#so i will have to figure out how to mass transfer pictures and videos from my switch to my phone other than that weird convoluted

[thelegendofhino]

So. An explanation of who hino is. Apologies in advance for the lack of pictures, i dont have access to them at the moment but i will make a better post with all of that in the near future.

Hino is an npc in botw that stayed at the dueling peaks stable. Every day starting at 12pm, he stands outside the stable, thinking to himself. He really likes the moon and is researching the blood moon phenomenon. He tells you what the phase of the moon will be that night. Starting at 10pm, he will start to watch the moon in the sky until 2am, where he'll just stand there looking sad until finally going back into the stable at 3am to sleep until 12pm the next day. He does this every single day. If it rains, he'll stand inside the stable by the entrance and complain about how he wont be able to see the moon in the rain, and he wont tell you what the phase will be if you ask him while it is raining.

During a blood moon, he continues his regular routine until the blood moon starts doing its thing at 11:30pm, where hino will take off running around the stable. If you talk to him, his text is all red, and he will be... very excited, to say the least. Its almost as if hes worshipping the blood moon, but also as if hes just straight up possessed. During this time, his focus seems to be more on the "blood" aspect of the blood moon, which is further emphasized in totk. He even growls sometimes. Its awesome. He doesnt really seem to reguster the fact that you are speaking to him. After the blood moon passes, at around like 12-12:30 ish, he stops running and goes back to his regular spot, completely unaware of how he was just acting (or very much aware and just actubg really normal about it), and will continue to watch the moon as he usually does before once again going to bed at 3am.

In totk, he is no longer at the stable. Occasionally, a newspaper npc will mention a person who was researching the blood moon who was excited to visit a monster fort. In this game, hino is captured at 4 different monster forts (as far as im aware), and a 5th one for a quest at zoras domain. He is still researching the blood moon, but this time hes focusing more on how it revives monsters, and he gets captured because he got too close. He will be sitting inside of a cage behind the boss bokoblin in the fort and will be completely unresponsive to anything going on unless you take the cage off of him (you can put him back in the cage and he'll comment on it too). Saving him will cause him to give you 3 things, the first thing being either salt-grilled meat or mushrooms or fish, the second being sneaky meat and seafood or hasty fish skewer or energizing fish skewer, and then the third thing being hearty elixir, enduring elixir, or fairy tonic (or if your inventory is full he'll give you 20 rupees instead. Also, it seems he will continue to only give you fairy tonic if you still have the previous elixirs that he gave you). He will talk about the phase of the moon and then disappear to another monster fort. Saving him from all of the forts will cause him to disappear entirely until the next blood moon refreshes everything, putting him back into the forts.

When the blood moon starts at 11:30pm and hes still in the cage, he will start to mumble about blood. Honestly, to me he sounds kind of miserable. If you rescue him and speak to him during the blood moon, he will hurriedly give you the 3 items and then.. he will begin reacting physically to the blood moon. He wont run around or anything, but he will start breathing heavily and then it seems like hes in a bit of pain. He will then say one of three things, very excited and possibly agitated, text red once again, and then disappear again. If you speak to him only after the blood happens, he will comment on how it makes him feel alive.

For the zoras domain quest, he doesnt give you the 3 regular items but will instead give you a diamond as a reward. From what i can tell, he doesnt show up at that monster fort again. Unfortunately, i dont have his dialogue for if thats the first time you ever save him or if you save him during a blood moon (or its the first time and its a blood moon)... im gonna have to make. Two extra save files or just one if i do it right just to get that dialogue. And i absolutely will do that, eventually.

Im currently working on getting all of his moon phase dialogue, but im not very good at keeping track of that and you can only save him 4 times before each blood moon, so im not actually sure if i have it all or not.

Through my... stalking him in totk, i figured out you can postpone a blood moon for the next night if you go to the depths and wait in there. The blood moon will not activate at 12am and will instead happen the next night and you can just keep postponing it by going to the depths each time.

Overall, he seems to be fairly different than he was in botw.. my headcanon is maybe the upheaval did something to him. I mean, the blood moon is cooler than ever in totk, so i wouldnt doubt it. Its definitely affected him somewhat. He just seemed a lot calmer and more reserved in botw so its very interesting to see how hes changed a bit, though to be fair he has a lot less dialogue in botw than he does in totk. Hes awesome either way, i used all my travel medallions on 3 of the forts he can be in (since one of the locations is actually in a place that has a shrine) just so i can see him if i ever miss him enough, lol.

Thats my somewhat disorganized summary of hino. Ill make more in depth posts with pictures of his dialogue soon. I just have to get the pictures from my switch first..

I do have this picture

I was VERY excited when i first found him, but it was before i had my own copy of the game so i had to wait a whole two weeks to see him again.. i was ITCHING to play

Important edit: if its your first time saving him for the ja'abu ridge fort quest, he doesnt give you a diamond. Im currently figuring out what caused him to give me a diamond when i did that quest.

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications

Lobbyists for "creators" threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair's-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.

Here's what the EU voted in favour of this morning:

* Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run by the big platforms. They'll compare your posts to databases of "copyrighted works" that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything that appears to match the "copyright database" is blocked on sight, and you have to beg the platform's human moderators to review your case to get your work reinstated.

* Link taxes: You can't link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word from the article's headline. The platform you're using has to buy a license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.

* Sports monopolies: You can't post any photos or videos from sports events -- not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the "organisers" of events have that right. Upload filters will block any attempt to violate the rule.

Here's what they voted against:

* "Right of panorama": the right to post photos of public places despite the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements, public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).

* User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from works to make memes and other critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.

Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret, closed-door meetings with national governments ("the trilogues") and then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these rules: spying on everyone just isn't legal under European law, even if you're doing it to "defend copyright."

In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters, but we won't be able to get them unstuck without the help of big entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down: if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).

But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding videos and online educational materials are also going to be filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you're going to have to get in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator at one of the platforms to plead your case.

The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their internet for so much more.

It's like the right-wing politicians who spent 40 years describing roads, firefighting, health care, education and Social Security as "socialism," and thereby created a generation of people who don't understand why they wouldn't be socialists, then. The copyright extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can't be far behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.

This idiocy was only possible because:

* No one involved understands the internet: they assume that because their Facebook photos auto-tag with their friends' names, that someone can filter all the photos ever taken and determine which ones violate copyright;

* They tied mass surveillance to transferring a few mil from Big Tech to the newspaper shareholders, guaranteeing wall-to-wall positive coverage (I'm especially ashamed that journalists supported this lunacy -- we know you love free expression, folks, we just wish you'd share);

What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019 EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying "I did this amazing copyright thing!" From experience, I can tell you that no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.

On the other hand, there are tens of millions of voters who will vote against a candidate who "broke the internet." Not breaking the internet is very important to voters, and the wider populace has proven itself to be very good at absorbing abstract technical concepts when they're tied to broken internets (87% of Americans have a) heard of Net Neutrality and; b) support it).

I was once involved in a big policy fight where one of the stakes was the possibility that broadcast TV watchers would have to buy a small device to continue watching TV. Politicians were terrified of this proposition: they knew that the same old people who vote like crazy also watch a lot of TV and wouldn't look favourably on anyone who messed with it.

We're approaching that point with the internet. The danger of internet regulation is that every problem involves the internet and every poorly thought-through "solution" ripples out through the internet, creating mass collateral damage; the power of internet regulation is that every day, more people are invested in not breaking the internet, for their own concrete, personal, vital reasons.

This isn't a fight we'll ever win. The internet is the nervous system of this century, tying together everything we do. It's an irresistible target for bullies, censors and well-intentioned fools. Even if the EU had voted the other way this morning, we'd still be fighting tomorrow, because there will never be a moment at which some half-bright, fully dangerous policy entrepreneur isn't proposing some absurd way of solving their parochial problem with a solution that will adversely affect billions of internet users around the world.

This is a fight we commit ourselves to. Today, we suffered a terrible, crushing blow. Our next move is to explain to the people who suffer as a result of the entertainment industry's depraved indifference to the consequences of their stupid ideas how they got into this situation, and get them into the streets, into the polling booths, and into the fight.

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/12/vichy-nerds-2.html

[dailytechnologynews]

The Coming Age of Imaginative Machines: If you aren't following the rise of synthetic media, the 2020s will hit you like a digital blitzkrieg

The faces on the left were created by a GAN in 2014; on the right are ones made in 2018.

Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues gave the world generative adversarial networks (GANs) five years ago, way back in 2014. They did so with fuzzy and ethereal black & white images of human faces, all generated by computers. This wasn't the start of synthetic media by far, but it did supercharge the field. Ever since, the realm of neural network-powered AI creativity has repeatedly kissed mainstream attention. Yet synthetic media is still largely unknown. Certain memetic-boosted applications such as deepfakes and This Person Does Not Exist notwithstanding, it's safe to assume the average person is unaware that contemporary artificial intelligence is capable of some fleeting level of "imagination."

Media synthesis is an inevitable development in our progress towards artificial general intelligence, the first and truest sign of symbolic understanding in machines (though by far not the thing itself--- rather the organization of proteins and sugars to create the rudimentary structure of what will someday become the cells of AGI). This is due to the rise of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Popular misconceptions presume synthetic media present no new developments we've not had since the 1990s, yet what separates media synthesis from mere manipulation, retouching, and scripts is the modicum of intelligence required to accomplish these tasks. The difference between Photoshop and neural network-based deepfakes is the equivalent to the difference between building a house with power tools and employing a utility robot to use those power tools to build the house for you.

Succinctly, media synthesis is the first tangible sign of automation that most people will experience.

Public perception of synthetic media shall steadily grow and likely degenerate into a nadir of acceptance as more people become aware of the power of these artificial neural networks without being offered realistic debate or solutions as to how to deal with them. They've simply come too quickly for us to prepare for, hence the seemingly hasty reaction of certain groups like OpenAI in regards to releasing new AI models.

Already, we see frightened reactions to the likes of DeepNudes, an app which was made solely to strip women in images down to their bare bodies without their consent. The potential for abuse (especially for pedophilic purposes) is self-evident. We are plunging headlong into a new era so quickly that we are unaware of just what we are getting ourselves into. But just what are we getting into?

Well, I have some thoughts.

I want to start with the field most people are at least somewhat aware of: deepfakes. We all have an idea of what deepfakes can do: the "purest" definition is taking one's face replacing it with another, presumably in a video. The less exact definition is to take some aspect of a person in a video and edit it to be different. There's even deepfakes for audio, such as changing one's voice or putting words in their mouth. Most famously, this was done to Joe Rogan.

I, like most others, first discovered deepfakes in late 2017 around the time I had an "epiphany" on media synthesis as a whole. Just in those two years, the entire field has seen extraordinary progress. I realized then that we were on the cusp of an extreme flourishing of art, except that art would be largely-to-almost entirely machine generated. But along with it would come a flourishing of distrust, fake news, fake reality bubbles, and "ultracultural memes". Ever since, I've felt the need to evangelize media synthesis, whether to tell others of a coming renaissance or to warn them to be wary of what they see.

This is because, over the past two years, I realized that many people's idea of what media synthesis is really stops at deepfakes, or they only view new development through the lens of deepfakes. The reason why I came up with "media" synthesis is because I genuinely couldn't pin down any one creative/data-based field AI wasn't going to affect. It wasn't just faces. It wasn't just bodies. It wasn't just voice. It wasn't just pictures of ethereal swirling dogs. It wasn't just transferring day to night. It wasn't just turning a piano into a harpsichord. It wasn't just generating short stories and fake news. It wasn't just procedurally generated gameplay. It was all of the above and much more. And it's coming so fast that I fear we aren't prepared, both for the tech and the consequences.

Indeed, in many discussions I've seen (and engaged in) since then, there's always several people who have a virulent reaction against the prospect neural networks can do any of this at all, or at least that it'll get better enough to the point it will affect artists, creators, and laborers. Even though we're already seeing the effects in the modeling industry alone.

Look at this gif. Looks like a bunch of models bleeding into and out of each other, right? Actually, no one here is real. They're all neural network-generated people.

Neural networks can generate full human figures, and altering their appearance and clothing is a matter of changing a few parameters or feeding an image into the data set. Changing the clothes of someone in a picture is as easy as clicking on the piece you wish you change and swapping it with any of your choice (or result in the personal wearing no clothes at all). A similar scenario applies for make-up. This is not like an old online dress-up flash game where the models must be meticulously crafted by an art designer or programmer— simply give the ANN something to work with, and it will figure out all the rest. You needn't even show it every angle or every lighting condition, for it will use commonsense to figure these out as well. Such has been possible since at least 2017, though only with recent GPU advancements has it become possible for someone to run such programs in real time.

The unfortunate side effect is that the amateur modeling industry will be vaporized. Extremely little will be left, and the few who do remain are promoted entirely because they are fleshy & real human beings. Professional models will survive for longer, but there will be little new blood joining their ranks. As such, it remains to be seen whether news and blogs speak loudly of the sudden, unexpected automation of what was once seen as a safe and human-centric industry or if this goes ignored and under-reported— after all, the news used to speak of automation in terms of physical, humanoid robots taking the jobs of factory workers, fast-food burger flippers, and truck drivers, occupations that are still in existence en masse due to slower-than-expected roll outs of robotics and a continued lack of general AI.

We needn't have general AI to replace those jobs that can be replicated by disembodied digital agents. And the sudden decline & disappearance of models will be the first widespread sign of this.

Actually, I have an hypothesis for this: media synthesis is one of the first signs that we're making progress towards artificial general intelligence.

Now don't misunderstand me. No neural network that can generate media is AGI or anything close. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that what we can see as being media synthesis is evidence that we've put ourselves on the right track. We never should've thought that we could get to AGI without also developing synthetic media technology.

What do you know about imagination?

As recently as five years ago, the concept of "creative machines" was cast off as impossible— or at the very least, improbable for decades. Indeed, the phrase remains an oxymoron in the minds of most. Perhaps they are right. Creativity implies agency and desire to create. All machines today lack their own agency. Yet we bear witness to the rise of computer programs that imagine and "dream" in ways not dissimilar to humankind.

Though lacking agency, this still meets the definition of imagination.

To reduce it to its most fundamental ingredients: Imagination = experience + abstraction + prediction. To get creativity, you need only add "drive". Presuming that we fail to create artificial general intelligence in the next ten years (an easy thing to assume because it's unlikely we will achieve fully generalized AI even in the next thirty), we still possess computers capable of the former three ingredients.

Someone who lives on a flat island and who has never seen a mountain before can learn to picture what one might be by using what they know of rocks and cumulonimbus clouds, making an abstract guess to cross the two, and then predicting what such a "rock cloud" might look like. This is the root of imagination.

As Descartes noted, even the strongest of imagined sensations is duller than the dullest physical one, so this image in the person's head is only clear to them in a fleeting way. Nevertheless, it's still there. Through great artistic skills, the person can learn to express this mental image through artistic means. In all but the most skilled, it will not be a pure 1-to-1 realization due to the fuzziness of our minds, but in the case of expressive art, it doesn't need to be.

Computers lack this fleeting ethereality of imagination completely. Once one creates something, it can give you the uncorrupted output.

Right now, this makes for wonderful tools and apps that many play around with online and on our phones.

But extrapolating this to the near future results in us coming face to face many heavy questions, and not just of the "can't trust what you see variety."

Because think about it.

If I'm a musical artist and I release an album, what if I accidentally recorded a song that's too close to an AI-generated track (all because AI generated literally every combination of notes?) Or, conversely, what if I have to watch as people take my music and alter it? I may feel strongly about it, but yet the music has its notes changed, its lyrics changed, my own voice changed, until it might as well be an entirely different artist making that music. Many won't mind, but many will.

I trust my mother's voice, as many do. So imagine a phisher managing to steal her voice, running it through a speech synthesis network, and then calling me asking me for my social security number. Or maybe I work at a big corporation, and while we're secure, we still recognize each other's voice, only to learn that someone stole millions of dollars from us because they stole the CEO's voice and used to to wire cash to a pirate's account.

Imagine going online and at least 70% of the "people" you encounter are bots. They're extremely coherent, and they have profile images of what looks to be real people. And who knows, you may even forge an e-friendship with some of them because they seem to share your interests. Then it turns out they're just bundles of code.

Oh, and those bot-people are also infesting social media and forums in the millions, creating and destroying trends and memes without much human input. Even if the mainstream news sites don't latch on at first, bot-created and bot-run news sites will happily kick it off for them. The news is supposed to report on major events, global and local. Even if the news is honest and telling the truth, how can they truly verify something like this, especially when it seems to be gaining so much traction and humans inevitably do get involved? Remember "Bowsette" from last year? Imagine if that was actually pushed entirely by bots until humans saw what looked like a happenin' kind of meme and joined in? That could be every year or perhaps even every month in the 2020s onwards.

Likewise, imagine you're listening to a pop song in one country, but then you go to another country and it's the exact same song but most of the lyrics have changed to be more suitable for their culture. That sort of cultural spread could stop... or it could be supercharged if audiences don't take to it and pirate songs/change them and share them at their own leisure.

Or maybe it's a good time to mention how commissioned artists are screwed? Commission work boards are already a race to the bottom— if a job says it pays three cents per word to write an article, you'd better list your going rate as 2 cents per word, and then inevitably the asking rate in general becomes 2 cents per word, and so on and so forth. That whole business might be over within five to ten years if you aren't already extremely established. Because if machines can mimic any art style or writing style (and then exaggerate & alter it to find some better version people like more), you'd have to really be tech-illiterate or very pro-human to want non-machine commissions.

And to go back to deepfakes and deep nudes, imagine the paratypical creep who takes children and puts them into sexual situations, any sexual situation they desire thanks to AI-generated images and video. It doesn't matter who, and it doesn't have to be real children either. It could even be themselves as a child if they still have the reference or use a de-aging algorithm on their face. It's squicky and disgusting to think about, but it's also inevitable and probably has already happened.

And my god, it just keeps going on and on. I can't do this justice, even with 40,000 characters to work with. The future we're about to enter is so wild, so extreme that I almost feel scared for humanity. It's not some far off date in the 22nd century. It's literally going to start happening within the next five years. We're going to see it emerge before our very eyes on this and other subreddits.

I'll end this post with some more examples.

Nvidia's new AI can turn any primitive sketch into a photorealistic masterpiece. You can even play with this yourself here.

Waifu Synthesis- real time generative anime, because obviously.

Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models | This GAN can animate any face GIF, supercharging deepfakes & media synthesis

Talk to Transformer | Feed a prompt into GPT-2 and receive some text. As of 9/29/2019, this uses the 774M parameter version of GPT-2, which is still weaker than the 1.5B parameter "full" version."

Text samples generated by Nvidia's Megatron-LM (GPT-2-8.3b). Vastly superior to what you see in Talk to Transformer, even if it had the "full" model.

Facebook's AI can convert one singer's voice into another | The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique. as a prototype for shifting vocalists or vocalist genders or anything of that sort.

TimbreTron for changing instrumentation in music. Here, you can see a neural network shift entire instruments and pitches of those new instruments. It might only be a couple more years until you could run The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" through, say, Slayer and get an actual song out of it.

AI generated album covers for when you want to give the result of that change its own album.

Neural Color Transfer Between Images [From 2017], showing how we might alter photographs to create entirely different moods and textures.

Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000

"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets" [GAN faces for fake LinkedIn profiles]

This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist | This blog written entirely by AI is fully in the uncanny valley.

Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies | This method has already been used over one million times by Chinese gamers.

"Deep learning based super resolution, without using a GAN" [perceptual loss-based upscaling with transfer learning & progressive scaling], or in other words, "ENHANCE!"

Expert: AI-generated music is a "total legal clusterf*ck" | I've thought about this. Future music generation means that all IPs are open, any new music can be created from any old band no matter what those estates may want, and AI-generated music exists in a legal tesseract of answerless questions

And there's just a ridiculous amount more.

My subreddit, /r/MediaSynthesis, is filled with these sorts of stories going back to January of 2018. I've definitely heard of people come away in shock, dazed and confused, after reading through it. And no wonder.

[vtmusicomp]

That Day

I’ve been doing mostly upbeat posts about our time together chronologically up to this point, but since this is glioblastoma day (at least the senate says so!) I wanted to go out of order and share what happened on that fateful day. It really all started in December of 2016. Grant had the flu. It was also around this time he told me he was having slight memory issues; specifically, that he would see people at work who weren’t a regular part of his team and he couldn’t remember their names. I admit to thinking nothing of this – he was turning 45 in January, and I teased him that he was having problems remembering things because of his advanced age. Sometimes I have trouble remembering things I could easily have recalled in my 20s, and I thought it was the same. Here’s a picture of us at BART in San Bruno from that time, on our way to see Primus at the Fox Theatre in Oakland, CA - NYE 2016.

A few days into the new year, he started feeling bad again. He went to urgent care and they told him he was probably just having lingering flu symptoms. He took a couple extra days off work to rest and seemed to get better.  I had scheduled time off on 1/19/17 and 1/20/17 to get an outpatient procedure done for my sinuses, so I was recuperating through the weekend and feeling mildly sorry for myself. Saturday 1/21/17 we went to IKEA because I was restless and we were still trying to add a couple small pieces for our condo we’d just bought in May. We went across the street for mid-day ablutions/a snack; I was talking to him about something inane, and he told me to hold on a minute. Then we just sat there in silence…after maybe couple minutes I asked him what was wrong, and he said he didn’t know. The way he described it was he got confused and needed a moment, but then he was himself again. It was such a short blip in the day that I didn’t think too much of it.

Sunday 1/22/17 we went to the mall in Woodland Hills to get birthday gifts for Naomi. While I was purchasing something, Grant went to get coffee from a kiosk. When I was done, I found him waiting for his drink. He told me he had a hard time ordering his coffee, that it took longer than it should and he had gotten confused. There was a lot of noise and activity in that section of the mall – there were children running around and parents yelling, also a couple dogs, in addition to the noise of the coffee kiosk itself – so I could see why that might have been distracting. Again, I didn’t pick up on anything out of the ordinary. We went home and relaxed for a couple hours, but I wanted to try this gastropub in Sherman Oaks we read about online. This picture is from his 45th birthday, on 1/8/17 at Chris and Anne’s house.

Dinner time rolled around and I decided to drive because I chose the place. Usually, he liked to drive us to dinner but we reversed roles that night – and it’s provident we did. I was turning to get on the freeway, and talking to him, when he again told me to hold on a minute. That minute stretched out into the entire length of the drive. At first, I thought maybe he was tired - he had been battling that flu and also had mentioned to me at some point over the weekend that his stomach hurt. I changed my mind and told him since he wasn’t feeling well, we shouldn’t be going out to some random bar we’d never been to before. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, but we were coming up on the exit to Van Nuys Blvd, so I got off and headed towards the Mendocino Farms next to Guitar Center in Sherman Oaks.

At this point, Grant had said nothing to me for a while, and I started asking him questions. I wanted to know what his stomach felt like – did he feel like he was going to throw up, was it a dull pain, was it localized in some area? I was thinking maybe he needed to get his appendix taken out or something. He would only grunt at me, which got me thinking maybe he was annoyed with me for asking him so many questions, so I shut up. I confess to being a little annoyed myself that he wasn’t communicating with me (I wish I could take that feeling back). Mendocino Farms is part of a larger structure with a parking garage and a couple different restaurants. I parked and asked him again if everything was ok. He got so frustrated he started talking to me, only what he was saying didn’t make any sense. He was using vowels and consonants but it was all gibberish.

Initially, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, because what was coming out of his mouth sounded so close to actual words, I thought my hearing was the problem. I didn’t always take good care of my ears in the early years of playing in a band; maybe I was losing my hearing. I told him I didn’t know what he was trying to say and asked him to repeat it. I asked if he was talking about the restaurant but he couldn’t tell me. He tried to get out of the car anyway, with the intention of going in to order something, but I stopped him.

I want to describe what this felt like but I’m not sure I have the right words. I got a chill that went right through my body. My head felt just a little faint and I couldn’t quite focus. I wondered if he was having a stroke, but his face didn’t look like it was drooping and he was able to operate all his limbs just fine. We sat there for only a few seconds more and I told him I thought maybe we should go to urgent care. I took Woodman to the Kaiser in Panorama City; it was dark out, raining and cold. The whole drive, he kept talking gibberish to me; and I kept telling him I didn’t understand him but that was ok. Every now and then he’d pepper an actual word in there, which made me think he was making sense and it was just me who couldn’t understand. So, I’d apologize and ask him to repeat himself, he’d respond, I would say I didn’t get it, and so on. It was a loop that went around and around.

When we got there, we went to urgent care first – my default. He had progressed to being able to put some words together – we were at half words, half gibberish. Of course, the intake desk at urgent care told us we should go to the emergency room. The ER is across a driveway in a separate building, so we walked over there in the rain under my umbrella. Someone was waiting to take us back – the urgent care folks had called ahead. Then it was this whirl of activity – four nurses and a doctor getting his vital signs, drawing blood, asking him questions he couldn’t answer because he still couldn’t quite talk. They took him for a CT scan about five minutes after we arrived, and then he was back in his ER bay ten minutes later. The whole time, a lady was screaming in the next room, and hilariously, I felt like I was in a horror film. I mean, turns out we both were, we just didn’t know it yet.

At first, they wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. Panorama City Kaiser doesn’t have neurology, so we did a video conference with the neurologist at the Sunset Kaiser – this was Dr. Guzman, and he would eventually become Grant’s neuro-oncologist. He asked Grant to identify pictures on a laminated sheet. Grant was able to get some of them right, but he couldn’t tell the doc what a cactus was, or a feather, or a chair. By this time, Grant was able to talk again, albeit not confidently, but he could at least form sentences and tell me things. I sent a text to Grant’s sister Kim, telling her what was going on and asking her to help me relay this to his parents, Larry and Connie. Shortly after that I was in touch with Connie, messaging her the little I knew about what was happening. She told us they were coming out first thing the next day and requested we keep them updated in the interim, no matter how late.

After the neuro guy was done, the ER nurses told Grant he was being transferred to the Sunset Kaiser. I was so confused by this point, and also so hungry, that I wanted to know if they’d let me pull up to the ER door so Grant wouldn’t have to walk back to the parking lot. No, Val, they’re transporting him by ambulance (duh). I wanted to ride with him, but I also didn’t want to leave the car behind in case we needed something, so I ended up following them on the freeway. The guy drove 55 the whole way – I’m sure the people behind us were thrilled! I could see the paramedics talking to Grant in the back of the ambulance. Later I learned this is when Grant learned there was a mass on the CT scan and that’s why he was being admitted.

When we got to Sunset, I figured it was going to take a bit before they got Grant settled; my phone was dying and my stomach was grumbling so I went to the Rite Aid on the corner of Hollywood and Vermont. I am never going to that Rite Aid again because I don’t want those memories. I bought the cheapest phone charger I could find and bag of Chex Mix, then I went to the hospital. Kim texted she was on her way and asked if we needed anything, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I found Grant in the ICU on the 6th floor just by the elevator. He was talking and laughing with the nurse. At this point he’d gotten most of his words back and was able to tell me what the paramedic told him. Even though I know he was worried about what they’d found on the scan, he was also feeling better because he was able to communicate again. He asked me to call Alicia and let her know what was happening – it was 11pm by then and I had to leave a voicemail. That’s probably the worst voicemail I’ve ever left a person. One last picture, this one of the first evening we went out after his surgery, wearing a hat Carrie knitted for him.

The week that followed was insanity – but I’m going to stop here for now. I hope this isn’t too much information; I know we told some of this story to different people in fits and starts, and I’m happy to be able to share it fully. He didn’t really want people to know much of what happened when it was happening, but he was so brave it’s almost not fair to NOT share it. He did so incredibly well; his will to keep going stayed strong despite all the challenges, and it remains inspirational to me. A better role model could not exist for this horrid disease. Thank you for reading.

[the-kipsabian]

Let's have the following for all the a!grumps you wanna answer; tea orange, crimson, mallow, honey, chartreuse and anise~

welp i answered everything for dan already, so lemme see about the rest of them grumpy kids for these ~

tea orange: what is something that your muse is fascinated with?suzy: definitely anything to do with deatharin: he likes. anything that has to do with designing anything? be it games or getting together an animated video or writing something, as long as it has something of designing and creating in it, hes really into it tbhross: cartoons. like. its one thing that he will never shut up about tbhbarry: tech stuff tbh? he likes to figure out how everything works and how things are madebrian: anything to do with science tbh. hes a smart boi and he likes to learn complex stuff idk

crimson: how passionate is your muse about the things they love most?this really goes for all of them, but honestly? very. if they get to talking about something they are passionate about, you better buckle up and sit down and listen cause they aint gonna stop any time soon. i feel like barry would be the one out of these kids who would like. constantly ask tho if hes boring you or anything, but that doesnt make him any less passionate about what hes talking about and eager to share things with you tho

mallow: what sorts of things might remind your muse of those close to them? any scents, objects, sounds?aaaaa i really wanna say that they all have like. certain kind of objects, really? or well in ross’ case its hearing an accent of any kind - as hes a foreign transfer as well, with a very soft australian accent, so talking with other kids who have accents reminds him of home tbharin and suzy have like. promise rings they share cause thats just cute as heck so fight me. also in case for both of them, cats remind them of home as they both have catsbrian probably has like. similar to dan songs associated with specific people that remind him of themfor barry i wanna say. certain characters? like he strongly associates different video game characters with certain people and every time he sees them anywhere hes like ‘oh hey x’. ya know?and as a whole, they are often reminded of each other cause of the shared grumps jackets so its really easy to spot something in orange and/or blue and think about your best friends ~

honey: when your muse loves someone (whether it be romantic, platonic, or familial love), how do they show it?suzy takes extra steps to make sure you know she cares for you. she gives little gifts more often, makes sure to text you to ask how youre doing and if she knows youre having a bad day, asking if youve remembered to eat and sleep properly etc. romantic stuff includes cuddles and hand holding, soft little kisses sneaked in when nobody can seearin is. much of the same? plus he keeps sending you memes in the middle of the night a LOT, or just stupid pictures of his cat. hes also much more open when hes around people he really likesbrian is a bit harder to figure out whether he likes someone or not, but honestly when he starts being really blunt in a comedic way to you, you know youve made it in his books tho. he also smiles a lot more when hes around people he cares aboutross is just. pretty much the same around everyone honestly? hes loud and giggly and smiling all the same, maybe he opens up more when hes around people he likes? but its kinda hard to see honestly, and he never really straight up says if he likes you more than other peopleand barryyyyy. hes like. the exact opposite of the rest of them i feel like? like yeah he can be a bit more quiet at first before getting to know people, but he gets like. the shy type of sappy with people he really likes and cares about. hes comfortable around you, sure, but like. hes more hesitant to confess how much you mean to him, romantic or not. and when it comes to the romantic side of things, barry is just. a disaster. of blush and messed up words and yeah. its adorable but its really rare to see so if you do? cherish it ~

chartreuse: if you had to describe your muse with a color, what color would it be and why?arin is pink. absolutely. hes a soft precious princess and i will fist fight anyone that says differentlysuzy is black. cause goth girlfriend obviouslyfor brian i wanna say gray? like, a really soft shade of gray? as hes the “dad friend” of the group and he can be blunt and not really easy to figure out, so. yeah. grayross is blue. a soft baby blue. like his eyes. cause hes pure and innocent but can be a pain in the ass like a smol baby boiand barry isssss red. a kind of a neutral color, kinda hazes into the mass and easy to wear with everything else? he just goes with the flow of it

anise: when it comes to self-care, what does your muse do to take care of themselves? do they take care to spend time on it, or do they feel they don't deserve it?this probably varies quite a lot depending who you ask about this, but like. suzy is definitely the one who takes most care of herself, and she dang sure makes sure that the boys are also taking care of themselves. arin and ross especially are notoriously bad at this (see; ross’ amazingly horrible sleep schedule and arin’s need to overwork himself), so its up to suzy to make sure everyone is taken care of. barry somewhat can take care of himself tbh, sometimes he needs reminders but hes usually the one reminding others to care for themselves - take your meds, eat something, be hydrated, take breaks, etc.selfcare moments with these kids often include getting them all together in a room, just to chill and play something nice or just chat it away, have something to eat and snack on and just relax and have a nice time. especially if any one of them is stressed about anything, then its time for a game night for sureand although brian is the dad friend of the group, hes not. like an actual dad to them so hes really bad at this ‘taking care of his kids’ business, ya know? he can take care of himself no problem and often participates in the game nights if they happen on the weekend at the academy, but apart from that hes. more of an enabler to these already bad-of-taking-care-of-themselves kids than anything else, really

colorful headcanons ~

[phoenixbrandtackerman]

It’s anime rant time again!

Okay. So I just watched a Film Theory on My Hero Academia that suggested All Might had a “buff up” quirk he didn’t know about before he inherited One For All. The video claims that the difference between All Might’s muscle form and his actual form are because of this quirk he didn't know he had. 

No. Just...no.

Additionally, there was also a claim that Midoriya was able to use 1,000,000% power. *beleagered sigh* Also a flat no. Anyone who typically watches anime understands exactly what Midoriya was doing there. It was a hype-up. A confidence boost. (Apparently this was also confirmed by the writer.)

At the beginning, Midoriya hadn’t even inerited the full quirk yet. (Duh, All Might is still going around superhero-ing even though he’s passed the quirk on, which I took to mean that it would transfer over time and not in a single instant - wasn’t this out-right stated?) Also, at the beginning, Midoriya can only use 100% or 0% of One For All (of the percentage he’s already inherited from All Might). He hasn’t had any training and has no idea how to use it yet. The sheer power output breaks HIS ENTIRE BODY the first time he uses it. During the attack on the school, Midoriya is able to throw ONE PUNCH that isn’t a lethal shot. Just the one. He figures it out a bit more while training with Gran Torino. His SAFE LIMIT is a certain percentage of the power he has. If he goes over that, he damages his body. There’s a BIG difference between using 100% of One For All (All Might at the start of the series), using 100% of a percentage of One For All (Midoriya before All Might no longer had One For All), and using a percentage of a percentage of One For All (what Midoriya can use safely without injuring himself before the quirk was fully passed on to him). 

Would it make sense for every hero who has inherited One For All to pick people with quirks that work with One For All? Sure. But because we don’t have any actual proof of that process, it could be as simple as it was for All Might to chose Midoriya -- he chose someone with a good heart, and who just wanted to help people in any way he could. It’s also possible that All Might had way more training before he inherited One For All than Midoriya did, which could easily explain why he was able to use One For All right off the bat. He had more time to prepare his body for it. 

Also, if we realy want to talk about it, All Might wouldn’t have inherited 100% of All For One instantly either. It would have happened over time, just like we see with Midoriya, and while we see him training with Gran Torino and he isnt a muscle-bound giant (but still muscular), those could also be his earlier days of training. Gran Torino is beating the tar out of him in that scene/frame. Would a more tained All Might be letting Gran Torino just whoop his ass like that? My personal guess is that as he gained more experience using One For All, he also gained more body mass. There is a grand assumption that Midoriya is going to stay the size he is at the current point in the story. That is not a guarantee. He could also eventually become a buff giant like All Might and stay that way. Part of his training with Gran Torino is to emphasize that he should keep One For All activated. As All Might did. 

Another point to be made is that we don’t know what inheriting One For All looks like with anyone other than Midoriya (because he’s the protagonist and this is his story). Let’s look at Todoroki as an example. His father purposefully bred him to be the way he is. We are shown that he has other siblings as well, and all of them have different levels of each ability despite having the same parents (and allowing for the possibility of some of those kids having different mothers). I’m not even going to go into it beyond this: we don’t know if the differences we see between users of One For All are due to biological differences, or if the fact that the method of passing the quirk on is by DNA sharing would change something in the next person’s use of One For All. 

Let’s move backwards a bit to the drastic difference we see in All Might between his activated appearance and his seriously emaciated actual appearance. At least in part, this is visual shorthand - the stark difference between All Might, the grand, buff, perfect picture of a hero versus the emaciated, tired, injured Toshinori? Yeah, there’s a visual metaphor in there too, but I’ll let you guys suss that one out. All Might is unwell in the extreme. He is missing organs, he spits blood a TON (though it’s usually played for laughs), his eyes are sunken in. He looks like a walking corpse. There’s a reason for that. He’s dying. 

One more point to make here is that the assumption that One For All, because it is described as one that stockpiles power, does not have any of the actual quirk effects of previous users. We don’t know that. It is possible that the quirk was passed on to people with strength-specific quirks. We also don’t know that One For All isn’t an effect-stack quirk. (Note that I am playing devil’s advocate here -- I am making the point that saying One For All “stockpiles” quirks is vague enough that is allows for multiple ideas to possibly be true.)

Here’s my main problem with Film Theory when they tackle anime: they seem to be paying half attention to what’s right in front of them. I also had a ton of problems with the Film Theory done on Attack on Titan for much the same reason. Additionally, I know it is no accident that the third season of My Hero Academia is coming out and there’s a Film Theory about it. The same thing happened with Attack on Titan. I’ve noticed a ton of people point out innacuracies in the math done in one of the Fullmetal Alchemist theories. I didn’t have a problem with that one. I also didn’t have a problem with the one on Swoard Art Online (even though I loathe the actual anime).The difference was in the level of care that went into it. Even if some of the math may have been wrong (I am no expert -- this was something I was seeing endlessly and incredibly specifically in the comments on that particular video), they still did all that math. 

I’m not saying I don’t want any more theories on anime. I’m saying that there’s a clear difference between a quick popularity grab attempt and something that they actually care about making and it is painfully obvious which is which. 

[raioseucliffe-cheney]

Day 2: Black

Absorbed by his thoughts he stares out of the window. He’d never faced such a difficult case before. Actually, his work is simple. To allow the convicted criminals to talk one last time with him in order to get some needed information or a much needed confession for a crime being still unsolved. But this time he really doesn’t know at all what to do with this one particular convicted man. He read the files at least three times. Still he doesn’t understand at all why someone would inflict mass murder in a monastery at such a young age.

A few hours later he arrives at the gateway to the maximum security prison complex outside the Solaris Colony. This is one of his workplaces. Even though he loves to interact with people, he’s simply doing this job only because his guardian Cross had made him pick this kind of job in the first place. If he’d been able to choose a job freely on his own free will, he would most likely work as clinic clown. Simply, because he loves to see the honest smiles on the faces of children.

Nearly an hour later he is now meeting the convict he was sent to get the reason for the mass murder happening almost ten years ago. Still, no one really knows why this tragic incident had to happen in the first place. Cross and some other personnel from the Black Order simply hope for some valuable clues in order to avoid such tragedies to happen again. While he sits at the table, watched by video cameras and guards standing near the door he’s for sure becoming more and more nervous. What if he fails?

His gaze rests right now at a young man with dark blue hair, slender built and a flicker within the bright eyes sending cold shivers down his spine. Only now as this young man is sitting across him at the table he notices some violet tint within the dark blue hair as well the scar across the bridge of his nose. Is this really the one charged for murder on at least 45 counts and locked up with three times of life-long sentence without parole? Actually, he’d thought of someone as you’d face in a classical Hollywood movie where the bad guy is some family father and a well-respected member of the neighborhood.

“Are you Alma Karma?” “Why ya asking? Yes, my name is Alma”

is this young man now answering him and in a way he doesn’t feel comfortable in his presence at all. Actually, he was in situations far worse than this but still, somehow his entire body trembles inside with fear. Keeping up a mask by showing a friendly smile he can only hope Alma isn’t sensing at all how afraid he is right now.

“I’m Allen Walker. I was sent here to…” “I know why you are here. Since the monastery belongs to the Black Order they still want to have their answers. But instead of asking me, why don’t you ask the head of the Order?”

comes now Almas response before he’s even able to explain the reason of his current presence here and slightly confused he gazes now at Alma. What kind of implication is this? Why is he trying to blame the head of the Black Order after so many years passing by?

“Can you please tell me what happened on this morning at November, 14th?” “Some friends and I were kept imprisoned there for years. They tested new kind of drugs and medicaments on us. A lot of them died during the process until only another boy survived next to me. I snuck away from the room where we stayed the entire day if there wasn’t any testing. Then I found a room filled with columns made of glass and filled with a strange green liquid. Inside there were bodies of people I know and even of my own parents. I guess, I snapped seeing them like this”

is Alma now saying with a sad smile appearing on his face rushing through his dark blue hair and the sheer horror of the pictures of the crime scene appears again in front of his inner eye. So Alma turned into a murderer in order to escape whatever suffering he had to face? Shortly he shakes his head in disbelief. This young man had shown some premeditation by taking the lives of everyone residing within the monastery at this time. The doctors and nurses, the priests and monks and even the scientists working in the hidden downstairs laboratories of the monastery for the Black Order.

“Is there anything new you can tell me, Alma?” “There is supposed to be a survivor. A boy close to a year younger than me. He can prove to you that the Order is financing illegal tests and does some disputable tests on human beings”

are the next words coming from Alma as he raises slightly an eyebrow. Again he recalls the content of the official report. There had never been another boy within the monastery at all. The crime lab had searched for traces of more than one child having lived there but only Alma had been confirmed to have lived among the monks. A slight sigh escapes his lips. Somehow he feels bad to know a man like Alma is convicted even though he’s obviously having a mental illness.

He gives now the guard a sign that he’s finished with asking the convict right now and before the guard is able to place the hand-cuffs back on Alma’s wrist, the young dark blue-haired man leans now over to him to gaze deep into his eyes. “Everything I’ve told you so far is the truth. Please, Allen, I want you to prove it to the court. Prove them, I’m mentally instable” is he hearing him say in almost a whisper, then Alma is yanked way from him in almost a brutal way. Slightly nibbling his bottom lip he watches how the young man is now lead back into his cell while he is ordered to leave.

********_*********

“So how did it go, Walker?” “Actually, he only confessed what we already know” “Where you able to learn about his motive?” “He only said he snapped”

is he responding right now while he’s sitting in a conference room next to his guardian and a man named Froi Tiedoll, who simply works as advocate for the entire Order. So once his direct superior left the room a deep sigh escapes his lips. Cross is leaving the room as well and so he’s now all on his own. Well, not quite since Tiedoll is still present. The man only asks for the parts of the conversation he wasn’t telling right now and with a sigh he tells about one survivor from the monastery besides Alma Karma.

“At this point Alma is right. There had been one survivor. A boy named Kanda Yuu. But he passed away two years after the massacre within the monastery. Died due to pneumonia” is the old man now explaining him while cleaning his glasses and thoughtfully he lays his hand on his chin. So if he could prove this to the court, that there had been for sure tests on Alma and his friends, then maybe he’s even able to find out the real culprit.

“You act like someone drove this young man so far that he’d go and kill innocent people” “Alma told something about being test objects for drugs and other new medicaments” “Yuu said the same. His immune system was quite at a low level when he ended up living with me” “But that would mean one tiny infection and even Alma could die from it. Do you think there is a way to prove his immune system is so low from being an unwanted test candidate?” “Maybe. But don’t forget, Allen. This is ten years ago and the body isn’t holding such an evidence for long”

is Tiedoll now explaining to him and next to a deep sigh, a slight curse escapes his lips. Somehow there has to be some clue as to how he can help Alma.

“Tiedoll, can the verdict be changed if we prove Alma has a mental illness? He said, he snapped after seeing his parents and some of his friends in containers filled with a green liquid” is he now asking the man right now an idea popping up in his head. If he’s lucky enough there are even photos of the room the dark blue-haired young man had described to him.

“Do I get it right? You want to plead on insanity, Allen?” “If this saves Alma from being killed on the electric chair, then yes”

is right now his answer, a serious expression plastered on his face. There in one fact no one in the order knows but only his guardian. Within him rest some slight tendencies of schizophrenia. A trademark he sadly inherited from his father’s side. That’s also why he can in a way understand why Alma was acting this way back than when he had been a child.

“Alright, I’m going to help you” is he hearing Tiedoll say after a while and a deep sigh of relief escapes now his lips. At least he’ll stop the Supreme Court from sending a young man into death row only because he wasn’t in full control of his mind at that time.

********_*********

Weeks pass by, where he works in full effort to prove Alma isn’t even able to be counted sane at all. Luckily for him he found even a specialist for mental diseases agreeing to take a proper look at Alma Karma. If he isn’t working at all he’s either visiting the dark blue-haired-man in order to learn more about him or he sits in the local library in order to gather more useful information. During the visiting hours he’s now waiting for Alma, he’s now thinking about the fact he might be able to get him transferred out of here into a psychiatric clinic over at the Tethys Colony on Titan. But only if the expertise of the specialist is able to convince the Supreme Court of Alma being mentally ill.

“Actually, I’m quite surprised to see you so often, Allen” “I’m here, because I want to inform you about an option I was able to figure out” “So you found a way to avoid me facing the death penalty?”

is Alma now asking, supporting his head on his still hand-cuffed arms and he nods.

“Once the Supreme Court accepts the expertise explaining you being mentally ill, you’re going to be transferred to the Tethys Colony” “So the choice is simply: living between convicts facing death penalty or living locked up in some facility”

is he hearing Alma say in quite the sarcastic way. But within this moment he realizes a short haze of gratefulness rests within these cobalt-blue eyes. Something he hadn’t seen at all while coming here and talking to him.

“This is all I can do for you, Alma” “Still, thanks for even trying to listen to my words. But I think it is already too late, Allen”

are now the next words coming from the dark blue-haired man coming as he widens now his eyes. Right in front of him Alma is shaken by a cough and right now the surface of the table is a spatter of blood. “As you see, I’m already knocking on death’s door” is he hearing Alma saying to him with a smile as the guard tells him the visiting hour is over.

As he sits in the shuttle bringing him away from the prison complex he somehow feels how his inside starts to churn by the simple thought of being too late in order to help Alma Karma. He really started to bond and sympathize with this man. One thing for sure. If Alma wouldn’t be locked up by now, maybe he would have taken him out on a date. He’d for sure spend more time with him and learned more about what he likes and dislikes. Even though he knows Alma won’t be alive when the Supreme Court tells the final verdict, he vows himself to fight in Almas name for justice. Even if he has to leave the Order to do so.

[eurekakinginc]

"The Coming Age of Imaginative Machines: If you aren't following the rise of synthetic media, the 2020s will hit you like a digital blitzkrieg"- Detail: The faces on the left were created by a GAN in 2014; on the right are ones made in 2018.Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues gave the world generative adversarial networks (GANs) five years ago, way back in 2014. They did so with fuzzy and ethereal black & white images of human faces, all generated by computers. This wasn't the start of synthetic media by far, but it did supercharge the field. Ever since, the realm of neural network-powered AI creativity has repeatedly kissed mainstream attention. Yet synthetic media is still largely unknown. Certain memetic-boosted applications such as deepfakes and This Person Does Not Exist notwithstanding, it's safe to assume the average person is unaware that contemporary artificial intelligence is capable of some fleeting level of "imagination."Media synthesis is an inevitable development in our progress towards artificial general intelligence, the first and truest sign of symbolic understanding in machines (though by far not the thing itself--- rather the organization of proteins and sugars to create the rudimentary structure of what will someday become the cells of AGI). This is due to the rise of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Popular misconceptions presume synthetic media present no new developments we've not had since the 1990s, yet what separates media synthesis from mere manipulation, retouching, and scripts is the modicum of intelligence required to accomplish these tasks. The difference between Photoshop and neural network-based deepfakes is the equivalent to the difference between building a house with power tools and employing a utility robot to use those power tools to build the house for you.Succinctly, media synthesis is the first tangible sign of automation that most people will experience.Public perception of synthetic media shall steadily grow and likely degenerate into a nadir of acceptance as more people become aware of the power of these artificial neural networks without being offered realistic debate or solutions as to how to deal with them. They've simply come too quickly for us to prepare for, hence the seemingly hasty reaction of certain groups like OpenAI in regards to releasing new AI models.Already, we see frightened reactions to the likes of DeepNudes, an app which was made solely to strip women in images down to their bare bodies without their consent. The potential for abuse (especially for pedophilic purposes) is self-evident. We are plunging headlong into a new era so quickly that we are unaware of just what we are getting ourselves into. But just what are we getting into?Well, I have some thoughts.I want to start with the field most people are at least somewhat aware of: deepfakes. We all have an idea of what deepfakes can do: the "purest" definition is taking one's face replacing it with another, presumably in a video. The less exact definition is to take some aspect of a person in a video and edit it to be different. There's even deepfakes for audio, such as changing one's voice or putting words in their mouth. Most famously, this was done to Joe Rogan.I, like most others, first discovered deepfakes in late 2017 around the time I had an "epiphany" on media synthesis as a whole. Just in those two years, the entire field has seen extraordinary progress. I realized then that we were on the cusp of an extreme flourishing of art, except that art would be largely-to-almost entirely machine generated. But along with it would come a flourishing of distrust, fake news, fake reality bubbles, and "ultracultural memes". Ever since, I've felt the need to evangelize media synthesis, whether to tell others of a coming renaissance or to warn them to be wary of what they see.This is because, over the past two years, I realized that many people's idea of what media synthesis is really stops at deepfakes, or they only view new development through the lens of deepfakes. The reason why I came up with "media" synthesis is because I genuinely couldn't pin down any one creative/data-based field AI wasn't going to affect. It wasn't just faces. It wasn't just bodies. It wasn't just voice. It wasn't just pictures of ethereal swirling dogs. It wasn't just transferring day to night. It wasn't just turning a piano into a harpsichord. It wasn't just generating short stories and fake news. It wasn't just procedurally generated gameplay. It was all of the above and much more. And it's coming so fast that I fear we aren't prepared, both for the tech and the consequences.Indeed, in many discussions I've seen (and engaged in) since then, there's always several people who have a virulent reaction against the prospect neural networks can do any of this at all, or at least that it'll get better enough to the point it will affect artists, creators, and laborers. Even though we're already seeing the effects in the modeling industry alone.Look at this gif. Looks like a bunch of models bleeding into and out of each other, right? Actually, no one here is real. They're all neural network-generated people.Neural networks can generate full human figures, and altering their appearance and clothing is a matter of changing a few parameters or feeding an image into the data set. Changing the clothes of someone in a picture is as easy as clicking on the piece you wish you change and swapping it with any of your choice (or result in the personal wearing no clothes at all). A similar scenario applies for make-up. This is not like an old online dress-up flash game where the models must be meticulously crafted by an art designer or programmer— simply give the ANN something to work with, and it will figure out all the rest. You needn't even show it every angle or every lighting condition, for it will use commonsense to figure these out as well. Such has been possible since at least 2017, though only with recent GPU advancements has it become possible for someone to run such programs in real time.The unfortunate side effect is that the amateur modeling industry will be vaporized. Extremely little will be left, and the few who do remain are promoted entirely because they are fleshy & real human beings. Professional models will survive for longer, but there will be little new blood joining their ranks. As such, it remains to be seen whether news and blogs speak loudly of the sudden, unexpected automation of what was once seen as a safe and human-centric industry or if this goes ignored and under-reported— after all, the news used to speak of automation in terms of physical, humanoid robots taking the jobs of factory workers, fast-food burger flippers, and truck drivers, occupations that are still in existence en masse due to slower-than-expected roll outs of robotics and a continued lack of general AI.We needn't have general AI to replace those jobs that can be replicated by disembodied digital agents. And the sudden decline & disappearance of models will be the first widespread sign of this.Actually, I have an hypothesis for this: media synthesis is one of the first signs that we're making progress towards artificial general intelligence.Now don't misunderstand me. No neural network that can generate media is AGI or anything close. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that what we can see as being media synthesis is evidence that we've put ourselves on the right track. We never should've thought that we could get to AGI without also developing synthetic media technology.What do you know about imagination?As recently as five years ago, the concept of "creative machines" was cast off as impossible— or at the very least, improbable for decades. Indeed, the phrase remains an oxymoron in the minds of most. Perhaps they are right. Creativity implies agency and desire to create. All machines today lack their own agency. Yet we bear witness to the rise of computer programs that imagine and "dream" in ways not dissimilar to humankind.Though lacking agency, this still meets the definition of imagination.To reduce it to its most fundamental ingredients: Imagination = experience + abstraction + prediction. To get creativity, you need only add "drive". Presuming that we fail to create artificial general intelligence in the next ten years (an easy thing to assume because it's unlikely we will achieve fully generalized AI even in the next thirty), we still possess computers capable of the former three ingredients.Someone who lives on a flat island and who has never seen a mountain before can learn to picture what one might be by using what they know of rocks and cumulonimbus clouds, making an abstract guess to cross the two, and then predicting what such a "rock cloud" might look like. This is the root of imagination.As Descartes noted, even the strongest of imagined sensations is duller than the dullest physical one, so this image in the person's head is only clear to them in a fleeting way. Nevertheless, it's still there. Through great artistic skills, the person can learn to express this mental image through artistic means. In all but the most skilled, it will not be a pure 1-to-1 realization due to the fuzziness of our minds, but in the case of expressive art, it doesn't need to be.Computers lack this fleeting ethereality of imagination completely. Once one creates something, it can give you the uncorrupted output.Right now, this makes for wonderful tools and apps that many play around with online and on our phones.But extrapolating this to the near future results in us coming face to face many heavy questions, and not just of the "can't trust what you see variety."Because think about it.If I'm a musical artist and I release an album, what if I accidentally recorded a song that's too close to an AI-generated track (all because AI generated literally every combination of notes?) Or, conversely, what if I have to watch as people take my music and alter it? I may feel strongly about it, but yet the music has its notes changed, its lyrics changed, my own voice changed, until it might as well be an entirely different artist making that music. Many won't mind, but many will.I trust my mother's voice, as many do. So imagine a phisher managing to steal her voice, running it through a speech synthesis network, and then calling me asking me for my social security number. Or maybe I work at a big corporation, and while we're secure, we still recognize each other's voice, only to learn that someone stole millions of dollars from us because they stole the CEO's voice and used to to wire cash to a pirate's account.Imagine going online and at least 70% of the "people" you encounter are bots. They're extremely coherent, and they have profile images of what looks to be real people. And who knows, you may even forge an e-friendship with some of them because they seem to share your interests. Then it turns out they're just bundles of code.Oh, and those bot-people are also infesting social media and forums in the millions, creating and destroying trends and memes without much human input. Even if the mainstream news sites don't latch on at first, bot-created and bot-run news sites will happily kick it off for them. The news is supposed to report on major events, global and local. Even if the news is honest and telling the truth, how can they truly verify something like this, especially when it seems to be gaining so much traction and humans inevitably do get involved? Remember "Bowsette" from last year? Imagine if that was actually pushed entirely by bots until humans saw what looked like a happenin' kind of meme and joined in? That could be every year or perhaps even every month in the 2020s onwards.Likewise, imagine you're listening to a pop song in one country, but then you go to another country and it's the exact same song but most of the lyrics have changed to be more suitable for their culture. That sort of cultural spread could stop... or it could be supercharged if audiences don't take to it and pirate songs/change them and share them at their own leisure.Or maybe it's a good time to mention how commissioned artists are screwed? Commission work boards are already a race to the bottom— if a job says it pays three cents per word to write an article, you'd better list your going rate as 2 cents per word, and then inevitably the asking rate in general becomes 2 cents per word, and so on and so forth. That whole business might be over within five to ten years if you aren't already extremely established. Because if machines can mimic any art style or writing style (and then exaggerate & alter it to find some better version people like more), you'd have to really be tech-illiterate or very pro-human to want non-machine commissions.And to go back to deepfakes and deep nudes, imagine the paratypical creep who takes children and puts them into sexual situations, any sexual situation they desire thanks to AI-generated images and video. It doesn't matter who, and it doesn't have to be real children either. It could even be themselves as a child if they still have the reference or use a de-aging algorithm on their face. It's squicky and disgusting to think about, but it's also inevitable and probably has already happened.And my god, it just keeps going on and on. I can't do this justice, even with 40,000 characters to work with. The future we're about to enter is so wild, so extreme that I almost feel scared for humanity. It's not some far off date in the 22nd century. It's literally going to start happening within the next five years. We're going to see it emerge before our very eyes on this and other subreddits.I'll end this post with some more examples.Nvidia's new AI can turn any primitive sketch into a photorealistic masterpiece. You can even play with this yourself here.Waifu Synthesis- real time generative anime, because obviously.Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models | This GAN can animate any face GIF, supercharging deepfakes & media synthesisTalk to Transformer | Feed a prompt into GPT-2 and receive some text. As of 9/29/2019, this uses the 774M parameter version of GPT-2, which is still weaker than the 1.5B parameter "full" version."Text samples generated by Nvidia's Megatron-LM (GPT-2-8.3b). Vastly superior to what you see in Talk to Transformer, even if it had the "full" model.Facebook's AI can convert one singer's voice into another | The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique. as a prototype for shifting vocalists or vocalist genders or anything of that sort.TimbreTron for changing instrumentation in music. Here, you can see a neural network shift entire instruments and pitches of those new instruments. It might only be a couple more years until you could run The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" through, say, Slayer and get an actual song out of it.AI generated album covers for when you want to give the result of that change its own album.Neural Color Transfer Between Images [From 2017], showing how we might alter photographs to create entirely different moods and textures.Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000"Experts: Spy used AI-generated face to connect with targets" [GAN faces for fake LinkedIn profiles]This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist | This blog written entirely by AI is fully in the uncanny valley.Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies | This method has already been used over one million times by Chinese gamers."Deep learning based super resolution, without using a GAN" [perceptual loss-based upscaling with transfer learning & progressive scaling], or in other words, "ENHANCE!"Expert: AI-generated music is a "total legal clusterf*ck" | I've thought about this. Future music generation means that all IPs are open, any new music can be created from any old band no matter what those estates may want, and AI-generated music exists in a legal tesseract of answerless questionsAnd there's just a ridiculous amount more.My subreddit, /r/MediaSynthesis, is filled with these sorts of stories going back to January of 2018. I've definitely heard of people come away in shock, dazed and confused, after reading through it. And no wonder.. Title by: Yuli-Ban Posted By: www.eurekaking.com

[communistcanuck]

Cross examination

I don’t usually do personal posts but of course if a personal subject becomes politicized then you better believe I am going to step into the ring so here we go: Here is post of some I had just followed very recently that is in fact talking about me:   ___________________________________________ The Internet is Weird So early this morning I was so frustrated and so fed up with life.  Im in the process of trying to move because the lease at my current apartment is up on the first of July (Saturday).  To top off this move, my company shut down last week and I haven’t seen my last check as of 8:38 am this morning.  So I was beyond frustrated when my car wouldn’t start.  I was so frustrated that I put my pride aside and even posted my cash app in hope of some financial help here from my followers, granted I didn’t expect anything but I had nothin to lose.  I posted my link and asked if anyone could.  A follower messages me and says that he would love to help me but he doesn’t know how to navigate around his cellular device.  I thank him for trying but Im not about to teach you your phone, asking was enough and that you tried was enough for me as well so I thank ed him and let it go.  He then messages me and says that he could use a video of me strip teasing.  Okay, wait… So you think that since Im posting about a financial, emotional, and material hardship that gives you a right to prey on me like that. I hate men sometimes. But its my fault because I should have known not to ask people on the internet for shit, or give them a reason to try to exploit me because I don’t know these people. Sorry had to get this off my chest.  ____________________________________________________ Unlike this post I will post the entire transcript of our conversation below with of course only me named: _________________________________________________   communistcanuckHey just came across your Tumblr, just wanted to say you are stunning and I like that there is some political content on your Tumblr, beauty comes in so many different forms and you are such a spectacular example for the world!!Last Wednesday at 9:01AM  R:Thanks!!!Yesterday at 1:05 AM communistcanuck: It was my pleasure to try to give back something considering you have shared your beauty so freely. communistcanuck: Just saw the message and I would like to help but the tumblr message isn't very clear on how I could help out, or at least I am not tech saavy enough to figure out what to do. communistcanuck: The message about your car not starting and you needing money that is. R:Thank you for even considering... but it was just my cash app communistcanuck: OIC an app, I should have guessed the one platform I am probably the least familiar with as I have only had a cell phone for less then a year or at least the last time I had a cell phone before the one I currently have apps didn't even exist....heck Iphones didn't even exist the last time I had a smartphone! R:Omg lol 💀😭 communistcanuck: Too bad your pictures are awesome I would so be willing to buy a video of you doing a strip tease le Sigh R:I don't do that. communistcanuck: Cool I totally understand that as well communistcanuck: That was my hormones getting hopeful, but I am not interested in making some one do what they are not comfortable with, basic communist principles really. R:I understand. Thank you for respecting boundaries communistcanuck: Of course, here's hoping things turn around for you!! ________________________________________________________

1st off the message that I saw only mentioned that her car wouldn’t start and that she was moving soon : in fact before that she hadn’t made a post for the last 6 days and to top it off that original post was removed or edited, regardless the above exchange is copy and pasted with only her name removed as she does not name me in her post, what I call into question is whether she was exploited at all: 1: she hasn’t done something for me and not get paid for it, I did not receive anything nor did I take anything of her’s virtual or material against her consent. 2: I did not use what limited knowledge I had of her financial situation to pay less then what I have paid before for other times I have given money on Tumblr in exchange for exemplary creative pornography, I made a suggestion for a striptease video, but did not force any parameters on what that striptease would contain. 3:I said I would be willing to buy a video, not “could use it” the former clearly puts me where I belong as a consumer while the latter suggest I am some sort of hub for virtual porn. 4: She is confusing the way the capitalist system forces people into negotiating ones labour in exchange for money and the way average working people try to deal with the social pressures that system puts on them, she degrades sex work along with expressing misandry with this confusion, an individual offer to help becomes the very force that exploits: as it should be clear by her own testimony this force was already weighing down on her well before I had even started the correspondence nor have I done anything to leverage my position to force her to do anything. 5:Maintaining her security does not mean putting my security at risk: you want people to send you money, how about you find a way to that so that I don’t have to download something I cant find on a google search unlike Paypal, bank account E Transfer, Amazon account: all of which I have used for payments to people(not corporations or pimps, other then of course the omnipresent pimp of them all: the banking sector) and am quite comfortable with using. I guess she would rather burn bridges by accusing me of being a predator, lastly I am just going to highlight that it is TUMBLR itself that makes connections by calling such connections: following, chew on that systemic enabling and enforcing of society roles and stigmas on individuals Vs it’s so called positive connotation when used en mass!!  Yup I un-followed her in a heart beat after that last post, never the less maybe some one might read this and weigh in through the shit-posting fog of this site and comment on my analysis of the situation.  

[bloojayoolie]

Animals, Apparently, and Click: ID# 23291 Elizabeth Ready for a new home Manhattan ACC Happy little girl. Super cute, Playful Funny and Smart. Jumps up for kisses, her tail never stops wagging, gets the zoomies in the back yard and LOVES belly rubs. 4 yrs old, 45.4 lbs TO BE KILLED - 4/10/2018 THE MOST BRINDLE FUN YOU´LL EVER HAVE <3 TREATS, TOYS and BELLY RUBS is what Elizabeth wishes for in her future 😊 Not to forget the unconditional love of a family, lots of fun and playtime. Please share! A volunteer writes: Up front in her kennel ready to make new friends, Liz is so ready for a walk. (Elizabeth seems far too stuffy and serious a name for this little imp who loves to run and play.) She jumps up for kisses, her tail never stops wagging, gets the zoomies in the back yard, loves love loves treats, and even figured out how to unzip the zipper on a fellow volunteer's pouch to get to her favorites. Smart girl! She's a little brindle girl with a wide smile, posing seriously for pictures, and I won't tell her that her little lip gets caught when she's serious. Too cute! Liz loves attention, and when we came back upstairs she delighted in all the people around, flopping right over for a belly rub looking as cute as can be upside down. We think she could have stayed there forever as long as she had a willing belly-rub buddy. They don't come cuter than this little girl for whom an active, playful family will be ideal, as long as they also love to cuddle and give belly rubs. Ask to meet Elizabeth today; she'd love to make you hers! VIDEOS: https://youtu.be/igdDVOKt9kk https://youtu.be/ncVPsO3U4yk Elizabeth ID# 23291 MANHATTAN ACC 4 years old, 45.4 lbs BROWN BRINDLE / WHITE FEMALE Medium Mixed Breed Cross FOUND STRAY Intake Date: 03-20-2018 * SHELTER ASSESSMENT: EXPERIENCE / SINGLE PET HOME * BEHAVIOR NOTES: SAFER SCORES: Look: 1. Dog leans forward or jumps up to lick the Assessor's face with tail wagging, ears back and eyes averted. Sensitivity: 1. Dog leans into the Assessor, eyes soft or squinty, soft and loose body, open mouth. Tag: 1. Dog assumes play position and joins the game. Or dog indicates play with huffing, soft 'popping' of the body, etc. Dog might jump on Assessor once play begins. Paw squeeze 1: 1. Dog does not respond at all for three seconds. Eyes are averted and ears are relaxed or back. Paw squeeze 2: 1. Dog does not respond at all for three seconds. Eyes are averted and ears are relaxed or back. Toy: 1. Dog settles down close to chew, will relinquish toy to you. Summary: Elizabeth was highly social during her assessment, remaining soft and attention seeking throughout; she displayed no concerns. Summary: Due to concerning behavior observed when introduced to the helper dog (immediately rushing over, snapping toward), it is recommended Elizabeth be the only resident dog and be kept out of dog parks until this behavior can be assessed outside of the shelter environment. Summary (1): 3/20: Elizabeth displays a soft body and wagging tail when greeting the female helper dog. When introduced off leash, Elizabeth immediately rushes toward the helper while growling, and continues to vocalize while attempting to snap. Elizabeth is removed from the interaction. Summary (2): 3/24: Elizabeth greets a male dog through the fence with soft body. When introduced off leash she immediately rushes forward, jumps on his back, snaps and vocalizes. Date of intake: 20-Mar-2018 Summary: Active, allowed all handling Date of initial: 20-Mar-2018 Summary: Active, playful BEHAVIOR DETERMINATION: EXPERIENCE (suitable for an adopter with some previous dog experience, especially with the behaviors outlined below) Recommendations: Single-pet home Recommend no dog parks Recommendations comments: Single pet/no dog parks: See DOG-DOG INTERACTION ASSESSMENT. Due to immediate escalation toward the helper dog, it is recommended Elizabeth be the only resident dog at this time. MEDICAL EXAM NOTES 27-Mar-2018 Hx: Diarrhea on 3/25, not yesterday. Vomited a sock yesterday. Concern for CIRDC. S: Alert and calm in kennel O: -No coughing, sneezing or nasal discharge. -No vomit, diarrhea or signs of GI upset A: Vomited a sock, no further GI signs P: No tx at this time 26-Mar-2018 Progress Exam Around 3 pm, adoption counselor reported that Elizabeth vomited up a large sock A 1. Medical foreign body P -recheck tomorrow, if any concerns then consider abdominal rads Had diarrhea reported yesterday, none reported today but is reported to be sniffling S/O -BAR, energetic and friendly, stands at front of cage wagging tail -no nasal discharge, coughing or sneezing noted during observation -appears eupnic -no diarrhea in cage or reported A 1. Diarrhea-r/o stress colitis vs secondary to treats vs early CIRDC P -CTM for CIRDC/diarrhea 20-Mar-2018 DVM Intake Exam Estimated age: 4yo Microchip noted on Intake? neg Microchip Number (If Applicable): History : stray Subjective: BARH. Energetic and playful, likes to jump on you, well behaved. Observed Behavior - Evidence of Cruelty seen - n Evidence of Trauma seen - n Objective T = P = wnl R = wnl BCS 5/9 EENT: Eyes clear, ears clean, no nasal or ocular discharge noted Oral Exam: mild calculus PLN: No enlargements noted H/L: NSR, NMA, CRT < 2, Lungs clear, eupnic ABD: Non painful, no masses palpated U/G: FI, no spay scar or tattoo seen MSI: Ambulatory x 4, skin free of parasites, no masses noted, healthy hair coat CNS: Mentation appropriate - no signs of neurologic abnormalities Rectal: normal externally Assessment intact female apparently healthy Prognosis: excellent Plan: plan for OHE ctm until transfer/adoption SURGERY: Okay for surgery * TO FOSTER OR ADOPT * If you would like to adopt a dog on our “To Be Killed” list, and you CAN get to the shelter in person to complete the adoption process *within 48 hours of reserve*, you can reserve the dog online until noon on the day they are scheduled to die. We have provided the Brooklyn, Staten Island and Manhattan information below. Adoption hours at these facilities is Noon – 8:00 p.m. (6:30 on weekends) HOW TO RESERVE A “TO BE KILLED” DOG ONLINE (only for those who can get to the shelter IN PERSON to complete the adoption process, and only for the dogs on the list NOT marked New Hope Rescue Only). Follow our Step by Step directions below! *PLEASE NOTE – YOU MUST USE A PC OR TABLET – PHONE RESERVES WILL NOT WORK! ** STEP 1: CLICK ON THIS RESERVE LINK: https://newhope.shelterbuddy.com/Animal/List Step 2: Go to the red menu button on the top right corner, click register and fill in your info. Step 3: Go to your email and verify account Step 4: Go back to the website, click the menu button and view available dogs. It should read, "reserve in progress". That is YOUR reserve. Step 5: Scroll to the animal you are interested and click reserve STEP 6 ( MOST IMPORTANT STEP ): GO TO THE MENU AGAIN AND VIEW YOUR CART. THE ANIMAL SHOULD NOW BE IN YOUR CART! Step 7: Fill in your credit card info and complete transaction Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC) nycacc.org At-Risk Animals Thank you for your interest in adopting from Animal Care Centers of NYC. Our At Risk List is posted each day (except Saturday) at 6:00PM and remains viewable until 12:00PM noon the following day. newhope.shelterbuddy.com HOW TO FOSTER OR ADOPT IF YOU *CANNOT* GET TO THE SHELTER IN PERSON, OR IF THE DOG IS NEW HOPE RESCUE ONLY! You must live within 3 – 4 hours of NY, NJ, PA, CT, RI, DE, MD, MA, NH, VT, ME or Norther VA. Please PM our page for assistance. You will need to fill out applications with a New Hope Rescue Partner to foster or adopt a dog on the To Be Killed list, including those labelled Rescue Only. Hurry please, time is short, and the Rescues need time to process the applications.

[5-star-songs]

Weekend Rant: FOOBAR2000

Since I rhapsodised about my wonderful new mp3 player last weekend, I figured a companion piece was in order. This one’s about Foobar2000, the media player I set up on my PC to replace iTunes, once I ditched my iPod. Foobar is not for the faint of heart, as it requires users to build it piece by piece, but once you figure out its quirks it’s all kinds of amazing.

I downloaded my first mp3 in 1999, and started ripping my vinyl and CD collection in earnest sometime in 2000, so I’ve got almost two decades’ worth of digital files for a media manager to deal with. iTunes wasn’t my first choice, but once Apple started making iPods with significantly more storage than any of their competition, I succumbed. As my computer and that iPod came to account for a majority of my listening, I invested more and more time into making those files neat and orderly: assigning consistent genres and artist names, rating each and every song, adding album art, removing track numbers from song titles, and 101 other little metadata clean-up tasks. Amazing as they can be, computers are also pretty dumb, as they think Allison and the South Funk Boulevard Band is a different group than Allison & the South Funk Boulevard Band (and that Allison & The South Funk Boulevard Band is yet a third ensemble).

If you have a certain type of personality (which I most decidedly do), fussing about correcting all that can be oddly rewarding.

The problem is, the more time you invest in performing such tasks within a given piece of software, the harder it becomes to change over to another solution. In product management circles, this phenomenon is called “switching costs,” and it can be a deliberate strategy -- there’s a reason all the playlists you’ve made in Spotify, or Apple Music, or the streaming service of your choice, cannot be easily transferred to one of their competitors. They want you locked in.

Since I worked with the product teams at both Rhapsody and Google Play, I don’t think making switching costs high is automatically evil. But Apple has been particularly nefarious about these things, when it comes to iTunes. Though iTunes could have stored the 1 to 5 star ratings I’d assigned to >36,000 tracks within the mp3 files themselves, it deliberately did not, instead writing them to a database accessible only by iTunes itself. Similarly, any album art I’d let iTunes find for me was not attached to the mp3s, but instead locked within that database file.

This was annoying. iTunes had been getting more bloated and less reliable with every passing year, and I’d been looking forward to switching. But I knew it was going to be a huge hassle (as in, it was going to take weeks, not hours) re-adding all that album art and re-rating all those songs, so before my new X5II player arrived, I briefly considered just installing one of several programs that would let me manage my Fiio player via iTunes.

I’m glad I’m stubborn, though, because the thought of letting Apple win proved even more unbearable. And as a result I now have a lovely little media manager that hogs far less of my computer’s memory while doing dozens more things than iTunes ever managed.

That’s a picture of my particular Foobar installation up above, but one of the many great things about Foobar is that yours can look wildly different, should you want it to. That’s also what can make it so daunting, though: the trade-off for maximum customization is minimal hand-holding. When you first install it (which you can do here), you’re asked to choose among several possible layouts and colors, but given no information what any of the options might actually mean: “Album List + Properties” is one option; “Slim View + Tabs” is another. OK, thanks.

I found that selecting one at random and playing around with it for a while before going back and selecting a different one gave me a fairly quick idea what the different choices referred to, but even so that’s just a start. Foobar’s designed so that anyone with the know-how can create additional, or alternative, components -- you can add components that let you flip through album covers, view lyrics to all your tracks, fiddle with more advanced EQ settings, and more.

There are also plenty of articles and YouTube videos that walk you through the necessary steps to get a particular set of components up and running. It took me a couple weeks of playing around with different possibilities before settling on what you see up above, which includes a lyric viewer, a metadata viewer that helps me find where in the hell on my PC a given track might be hiding, and a view of all the album covers in my library.

Then the real work began: I had to install additional components to handle five star ratings, and to let me mass tag thousands of songs at once with a given rating. The satisfaction I felt when I finally figured out how to steal my ratings back from iTunes (step 1: build then save smart playlists for each star rating; step 2, import that playlist into Foobar; step 3, mass tag every song in that playlist with the appropriate number of stars) was particularly sweet: fuck you back, Apple.

Making smart playlists required getting comfortable writing queries such as “%rating% GREATER 4 AND %genre% IS soul,” which again is the type of thing that might scare away average music lovers, but once you learn the syntax it’s not any more complicated than selecting options from drop-down menus in iTunes.

Dealing with the album art took forever. I used a program called Album Art Downloader that scanned my entire collection to let me know not just which albums were missing art, but also the precise dimensions of the art on any albums that already had it, so I could upgrade if I wanted. It took me a week of very late nights to download >6000 images, and then to attach those images to every file on a particular album via Foobar. And then it turned out I had to repeat the entire process with about half of them, as my Fiio player won’t actually display anything over 1000 X 1000 (though you might want to stick with 500 X 500 to keep large playlists loading quickly).

That occupied most of my November and all of my December, and then I spent a good chunk of January doing the somewhat absurd favoriting of 24,760 songs on my Fiio as detailed last week. While I really do find such operations somewhat meditative, the truth is I did it all because I was hiding. I couldn’t bear to turn on the news or look at a newspaper after the election, and my Twitter and Facebook feeds were minefields best avoided, though I couldn’t resist tiptoeing around their perimeters from time to time.

The energy I devoted to Foobar and Fiio can’t really be justified beyond that. They helped me keep my mind blank when it seemed like I had no other choice, and I got something that’s not going to save the world but did save me, temporarily.

In any event, my project is now finished, and I can come out of hiding. I will be marching today, to let the world know we haven’t ALL lost our minds. I hope to see you out there.

I know a LOT of songs we can sing together.

[louiscoleus]

Why SaaS Marketing is so Difficult

If you are a SaaS company who is committed to marketing you:

Try to do whatever possible to stay ahead of the curve with inbound and interruption marketing.

Strive to be effective as possible with lead generation, lead nurturing, conversion, retention and growth hacking.

Realize that marketing expectations from clients are greater than your ability to satisfy.

Have just a handful of overworked employees that represent your marketing department.

You are often left with a disjointed approach that includes multiple vendors, inconsistent messaging, and hundreds of marketing initiatives that are only 30 to 40% complete.

Meanwhile, your team and your C-Level employees are tapping their feet wondering when your SaaS marketing engine will turn into the marketing machine that you were hoping for when you had your quarterly board meeting.

Sound familiar?

Why Is SaaS Marketing So Difficult?

Let’s break it down to size:

Problem 1: The Financial Mismatch

Problem 2: Silver Bullet Marketing

Answer: Systems not Solutions

Problem 1: The Financial Mismatch

Before SaaS companies were “a thing”, technology companies used to create software where they charged their full asking price upfront.

That had its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are that when you actually made sales, you had more capital upfront to work with than you currently do with modern SaaS pricing models.

For example, if you look at a software product like Adobe Photoshop, the cost of this product before they went to a monthly recurring payment model was between $400-$600. That means Adobe had $600 per sale added to its top-line revenue.

The downside of this revenue model is that a $600 piece of software becomes a big financial barrier to potential customers.

Therefore, they decided to modify their approach to a monthly fee of $20.99 monthly payment.

The bean counters at Adobe realized that in the long run, they would sign more new clients and retain them longer if they have a lower barrier of entry.

Another illustration of this model is Planet Fitness. In Philadelphia, there is a Planet Fitness in every town. The gym experience is average at best. However, they have made the pricing a measly $10 a month.

The reality is that people rarely go to this gym regularly. But, Planet Fitness is smart enough to know that paying $10 a month is less of a pain in the butt than canceling a membership.

The same concept applies to SaaS companies like Adobe, who now charge $21 a month for Photoshop, knowing that nearly every company in the world has that kind of money to invest in their SaaS marketing budget.

But if you’re a startup SaaS company operating with seed capital or funding that comes from your own pockets or those of your parents, friends, or family, the financial issues that arise from the measly monthly payments can be quite significant.

SaaS Financing Before Reaching Critical Mass

With a low-cost recurring payment model, it might be exciting to get a new sale knowing that the lifetime value of a client might be $600-$1000 in the long run. But, if their monthly payment is $20, that doesn’t go very far. Your business needs cash flow to survive, operate, and thrive.

To make matters worse, if there’s any customer service involved in that initial sale, it might be two or three months before you recoup your time investment. And let’s be clear: time is money.

As a subject matter expert in SaaS marketing, we understand the cash flow challenges that our clients face.

We understand that reaching a critical mass in dependable monthly revenue in new client income as soon as possible is essential for the sustainability of your company in the long term.

If we know that the financial dynamics of running a low-cost recurring payment model can be a challenge, we need to figure out how to reach our clients’ expectations so that you retain their payment, and they help promote your business as loyal fans (something we call brand ambassadors).

Satisfying Client Expectations

Getting to critical mass is the concept where your company has enough regular paying clients to sustain your expenses, payroll, and growth goals. However, that can be a tall order for a start-up company even if it has significant funding, so it is essential not to waste time/money.

Traditionally, companies adhere to what we call a reactive marketing strategy. Reactive marketing is a series of sprints and slow periods throughout the year. For example, you might sprint to be ready for a trade show and then do nothing with your marketing for several months. Or, you sprint to be ready for seasonal events that are followed by periods of inactivity.

Enter the solution: proactive marketing.

Proactive marketing is built on the concept that your team is pumping out thought leadership content on a consistent basis. That way, management knows what content is going out in the next 30 days, 60 days, 6 months or even a year. It is designed to be consistent to show steady progress while at the same time being nimble enough to fit in items that come up throughout the year.

Picture proactive marketing as somebody who faithfully works out at the gym for six days a week according to their personalized workout plan. Then, picture reactive marketing as someone who goes to the gym once a week.

Who do you think will make more progress towards their fitness goals?

In the SaaS world, proactive marketers consistently work on the marketing system as if they are building a machine. Once the machine is built and running systematically and predictably, the results are often substantial.

For nearly 20 years, Farotech has been helping SaaS companies move from a reactive marketing approach to a proactive SaaS marketing approach.

To accomplish this, we teach our partners to stop looking for SaaS marketing solutions and to start looking to develop a SaaS marketing system that is predictable, dependable, and transparent.

Problem 2: The Silver Bullet Marketing Approach

Before I start explaining the silver bullet marketing approach, you need to know that it never works.

In the silver-bullet approach, your company often strives to excel at marketing in one or maybe 2 channels. This approach is commonly not intentional and is often born out of issues related to bandwidth.

If you find yourself saying things like, “If only we were on the first page of Google for critical keywords, then all of our lead generation problems would be solved,” or saying the same thing about social media, paid advertising or video-based SaaS marketing, then you are falling into the trap that is the silver bullet approach.

There are a lot of problems with this approach. The biggest one is that you don’t own the platforms that you’re marketing through–meaning that it is quite possible that you’re one algorithm change away from understanding the concept of “building your SaaS marketing house on sand.”

And these algorithm changes happen so often that the marketing industry literally tracks these changes into something similar to a weather report. This report is called MozCast

To avoid falling into the silver bullet trap, you need to create a digital marketing system.

A digital marketing system is an alternative to a standard marketing approach, so let’s unpack it.

With this approach, all of the critical parts of marketing are handled under one roof by utilizing a strategic partner who is a subject matter expert in SaaS marketing.

When done properly, an agency with a team-based approach will know how to cut the critical time-saving corners to keep your SaaS marketing budget productive.

When a SaaS marketing plan is done right you will:

Understand who your buyer personas are and how to effectively reach them to get the right message, to the right client at the right time.

Identify what user personas will have retention challenges and have pre-planned strategic approaches to combat cancellations.

Understand your platform’s usability and understand where conversion originates.

Have brand consistency between your website and your platform.

Apply heat mapping, scroll mapping, and click mapping to understand where user’s eye movements, and mouse movements are going on your website/platform.

Identify your SEO traffic potential and compare it to your competitors or industries/products with similar offerings.

Identify the critical buying keywords to use in conjunction with SEO.

Use effective content marketing strategies to understand your buyers’ journey as they transfer from awareness to consideration to decision.

Install marketing automation platforms, such as Hubspot, to understand where your potential clients are in the buyer’s journey, how to lead-score them, and how to monitor their engagement.

Consistently segment your audience to systematically drip market to potential candidates with pre-written emails that have to do with:

Overviews

Features and benefits

Cost of procrastination

Case studies

Frequently asked questions

Next offers

Develop a social media approach that maximizes your organic messaging to work seamlessly with your engagement strategy.

Integrate paid social media ads to put a pixel on your potential clients’ devices, so you understand the exact demographics. Then, you methodically reach out to similar audiences.

Implement retargeting campaigns so that users who have come to your website get targeted ads based upon the parts/products on your website that they have visited most.

Connect your system with an analytics tool that allows your organization to make data-driven decisions about your marketing.

Implement a paid ad strategy that uses the right platforms to reach the right target audience.

Understand the delicate balance of maximizing your impressions, click-through rate, and conversions at the lowest cost possible.

Repeatedly analyze and measure each part of this process through A/B testing and multi-variant testing to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Understand how to marry customer service with technology using sophisticated ticketing systems so that you can build a system around the concept of QWASI (Questions With Answers and Simple Information).

Develop a knowledge base so that your existing and future clients understand how to get information quickly and effectively.

Have a system to growth hack your platform so that your existing clients become your raving fans and best salespeople.

Have made user experience paramount.

Tired yet?

That sounds like a tall order, but it doesn’t have to be. When working with a team-based agency, your company’s marketing director becomes a quarterback using the battle-tested system mentioned above.

Where do you start?

You need support. You need a team-based agency.

The number one issue that separates a below-average marketing agency from a great SaaS marketing company is understanding clients’ needs inside and out. That starts with a Gap Assessment.

If you’re looking for a SaaS marketing company and they give you an estimate without a Gap Assessment, they are just guessing. It takes our team months to deep dive into our clients’ needs, goals, visions, and challenges.

Why is a Gap Assessment so long? Because we don’t believe that a marketing agency can make an accurate quote/proposal on how to transform your marketing until they have taken significant time to analyze your goals, vision, set up, and existing marketing.

Would you go to a heart surgeon if he insists you need surgery after a simple check up? Most likely not. This is no different.

A Gap Assessment is a proven process that we implement with our clients to develop a 3-5 year roadmap to 5x or 10x their sales and opportunities.

Interested in seeing what a Gap Assessment looks like? Click here to get one now.

Conclusion: Marketing Done Right

Ask yourself hard questions to see if your SaaS marketing approach is moving in the right direction.

Do you have a clearly defined 3-5 year goal with all of the KPI’s outlined to get there?

Consider whether you are falling victim to the silver bullet approach by putting all of your hopes and dreams into one channel.

Be certain that you understand the difference between SaaS marketing solutions and a SaaS marketing system.

If you’re interested in dramatically increasing your sales and business opportunities, consider getting a Gap Assessment for your company.

The post Why SaaS Marketing is so Difficult appeared first on Farotech.

from https://farotech.com/blog/why-saas-marketing-is-so-difficult-2/

from Farotech - Blog https://farotech.weebly.com/blog/why-saas-marketing-is-so-difficult

[hopingforbabyblog]

Last week I was so happy to finalize our plans to fly to Seattle for our frozen embryo transfer. But what I didn’t think about until after everything was booked was whether Kurtis could be in the procedure room with me. I was just so excited to have the date set that I didn’t think about the possible COVID restrictions. After reviewing a letter my clinic sent out to everyone, I realized one part of the letter did in fact state that partners were not allowed in the procedure room. I verified this with my nurse as well and she said they were still following those restrictions. This week I had to make some changes to my travel plans because of that.

  Catch-up on Previous FET Prep Posts

FET Prep Week 1: 3.5 months until FET

FET Prep Week 2: Supplements, WTF Email, & Increased AMH Level

FET Prep Week 3: You say Future Tripping, I say Future Planning

FET Prep Week 4: Bad News from SIS Test

FET Prep Week 5: Surgery, Depression & Trip to Nevada

FET Prep Week 6: Relax! You’re on Vacation.

FET Prep Week 7: Food Plan, Medical Debt,  Post-op Follow-up, & Imagining Motherhood

FET Prep Week 8: Migraines & Some Good News

FET Prep Week 9: A Tough Decision

FET Prep Week 10: Down-Regulation Started, Infertility Group, Coronavirus Concerns

FET Prep Week 11: Possible COVID-19 Travel Restrictions, Postpone Fertility Treatment?, & The Skyrocketing Cost of Leuprolide

FET Prep Week 12: Clinic Says “No FET” due to COVID-19 Pandemic, Digital Roundtable on COVID-19

FET Prep Week 13: FET Scheduled After Clinic Partially Reopened

Countdown Until FET: 39 days (as of 05-24-2020)

    Plans Changed, Flying Solo

I don’t know how I didn’t factor in COVID restrictions into our travel plans as far as the clinic rules. I unfortunately assumed the only thing we would need to do is to wear our masks, gloves, and social distance from medical staff. But what I didn’t consider is that Kurtis might not be able to join me at all for my FET procedure because of the clinic’s COVID rules. But sure enough I double checked a letter they had sent and within the letter there it was. My nurse let me know that he wouldn’t be able to join me. I wish I would have thought of that before I booked our flight.

I found this out the day after we had to pay our taxes. No tax refund for us, just thousands of dollars we had to pay. Because of that and the fact that he isn’t allowed in the room he decided he financially cannot afford to come down with me for the procedure. It was really disappointing to say the least. I called the airline to try to get a refund on his ticket but they would not refund it. They did allow me to get a credit for future travel as long as it’s booked within one year. So I agreed to the credit, that way I at least have that option of using it if I decide to do another round of IVF in the future. 

  Taking some shots…

  …of vitamins.  🙂

  If I had known he could not be there I would have scheduled my FET one week sooner, which was their earliest time, but I planned it around his time off. One week later isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, because my little embryo has been waiting almost two years to be transferred. I postponed my FET when I found out my mom had cancer so I could help her. When she recovered from her cancer I had my own cancer scare. I got pregnant naturally and it resulted in a miscarriage, which lead to complications that left me susceptible to gestational trophoblastic disease, which could lead to cancer. So my doctor told me to postpone my treatment for six months to prevent uterine cancer from developing. I needed a total of three surgeries over those six months because they were finding masses in my uterine lining and had to clear it. Thankfully they were only remaining products of conception that they had not completely cleared from my last miscarriage, and not a tumor. 

When I finally passed that six month window of “no baby making whatsoever” that my doctor prescribed, I was ready to get started on treatment again. I made all the plans then COVID changed the world and my clinic shut down temporarily. So when I say that this little embryo has been waiting a while to get transferred, it has been a long while. I am so ready to do this transfer, even if I have to do it alone. I have no choice right now other than to do it alone.

I’ve done solo travel multiple times across the world, no big deal. In fact I preferred traveling on my own sometimes. But when you pump a girl full of hormones that make her weepy and then you expect her to do one of the biggest events of her life alone with no support, it’s a recipe for even more hormonal emotions. It’s only two days that I’ll be gone. But it’s a really special and sensitive time in my life. I feel like this is the time I need the most support, but I’ve got to figure out how to emotionally handle this on my own.

I’ll get over this initial disappointment. I think the biggest thing I want to avoid is sitting in my dark hotel room staring up at the ceiling and crying by myself. Yeah that’s no fun for anyone. So I need to keep my mind occupied while I’m down there. I don’t plan on going anywhere but my clinic because I don’t want to risk exposure to COVID. I can get food delivered to my room so I don’t have to go out. Maybe I’ll work on my writing, listen to audiobooks, watch TV, or be amused by the goofy TikTok videos. I want to try to make it as stress free as possible so I can increase my odds of my embryo implanting. Now I need to keep my mind occupied until my transfer, because right now that’s all I can think about.

  Confusing Med Instructions

When I did my egg retrieval in the past there were some confusing instructions regarding the dosage of one of my meds. I can’t recall at the moment which medicine it was at the time, but I had a moment of deja vu again, but now it is with my progesterone shots that have me really scratching my head. 

    My instructions say to inject a dose of 50mg. Easy, right? Well when you look at the syringe it is in milliliters and not milligrams. Instead of relying on an internet source to help me convert, I decided to get clarification directly from my nurse. If you look at the pictures you can see how someone might get confused. She let me know I need 1cc and then later sent another message that 1cc is equal to 1ml. So in the end 50mg = 1 cc = 1ml. 

  Mini Victories for the Week

Got a lot of cleaning down around the house earlier the other day, which helped me get off my booty and exercise more. Buring calories!

Asked my nurse some questions about my medicine that wasn’t clear with the paperwork. 

Work in Progress

Review FET part of “It Starts with the Egg” by Rebecca Fett.

Order more of my non-toxic, fertility-friendly soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. All low on them since I had to postpone my treatment.

  FET Prep Week 14: Plans Changed, Flying Solo, & Confusing Med Instructions Last week I was so happy to finalize our plans to fly to Seattle for our frozen embryo transfer.

[newsfundastuff]

Two years ago, 17 people died in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla. In the intervening years, both those who survived it and those who observed it from afar have tried to figure out how something so terrible could have happened.That is understandable. Unfortunately, the tone of public debate on this matter was set early, and unhelpfully, on just one subject: gun control. The morning after the shooting, Parkland school superintendent Robert Runcie said that “now is the time to have a real conversation about gun control laws in our country.” Just a few days later, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel said: “While the people who are victims of mental-health illnesses in this country are being treated, in the opinion of this sheriff, they should not be able to buy, surround themselves with, purchase or carry a handgun. Those two things don’t mix.” David Hogg, a Stoneman student at school on that evil day, demanded national action on gun control shortly after as well. “We are children. You guys are, like, the adults,” he said. “Take action, work together, come over your politics, and get something done.” Hogg then helped spearhead a mass political rally in Washington, D.C., the next month, the “March For Our Lives,” that again emphasized this call for federal action on gun control.Those who survived something as horrendous as the Parkland shooting do not deserve unnecessary opprobrium. But the fact remains that it was not Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, President Donald Trump, or the National Rifle Association who were responsible for the murder of 17 people on that February day. It was a depressing cascade of actions (and inactions) by local actors over a series of years, and even on the day of the shooting, that sealed the victims’ fate. The collective failure to recognize and accept this, even years later, may be a consequence of a political culture that insists on all problems’ being made national. In any case, it simultaneously does nothing for the victims of Parkland and does little to prevent future similar slaughters.This story turns, sadly, on the shooter himself. (As recent research has suggested that media coverage of mass shootings can inspire subsequent ones, it is best not to use his name.)The shooter displayed violent tendencies from a young age, and through multiple schools, all the way up to the day he killed those 17 people. As a young child raised mostly by an adoptive single mother, he often fought with neighborhood children. He tortured animals. He argued frequently with his own family, quickly escalating verbal confrontations to physical ones. At one point, he required a physical harness to ride the school bus without attacking other students. Throughout his grade-school and middle-school years, he physically and verbally assaulted students and bragged about his mutilations of animals. He attempted to commit suicide during a fire drill. When transferred to a school for students with special needs, he openly obsessed over guns and violence, at one point bringing a weapon to the school. He continued virtually all of these behaviors as he matriculated into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, getting into several fights, sending death threats to ex-girlfriends and others, openly proclaiming his desire to shoot up the school to anyone who would listen, dressing in full camouflage gear, bringing dead animals to class, and, once again, bringing weapons (knives and bullet casings) to school grounds. All of this happened before February 14, 2018; he was seriously punished for surprisingly little of it.Could hindsight be 20/20? After the fact, many of these school shootings seem obvious, and their perpetrators fit a similar pattern: young, isolated, troubled, aggrieved, male. But it is impossible to overlook the sheer number of times somebody actively warned about the Parkland shooter’s tendencies only to be ignored.Florida mental-health officials declined on multiple separate occasions to institutionalize him. On February 5, 2016, the shooter posted a picture of himself posing with a gun to his Instagram account with the caption: “I am going to get this gun and shoot up the school.” A woman alerted a Broward County sheriff about this; he said there was nothing he could do. There were literally dozens of police visits to his house over the years. After he entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas, something his therapist advised against, school staff held a meeting in which they pegged him as the likeliest school shooter among their student body. Eventually, he was forbidden from bringing a backpack to school. When ultimately forced out of the school for academic reasons, he trespassed on school grounds on the first day of the 2017–18 academic year. A YouTube account in his actual name commented on a video that he wanted to become a professional school shooter; the video’s uploader contacted the FBI, which did nothing. Another woman, a family friend, alerted both the Broward County sheriff’s office and the FBI about the shooter’s consistently violent Instagram posts; neither acted on the tip. And a former Secret Service agent warned Parkland officials of the likelihood of a mass shooting given their security protocols.Little, if anything, was done. Demonstrating a horrifying and ultimately damning passivity, a series of ostensibly responsible adults passed up every chance to thwart an increasingly obvious imminent evil.But the failures of those in charge at and around Marjory Stoneman Douglas did not end in the lead-up to the shooting itself. On the very day, their actions enabled, prolonged, and worsened the massacre. The shooter walked right onto school grounds through a gate that security protocols said ought to have been closed. When he got there, campus-security monitor Andrew Medina saw him, recognized him, and knew he no longer belonged at the school. He declined to initiate school security procedures, as Ty Thompson, the principal, had reserved that authority for himself but was away from campus. Medina radioed David Taylor, another campus-security monitor, who went into the building where the shooter had entered, then hid in a closet when he began hearing gunshots, also without initiating security procedures. Meanwhile, school resource officer Scot Peterson, the only other armed person on school grounds, had been informed of gunfire in the school — yet stood idly outside of the affected building for almost an hour, awaiting the arrival of Broward sheriff deputies. They too did little but wait outside the building. And finally, due to miscommunication, Jan Jordan, the captain of the Parkland district of the Broward sheriff’s office, thought that recorded security footage of the shooter was live and delayed allowing both deputies and medics into the building until it was “empty” (on the basis of out-of-date information).By the time officers entered the building, the perpetrator had already fled school grounds with evacuating students. It was a shocking display of incompetence, inaction, and indecision that allowed the Parkland shooting to become what it did. (This is not even an exhaustive account; read the book by education-policy writer Max Eden and father of Parkland victim Andrew Pollack, Why Meadow Died: The People and the Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students for more.)Seen in this light, the after-the-fact statements by Runcie, Israel, and others blaming the lack of gun control seem more like deflection than any genuine attempt to figure out what happened that day. For they would have to blame themselves, not pat themselves on the back for their “amazing leadership,” to get to the bottom of the events that unfolded. The proximate causes of the tragedy were choices various local actors made -- or, in most cases, did not make. They, not some far-off villain with only marginal influence on their day-to-day lives, deserve to be held responsible. As Pollack puts it in Why Meadow Died, “Parkland was the most avoidable mass shooting in American history.”As for Hogg and those like him, it is unfortunate that they followed the lead of these deflecting adults in seeking blame afar. They still have every right to be angry. But the proper target of ire ought to be the officials and policies that directly failed him and all the rest at Stoneman Douglas that day, those who lived and those who died. On the second anniversary of Parkland, let us hope that we can think clearly about the best way to stop anything like it from happening again.

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[usuallyleftnight]

Two years ago, 17 people died in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla. In the intervening years, both those who survived it and those who observed it from afar have tried to figure out how something so terrible could have happened.That is understandable. Unfortunately, the tone of public debate on this matter was set early, and unhelpfully, on just one subject: gun control. The morning after the shooting, Parkland school superintendent Robert Runcie said that “now is the time to have a real conversation about gun control laws in our country.” Just a few days later, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel said: “While the people who are victims of mental-health illnesses in this country are being treated, in the opinion of this sheriff, they should not be able to buy, surround themselves with, purchase or carry a handgun. Those two things don’t mix.” David Hogg, a Stoneman student at school on that evil day, demanded national action on gun control shortly after as well. “We are children. You guys are, like, the adults,” he said. “Take action, work together, come over your politics, and get something done.” Hogg then helped spearhead a mass political rally in Washington, D.C., the next month, the “March For Our Lives,” that again emphasized this call for federal action on gun control.Those who survived something as horrendous as the Parkland shooting do not deserve unnecessary opprobrium. But the fact remains that it was not Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, President Donald Trump, or the National Rifle Association who were responsible for the murder of 17 people on that February day. It was a depressing cascade of actions (and inactions) by local actors over a series of years, and even on the day of the shooting, that sealed the victims’ fate. The collective failure to recognize and accept this, even years later, may be a consequence of a political culture that insists on all problems’ being made national. In any case, it simultaneously does nothing for the victims of Parkland and does little to prevent future similar slaughters.This story turns, sadly, on the shooter himself. (As recent research has suggested that media coverage of mass shootings can inspire subsequent ones, it is best not to use his name.)The shooter displayed violent tendencies from a young age, and through multiple schools, all the way up to the day he killed those 17 people. As a young child raised mostly by an adoptive single mother, he often fought with neighborhood children. He tortured animals. He argued frequently with his own family, quickly escalating verbal confrontations to physical ones. At one point, he required a physical harness to ride the school bus without attacking other students. Throughout his grade-school and middle-school years, he physically and verbally assaulted students and bragged about his mutilations of animals. He attempted to commit suicide during a fire drill. When transferred to a school for students with special needs, he openly obsessed over guns and violence, at one point bringing a weapon to the school. He continued virtually all of these behaviors as he matriculated into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, getting into several fights, sending death threats to ex-girlfriends and others, openly proclaiming his desire to shoot up the school to anyone who would listen, dressing in full camouflage gear, bringing dead animals to class, and, once again, bringing weapons (knives and bullet casings) to school grounds. All of this happened before February 14, 2018; he was seriously punished for surprisingly little of it.Could hindsight be 20/20? After the fact, many of these school shootings seem obvious, and their perpetrators fit a similar pattern: young, isolated, troubled, aggrieved, male. But it is impossible to overlook the sheer number of times somebody actively warned about the Parkland shooter’s tendencies only to be ignored.Florida mental-health officials declined on multiple separate occasions to institutionalize him. On February 5, 2016, the shooter posted a picture of himself posing with a gun to his Instagram account with the caption: “I am going to get this gun and shoot up the school.” A woman alerted a Broward County sheriff about this; he said there was nothing he could do. There were literally dozens of police visits to his house over the years. After he entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas, something his therapist advised against, school staff held a meeting in which they pegged him as the likeliest school shooter among their student body. Eventually, he was forbidden from bringing a backpack to school. When ultimately forced out of the school for academic reasons, he trespassed on school grounds on the first day of the 2017–18 academic year. A YouTube account in his actual name commented on a video that he wanted to become a professional school shooter; the video’s uploader contacted the FBI, which did nothing. Another woman, a family friend, alerted both the Broward County sheriff’s office and the FBI about the shooter’s consistently violent Instagram posts; neither acted on the tip. And a former Secret Service agent warned Parkland officials of the likelihood of a mass shooting given their security protocols.Little, if anything, was done. Demonstrating a horrifying and ultimately damning passivity, a series of ostensibly responsible adults passed up every chance to thwart an increasingly obvious imminent evil.But the failures of those in charge at and around Marjory Stoneman Douglas did not end in the lead-up to the shooting itself. On the very day, their actions enabled, prolonged, and worsened the massacre. The shooter walked right onto school grounds through a gate that security protocols said ought to have been closed. When he got there, campus-security monitor Andrew Medina saw him, recognized him, and knew he no longer belonged at the school. He declined to initiate school security procedures, as Ty Thompson, the principal, had reserved that authority for himself but was away from campus. Medina radioed David Taylor, another campus-security monitor, who went into the building where the shooter had entered, then hid in a closet when he began hearing gunshots, also without initiating security procedures. Meanwhile, school resource officer Scot Peterson, the only other armed person on school grounds, had been informed of gunfire in the school — yet stood idly outside of the affected building for almost an hour, awaiting the arrival of Broward sheriff deputies. They too did little but wait outside the building. And finally, due to miscommunication, Jan Jordan, the captain of the Parkland district of the Broward sheriff’s office, thought that recorded security footage of the shooter was live and delayed allowing both deputies and medics into the building until it was “empty” (on the basis of out-of-date information).By the time officers entered the building, the perpetrator had already fled school grounds with evacuating students. It was a shocking display of incompetence, inaction, and indecision that allowed the Parkland shooting to become what it did. (This is not even an exhaustive account; read the book by education-policy writer Max Eden and father of Parkland victim Andrew Pollack, Why Meadow Died: The People and the Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students for more.)Seen in this light, the after-the-fact statements by Runcie, Israel, and others blaming the lack of gun control seem more like deflection than any genuine attempt to figure out what happened that day. For they would have to blame themselves, not pat themselves on the back for their “amazing leadership,” to get to the bottom of the events that unfolded. The proximate causes of the tragedy were choices various local actors made -- or, in most cases, did not make. They, not some far-off villain with only marginal influence on their day-to-day lives, deserve to be held responsible. As Pollack puts it in Why Meadow Died, “Parkland was the most avoidable mass shooting in American history.”As for Hogg and those like him, it is unfortunate that they followed the lead of these deflecting adults in seeking blame afar. They still have every right to be angry. But the proper target of ire ought to be the officials and policies that directly failed him and all the rest at Stoneman Douglas that day, those who lived and those who died. On the second anniversary of Parkland, let us hope that we can think clearly about the best way to stop anything like it from happening again.

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