#posts from the meme machine

[aimasup]

and I don't mean things like roombas and space rovers

[example-of-a-romantic]

more merlin textposts? in this economy?

[crystal-mouse]

@gayfour

[frowny-clowny]

I could make the audio better or I could just stop working on this shitpost. Maybe one day I'll come back to it but I'd like to see others do this too. @machine-unlearning

Not sure if this is even a good idea but I'm tired honk shnoo

[iamnotmitskii]

Mitski for GQ Magazine (2018)

[dailyrickastley]

The year is 2008 and the internet has been blessed with rickrolling, a compilation.

[pterrorgrine]

every rage against the machine song

[guitar riff that incites bloodthirst]

THROW A BRICK AT A COP [fills derived from riff]

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

THROW A BRICK, THROW A BRICK, THROW IT

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

GO OUTSIDE AFTER THIS CONCERT AND

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

[guitar riff]

[stripped down rhythmic part]

Throw it, throw it, throw a brick

Throw it, throw it [x2]

[rap part]

parabolic motion of a ceramic block

impact to the skull and it makes a body drop

slap chop coppers with a steel file knife

life flight fellows down the thin blue line, AAAAUUUGGHH

THROW IT, THROW IT

[riff but more atonal and with weird electronic noises on top]

THROW A BRICK AT A COP, THROW IT

THROW A BRICK AT A COP, YEAH THROW IT

COP ON THE STREET RIGHT AFTER THIS CONCERT YEAH

THROW A BRICK AT THAT COP

[spoken] here's a bunch of bricks we brought, everybody take a free brick for later! UNH!

[funk dance break]

[quiet part]

masonry unit

blue reign of terror

construction material

for the new era

aaaahhh, masonry unit

blue reign of terror

construction material

FOR THE NEW ERA, AAAAUUUUGGGHHH

[riff now fully polyphonic with vocals]

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

GO OUTSIDE AFTER THIS CONCERT AND

THROW A BRICK AT A COP

yeah!

[thefactsofthematter]

guess who started another new wip

[void-detective]

The entire batim fandom collectively agreeing on protecting Toon Bendy, holding him, and freaking over his general adorableness 🤝

[aromantic-pantyanarchy]

It's me. I'm the cis, heterosexual, aromantic man. I will never marry, I will never be married, I will grow into middle age and elder age and I will die unmarried. I will be forced to support a household of myself on only my wages alone for the rest of my life. I will be asked about women and marriage and children by my family for the rest of my life (or men, the progressive ones might say). I may not ever come out to them. I feel like I burned my coming out on something stupid. I don't want to explain it. I don't want to run them through the definitions and intricacies. I don't want the acceptance without understanding, placating me with ceased questions and poor explanations to other, drunk adults.

I like my hair to be long, I spent a year with it dyed a golden blonde with dark roots because I like the trashy party girl aesthetic. I want to dye it again with pink tips. I like painting my nails, black and blue are my favorite colors. I like wearing chokers. I also like wearing baggy jeans and ratty hoodies. I like having stubble. I like having chest hair. I like having a square jaw and broad shoulders. I wish I had a flatter stomach and a thinner profile frame. I don't know what this makes me, perhaps this is something no more GNC than Machine Gun Kelly. I think about this a lot, how queer my appearance truly is. I should think about it less. I have thought long and hard about if I could be trans or if I could be non-binary or if I could be genderqueer and the conclusion I ultimately came to is that I most enjoy being a man open to whatever self-expression I want.

I don't date, but I've thought about it. I would like to meet people, and I would like to have sex with them. But I don't want to hurt them. I fear if I explain what I am beforehand it'll scare them away. I fear if I explain after they'll feel manipulated or abused. I don't know how many people in the dating scene want what I want. I fear my own lack of experience will make me a bad lay, an embarrassing story to tell to confidants in hindsight. I fear my own virginity, a boundary to those I wish to be like. All of these fears are baseless, as I've not been able to even begin a single relationship in my life. Despite this I still heavily identify with terms like "slut" and "manwhore" and "thot" because my interests lay so deeply within casual sex, sex without great intimacy or emotion. This may be some form of stolen valor. I hope the true sluts are not too mad at me.

I made this blog several years ago because a mutual of mine reblogged memes making fun of aro and ace people, making fun of the concept of aphobia, and in addition well known aphobes. I didn't feel comfortable talking about aro stuff on my main blog, for as little as I talk about it. Living through the ace discourse of the 2016 era has largely caused me to cringe in embarrassment any time I am forced to discuss my orientation with people who aren't aro or ace themselves. I no longer follow this person. I unfollowed many people I was mutuals with from that time, most of them because they posted too often about how much they hated men and I didn't want to see that, some because our interests simply drifted too far apart, only one for explicit aphobia reasons. (Also one because they became a "both sides are bad, any vote is wasted" libertarian, but that's unrelated.)

I guess at this point I don't care deeply about what strangers on the internet think of me. If a trusted friend told me that they don't think I'm truly queer that may hurt. But I am going to continue to use the word for myself. I take up no resources. I go to events that are open to me. If an event was not open to me, I think I'd not want to go anyways. I am not a hypothetical, I am not a strawman, I am a person with lived experiences both within and exterior to the queer community. If you hate me, I will permit you to continue to do so. But ultimately, I am who I am, I cannot change these facts, and I would not choose to do so even if I could.

[copperbadge]

AI Scraping Isn't Just Art And Fanfic

Something I haven't really seen mentioned and I think people may want to bear in mind is that while artists are the most heavily impacted by AI visual medium scraping, it's not like the machine knows or cares to differentiate between original art and a photograph of your child.

AI visual media scrapers take everything, and that includes screengrabs, photographs, and memes. Selfies, pictures of your pets and children, pictures of your home, screengrabs of images posted to other sites -- all of the comic book imagery I've posted that I screengrabbed from digital comics, images of tweets (including the icons of peoples' faces in those tweets) and instas and screengrabs from tiktoks. I've posted x-ray images of my teeth. All of that will go into the machine.

That's why, at least I think, Midjourney wants Tumblr -- after Instagram we are potentially the most image-heavy social media site, and like Instagram we tag our content, which is metadata that the scraper can use.

So even if you aren't an artist, unless you want to Glaze every image of any kind that you post, you probably want to opt out of being scraped. I'm gonna go ahead and say we've probably already been scraped anyway, so I don't think there's a ton of point in taking down your tumblr or locking down specific images, but I mean...especially if it's stuff like pictures of children or say, a fundraising photo that involves your medical data, it maybe can't hurt.

If you do want to officially opt out, which may help if there's a class-action lawsuit later, you're going to want to go to the gear in the upper-right corner on the Tumblr desktop site, select each of your blogs from the list on the right-hand side, and scroll down to "Visibility". Select "Prevent third party sharing for [username]" to flip that bad boy on.

Per notes: for the app, go to your blog (the part of the app that shows what you post) and hit the gear in the upper right, then select "visibility" and it will be the last option. If you have not updated your app, it will not appear (confirmed by me, who cannot see it on my elderly version of the app).

You don't need to do it on both desktop and mobile -- either one will opt you out -- but on the app you may need to load each of your sideblogs in turn and then go back into the gear and opt out for that blog, like how you have to go into the settings for each sideblog on desktop and do it.

[stingyslegslookweird]

update on the whole sims 4 toku house thing

yeah tbh that’s probably on indefinite hiatus. i made a (honestly kinda bad) kuroto, posted about 3-4 times, and haven’t touched it since. if anyone else wants to make their own version of it i give you my full blessing or whatever would be appropriate in this situation. idk. honestly i’m worried i may be stretching myself a bit thin with all my concurrent projects going on, plus life in general being exhausting and confusing. whatever. i’m probably gonna go play the new minecraft update in an attempt to clear my thoughts and then… idk, maybe i’ll write a new obscure kamen rider post. been a while since one of those, hasn’t it? but yeah. that’s all for now.

[approximately-174-gremlins]

That is exactly what someone who's garage

Is

Powered by hamsters would say

[ofsavior]

Have you read the bsd manga?

I read the BSD manga for a while back in 2018-2020 pretty consistently, but I dropped it after some issues in the fandom. I stopped reading around when Kunikida got shot and Dazai was in gay baby jail.

[iamnotmitskii]

New photos of Mitski.

[fireflysummers]

FireflySummers’ Guide to Arguing Against the Use of AI Image Generators

(AKA I hate AI image generators so fucking much that I published a whole ass academic article on it)

Read the Paper: Art in the Machine: Value Misalignment and AI "Art"

Citation: Allred, A.M., Aragon, C. (2023). Art in the Machine: Value Misalignment and AI “Art”. In: Luo, Y. (eds) Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering. CDVE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14166. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43815-8_4

The purpose of the original paper and now this post is the following:

Provide at least one academic article that you can cite. (Full paper + citation available below)

Make explicit community values that have previously been implicit, in order to better examine your own perceptions of the online artist community, and where you sit within it.

Provide rebuttals to common pro-AI talking points, with the intention of shutting down the conversation and reclaiming the narrative. 

What this paper and post cannot do:

Act as a sole authority about the online artist community and its values. We are not a monolith, and it is up to you to think critically about what, exactly, you want to take away from this discussion.

Provide a way to convince AI Evangelists that what they’re doing is wrong and bad and needs to stop. You will never convince them. Again, focus on shutting them down and reclaiming the narrative.

Final Disclaimer: I'm a very fallible researcher who is still very much learning how to do academia. I cannot speak for the entirety of the online artist community or fanartist community. We all have different lived experiences. I have done my best to include diverse voices; however if you have concerns or critiques, I am open to hearing them.

If you show up to debate in favor of AI image generators, you will be automatically blocked.

Credits:

Editors, Meme Experts, and Annotators: @starbeans-bags, @b4kuch1n, @cecilioque.

Tutorial Examples: @sabertoothwalrus, @ash-and-starlight, @miyuliart, @hometownrockstar, @deoidesign, @cinnamonrollbakery

If you have read this far, thank you very much. I hope that you have found a constructive lens for approaching the war with AI image generators, as well as a new tool for shutting down debate and reclaiming the narrative.