#the lazy hobbyist

[myriadebleue]

[lysolstrider]

whoever died and dropped all their loot at the exchange store. thank u

[mrsonvsyoutube]

I had to throw out my script about this submarine simulator

[discountalien-pancake]

Things to do before you cut into fabric:

Iron it. Listen to me. Look me in the eyes. Are you listening? Iron your fabric. Don’t be an idiot and waste a solid yard of material bc you were too lazy to do it right the first time. Ask me how I know. Velvet is possibly the only exception.

Expanding on the ironing, make sure your grainlines aren’t skewed. When you buy fabric, 99% of the time it will be cut crooked and you cannot rely on the cut edge to lay your fabric out straight. If your fabric has a woven pattern, you can use that as a reference, but printed ones aren’t reliable either. I draw a thread an trim off the slanted excess.

Lay your fabric out on a flat surface with straight reference lines that can be used to align the grain. For me this means my hardwood floors.

Yes I am way more obsessive than the average hobbyist tailor but getting your grain aligned is so important.

[spacecadets-and-ghoulies]

Well??

would be sure swell to have some engagement here

[tangibletechnomancy]

Economic anxiety has a way of bringing out reactionary sentiment in anyone if they're not careful.

It is deeply, deeply frustrating to watch it play out in front of me in leftist spaces such that self-proclaimed leftists are using actual, literal fascist arguments about Real Art vs. Fake Art and Real Labor vs. Lazy Button-Pushing.

These things don't become any less bad when you SAY your enemy is "some rich techbro" while calling broke disabled hobbyists "evil soulless automatons".

The central logic doesn't become true when you SAY you're targeting an inhuman machine while you screech obscenities about a great replacement at its operator.

When you say one minute "there is no unskilled labor, only undervalued skills", it doesn't magically absolve you of saying "nooo, you were supposed to automate away the BAD and DEMEANING jobs with no financial safety net for the workers, not THIS one I consider RESPECTABLE" in the next breath; it only makes you a fucking hypocrite.

"Fair use for me but not for thee" is not a rational position to prevent plagiarism and forgery; it's just a means to codify an ingroup and an outgroup.

"Degenerate art" is always, ALWAYS a reactionary and proto-fascist thing to believe in, even if you wrap it up in other fancy words because you know "degenerate" is a Bad Word. "There is Good Art that makes society better and Bad Art, if you can even CALL it Art at all, that will rot our brains and turn us all into mindless drones if it's allowed to survive" cannot be made into anything but a reactionary position! Period! End of!

"Lazy button-pushers" are EXACTLY what corporations want you to think ANY automation operator is, so they can take credit away from those employees and criminally underpay them. They said the same damned thing about digital artists back in the early days of Photoshop. They say the same thing about overworked VFX artists today. You are DIRECTLY helping them make it worse with this argument.

The same old fucking trick of making you uncertain of your financial future so you lash out at other victims of the system because you "can't take the risk" of coming together to fight the actual enemy? Is working a FUCKING treat on way too many people who pride themselves on Not Being Like That - and it's even worse because a lot of the time pointing this out will get nothing but denial because maintaining pride in a leftist, progressive, pro-labor, pro-human Identity is more important to way too many people than ACTUALLY identifying the root of reactionary sentiment and the strategies used to spread it.

It makes me genuinely feel like I've fallen into a Fox News convention, hearing all these blatantly reactionary arguments and actively self-defeating strategies to Protect Labor.

[ping-ski]

Hewwo, hope you are having a lovely day! :3 For the Artist Ask meme questions, what is your favourite music to draw to, your go-to things to draw for comfort and do you little warmup sketches before drawing? Thank you and have a wonderful rest of the weekend!!

hi ama!! :3 thank you and i hope your day + weekend is lovely too!! <3 (now to the questions, sorry for the yappage lol)

🎼 Your favorite music to draw to right now? ooo how fun!! i got 2 other anons asking this too haha! i love music and i'm also a (hobbyist) musician myself so... usually the music while i draw is dependent on the mood/intention/character i have with the piece! (silly art = silly music etc.) often times i'll loop a song for DAYS just to keep up the "vibe" cause i don't have a go-to favorite when i draw! otherwise i just listen to whatever comes to mind in the moment! but yeah right now (while i draw DCA au stuff), i'm listening to Willow Smith's "empathogen" album & yaelokre's "Hayfields" because i adore that project and it's fun to sing along with!

🐻 Your go-to things to draw when you need comfort? hmm... my go-to comfort to draw is almost always whatever my current hyperfixation is! which is primarily DCA right now! outside of that (tho i'd probably have art block tbh), it's usually drawing myself in varying styles or (if i pull them out of the basement) my OCs. i'm a fanartist at heart, so drawing original stuff sometimes feels alien to me haha! i need a fictional muse to fuel the art lmao

☕ Do you do warmup sketches before drawing? (Bonus: do you have any to share?) actually- no i don't! i don't really "warmup" at all because it ALWAYS ends up being a sketch i post or end up as a finished piece! (i feel like this would make more sense if you watch me draw live ig/posted a speedpaint? maybe for art requests and commissions, but i can't recall tbh.) before digital art, i always drew with a PEN or CRAYON cause that's the most sensory friendly option for me. (it doesn't make a lot of scratchy noises like markers and pencils) so i unintentionally trained my muscle memory and myself to draw whatever comes to mind because every stroke was (literally) permanent + i tried to draw fast and loose cause i hate the feeling of paper. it gives me the strongest, most volatile, and intense visceral ICK. when i draw, i always draw with intention otherwise i'm probably not drawing at all! (this is also why i'll go on streaks of posting often then disappearing) idk my vision is usually clear, even for sketches and the muscle memory does its job! im too lazy to do actual "warmups" tbh. anyways, it's not a warmup sketch per say but i here's a random wips i have !! :3 (it's all LDR, but the last two images are from a separate wip!)

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

GOD the way you draw Eridan's capes is so good!!!! do you take inspiration from anything or does it just come to you in visions?

Thank you!!! I'm actually pretty interested in fashion (only on the level of a hobbyist, haha), so I do actually look at a lot of capes (#1 clothing fad we need to bring back imo). In the case of eridan's disgrub outfit, it's drawing inspiration from two main places: the first is that Eridan is specifically noted to model himself off great despots of history (so, going for an evil military vibe), and because in the roleplay, he's started leaning into his Prince of Hope stuff (so, going for kind of a regal/royalty kind of look). I also read like, an embarrassing amount of otome isekai manga/manwha, so i have a million be-caped prettyboys floating around my unconscious

longer explanation below:

And on top of these inspirations, the main consideration is, like, what I'm trying to convey with the character design, which I touched on above - Eridan deliberately dresses like Dualscar in canon

(Hence the rings, the cape, the striped pants)

The dweebishness of his outfit kind of overshadows the fact that, by troll standards, Eridan actually looks FUCKING TERRIFYING - it's outright noted in Gamzee's introduction that he shouldn't stay on the beach, as sea dwellers are outright dangerous

The first thing anyone's going to see when looking at Eridan, even from a distance, is going to be his massive violet cape in his sea dweller blood color

And on top of that, Eridan is literally an orphaner, like Dualscar.

By troll standards, Eridan is BAD FUCKING NEWS, like Karkat probably shit himself when Vriska added her new kismesis to the group chat (and when he brought along his moirail, the heir fucking apparent LOL). And he dresses like that on purpose - he pretty blatantly advertises that his appearance is something to run scared from. And also Dualscar and Eridan are pirates. So

The final outfit I landed on for the Disgrub combines these elements as best I can - military, pirate, prince, and supervillain. You can easily imagine more straps and gold decorations and embroidery and such if I weren't too lazy to draw it out.

So at least he can look scary before he opens his mouth.

[insertsomthinawesome]

I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!! Okay so honestly I have been very very inconsistent over the years with just disappearing for periods of time due to various things 😂 So it probably seemed pretty normal to most people.

But it felt different on my side, so I'm excited to be back in business. I took a month long hiatus! 31 days of not drawing digital art. Its not something I talk about on here? But I've been suffering from some serious long term Art Burnout for.... a really really long time. Long enough that I should've taken a break probably years ago. It finally got so bad that I could barely draw. I was scared to do it (cause it always looked "bad" in my eyes [i'll come back to that]) and doing it was exhausting and disheartening.

I talked it over with somebody and realized that the fear and anger and frustration I felt towards my own artwork was uh. Not Normal or Healthy. And I finally committed to taking a real break for once.

I still drew a little bit by hand? Traditional art has always felt like it has lower stakes for me (i don't often share it online, and sometimes I don't even share it with friends) so I did some of that when I felt like it. But Digital art was completely off the table.

I had put such an immense pressure on myself to make my digital art perfect, to make as much of it as quickly as possible to satisfy something. It wasn't fun anymore. I'm proud of what i've made over the years! But for a long time now the stuff I've been making was made while hating every second of making it. With some rare exceptions.

I hated my art! It was a combination of Perfectionism, taking in too many external expectations, and the burnout. If you hate doing something its kinda hard to love it even when you want too lol. It wasn't "Bad" in the sense that the quality was low and it was ugly! It was "Bad" in the sense that it was unhealthy for me to keep doing it at that point in time.

I'm glad to report though, that with my hiatus officially over as of Wednesday last week: I am once again. In Love. With doing art, and being an artist :)

I put off taking a break for years cause I was scared that taking a break would mean that I would never achieve all the things I wanted to do with art. I was scared it was a stupid and lazy thing to do that would mean I'd never achieve my dreams. And Also even though I kinda hated drawing, I also loved making art. Its a weird duality that I can't even really explain??? I hated it but I also loved it. I wanted it but I also wanted to run from it. It wasn't until I was more mature and had more clarity and insight (and unfortunately also until the problems got worse) that I was finally able to let go of those fears and just do it.

And I'm really really glad I did. It was everything I needed. And I hope to strike a better balance in the future with art. Taking more breaks when I need them, or just when other things have my attention like reading or Video games (Some star rail got played during this time xD)

From the outside things probably aren't going to be that different?? At this point I don't really have any sure plans to post anything I've been drawing since my Hiatus ended. I might or I might not xD I'm still a hobbyist artist taking things at her own pace, but I hope that it shows how much happier I am :)

Whumptober 2023 is being officially put to rest by this post btw! I was in major burnout when that event started, and I'm ready to just, move on from all the past expectations I'd shoved on my shoulders. If I feel like filling any of the prompts or going back to any of the ideas I'd come up for it I will! But I'm not going to worry about doing it unless the desire sets in. Thanks to everybody who's been so kind to me throughout my time on here as an artist! Ya'lls tags and screaming and kind words, the fanfic, the asks and the responses? Its been fantastic :) You guys have made me laugh, smile, and cry tears of joy. I hope from here that things only get better and sweeter! And if I have bad days again, that's okay too.

Here's to 2024 and whatever it may bring ya'll :D 🎉🎉✨✨🧡💜

[noirgasmweetheart]

"Casablanca" in (vomitable) color

You are not looking at a fan's armature hobbyist project, nor something AI generated. This is the official, professional colorization by Ted Turner's company, unleashed on the unsuspecting public in 1988.

I want you all to share in my pain.

The very first image we're greeted with is this lollypop logo:

...my thoughts exactly.

Look at the laziness of this coloring job. It's like they selected colors at random, and just covered characters' entire outfits in them. My amateur Photoshop colorizations from college had more thought put into them!

But it gets worse.

...from Sam's "Rocky Horror" worthy suit...

...to Captain Renault's Fruit-by-the-Foot ribbons, to...

Ugarte contemplating whether his cheese curd suit was appropriate for Rick's Cafe.

"Signor Ugarte, you are under arrest for wearing that...thing."

But Ugarte's not the only one who looks like a bottle of mustard. Someone in the coloring department really loved that ugly shade of Craft yellow.

...is this Casablanca, or the Wisconsin Cheese Festival?

Because of that one line about Ilsa wearing blue on the day the Nazis marched into France, the color supervisor decided that Ilsa should only wear blue--except of course, for her cheese blouse previously shown.

A PROFESSIONAL. COLORING JOB.

[glatisant-questing]

Souji's Short Story from Hakuoki Manyo Limited Edition Booklet (Translation)

Newbie + hobbyist here translating random Hakuoki stuff I came upon. This is Souji's short story in the Manyo no shou limited edition booklet.

---

“So, Souji, see you later!” “Sou-san, bye-bye! Let’s play together again later!” In the twilight, the children who had just played with me waved their hands innocently and said goodbye. “Okay, see you later. Be careful on your way home.” I smiled and answered, and the children ran away energetically. (Today I also tried my best to play with everyone, I’m very happy…) But as I watched the children running away into the twilight, I felt a bit lonely. (Today I’m responsible for buying the ingredients for dinner. It’s really troublesome… If I don’t go, I’ll be scolded by Mr. Hijikata again.) To confirm what to buy, I went to find Uncle Gen. At this time, Uncle Gen was probably in the meeting room. Thinking so, I opened the door and wanted to check the situation inside. “Huh?” What came into my sight was a person who was drowsily asleep. She was probably sewing halfway through, and she still had a kimono with torn cuffs and hems in her hand. (It’s really dangerous to fall asleep like this with a needle in your hand. What if you get hurt?) It is rare that she should fall asleep in such a place. (The Shinsengumi has been very busy lately, Chizuru-chan is also busy with various chores ordered by Mr. Hijikata.) As I thought so, I quietly looked at her sleeping face. If I were in Chizuru-chan’s position, I would wake up as soon as I felt someone enter the meeting room. (You’re full of flaws… Just like this, showing a carefree sleeping face…)

While surprised that she was so lacking in vigilance, I couldn’t help but envy her past life before coming to Kyoto. She didn't have to put her life in danger as constantly as we did. “Hey~ Chizuru-chan, wake up! If Mr. Hijikata knows you’re napping here, he’ll lecture you again.” As I said so, I gently poked her face with my finger. Her cheek felt soft like mochi. Soon, her closed eyelids trembled slightly and opened a little. “…?!” She blinked a few times and seemed to gradually come to her senses. Her eyes rolled around. “Mr. Okita! This is…!” Seeing her like this, I just smiled and answered. “Good morning, Chizuru-chan. You slept very well. But this is not your room, it’s the meeting room shared by the Shinsengumi.” “I’m sorry! I…!” She apologized to me several times with a very interesting expression of confusion. She herself seemed to have no idea that her very easy-to-understand reaction would make the other Shinsengumi members, including me, want to tease her even more. “What if I told Mr. Hijikata? He might scold you ‘What are you lazy for!’ And besides, there are also people in the Shinsengumi who doubt your identity or even suspect that you are a woman.” “…I’m sorry.” Even though this was just my joke, she still apologized seriously. “It’s just a joke. I didn’t mean for you to take those words seriously. Rather than that, you have drool on your mouth corner.” “Eh–really!” Chizuru-chan hurriedly wiped her mouth corner with her finger. “That was also a joke. By the way, how long has it been since you started helping us? I hope you can feel more at home…” “Was that also a joke…” Hearing my words, she seemed very depressed and her shoulders drooped. Seeing Chizuru-chan like this, I said. “By the way, I’m going to buy the ingredients for dinner with Uncle Gen. Do you know where I can find him?” “I think he’s mostly in the kitchen. I’m also going to go with Uncle Gen. Let’s go together!” After saying that, she started to put away the sewing tools she had used into the needle box. “Is that it? Is it okay to end halfway?” “I do these chores whenever I have time. I’ll continue at night.” She said so firmly. “If you stay up late like this, you’ll nap again like before.” Chizuru-chan seemed to be stung by these words and she couldn’t help but let out a “hmm…” and then fell silent. But soon after, she raised her head and answered. “…Today I failed because I was distracted. I’ll be careful next time.” She looked at me straight in the eye and said that. “Hmm…” Although I agreed with a lack of interest, I still muttered in my heart. (If you say everything so honestly, you’ll be laughed at by people, right? But, it’s also because of this personality that it’s fun to watch you.) “Mr. Okita, what’s wrong? You look like you’re smiling. Did I say something strange?” She asked me with a bit of anxiety. But since I was asked like this, I didn’t want to answer seriously even more. “Are you still not awake? Surely everything you say is strange to me.” “That’s…! Well, specifically, what’s strange?” Chizuru-chan asked me nervously again. “So didn’t I say it’s everything you say?” I said to her lightly and walked to the kitchen with her.

That night. I woke up unexpectedly and decided to go to the kitchen for some water. I was curious about what happened during the day, so on my way back to my room, I decided to check on Chizuru-chan’s room. It was just as I had expected. There was a faint light coming from the crack of the door. She seemed to be still awake and busy with something. (Even though I reminded her that much during the day, she still did this…) My kindness seemed to be wasted, which made me a bit angry. I walked towards her room and thought. (Maybe I should remind her more sternly and make her go to bed early.) As I thought so, I suddenly stopped. (It’s not my business if she wants to stay up late… If I talk to her now, she might think I’m watching her and worrying about what happened during the day… But if she doesn’t sleep at night, will she fall asleep inadvertently again tomorrow?) As I was thinking about these things in my heart, the light in Chizuru-chan’s room went out. There was some noise at first, but soon it turned into a steady breathing of sleeping soundly. “Good night, Chizuru-chan.” I said softly and returned to my room.

—fin—

[kkachizip]

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[wings-n-bees]

An Artist's Take on The Night Comes Down

This might piss some people off, but I don't care, because you need to hear it. Most of this is taken from an earlier conversation I had about the use of AI in art.

I have a lot of thoughts about using AI. To me, it's like a crutch when you're an artist. Should AI have been used in the music video? Probably not, but with how shitty some of you were behaving about the art style used for the Face It Alone video (I seem to recall the words 'lazy' and 'cheap' being used), I do not blame the creative department for using AI. People's expectations are far too high when it comes to art - from both a professional standpoint and a hobbyist standpoint.

Artists are already underpaid and undervalued - I cannot blame an artist for using a tool that's available to them when their pay is probably pennies to the dollar for what their normal art is worth.

Expecting an artist to make a grandiose piece and then paying them for the most basic work they've made is not a mindset any of us should have. You can't have it both ways.

AI, when used appropriately and when it's credited as such, has great value to the artistic world.

Now comes the part that is going to be a hard pill for some of you to swallow: AI has been around for decades. You might not know of it as such, but guess what? It has. You might know it better as "Computer Generated Imagery" - CGI for short. All AI is CGI. This is a concept that has been around since AT LEAST the 1970s - if not earlier, and has been used in almost every blockbuster film to date, including (but not limited to) films like Lord Of The Rings, Captain America, and The Dark Knight Series.

The issue around AI arises when people are not forthright about their use of it - something that was immediately disclosed in the description of the video. My feelings about this would be different had it not been disclosed.

Do I want my art used to train AI models? Not particularly, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too. The most basic Photoshop Filters and Elements, all the way back to the first editions of Photoshop, are all technically AI... because they are computer generated. I use those filters and elements in my own art and graphics all the time.

[bloodgulchblog]

I am once again thinking about how if you make a character in Halo reference music from now it's like a character from now listening to music from the 1400s.

Also I know everyone loves a WWII reference but it's so creatively lazy when these people are so far in the future. At least make some vague shit up about the jovian moons or the rainforest wars or especially all the insurrection fighting, which is still really recent to them. That would be what characters would have a more immediate mental reference for.

(This is about pro writers, hobbyists do whatever the fuck you want you're not being paid for your time)

[genericpuff]

(about the bell post) i dont know anything about lore olympus but is there something inherently bad in using free stock images? like, thats what stock images are for right? i know that its probably lazy or whatever but is that the only problem? /genuine

Part of the issue with using stock photos is licensing. Like fonts, they're in abundance online and easy to snag for "free", but as soon as you enter commercial work, it becomes a legal minefield. Stock photos typically belong to either individuals or corporations that rely on people buying the rights to those photos to use them; if they don't, they could very well be sued for copyright infringement.

In that respect, emojis fall into a similar grey area. Some emojis are public domain/open source meaning they're free to use for everyone. But many are not. It's why different social media platforms and different phone providers use different emoji's - it's not purely for branding (though that is a factor as Facebook emojis have become distinguishable from Android emojis) but also for ownership.

So, in the legal sense, I do not know if the bell emoji that Rachel used in LO is legally hers to use, or if it's even subject to such laws (it could be an open source image meaning it's free-for-all). I'm hoping for her sake she's not breaking any sort of copyright ownership laws, but I'm also not a lawyer and wouldn't know how to get that information even if I wanted to lmao

Aside from the legal, it's also just... sigh I'm gonna get into more opinionated territory here, but even if something is open source, even if you're legally free to use a stock photo or other tool to create your comic, there's also the ethics/integrity of it. Lore Olympus is not a Canvas comic. It is not an indie hobbyist project. It's a commercial product with multiple people working on it behind the scenes, book deals, merch deals, a TV deal, and an upcoming feature at this year's SDCC, with Rachel headlining alongside Cassandra Claire (Mortal Instruments) and Jeff Smith (BONE). Webtoons is trying very hard to market LO as a 'flagship' series and convince the public that it can stand alongside other literature juggernauts.

What I'm trying to say here is, if Rachel did legally use it, it doesn't make it any less cheap. There's a lot of discussion in the art field over the usage of external tools and assets in art creation, especially here in the west. 3D models, AI shaders, gradient maps - there are tons of things that exist now that stand to benefit artists, but can be abused or used poorly, being used as less of a tool to benefit an artist with pre-existing skills and more as a cheap shortcut to circumvent actual skill/effort.

The bell emoji isn't the heart of the issue I pointed out in that post. If it were an isolated thing, if LO were an otherwise impeccable comic with high-effort art and just one little picture of a bell, it wouldn't be that big of an issue.

But LO isn't that comic. The recipe of its art development week after week has become very cheap and low-effort, and the bell is really just the cherry on top.

And just to make it clear, I do stand by artists being able to use tools that make their lives easier. None of this is to say it's wrong to use stock images, or 3D models, or gradient maps, or whatever have you. Those tools exist to help and can be used in fun and experimental ways to bring new perspectives and life to your work. And I'm not going to scrutinize whatever shortcuts are being used in a comic that's being made for free by a hobbyist or someone who's still learning.

But like all tools, there are still ways to use them to the detriment of your own work, either due to a lack of understanding as to how that tool works, or lack of effort to blend it into your work. It can make it glaringly obvious that third-party assets are being used, and can often distract from what you've drawn (the complete opposite of what most people are trying to achieve).

When I think of art shortcuts and tools being used poorly, I think of Let's Play and its stock photo background characters.

I think of Time Gate: [AFTERBIRTH]'s stiff default 3D models that result in lifeless poses and restricted body types, which I am VERY eager to move on from LMAO

I think of LO's 3D backgrounds with only 1-2 colors thrown in and the characters floating in front of them. Or sometimes no characters at all even when people are speaking.

And of course, I think of the emoji bell, which could have easily just been drawn as a door or an actual doorbell, and not some random grey bell copied and pasted from a Google search.

All that's to say, too much reliance on poorly-implemented assets can take a great piece of work down to a mediocre one. Of course, the assets definitely aren't the only issue with LO, but they are definitely a piece of the problem. There might not be anything 'wrong' with using assets, but they can still be used poorly or result in cheap-looking work and that's primarily what I'm calling out here.

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I keep stressing that The Problem Is Capitalism isn't because I think we should all just give up on doing damage control with the worst of the ways new tech is abused and wait until Capitalism Gets Overthrown and solves all our problems; I think that's an incredibly stupid strategy for anything and damage control matters a lot-

I keep stressing it because ~98% of the proposed "solutions" are at best time-honored losing bets (e.g., "unmake these technological advances! Shove those worms back in the can NOW!") and at worst actively making things worse (agreeing with corporations that use of new tech is Mindless Unskilled Labor not even worth minimum wage) or even indulging in blatant trad and/or fascist ideology abstracted by the computer (if you have accepted the premise that degenerate art is a real thing and a great replacement is possible, you are headed for some DARK places even if you truly believe you're not fighting any human - you're already dehumanizing the people operating the "robot" you hate so much by extension).

We don't need copyright to devastate transformative art, we don't need to shove worms back in a can, and we DEFINITELY don't need to attack random hobbyists as Fake Artists; we need unions and automation taxes. We don't need to clamor for Real Art over Degenerate Art, we need to recognize the work involved in art that's been devalued for decades. We need to, for example, stop shitting on CGI because it's "lazy" and start shitting on the conditions that MAKE it unfairly cheaper than practical effects - i.e., corporate greed combined with the idea that the computer just does it for you and CGI is a cop-out rather than an art that we've been hearing since 1982; we need to push for VFX artists to unionize and recognize them as artists. We need improved unemployment protection as a foot in the door that can be upgraded into UBI, paid for with said automation taxes. We need online privacy protections so we have more control over who has access to personal things in the first place, as far as we can have privacy in a public space at all, and we need to undo Facebook culture and start remembering, and reminding others, that public websites ARE public.

Does it suck that the easy way out is anywhere from impotent to actively detrimental? Yes. Does the fact that it sucks suddenly make it untrue? No!