!!!!

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I love watching youtube videos about tiktok and influencer drama, mainly because I'm completely disconnected from stuff like that (I have never watched an influencer video in my life) so it gives me the thrill of true crime without the tragedy exploitation aspect, but sometimes I also feel completely disconnected from the youtubers too?

Like every youtuber has to offer up a million disclaimers about how they aren't judging influencers or whatever and that's usually fine but like. I do feel that there ARE points where people need to be judged for the content they're sharing and promoting and profiting off of!

"I'm not judging tradwives or saying their content is bad—" I am!! I am absolutely judging tradwives! Extremely harshly! Because the entire "tradwife" movement is conservative propaganda based on misogynistic and patriarchal ideas about history with no basis in reality or in our modern world! And tradwife influencers explicitly target young women and especially teen girls and try to convince them to put their entire lives in the hands of their husbands, which is a horrific recipe for domestic abuse!

These women making hundreds of thousands of dollars off tiktok videos (and often coming from extremely wealthy families) are out here telling young girls that they don't need an education, that they don't need their own income, that if they're just pretty enough and obedient enough then they'll find a rich husband and never have to worry about anything ever and it's fucking scary! And I don't know why we are tolerating it!

We know what happens when people, especially women, give up complete control to their partners. We know what that leads to, resentment and extreme control and total lack of options when things go from totally fine to constant arguing to violence. These influencers, who ARE making extremely significant personal incomes from their jobs as influencers online, lie through their fucking teeth about how perfect it is that their husbands do everything for them and all they have to do is take care of the kids and home (with the help of nannies and housekeepers and personal chefs off-screen. . .) and about how they've escaped from capitalism, meanwhile the people actually in those situations who AREN'T making all that extra cash are either already in abusive relationships or they're in incredibly precarious positions where they could end up abused or thrown out with nothing in an instant.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be a homemaker or stay-at-home parent. I don't think it's wrong to not want to go to college or have a 9-5.

But you NEED options. You need full access to your own money that can't be monitored or controlled by a partner. You need access to a vehicle. You need a life outside of your home and family, especially friends who are willing and able to help you if needed. You need the ability to survive on your own in some way. Because if and when things go wrong in the relationship, THOSE are the things that will save your life.

Also remember that again, these tradwives DO have jobs and their jobs involve selling a fake lifestyle and fake ideals. They are getting paid BIG TIME for the shit they peddle to you, whether that's through the millions of views they get (both from genuine fans and from haters, the algorithm doesn't know or care about the difference) or the many sponsorships they get, they have incomes that they are not disclosing. They have help that they are not disclosing. Many of them started out with extreme wealth but lie through their teeth and cosplay as fucking homesteading peasants. It's all a lie to sell shit to you. Don't buy it.

Disclaimer: Please do not nitpick this post, it's very late and I'm ranting and if this leaves my circle of followers I will regret it deeply. Be nice. Tradwives dni, you're all annoying.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, y'all, it's rant time again. Buckle up.

A new report just came out from Public Citizen highlighting the dangers of using apps and AI foraging guides for identifying mushrooms, particularly when mushroom foraging. It's the latest in a string of warnings that are fighting against a tide of purported convenience ("just take a picture and get your answer instantly!")

I've ranted about this since last August, and I also wrote up a detailed post on how to identify an AI-generated foraging guide. I'm also including info on the limitations of apps and AI in The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go. I'm not just saying this to toot my own horn--it's because nature identification, and teaching it to others, is literally what I do for a living. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

I teach a very, very specific sort of identification class; whether we're focusing on animals, plants, fungi, or all of the above, I walk people through a detailed process of how to observe a given organism, make note of its various physical traits and habitat, and use that information to try to determine what it is. I emphasize the need to use as many sources as possible--field guides, websites, online and in-person groups, journal articles, etc.--to make absolutely sure that your identification is solid.

And every year, I get people (thankfully, a very small minority of my students) who complain because my two-hour basic mushroom hunting class wasn't just five minutes of introduction and one hundred and fifteen minutes of me showing slide after slide of edible mushrooms. There are so many people out there who just want a quick, easy answer so they can frolic in the woods and blithely pick mushrooms like some idealized image of a cottagecore herbalist with a cabin full of dried plants and smiling frogs or something.

While I do incorporate a bit of information on getting started with the app iNaturalist in my classes, it is as only ONE of MANY tools I encourage people to use. Sure, it's more solid than most apps because, in addition to the algorithmic I.D. suggestions it initially gives you, other iNaturalist users can go onto your observations later and either agree with your I.D.s or suggest something different and even explain why.

And yet--even as great as iNat is, it and its users can still be wrong. So can every other I.D. app out there. And I think that is one thing that the hyper-romanticized approaches to foraging--and nature identification in general--miss. In order to be a good forager, you HAVE to also be good at nature identification.

And nature identification is an entire process that requires you to have solid observational and critical thinking skills, to be able to independently research using many different types of tools, and be willing to invest the time, patience, and focus to properly arrive at a solid identification--if not to species level, then as far down the taxonomic ladder as you can realistically manage. (There's a reason even the experts complain about Little Brown Mushrooms and Damned Yellow Composites!)

People mistake one single tool--apps--for the entire toolkit. They assume any book they find on Amazon is going to be as good as any other, and don't take the time to look up the author to determine any credentials or experience, or even whether they actually exist or not. It doesn't help that the creators of these products often advertise them as "the only [book/app/etc.] you need to easily identify [organism of choice]!"

I mean, sure, the world isn't going to end if you never question the birdsong results on the Merlin app, or if you go through life thinking a deer fern is just a baby western sword fern. But when we get into people actually eating things they find in the wild, there's often no room for error. There are plants and mushrooms that can kill you even if you only eat a tiny amount. And even if they don't kill you, they may make you wish you were dead for a few days while you suffer through a whole host of gastrointestinal nastiness and other symptoms.

There aren't any shortcuts if you want to be safe in your foraging. You HAVE to be willing to do the work. And any teacher, author, or product that says otherwise isn't being ethical. I'm glad to see more people speaking out against the "fast foodization" of foraging in regards to overreliance on apps and the existence of AI foraging books; I just hope it's enough to prevent more people from getting sick or dying.

[womendeservehumanity]

Ok I really am done with twitter now…. To Bluesky I go because the fact that this complete and utter garbage shows up on my tl because it’s the alt right misogynistic (along with racist, homophobic, etc.) bullshit that Elon wants to shove down my throat instead of my actual interests such as feminism, tennis, film, humor, etc which prior to about a year ago was what I would see because the algorithm was actually formulated for ME. Now it’s this. And what I especially find crazy is I’ve seen this account before. He’s a self proclaimed incel who hates women to unfathomable degrees. Thinks they’re all evil, narcissistic, shallow, promiscuous, etc. And yet men still gave him a semi viral tweet because there’s no line to be drawn

There is no line in the sand for what is unacceptable. Men have no problem endorsing the ideas of a clearly mentally ill and delusional individual who loudly and proudly hates women and perpetuates harmful and untrue rhetoric about them and their “nature”. Who, like many incels, genuinely think every single woman is somehow dating 1% of the male population when all it takes is actually going outside and seeing that average people are dating each other and not every woman has her very own Ken doll.

And he is another example of my last post where these plebs live in a reality where men are perpetual victims being beaten, kicked, and spit on by evil wahmen and men. Uhh erm men are totally not doing anything. They’re totally hating, bashing, and harassing women online. Dedicating entire spaces to it. They’re totally not literally raping, abusing, and killing women. Implying that would be painting them as anything other than innocent babies and would give more nuance to these evil women “hating them”

Also, and my last thing, this dude is Chilean. Still lives there and tweets about it from time to time (getting little to no likes bc his followers only care when he’s shitting on women). He sometimes shows his especial hatred for Latina women, mainly for being disloyal and promiscuous. He gets upset about their fetishization and them being pedestalized by white males along with Asian women as the ideal woman who’s submissive and traditional unlike those combative white women because to him all women should be hated by men and men need to “wake up”. He’s constantly trying to push back at those sentiments and Latina women being painted in a (not really) positive light. And use anecdotes to prove that they’re sooo evil. Something about being an mra who acts as though women have this collective hive mind dedicated to making men’s life miserable while living in Chile when your country along with all of Latam has a huge misogyny culture namely femicide. Chile especially has a huge domestic violence problem yet he still finds it in himself to villainize women, specifically women from his region and act as though they don’t suffer. Act as though men aren’t the reason. Or that it’s just these 1% chads when if you look at the news your average abuser is literally just some guy.

[insert-something-funy-here]

MUEHEHEHE >:)

CHAT IT'S SILLIES TIME!!!!

For those who didn't see before I deleted it, sometime ago, I made a post about an idea for an AU I have where Biograft is sentient enough for Medkit leaving Blackrock to affect him (and on top of that, that's how he discovers his own sentience). I spent a couple hours writing cus I got inspired! Biograft doesn't yet realize he's sentient, so I think (if people like thus enough) I'll make a pt2 to this cus I have ideas for where this could go!! (Tbh, I'll probably do it regardless of if people like it or not, but still!!!)

Edit: Am in fact making this a series

This is the start || Part 2

An error. A simple miscalculation. Making breakfast for two, when there was only one here who could eat. Opening the door to an empty, and uncharacteristically clear room. No phighter for me to wake. Green flowers at the bedside now wilting from missing… from his absence. It was odd how he would “heal,” them every other morning. I don't have such an ability, being created for the opposite of healing. Most iterations of me anyway.

I should throw those away before they begin to rot. It’s been a week now. Or I could leave them. Perhaps after such long-term exposure to his crystal, they will last longer than regular flowers. That’s all this is, testing a hypothesis. I can leave them a little longer, just to see the results.

New connections have started forming in my programming. One of me was out collecting materials for Subspace, and I saw those flowers again. When I saw them, what came to mind wasn’t any data about it, not its place of origin, ideal habitat, or its potential uses, but the memory of seeing Medkit reverse the effects of time on the ones he kept. Yet another odd error.

I asked Subspace to help me troubleshoot these recent errors. We came to the same conclusion of there being something in my software. He checked, said that my algorithms had been evolving rapidly and creating a new type of data, which could have been overwhelming the system and causing these errors. But what caused that spike in complexity? The only thing to have changed recently outside of myself is that his presence is no longer here. Subspace hasn’t given me any new updates, and such drastic change has never happened without Subspace’s intervention before. There is no reason for me to have change unless my creator requests it or it is within his benefit for me to do so on my own time. This isn’t benefiting anyone, so why is it happening? And why didn’t Subspace fix me?

He said even though he himself had no idea of the catalyst of these changes, with refinement, they gave the opportunity to lead wonderful new breakthroughs. Yet I find myself still unable to understand, which only in turn creates further lack of understanding. How am I unable to see what it is my creator wants from me? Why don’t I understand the results he wishes for?

Why do I ask and hesitate now instead of proceeding onward as I always have?

What makes life?

The definition I was programmed with was, “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.”

Am I alive?

I fit 2.5 of the important descriptors. I have the capacity for artificial change and growth (but it is not continual) and functional activity. I have the ability to die. To its simplest point, is living not just the absence of death?

Perhaps I mean to ask if I have sentience?

Is there a difference between chemical and code if they both have the potential to react irrationally to stimulus, be it internal or external?

Could this metal exterior be made metaphorical flesh?

One of me was out at the Crossroads today. I saw him, yet I did not attack. He is a wanted traitor, and I had the opportunity to pursue him, yet I didn’t. He saw me, and he didn’t run, even though he should have.

When I saw him, I thought of those flowers again. It’s been a month now. They’ve dried out but haven’t rotted yet. I should’ve thrown those away the same way I should’ve gone after him, without hesitation.

For some reason, part of me wanted to follow him, not to bring him back, but to see how he is now. Perhaps he would be able to explain why I’ve changed. What a strange hypothesis. Perhaps one worth further investigation.

It’s happened a few more times now. It’s been 4 months since his leave. Every time I see him, I act as though I haven't. I believe he’s caught on that I do it on purpose. I don’t know why I have this inability to approach him first. I think this “test” ends here. How unsatisfactory, with no results to show for it.

Is this cowardice? I think I better understand the concept outside of its definition now.

He stopped me as I went to leave this time. He pulled me aside into a nearby alley. Why? We stared at one another in an uncomfortable silence. Could silence be comfortable?

He asked me what I was doing. I asked him to clarify. He asked why I hadn’t been trying to go after him whenever Subspace wasn't around. I had no response. I moved on and told him something within me changed, but I couldn’t figure out what. He seemed confused but told me to continue. I told him about the errors, some of my questions, and about the flowers.

Something in the way he looked at me changed. He understood something about me that I did not. I couldn’t recognize what it was he held towards me with his gaze, but he stepped closer, and I let him

Innocent hands, covered in blood, not mine or its own, that wished to hold onto me. Sorrow grips us both.

I flew away to a false sky before my wings could be fully clipped, but left you, a fish in a bird cage. I can't take you to the water, but let me bring you drops of the sea.

“Even you need to rest and grieve… I missed you too.”

New ideas I had yet to understand.

I felt his arms wrap around me and an intense sensation rushed through me, it wore at me, as the waves do to a coastline, until I was left with nothing but the soothing sounds of the ocean.

[roaldseth]

Need to just let some frustrations out with the “migration to Bluesky” because it’s been 3 days and I can’t dispel this by my usual means.

For the unaware, due to some TOS changes to Twitter, people really have finally started moving over to Bluesky in droves. There’s something like over 18m people now, which I am happy for, however that’s been putting a lot of positivity on my feed that… has rubbing against my grain if only because I’m a plane that got shot down and never came back to be counted amongst the statistics. Me—and probably tons of other small artists/accounts—are finding things just as equally as difficult, discouraging, and despairing as they always have been.

“Create what you like and your people will find you!” “It’s so refreshing to see that so many artists are getting love now because we don’t have to deal with shitty algorithm problems!”—they’re nice sentiments, but once again I’m forced to remember these kind of posts are not for me or regarding me, and they never will be. I’m an undesirable no one will ever care about and it does kinda feel like the “everyone deserves success, except you.”

People always say “create for yourself” but honestly it doesn’t matter if I do or don’t because the result is usually the same either way. “Create for yourself” also doesn’t consider that a point of why I create for myself is the slim hope of finding the people that supposedly will come.

And as someone who was the “weird kid” in school and found solace online because it was easier to make things smaller to then also be “rejected” by it, it really drives home that the problem is me and it always has been me and I really do wish that I was just a living vision of an average person. I certainly think things would be kinder.

It’s ironic too. There was one brief moment in time on Twitter where I felt like I was perhaps alright, had the most fun I’ve ever had, and it was when there was an algorithm and Likes showed up on timelines. But that’s no more anywhere. The rug was yanked out and I was left to go back to thinking “oh right,” and here we are. I worked from bad art to slightly less bad art, and now that I feel like I finally have something somewhat passable as presentable, it still doesn’t work.

And I know 10 years ago my art and writing was shit! I wouldn’t want to have followed me either and there were so many times I wanted to quit while being quite literally depressed! I still look back and think I should have, I should just stopped long ago because I will not be missed, but for some godforsaken reason I am still here and I hate it.

The one holdout that says it all worked out is that I do find people, they are the others like me who have dirt lawns and simply dream of having grass at all, and we find each other. And I know this is true, and honestly my ideal situation, but because it’s not the thing I think I want in my head, I reject it. But in the end I don’t know how to switch over to being okay with what is and not the vision of what I think will make me happy.

[awakenedsalamander]

would you be willing to speak moron the Technocracy? you have very interesting takes on it and I would like to know more

Happily!

So to me the Technocracy (in its 20th and 21 century incarnations, anyway, the early Technocracy/Order of Reason is different in some significant respects) represents a view of the world that is divorced from anything other than data and hard facts. This viewpoint is not exclusive to scientism, the paradigm I discussed in my recent post on the Technocracy, and is in fact an arguable core of pragmatism itself— there are times when it is essential to put aside ideals, emotions, and speculation and work only with what you can tangibly interact with. Sometimes, you have to put aside how the world should or could be, and work only with what it provably, unquestionably is.

But if you’ve ever discussed politics with someone who keeps insisting “well, that’s just how the world is,” rather than engaging with new ways of thinking or unconventional ideals, you’ll probably have realized that this way of looking at things can be profoundly limiting.

(Incidentally, this is why I think there’s the tendency to align most Technocrats with Stasis/The Weaver— the paradigm of technology itself can be Dynamic, Entropic, and Questing in a lot of cases, but the way the Technocracy uses it is broadly static, I think.)

Let’s use an example here, and talk about climate change. There’s a tendency to view the people most effectively driving climate change— the executives who profit off it, the lobbyists and politicians who sustain it, the demagogues and conspiracists who argue against its reality— as malevolent. They know what they’re doing, they know how it hurts the world and the people who inhabit, and they’re fine with it. Maybe some of them even enjoy it. This is basically the tack Werewolf: The Apocalypse takes with Pentex, for instance.

And that view is, to a larger extent than I think is remotely comfortable, true. Reckoning with the truth in that is part of what makes Werewolf fun, and it’s also one of the drivers on Mage’s own Nephandi.

But, I think it’s also true that most of the people responsible for ecological collapse don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong, and are instead able to just elide the details of the morality and ramifications of their industry/system/ambition and focus purely on the benefit. As said earlier, that is sometimes necessary— in an immediate crisis it can even be a godsend— but in the long-term and on a wider scale it can be quite damaging.

See, if you focus only on quantifiable data, there’s a way to look at climate change as kind of a trade-off you make for important numbers to go up. Industrialization is, economically speaking, incredibly beneficial, the advancement of technology improves not only wealth, but also security, communication, and even quality of life, and from the point of view of certain fields (at least as they currently exist) like agriculture, commercial shipping, energy production, and so on, the policies that really combat the bad effects of climate change would be disastrous! Can’t we afford a few more degrees Celsius for all that?

And if you want to get really dark, there’s the fact that wealthy countries and their oligarchs are going to be the least affected by natural disasters, resource conflicts, and pandemics. It won’t be easy, sure, but nothing ever is, and from a realpolitik standpoint, if other nations (which are potential threats after all) suffer those bad effects more than you do, then maybe weathering the storm is tactically viable…

So all in all, don’t pump the brakes, and certainly don’t reinvent the wheel here! We’ve got a good thing going, and it could be chaos to stop it! Hell, with all the benefits we’re getting, we might even invent some gadget or technique to solve the worst of it.

But of course, this misses so much. In the same way that topics I wanted to touch on, like algorithmic culture and automation, may have valuable benefits from certain points of view, you have to look at the whole picture. With climate change, you already see mass extinctions, and no amount of restorative cloning is going to reverse the ecological damage there. We’re going to see an increase in displacement and homelessness by disasters and the need for people to relocate from dangerous areas, which will ruin lives, if not end them. To say nothing of the inhumanity of allowing suffering on this scale when something can be done about it, right now!

But how do you prove that “ecological damage,” “ruined lives,” and “inhumanity” are worse than the loss of trillions+ of dollars which we’d have to spend to avoid them? It’s apples to oranges— no, it’s the abstract to the concrete. If someone only wants to think about the numbers, then there’s at least a debate. There’s cost benefit analysis and logistic comparison— but not action.

Now, I am simplifying significantly here. There are many reasons that climate change and other societal crises aren’t addressed beyond scientism, or political inertia, or even just greed and selfishness. To name a few, we also struggle against ignorance, against fear, against exhaustion, against bigotry, against the unknown. It’s not so simple. One of the problems with the worldview I’m attacking is its tendency to simplify things by smoothing over the issues, so I don’t want to do that.

But I do think that the biggest issues in our society can’t be tackled with cold math and a focus on what nets the best cost-to-benefit ratio. I think in a lot of cases, that kind of thinking— which, to bring it back to the point, is the kind of thinking the Technocracy embodies— is what got us these issues in the first place.

God, was this too serious for a World of Darkness discussion?

Anyway, thanks for the question! I appreciate the chance to analyze the topic.

[wuhuha]

Thoughts on Cara

Note: I am rambling/taking my thoughts on this on a walk cause no one irl to me care or know about this.

Like, this is like the dozenth time I've seen artists say that they're 'migrating' from one platform to another, aaand ultimately it everyone returns to Instagram and Twitter.

"The artist needs to go where the people are"

Beyond the AI protecting, I feel like Cara will end up failing because the general audience aren't there. And to grow as an artist you kinda need that audience.

Honestly from the bottom of my fandom heart I hope any new platform can capture the essence of 'old Deviantart'. It was artist focused but it also had a decent amount of non artists. Let's not forgot about our fanfic/fic writers too. Can we hang together somewhere?

Yet another portfolio site…?

As a hobbyist with no strong interest in selling anything, this situation kinda sucks.

I just want to post art in an art-focused community and meet people with the same interests/fandoms. Back in the day in fandom it was just fun. Now it’s all about growing, getting jobs and making money, which is fine honestly, but for casual artists who already have jobs, but want community it stings too.

I know AI scaping is a problem for artist and that twitter and Instagram ain't ideal, but remeber those aren't art sites. Despite Insta once allegedly was for Photography, not bathroom selfies.

While Cara is a site for and by artists, I guess I just really wonder what it's going to turn into once the first migration storm has passed. Like what's the culture gonna be like? Yes, It's too early to decide if Cara could be a good replacement for Deviantart or even Artstation, and to grow your non-artist audience.

Closing brain (thoughts) farts

I know some think you should join Cara if you’re anti-AI in any capacity. I think it’s meaningful and important that many artists have switched to Cara, it sends a message to the social media giants that we won’t stand for AI scrapping of our work.

But it feel like It’s a movement, rather than an ernest attempt at creating a space for artist, all artist not just the algorithm's favorite child.

Personally I tend to search for art of charater/fandoms I like by activly searching for them and browsing the popular and newst tab. Not what the for you/dashboard spits at me.

*sigh*

I want it to succeed for being a middel finger to AI, but Cara is prohibits the posting of AI-generated artwork, but AI groups are can currently scrap and de-glaze art on Cara as we speak, but it might be nice to be able to connect with actual artists...

[creamsicle-art]

Game Development in Raylib - Week 1

Recently I've been getting into retro game development. I don't mean pixel art and PSX style game development, those are nice but they don't quite scratch the itch. I'm talking about developing games with retro tools. Because of this, I decided to give Raylib a try.

For those of you who don't know, Raylib is a C framework targeted at game developers. Unlike Godot, which I used for my previous project Ravager, Raylib is not a game engine, it doesn't offer physics, scene management, or any kind of graphics more complicated than drawing textures to the screen. Almost everything that makes a game a game, is something you have to do yourself. This makes it ideal to scratch that "retro" itch I've been feeling, where everything has to be made on my own, and a finalized game is a fine tuned engine entirely of my own creation. Raylib offers bindings for almost any language you can think of, but I decided to use it's native C.

Setting the Scene

Since Raylib is so barebones, there's no concept of how the game should be built, so the first thing I had to do was define my engine architecture. For this initial outing, I decided to build a simple Scene+Actor system, wherein at any given time the game has one Scene loaded, which contains multiple Actors. I settled on this mainly because it was simple, and my experience with the C language was very limited.

Since Raylib didn't have any concept of a Scene, naturally it had no way to build them. While I could just hardcode all the entities and graphics in a scene, that would be unmanageable for even a basic game. Because of this I was forced to invent my own way to load scenes from asset files. This gave me the opportunity to do one of my favorite things in programming, defining my very own binary file type. I won't get into it too much right here and right now, but in this format, I can define a scene as a collection of entities, each of which can be passed their very own long string of bytes to decode into some initial data.

The main drawback of using binary files instead of a plaintext format is that I can't write the level files by hand. This meant that I had to write my own level editor to go along with my custom engine. Funnily enough, this brought me right back to Godot. The Godot engine offers some pretty powerful tools for writing binary files, and it's editor interface automatically offers everything I need in the way of building levels. It's sort of ironic that my quest to get away from modern engines lead me to building yet another tool in Godot, but it sure as hell beats building a level editor in C, so I don't really mind all that much.

Getting Physical

After getting scene management out of the way, I moved on to the physics system. My end goal here is making a simple platforming game, so I wanted a simple yet robust system that allows me to have dynamic-static physics that allows for smooth sliding along surfaces, and dynamic-dynamic collisions for things like hitboxes. For the sake of simplicity (which seems like it's going to become my catchphrase here) I decided to limit physics to axis aligned rectangles. Ultimately I settled on a system where entities can register a collision box with the physics system and assign it to some given layers (represented by bit flags). Then entities can use their collision box to query the physics system about either a static overlap, or the result of sweeping a box through space.

Raylib offers built in methods for testing rectangle overlap, so I didn't have to worry much about overlap queries, but the rectangle sweeping method is something a little more special. The full algorithm honestly deserves it's own post, but I'll give the basics here. The core of the algorithm is a function that determines where along a movement a given rectangle touches another rectangle, and that edges of the rectangles touched. It makes use of the separating axis theorem to determine when the shapes will start and stop intersecting along each collision axis. If the last intersection happens before any have ended, then the shapes do collide, the axis they collide on is that final axis, and the time of collision is the time of the final intersection. Looking back I could easily extend this algorithm to any arbitrary shape, but that's for next time I do this.

Going Forwards

My plan for this game is to build a minimal metroidvania style game. The target playtime is probably going to only be around 30-45 minutes. In the following week I plan on building out my Godot level editor, and working out a system for scene transitions and managing sound effects. I hope to by done by the end of November.

[cozylittleartblog]

As someone who is a fan of old Hollywood musicals from the 1930s and 1940s, I love your James and Clara pieces. This adorable OC couple gives off major Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vibes.

I was wondering, will we ever get to see some full fledged web comics with these two? With the backstory you described, I can kind of picture a 42nd Street-style story that shows how James and Clara met and ended up starring together in their movie musical “Swingin’ Sweetheart”.

Also, if you were to draw Clara in one of the dresses that Ginger Rogers wore on screen, which one would you pick?

(On a related note, I think James would totally look great in a white tie and tailcoat.)

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! :D fred and ginger were a huge inspiration for them, I saw the famous scene from swing time where they dance together in the school and instantly fell in love with them both, i've seen all the movies they made together. the characters had already existed, but i had to incorporate more of their charm and dynamic after that. the more old musicals i watched, the more i wanted to tell a story like them!

I'd like to do more short comics with them! though ideally if i magically stumbled into some $50 million dollars, I'd want to make a 2D animated film in the styles of singin' in the rain and cats dont dance. i have a rough plot in mind, it's just a matter of ironing it all out and making the thing, which... will not be for a long time, if ever. i refuse to sell them off to some studio that will make too many changes in the name of appeasing demographics and algorithms, and probably use it as a tax write-off right before release anyway, so it'd be indie or bust. i feel like with as integral as song and dance is to the story, doing it fully in comic form wouldn't do it justice, but there are shorter little moments and scenes i want to do with them in the meantime. maybe in ten years i can reblog this post with a trailer, if i am very lucky :') you're right though that that's what the movie would be about! and if i ever feel like a film absolutely wont happen then i'd find a way to make it work as a comic instead.

as for your last two comments... ginger has a lot of really good outfits, and i've drawn clara in a couple of them, but i suggest you look at my newest post :)c thank you for the inspiration hehehe

[othersystems]

per ur last post ab counterculture dying and weird not existing…do u think it can make a comeback

a big problem is just how algorithmically based all social media is now. there is also less and less social interaction on it, dwindling ability to form communities or even interact personally, less ability or desire to use search functions or explore and find things on your own. it's really nothing like the internet was even 10 years ago.

I guess its now maybe more similar now to how people used to watch tv, where people would just sit in front of a tv and watch whatever was on. and then there was always a counter culture who wanted to look beyond that and form communities and search for things in other places, for no other reason than curiosity and interest.

But I think algorithms are harder to pull away from than like, tv and print and tv ads, because of how pervasive the algorithm is. People are on their phones all day, the tv wasnt an object you could bring with you and it wasnt as insidious in certain ways; there was no targeted advertising. I think a lot of people dont even get space to think of apps as being outside of their being or have space to fully form their own thoughts or interests and because algorithms resemble things like personal taste or interests, even though what they are presenting is not actually personal. i think people have a harder time separating their own self/identity/taste/thought from what is being shown to them.

I also think a decline in basic search literacy skills hinders the ability to form a real counter culture. As younger people grow up with apps and algorithms replacing internet searches etc. i think the ability to search for things, to find things on their own, really decreases. I think people who grew up having to do research or even do things that seem simple like use search terms take it for granted that it is an innate ability, when it isnt. and I think younger generations will suffer from that.

But of course there will always be people who try and see beyond what's in front of them, who have curiosity or interest enough to have the discipline to look for things on their own and to form their own tastes and ideas. but i do think there will continue to be less than there used to because of the nature of the technological tract we are on.

(On top of this there are also less DIY spaces in person to experiment or form community, which is a whole other thing. also i do think despite how much discussion goes on now about anti-capitlist ideals there is a weird disconnect with a trend towards monetization/cultural capital being an end goal and a disregard for the idea of DIY, or doing things for the sake of doing them/forming communities . which is weird and upsetting..)

[lover-of-mine]

Hey! Youre much better at numbers than i am but the ryliver vid is currently at 50k and going up with almost 400k views... while others have much more views in comparison to the likes. Does that make sense?

Okay, so here's the thing, the ryliver video is sitting at 50.6k likes with 391k views at the time I'm typing this, that means that 13% of the views came with a like, which is a decent number. Most videos from the 911 Instagram are between 7 and 9% view for likes (at least from a very quick math from the top 18 videos) but it can go as low as 5%. Ideally, when dealing with a social media that recommends stuff based on likes, you want the percentage of likes per view to be as high as possible, because theoretically, that means you're reaching more people. One account can watch the same video 100 times but they can only like it once. There's also the way that the algorithm that counts views tries to weed out an account that just left the video open and left the room. Things like the deleted scenes there are various reasons as to why someone would watch it and not like it, watch it multiple times and not leave a like, or even watch it enough times to drown out that percentage, because it's a scene at the end of the day. The thing with the ryliver video is that it seems to be reaching more people who are willing to drop a like, not reaching a group of people who will only watch it and not like it or the same group of people watching it multiple times. They clearly posted that video to create buzz and it worked, to reach 50k likes at the 911 account, you need at least half a million views based on other videos, a video with 300k something views usually gets anything from 18 to 30k likes. They have videos with a million views that didn't reach that 10% likes numbers, which puts the ryliver video as performing better than expected because at the end of the day, likes are worth more than views in some aspects.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Jerkins at Mother Jones:

Last year, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children—and making it look easy.

[...] I wanted nothing to do with her or any self-identifying trad wife in my own small piece of digital real estate, but their immense popularity (and algorithmic dexterity) had allowed them to trespass, and I find myself unable to turn away. Chances are, neither can you. But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.

To fully understand the rise of the trad wife phenomenon, it helps to look at its origins. In some ways, trad wives resemble the mommy bloggers of the mid-aughts to early 2010s. Back then, momfluencers like Dooce’s Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother commanded massive audiences through confessional posts about breast pumps and postpartum depression. As writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton pointed out in a 2020 New York Times piece, mommy branding was different back then: These bloggers were messy; they did not hold back in revealing all of the stickiness and ugliness in their matrescence. But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.

Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.” Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of ­extremism.”

Not all trad wives have direct links to the far right. But what unites them is a romanticized vision of domesticity, or, as Darby calls it, “June Cleaver 1950s cosplaying.” As self-proclaimed trad wife Estee Williams, who rejects any associations with white supremacy, declared in a 2022 TikTok video, “We believe our purpose is to be homemakers.” It’s not simply about looking pretty. Their aestheticizing of housework is a throwback to the mid-20th century, when women weren’t even allowed to get a credit card or a loan. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal were responsible for promoting a certain kind of wife as a way to reestablish social order after World War II, when many women had entered the labor force. As Ann Oakley puts it in her 1974 book, Housewife, “a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient ­homemaker­…Women’s expected role in society is to strive after perfection in all three roles.” Most trad wife content is marked with this desire for perfection.

[...]

So why are many millennial and Gen Z women an eager part of the trad wife audience? Here’s my theory: We’ve given up. The popularity of the trad wife content is demonstrative of a psychological resignation. In the past several years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end of the Girlboss­­ Era. The rise of the trad wives marks what Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of the 2024 book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, believes is “a response to the failures of a neoliberal workplace feminism” stretching from the 1960s to the present day—one that focuses on individuality. “What women fought for was an entry into the workplace,”­ Mukhopadhyay explains, but “being a mother in the workplace was almost untenable.” Even after decades of supposed progress, she points out, “we’re still not paid equally, and most women still don’t have resources commensurate with how hard they work and how they contribute to their families.” According to a 2023 report from the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress, women were 5 to 8 times more likely than men to work part time or not at all because of caregiving responsibilities. Maya Kosoff, a content strategist and writer who admits to me that she has become obsessed with trad wives herself, says their popularity is “a reaction to perceived systemic failures” that seem like they “can be easily solved by turning to the simpler life of homesteading.”

And look, escapism isn’t anything new. When life gets harder, it’s only natural that one would daydream about a different time. But fantasies are dangerous when the stakes are so high for American women right now. We have only started to feel the effects of the Dobbs decision. “We have not seen how bad it’s going to get as women are pushed out of public life over the coming years,” journalist and MeToo activist Moira Donegan tells me. “Our main educational institutions, our workplaces, our elected officials are going to start to look more male.” Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom similarly argues that attacks on reproductive rights represent an erosion of women’s place in a democracy. “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies,” she says. “When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men. I think this reclaiming of being the traditional wife is here so long as there’s a threat.”

Mother Jones does a solid report on the explosion of tradwife culture in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which abortion bans serve as a tool to drive women out of the workforce.

Tradwife influencers romanticize the 1950s aesthetic, and most of them tend to have far-right political views (especially on gender roles).

Read the full story at Mother Jones.