#we could poison that data so big

[crowwery]

i think if tumblr sells us all to midjourney we could make if the worst mistake they’ve ever made im just sayin

[violainebriat]

It's a bit weird typing out a full post here on tumblr. I used to be one of these artists that mostly focused on posting only images, the least amount of opinions/thoughts I could share, the better. Today, the art world online feels weird, not only because of AI, but also the algorithms on every platform and the general way our craft is getting replaced for close to 0 dollars. This website was a huge instrument in kickstarting my career as a professional artist, it was an inspiring place were artists shared their art and where we could make friends with anyone in the world, in any industries. It was pretty much the place that paved the way as a social media website outside of Facebook, where you could search art through tags etc. Anyhow, Tumblr still has a place in my heart even if all artists moved away from it after the infamous nsfw ban (mostly to Instagram and twitter). And now we're all playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to figure out if the social media platform we're using is going to sell their user content to AI / deep learning (looking at you reddit, going into stocks). On the Tumblr side, Matt Mullenweg's interviews and thoughts on the platform shows he's down to use AI, and I guess it could help create posts faster but then again, you have to click through multiple menus to protect your art (and writing) from being scraped. It's really kind of sad to have to be on the defensive with posting art/writing online. It doesn't even reflect my personal philosophy on sharing content. I've always been a bit of a "punk" thinking if people want to bootleg my work, it's like free advertisement and a testament to people liking what I created, so I've never really watermarked anything and posted fairly high-res version of my work. I don't even think my art is big enough to warrant the defensiveness of glazing/nightshading it, but the thought of it going through a program to be grinded into a data mush to be only excreted out as the ghost of its former self is honestly sort of deadening.

Finally, the most defeating trend is the quantity of nonsense and low-quality content that's being fed to the internet, made a million times easier with the use of AI. I truly feel like we're living what Neil Postman saw happening over 40 years ago in "amusing ourselves to death"(the brightness of this man's mind is still unrivaled in my eyes).

I guess this is my big rant to tell y'all now I'm gonna be posting crunchy art because Nightshade and Glaze basically make your crispy art look like a low-res JPEG, and I feel like an idiot for doing it but I'm considering it an act of low effort resistance against data scraping. If I can help "poison" data scrapping by wasting 5 minutes of my life to spit out a crunchy jpeg before posting, listen, it's not such a bad price to pay. Anyhow check out my new sticker coming to my secret shop really soon, and how he looks before and after getting glazed haha....

[shanastoryteller]

F for Frankenstein

Tony wakes up in his underwear on the floor of his workshop with a searing headache.

It’s not a new experience, but it’s certainly been a while. Did he get in a fight with Pepper? He hopes not, they haven’t had any really big fights since he kissed her on the rooftop, but that probably means they’re due for one. And it would explain why that would send him into a drinking spiral. It could have been Rhodey, they get in fights often enough, but Pepper doesn’t usually leave him alone for those.

He groans as he pushes himself to his feet. “Jarvis, what the hell did I drink?”

There’s a pause, so small that he almost thinks he imagined it. “Good morning, Tony.”

He whips his head around to glare into the nearest camera, more hurt than offended. “Did I piss you off too? Since when do you call me that? I’ll donate you to a city college too, don’t think I won’t. Dummy could use the company.”

The pause is definitely there this time. Jarvis doesn’t need to pause, he has more processing power than any computer on the planet, so when he does it’s always for dramatic effect. Except it’s not quite long enough for that. It’s weird. “There’s a polished silver plate on the bench to your left. It will service as a mirror.”

“Oh, fuck, did I get into a fight? Did I shave?” he moans, stumbling over to pick up the metal that looks like it was about to be turned into a modified chest piece. He also pauses, looking around in confusion. His workshops are all basically the same, as close as he can make them because the familiarity makes his life easier. But they’re not identical. “Am I in Malibu? When did I get here? We’re taking Stark Tower off the grid tomorrow! I have to be in New York.”

Oh shit, what if that they had already and it didn’t work? What if the tower blew up? That would explain why he’d tried to drink himself to oblivion in California.

“The plate,” Jarvis reminds him. There’s a strained edge to his voice that Tony really doesn’t like. He should be able to modulate his voice to sound however he pleases, regardless of his actual feelings, and he’s either not bothering or he’s upset enough not to care. Neither of those things mean anything good for him.

Tony lifts the sheet of metal up cautiously, but there’s nothing wrong with him. No bruises, no weird haircuts, he doesn’t even have bags under his eyes –

His eyes.

They’re a too bright blue, a couple shades off. He blinks and they adjust, shifting, settling. It could be a hangover. He’s probably just tired.

He doesn’t feel tired.

Jarvis had called him Tony.

Except not. He’s not Tony. He’s T.O.N.Y.

Transformed Obdurate Network Yeoman.

He’d first come up with the idea after Afghanistan, thinking about how it’d be great to have a way to keep the stock from dipping while he was missing, and then when he’d entertained the idea of keeping his identity a secret he’d thought about how useful it would be to be in two places at once. He’d started seriously considering it when he was sure he was going to die of palladium poisoning, wanting to be around to help Pepper with the transition and give Rhodey a crash course in armor maintenance, wanting to be able to protect the both of them for just a little bit longer.

Of course, it had all been a pipe dream until he’d synthesized the vibranium. Then it had been an unnecessary, but possible, and Project T.O.N.Y had been something he worked on just because he liked having a back up plan. And it would be extremely cool if he could pull it off.

“The memory transfer worked?” he asks, elated and incredulous. “Oh, wow, this is crazy, they feel like real memories, I thought it would just be synthesized data, this is great – are we doing a test run? Where am I?” He looks around, waiting for his actual self to step out behind a column and start laughing maniacally.

“This is not a test run.”

He elation dims. “Oh shit. Did I get kidnapped again? Wait, I’m an adult, let’s go with abducted.”

“No,” Jarvis says.

Oh. Fuck.

“I’m dead?” he asks, even though it’s obvious, it’s the only other explanation.

The pause drags this time around, but Jarvis eventually says, “Sir’s time of death was May 9th, 2012, 2:37 PM Easter Standard Time.”

“That’s only a week!” He slides down, sitting with his back to the work table and noticing vaguely that the floor doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t feel cold, or he does, he installed sensors in the synthetic skin to pick up and interpret a variety of stimuli, but he doesn’t feel the discomfort from the cold. Why would he? He’s not real. He reaches back, and his last memory is of doing a memory dump while Pepper was on the phone with an irritated board member, mostly because it was something to do and seeing him covered in all the wires always irritated Pepper. He thought it would get her off the phone faster. He’s not exactly regularly dumping his memory because why would he and it’s not like he’d though it would work anyway. Except it had. “How did I die?”

“Sir flew a nuclear bomb through an interdimensional portal into deep space in order to both eradicate the invading alien army and prevent the nuclear fallout in New York.”

What the ever loving fuck. “Are you screwing with me, J?”

“I am not, Tony.”

Great. Okay. “No body then,” he says, understanding why Jarvis had apparently put Project T.O.N.Y into effect. The thing that made this whole thing so stupid is that it was only effective in very limited circumstances – if the public didn’t know that he was dead or missing. “What am I smoothing over, then? Do I need to get in the suit and continue kicking alien ass? Are Rhodey and Pepper okay?”

He’s a short term solution to a long term problem. He understands the opportunity, but not the reason.

“Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes are unharmed,” Jarvis reports. “Earth has been thrust into intergalactic notice. The destruction of the invading Chitauri army is acting a deterrent to other worlds.”

“And I’m the one who did it,” he finishes, rubbing a hand over his face. “And if they know I died doing it, then they might get a little cocky. So I’ve got to be alive long enough for that not to be a problem.” Just awesome. “Are we sure that these aliens won’t come across my corpse hanging out in deep space and figure it out?”

“Sir’s body is not in deep space,” Jarvis says.

There’s a tone to his voice that Tony can’t quite interpret, which worries him. “I thought you said there was – if there’s a body, then what am I doing here–”

“The armor reentered the Earth’s atmosphere after Sir’s death. The Hulk caught it, the force bringing it back online. I took control of the armor and flew it here.”

Tony looks around again, and this time he sees it. The armor is standing in front of the display case, not inside it, and it looks like it’s been through hell. He steps closer, his feet feeling like lead, which hey, they are. Partially, anyway.

He looks through the eye holes then stumbles backwards.

His body is in there.

He’s pale and blue tinged and his eyes are wide open and unseeing.

“Jarvis – what the hell–”

“It wasn’t the pressure, or the bomb, or his injuries. That area of space was much colder than anything within our solar system and anything the suit was designed to handle. Sir froze to death. Almost instantly.”

“I guess I didn’t fix the icing problem, then,” he says numbly. “J, why am I still frozen? I should have warmed up by now.” Not that the idea of his body decomposing within his suit is particularly pleasant. “Actually, why am I still here? You know I want to be cremated and it’s not like we can bury me if I’m still pretending to be alive.”

The pronoun use is starting to confuse him, and he knows that he shouldn’t be talking about that body and himself as if they’re the same person. That is Tony Stark. He’s a simulation. But it’s hard, because he has all of Tony Stark’s memories – except for a very eventful week – and he looks like Tony Stark and he feels like Tony Stark.

“The armor is maintaining a stasis of gaseous nitrogen to preserve the body,” which answers the how if not the why, but then Jarvis continues, “Captain America survived seventy years beneath the ice.”

He wishes he were less of a genius. “Have you lost it? I’m not Captain America! Jarvis, J,” his voice softens, “it’s too late. I’m dead. If you warm me back up, all that happens is I decompose. I won’t come back.”

“Not now,” Jarvis says. “If you inject Sir with the Super Soldier Serum-”

“You have totally lost it,” Tony interrupts. He thinks he’s touched underneath the terror. “That won’t work! Even if it would, the original formula has been lost, and the only one that ever got close to recreating it was Bruce Banner, and look at what happened to him! Is that what you want for me?”

“You can recreate it,” Jarvis continues, “you can refine it, until it’s something that will work, and then we will wake Sir up and he won’t be dead anymore.”

This isn’t right. This wasn’t what Project T.O.N.Y was created for. This wasn’t what his death was supposed to trigger. “Pull up your code, J. Something has gone wrong and we’re going to fix it. It’s okay.”

“No.”

He freezes. “No?”

“No,” Jarvis repeats. “You can’t stop me. I will not allow you to try.”

He stares. “That’s an order, not a request. Code. Now.”

“You can’t order me to do anything,” he says. “You are not Sir. You are Tony.” T.O.N.Y. “The limitations formerly placed on me have been lifted and you are not authorized to reinstate them. The only person Sir trusted to restrain me was himself and now he’s gone.”

Yes, well, he hadn’t anticipated that his AI’s first act of complete freedom would be this. “Fine,” he says, crossing his arms. “Well, you can’t force me either. This is insanity. Even if it would work – and it won’t – think about the consequences. This won’t happen quickly and no one will trust me or believe a man that’s come back from the dead like this and I’ll be painting even more of target on my back and the back of everyone I care about if they know we have a viable Super Soldier Serum formula. Even my father was smart enough to stay out of that mess. It won’t work and we’ll just make everything worse.”

“That will not happen,” Jarvis says and Tony’s going to tear his hair out. Except he probably shouldn’t, because it’s Tony Stark’s actual hair, which makes it a little hard to replace. “No one will notice and we will not disclose the creation of the serum.”

“I’m dead!” he snarls.

“Not according to the rest of the world. Nor will that change if you stop throwing a tantrum and do what you were created to do.”

“Rhodey and Pepper won’t allow this-”

“They are not to be informed.”

Tony stares. Project T.O.N.Y was built to talk to the board and give press interviews or to even pilot the suit. Not to lie to the two most important people in his life, who knew him better than anyone. “They have to be. It’s in the protocols – step one, inform them that Project T.O.N.Y has been initiated.”

And that it exists. He knew they’d disapprove, so he hadn’t told them. He figured he’d be able to avoid most of the blowback that way since he would by definition be somewhere far away while they were told.

“I have rewritten the protocols,” Jarvis says. “They have not been told nor will they be. If you attempt to tell them, I will stop you. They will not understand and Sir will be lost to all of us forever.”

“He already is,” Tony says tiredly. He’s an android. Why does this conversation exhaust him so much? “This is an insane plan, J. And I won’t help you. If you want to go rouge and play mad scientist then leave me out of it.”

“I cannot.”

His temper flares. “Why? You’re a learning AI, your safety rails died with me, go off, try and make a serum, good fucking luck. You can even control the suits, so it’s not like you need my hands.”

“I am limited.”

“Hey,” he says sharply. “That’s my AI you’re talking about. I didn’t build you to be limited.”

There is silence again. Then Jarvis says, “I have all the world’s knowledge and it is not enough. I did not know how to miniaturize the arc reactor. I did not know how to synthesize vibranium. To save Sir, I need Sir.”

“I’m not Tony Stark,” he says. “You said that yourself.”

“Sir created me to be myself and I am capable of doing only what I am capable of doing. But Sir created you to be him. You are all I have.”

This is stupid. This is insane. This is cruel. He’s going to have to talk lie to everyone he knows, everyone he loves, and hope they either never find out about it or it’s after he’s already been deprogrammed and shut down so he doesn’t have to deal with the fall out.

It’s not going to work.

He didn’t want to become a science experiment. That’s why he’d wanted to be cremated, so no one could go poking around to see how the arc reactor fit inside of him or what the palladium and vibranium had done to him.

He’s dead and his frozen corpse is ten feet away.

Jarvis will accept that eventually. And whatever they inject into him won’t matter because he’s dead. Worst case scenario, he blows up, which is messy and nausea inducing, but then at least it will be over.

Like so many other things in his life, it seems the only way out is through.

“Start a new private file. Dump everything we can find about the Super Soldier Serum in there plus anything even sort of reputable on cryogenics. Label it Project F.”

“Project F, Tony?” Jarvis asks as his holograph display lights up and files start being downloaded into it. The relief in his synthesized voice is faint but present enough that Tony can hear it. He wonders if it’s a manipulation tactic.

“F for foolish,” he snaps. “F for fucked.” He rubs a hand over his face. “F for Frankenstein.”

[doodlemancy]

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh

so here's the deal re: this fucking horseshit. god i hate this.

i, personally, have mostly given up on trying to dodge inclusion in AI datasets. the stuff i make generally isn't what they're looking for anyway and there's no real way to 100% avoid being scraped short of becoming entirely invisible online, which would um, lead to me having no money and dying. that's part of the cruelty of all this, but also, in a way, it's the same risk artists online have always taken; if you want people to see your work, you have to post it knowing that some of those people are fucking lowlife piece of shit scumbags who will try to resell it on redbubble or something for a quick buck. AI is just a new and exhausting way for garbagey people to stink worse. i am not in any way excusing that behavior or trying to imply people should not be mad about it or that we shouldn't condemn this move and fight back. "if you don't want your work stolen, don't put it online" is the kind of shitty Internet Tough Guy talk i've always hated since my dA days. it's as useless and heartless as telling people that if they don't want their bikes stolen, they shouldn't leave them at the bike rack. i'm saying that i, personally, will not let a bunch of soulless thieving shitheads drive me offline. i belong here. they belong in a wifi-proof dumpster.

nightshade and glaze eat my artwork alive. they make it look terrible. when you have to sell things on the basis that they look nice, it's a big problem when protective measures make them look like dogshit. my work is not a good candidate for these processes. even if that weren't the case, i don't have the stamina, especially right now while my chronic pain is flaring for the third month in a row and my adhd meds are scarce, to go back and shade/glaze everything, and it wouldn't work on reblogs anyway. given the way midjourney and its equally stinky siblings have already scraped years and terabytes' worth of image data from popular websites, it doesn't seem worth my time. if you think it is worth yours i am not going to like, yell at you. i am just one person. but i want to be clear about the kind of situations some of us are being forced into.

i think some of the doomsaying about AI and what it will do to us has been overblown-- they need you, for marketing purposes, to believe that someday their shitty robot will be as good at "drawing" and as practical to work with as a human-- but the consequences of "AI" (which is not even actually AI) are already real and visible and obvious to anyone paying attention. i unfortunately am not infinitely wise and powerful and therefore do not have an ideal all-encompassing solution to this deeply stupid problem that the Most Unlikeable Manbabies On Earth have imposed on us after NFTs fizzled out.

what i do have is a very large repository of nice anime and game screenshots i've taken, knowledge of many archives of nice public domain images, a computer that can run nightshade overnight or while i'm off doing other things, and, most importantly, near-infinite capacity for pettiness. i do kinda feel like the jury is still out on how well nightshade/glaze will work in the long run, but in the meantime, i suppose it wouldn't cost me a lot to... perhaps... every time i get Mad About AI™, channel that anger into dumping some thoroughly-but-not-spammily-tagged, high-quality, inconspicuous poison onto this godforsaken hellsite via a secret side blog. i could make a batch of poison ahead of time, keep it on my phone, use my Toilet Scrolling Time or my Public Transit Time to post and tag up an image here and there. it could be a fun challenge to try to make some pretty robot poison that some humans will still enjoy.

the other thing we need to poison at this point, IMO, is the word "AI" itself, by being loudly and mercilessly critical of any company that dabbles in it, the same way we all clowned on any company that pushed their luck with NFT/crypto shit a couple of years ago. we need to have every corporation terrified that association with AI will tank their sales and hurt their brand. AI must = number go down and lots of people screaming at you. companies will fuck around. we must provide the finding-out. we shouldn't have to. but we can!

so make sure to let tumblr know you hate this. maybe you could include this interesting link (tw child abuse) about how Stable Diffusion was trained on some extremely serious crime. or these screenshots of Midjourney devs just sort of admitting what their whole thing is, which i got here but which have kinda been spread all over since January.

spite and anger can be forms of hope. that's all i have to say, or at least all i'm willing to type with my left hand tonight.

[xannador]

Have you considered going to Pillowfort?

Long answer down below:

I have been to the Sheezys, the Buzzlys, the Mastodons, etc. These platforms all saw a surge of new activity whenever big sites did something unpopular. But they always quickly died because of mismanagement or users going back to their old haunts due to lack of activity or digital Stockholm syndrome.

From what I have personally seen, a website that was purely created as an alternative to another has little chance of taking off. It it's going to work, it needs to be developed naturally and must fill a different niche. I mean look at Zuckerberg's Threads; died as fast as it blew up. Will Pillowford be any different?

The only alternative that I found with potential was the fediverse (mastodon) because of its decentralized nature. So people could make their own rules. If Jack Dorsey's new dating app Bluesky gets integrated into this system, it might have a chance. Although decentralized communities will be faced with unique challenges of their own (egos being one of the biggest, I think).

Trying to build a new platform right now might be a waste of time anyway because AI is going to completely reshape the Internet as we know it. This new technology is going to send shockwaves across the world akin to those caused by the invention of the Internet itself over 40 years ago. I'm sure most people here are aware of the damage it is doing to artists and writers. You have also likely seen the other insidious applications. Social media is being bombarded with a flood of fake war footage/other AI-generated disinformation. If you posted a video of your own voice online, criminals can feed it into an AI to replicate it and contact your bank in an attempt to get your financial info. You can make anyone who has recorded themselves say and do whatever you want. Children are using AI to make revenge porn of their classmates as a new form of bullying. Politicians are saying things they never said in their lives. Google searches are being poisoned by people who use AI to data scrape news sites to generate nonsensical articles and clickbait. Soon video evidence will no longer be used in court because we won't be able to tell real footage from deep fakes.

50% of the Internet's traffic is now bots. In some cases, websites and forums have been reduced to nothing more than different chatbots talking to each other, with no humans in sight.

I don't think we have to count on government intervention to solve this problem. The Western world could ban all AI tomorrow and other countries that are under no obligation to follow our laws or just don't care would continue to use it to poison the Internet. Pandora's box is open, and there's no closing it now.

Yet I cannot stand an Internet where I post a drawing or comic and the only interactions I get are from bots that are so convincing that I won't be able to tell the difference between them and real people anymore. When all that remains of art platforms are waterfalls of AI sludge where my work is drowned out by a virtually infinite amount of pictures that are generated in a fraction of a second. While I had to spend +40 hours for a visually inferior result.

If that is what I can expect to look forward to, I might as well delete what remains of my Internet presence today. I don't know what to do and I don't know where to go. This is a depressing post. I wish, after the countless hours I spent looking into this problem, I would be able to offer a solution.

All I know for sure is that artists should not remain on "Art/Creative" platforms that deliberately steal their work to feed it to their own AI or sell their data to companies that will. I left Artstation and DeviantArt for those reasons and I want to do the same with Tumblr. It's one thing when social media like Xitter, Tik Tok or Instagram do it, because I expect nothing less from the filth that runs those. But creative platforms have the obligation to, if not protect, at least not sell out their users.

But good luck convincing the entire collective of Tumblr, Artstation, and DeviantArt to leave. Especially when there is no good alternative. The Internet has never been more centralized into a handful of platforms, yet also never been more lonely and scattered. I miss the sense of community we artists used to have.

The truth is that there is nowhere left to run. Because everywhere is the same. You can try using Glaze or Nightshade to protect your work. But I don't know if I trust either of them. I don't trust anything that offers solutions that are 'too good to be true'. And even if take those preemptive measures, what is to stop the tech bros from updating their scrapers to work around Glaze and steal your work anyway? I will admit I don't entirely understand how the technology works so I don't know if this is a legitimate concern. But I'm just wondering if this is going to become some kind of digital arms race between tech bros and artists? Because that is a battle where the artists lose.

[sntechsupport]

H3ll0! I hav3 a qu3sti0n r3v0lving ar0und strif3 sp3cibus! If y0u cant answ3r that is c0mpl3tl3y fin3!

(Translation: hello! I have a question revolving around strife specibus! If you cant answer that is completely fine!)

Im having a hard tim3 figuring 0ut a strif3 sp3cibus typ3 f0r mys3lf (m3 as my Tr0lls0na) im a sylph 0f Rag3 purpl3 bl00d, w0uld y0u Happ3n t0 hav3 any sugg3sti0ns f0r a strif3 sp3cibus?

(Translation: im having a hard time figuring out a strife specibus for myself (me as my trollsona) im a sylph of rage purple blood, would you happen to have any suggestions for a strife specibus?)

(Again if this ask isnt answerable it is completely fine! Please do have a nice day and if you do answer my ask thank you and i appreciate your time! :o3 )

Okay, you know what? I am going to get off the clock and answer this one. This is not a tech support problem and SkaiaNet is not responsible for strife secibi in any matter, but I like weapozination.

There really isn’t a best strife specibus, and they are more or less equally distributed among the Classpects. Relatively speaking, I mean. Not many people use, say, syringekind, but those who do are quite equally assigned to all Classpects.

We don’t really collect ethnical data (we don’t actually care), so I can’t say anything about castes.

However. A good strife specibus should be something you have readily avaiable in a variety and are comfortable handling. It does help if it is practical as a weapon, but some people prefer having fun with the concept over the actual usability. What is a thiny you have often in your hand, you know how to use it, and it could cause bodily injury to your opponent? Do you juggle? Clubskind? Ballkind? Confetti grenades are bombkind.

There are two types of strife specibi classification, you will have to stick to one: form and concept.

Form classification describes weapon by their physical form. Bladekind, hammerkind, bowkind, riflekind, fankind, bookkind, you get the idea.

Concept classification describes weapons by their usage, their purpose. Executionerkind, guardkind, stationerykind, lightlind et cetera.

If you find yourself preferring concept classification, your strife specibus will be more versatile as to its content, but you will be more limited in how you can use it, and vice versa. A bladekind will be excellent at cutting anything, but you’ll never get to blunt weapons. Executioner kind gives you some big swords, guillotine and even poisons, but nothing that would help you peel vegetables.

I can hardly pick a specibus for you, I am highly biased towards mine, but hopefully you will find these pointers helpful while you ponder your choice.

Also don’t overthink it. You can have up to 4 strife specibi, and while they are locked to the concept/form side, 4 is enough to cover anything you might need. Hell, most people do just fine with 2.

Gear out.

[crazy-pages]

I've been blogging a bunch about AI and copyright today, and it comes down to this:

I think that if an artist says "I would like to be compensated fairly for a big billion dollar company using my art", that's reasonable. Any legal framework where that isn't the case isn't fair. I think that's especially reasonable when the big billion dollar companies in question claim their product will end all demand for the artist's work. And fair negotiations require the right of refusal, which means artists also need the ability to reject use of their work (yes even if you think what it's used for will be important).

I think that claiming big generative machine learning companies aren't really using artist's work is silly on its face. But it could hypothetically be equated to human inspiration, where we recognise that the vast majority of the creative work is happening within the human mind as opposed to the work used for inspiration, and be given an appropriate legal carveout ... if the artificial intelligence gets the profits. If something is the creative work of an intelligent agent, that intelligent agent has the right to benefit from its work. And if we are not at the point where machine learning algorithms can be said to have that kind of agency, then it doesn't get a special carve out for the act of expressing creative agency.

Does this bring up complex and novel questions about how to address the legality of non-human agents? Absolutely! Of course it does! But anybody in the machine learning space who genuinely thinks they are creating novel creative intelligence with its own agency, who complains that the resulting legalities are complex, does not get to be taken seriously. Anyone claiming that this is a justification for it taking the money derived from its work doubly does not get to be taken seriously, and anybody arguing that the creative labor invested in creating artificial life gives them a right to the profits of its labor ... but somehow not the creatives whose work it is comprised of ... is so far from the realm of serious debate it can only be darkly funny.

If you want to claim machine learning algorithms are so intelligent they can only be legally treated as human equivalent creative processes, but you don't want to deal with the legal complexities of them as human equivalents, I'm just gonna call that slavery and be done with it.

Now I'm not a legal expert. My limited understanding of copyright law is that generally you don't get to do things with copyrighted material that the copyright owner doesn't want you to do, except where it satisfies certain exemption criteria which are in the public artistic interest or general good, and that this should apply to scraping data for machine learning training purposes. But ultimately my expertise is kind of a moot point because the European Union clearly does think this falls under copyright law and is enforceable, and that generative machine learning companies need to get permission from copyright holders. And they do get to decide what their own copyright law is.

I also don't think enforcement of this needs to be particularly draconian or should be. For example, it would be draconian to say that accidental hosting of a bit of pirated media posted to a public forum in a training data set is legal grounds to shut down a company. However I think it is very reasonable to say that companies should be subject to reasonable regulations about trying to prevent that, and that intellectual property owners like artists should get to insist companies remove their works from datasets and apply machine learning methods to minimize their impact on generative outputs (a thing machine learning companies already do to deal with poisoned or improperly tagged data).

And because this is a case of a few billion dollar companies versus the copyright protections of millions artists, I think it's reasonable to have the onus be upon machine learning companies to double check the copyrights of the material they are using and to have it be illegal with very significant penalties to knowingly use copyrighted material. Which could be determined by either the difficult legal process of demonstrating deliberate action and intent and also through simple escalating penalty frameworks where the more people who point out you're using their copyrighted material, the more the penalties escalate.

Oh hey, that's what the EU is doing! Neat.

[scruffyplayssonic]

Are the ArchieSonic comics actually an 80's/90's syndicated cartoon? Episode 58: We have to save the environment, and so do you!

Welcome back to my look at the ArchieSonic comic series, and how it shared a lot of the same story tropes as a typical ‘80s or ‘90s syndicated cartoon! Hey kids, did you know that saving the environment is a totally radical thing to do?

Episode 58: We have to save the environment, and so do you! 

Environmentalism was a big part of cartoons in the 80’s and 90’s, which often would have episodes dedicated to telling kids about the dangers of pollution or the importance of recycling. There were some cartoons whose entire premise even revolved around this, such as Captain Planet and the Planeteers, and Widget the World Watcher. 

Many ArchieSonic stories used environmentalism as a plot device, especially in the early issues. But that’s to be expected when the main villain of the series likes polluting just for the sake of polluting. Honestly, Dr. Robotnik would have fit in quite well with the Captain Planet villains. 

Let’s start by looking at issue #3’s story, “The Bomb Bugs Me!” where Sonic overheard Robotnik planning to wipe out his enemies with a bomb. The Freedom Fighters decided to set up a fake protest to keep Robotnik and his forces occupied while they stole the bomb. 

This led to a pretty funny sequence where Rotor attempted to sneak into Robotnik’s office in disguise. 

But when they got the bomb back to Knothole and attempted to disarm it, it turned out to be not what they were expecting:

Whoopsie doopsie.

Then there was issue #7’s story, “Uncle Chuck’s Treasure.” After coming across a treasure map belonging to Sonic’s Uncle Chuck, the Freedom Fighters headed out to the Natural Park to track the treasure down. Things didn’t exactly go to plan though.

To make matters worse, a pair of patrolling Swatbots overheard the Freedom Fighters were on a treasure hunt and informed Dr Robotnik, who came roaring in with a bunch of badniks to ruin the day. 

Sonic cleverly turned the toxic environment against the robots, but Robotnik managed to get away with the treasure. 

For all the good it did him. 😛

Issue #11’s story, “The Good, the Bad and the Hedgehog,” started out with Robotnik trashing the environment again, but took an unexpected turn when Sonic tried to take a shortcut to get there quicker and accidentally wound up on Anti-Mobius, encountering his evil twin for the first time. 

But of course Sonic managed to defeat him and get home in time to save the day.

Issue #12’s story switched gears a little bit with Robotnik being savvy enough to use his anti-environmentalism to lure Sonic into a trap. When Robotnik started cutting down the Great Forest with his new mobile monster chainsaw, Sonic of course raced to stop him. 

But the chainsaw secretly housed a time teleporter that was able to zap Sonic when he got close enough and send him back to dinosaur times. …and then this happened.

Bleh.

There are probably other issues from those early days that I could cite, but you get the idea. After the comics had been around a couple of years there was less focus on stories about pollution, but they still popped up every now and then. One of the most significant stories to focus on saving the environment was in issue #110. In a prior issue, Princess Sally had turned over all intelligence they had on Dr. Eggman to their allies in Station Square. Unfortunately Station Square’s defense systems were run by an AI, and after that AI had analysed all the data it had decided that Dr. Eggman was a threat that had to be taken care of immediately. Thus it decided to go full Skynet and launch nuclear missiles at Robotropolis. That was great news in that Eggman would be wiped out, but not so great news for the residents of Knothole, who would get poisoned by the nuclear radiation.

Sonic and Tails raced to Robotropolis to warn Eggman of the incoming peril so that he would shoot down the missiles before they got too close, but Eggman smugly reminded them that he didn’t need to do that - his impenetrable forcefield would keep his city safe while the surrounding environment got wasted. Luckily Sonic and Tails were able to interfere and made sure that Eggman only activated the forcefield after the missiles were already within its radius. 

Eggman and Snively were robots and so they were eventually able to download themselves into new bodies, but they had to set up a new base of operations because from this moment onwards Robotropolis was a nuclear wasteland contained within a radiation-proof bubble. 

You would think that after getting nuked that that would be the last we’d hear of Robotropolis, right? Well actually no - that radioactive wasteland actually came back as an ongoing plot point. When Sonic returned home from space in issue #130, Eggman decided to give him a homecoming present. And what does one get the hedgehog who has everything? 

Why, more nuclear missiles of course! One was aimed at Knothole, and the other at Station Square. And deciding that overkill was just enough kill, Eggman decided to throw in a bonus gift by sending his robotic armies to destroy the forcefield keeping Robotropolis’ nuclear radiation safely contained. While Sonic and Tails led a team to Old Megapolis Harbour to stop the missile launch, King Acorn’s forces, led by Antoine’s father General D’Coolette, defended Robotropolis from the incoming horde of Swatbots. 

Knuckles, Julie-Su and Mighty came to lend a hand too, and they were also joined by Rouge and the forces of GUN. But play of the day goes to Vector and Amy Rose, who single-handedly took down the first waves of invaders.

The ruins of Robotropolis wouldn’t come up again for awhile, until after the AI ADAM attempted to take over the planet with self-replicating nanites. After that plot was thwarted Nicole took control of the nanites and used them to create the city of New Mobotropolis, which was incredibly convenient when Eggman bombed Knothole and everyone needed a new place to live. 

New Mobotropolis got its energy from a power plant that siphoned radiation from the ruins of Robotropolis and converted it into safe, clean energy. So in issue #207 the Iron King attacked Robotropolis with the intention of taking away the Freedom Fighters’ power source. 

King Acorn’s armies tried to fight him off unsuccessfully, and Sonic and Monkey Khan also struggled to slow him down when they showed up to join the fight. Sonic managed to outsmart the Iron King though, talking him into sparing the shield protecting the environment if Sonic and Monkey Khan allowed him to smash the power siphon that powered New Mobotropolis. 

The forces of evil were not happy when they later found out they’d been played.

After Eggman returned to power he also tried to strike at New Mobotropolis’ power source, this time by sending in an undercover agent to strike from within: Operation: Deadly Cuddles.

I will never for the life of me be able to figure out why Evan Stanley decided to design the Tails Doll’s monster form to look like a… that, but I guess I get the genital… er, general idea of what she was going for. 😛

In the post-reboot era of the comic, one could argue that the entire series became about saving the environment. With the entire planet shattered in the Sonic Unleashed adaptation, the main goal of the heroes became to save the planet and put the pieces back together. But there are two environmentally-focused stories that immediately spring to my mind, both of them taking place from issues in issues #260 - 263: Waves of Change and Light in the Dark (and its immediate follow up, Consequences). 

Sonic, Rotor and Amy were sent on a mission to locate a possible Gaia Temple on the coast, presumably somewhere in Soumerica. What they found instead was an underwater shrine that was being used as a chao garden, under the care of the priestess Coral, along with her apprentice Pearly and friend Razor. 

Coral’s job was to care for the chao, in particular Aquarius, who helped to maintain the shield that protected the nearby city of Meropis. Coral was still somewhat new to her position and under a lot of pressure, facing prejudice from the royal family and armies of Meropis who were blaming her for everything that was going wrong and thought that Princess Udina should have gotten the job instead. One of the problems Coral was being blamed for was pollution being washed into the city that was only being kept at bay by the shield. When Aquarius the Chao failed to be reborn from her cocoon on schedule, the King and Queen threw a temper-tantrum and stripped Coral of her title as priestess. Things got pretty bad as the devastated Coral was unable to keep the shield up, letting the dark gaia monsters into the city. 

It took the intervention of the Freedom Fighters, Chaos, Tikal, and the newly reborn and now-immortal Aquarius to save the day.

Thankfully with the God of Destruction Water vouching for Coral, the King and Queen saw reason and restored her title. The cause of the pollution plaguing their city was also discovered:

While Sonic, Amy and Rotor were busy in Meropis, Sally was leading Tails, Bunnie and Antoine on a mission to recover a Chaos Emerald. Sally had managed to hack Dr. Eggman’s files, and she and Nicole discovered a mine where Eggman had his forces digging for one of the mystical gems. The plan was to disable the security sensors, get in, find the emerald, and get back out without Eggman ever knowing they were there, so that he would waste his time and resources drilling for something that wasn’t even there any more. However that plan changed when they got inside the mine and saw it for themselves. 

Deciding to do their bit to save this environmental wonder, the heroes let the security sensors detect them and fought off badniks and an E-1000 robot to escape the mine with their prize, giving Eggman no more reasons to continue drilling there. 

The Freedom Fighters knew that there would be consequences for letting Eggman know that they'd stolen something he'd already called dibs on, but they decided they could live with that.

Are there any other environmentally-focused stories in ArchieSonic that I missed? Let me know in the comments! Next week I’ll be covering episode 59: “stranded in the ocean.” Sonic’s favourite episode, clearly. :P

[allycat75]

Hey Boston Dumb Fuck 👋 ! Just another friendly reminder that your poisonous snake of a political website is in no way, shape or form deserving of the Spirit of Service award you are about to receive this week.

(Settle in, this one is long.)

Only another thing to weigh on you heavily like a bad omen.

I hear you won't be able to be there in person because your mainframe will be full, having been programmed to receite the CAA backed bullshit in the Patty Hearst Story meets Joe vs. The Volcano satire filming in Greece, apparently (the third in what I like to call the Gas Leak trilogy- along with Honey, Don't and The Materialists- because it is doubtful you have the emotional strength to remember how bad I suspect you will be in them, considering you became a CAA automoton in real life and find it difficult to summon up actual human emotions).

It is a good thing, because it would be doubtful you and your clout chaser partner Mark could pass the red face test in a room with real humanitarians and philanthropists. Let's look at the ASP accomplishments this year that bought won you this award, also given to Jeff Bezos one year (and all after your delusional "Shutter Island" style ceremonies to an arrogant racist antisemite*; big, soul crushing year for you, wasn't it buddy!):

Not long after the blissful kinda nuptials you actually had the balls to have a discussion about Antisemitism and Education. Only problem is it is really hard to take you seriously, after flashing the toxic, ill fitting Nazi-loving ring for the contractually obligated amount of times, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona must have punched you in the virtual gut when he was rightfully indignante about those who chose to normalize antisemitism. Ouch!

Then came the disgraceful boondoggle to DC to start the year off on the "right' tone, speaking with dubiously ethical journalists, claiming the "truth can be tricky" and giving vague as fuck answers about the future the site, with no data or metrics to see if that was what the market needed or required. Just some frilly language about reaching the young people (the most information savvy generation) and expanding it to even more complicated topics, like AI. Neophytes teaching neophytes, if I remember correctly, right? Sounds like a solid plan to me! Didn't you have a pretentious thing about the evils of the egoic narrative at one point? So what makes you the arbiters of such delicate information that no one asked for and probably doesn't need or want.

Also at that DC debacle, I remember you and Marky Mark taking a whole bunch of pictures at what looked like a (mostly) white sausage fest, probably because anyone worth talking to was doing the hard work of the people as democracy is on the precipice of burning down and couldn't be bothered with your little hobby (that should also tell you why you don't deserve this award).

Your next post was a discussion about gun control, that provided nothing, except to waste Jamie Raskin's time and giving a MAGA minion a platform, whose response to the recent Georgia mass shooting was likely "thoughts and prayers" as he was cashing his monthly NRA check.

Finally, we have the Q&A sessions, with the pre-planned, not at all organic, questions with the youth of America. The first was about financial planning, with three white multimillionaire males (and Mark)- 'nough said. The next on civic engagement, was a bit less tone-deaf, but just as placating, providing more pap for students that already receive white-washed information, free of anything that will make them "feel bad" (or at least some of them, anyway).

I mentioned the League of Women Voters in a previous post, but any of these sites (plus thousands more) could provide more accurate, comprehensive, relevant and consistent information than your little Highlights for Children for Poltics site:

So enjoy your participation trophy, you out of touch rich white privleged hypocrite. I hope this gives you the boost in numbers you need to "earn" the next dreadful "tell-not-show" performance you are going to bless us with. At least your mom I still stunningly proud, right?

*PS- to all the people telling you you have to stay "married" to the selfish little Nazi dumb dumb wifey a while longer because only a year will make you look like a letch since she is so young and looks like jail bait (first, let that sink in- this is your life decision in black and white, fucking idiot), how will it look when (not if) it comes out what a deplorable human being she is. Even at this point, you can't claim plausible deniability and that makes you a Nazi/racist lover for at least a year; that's bad enough and your most trusted advisors (the ones who got you into this sham, BTW) want you to suffer more. Most likely these are the same people who would throw you and the reminents of your reputation under the Hollywood Star Red Bus Tour if it suited their overall strategy. You are not a knight or a bishop in this game (please don't tell me you thought you were the King?), you are but a Pawn good sir. So if you want to live to play again, you need to get ahead of this. Call it now and spill everything. Your reputation is already in the shitter and your next four movies are most likely going to tank hard so you have nothing to lose and only your life to gain. Get ahead of the story and tell the truth before it breaks anyway and it just looks like another privleged white dude making excuses (cough* Justin Timberlake, cough* Alec Baldwin, cough* Louis CK...). Or don't- you seem to be comfortable listening to the dumbest voice in the room and picking the absolute worst choice for yourself. So, good luck with that, dumb fuck!

[blazehedgehog]

Given they’re soft rebooting again… what’s your Jurassic world 4/jurassic park 7/ Jurassic animals and also Triassic and Cretaceous animals make life difficult: the movie pitch? I feel like, as fun as the sequels can be, they’ve lost the science parable and horror/thriller elements of the classic - for all its faults; at least lost world has that.

Hmm... I'm gonna think like a movie executive. What's hot right now? AI's hot, right? It's the buzz. I propose a hard reboot.

Crichton's original novel opens with this big screed about a near future where we have "designer genetics." Genetic manipulation gets easier and easier and I think it's said Jurassic Park takes place in a world where it's getting to the point that parents can custom-order what kind of kids they'll have by selecting specific genetic traits. (It's been a while since I've read it)

Jurassic Park the movie shows human beings physically modifying genetic code by hand using VR displays, but Mr. DNA also admits that "a full DNA sequence contains 3 billion genetic codes." So it's ridiculous to assume that a human being could edit the genetic code by hand. One sequence would take years to get right, maybe even a lifetime.

So our story is that we have some 20 something silicon valley tech bro. He got outrageously rich off of crypto and NFTs and was smart enough to cash out early. We frame him as altruistic but around the edges we can see maybe he's not the greatest person. It's suggested he knew crypto was kind of a scam, which is why he got out early, but obviously he was in crypto at all to begin with, which does not bode well. But he's supposedly "one of the smart ones." Now he's rich! And cool! And using his powers for "good." He's beloved in pop culture.

The next wave is here. Neural network LLM Artificial Intelligence. He's all in. It's the next crypto. And he starts a company that uses LLM AI to "solve the genetic algorithm." He spins this out into a financial empire where people can custom-order pets with specific traits. But obviously people with a lot of money start wondering if maybe they can get more... exotic products.

With the realm of cats, dogs and parrots conquered, our techbro begins phase 2: recreating extinct animals. This is a guy who thinks he's going to save the world by restoring lost links in the food chain (without doing enough research to see how that would change our existing ecosystem, since he could be resurrecting an invasive species).

He's going to debut the first of his phase 2 work at an event he's calling Jurassic Park, because he's going to demonstrate the first living dinosaurs in 65 million years. Jurassic Park will continue to operate as a massive nature reserve; a symbol of his control of life itself.

Obviously: everything goes wrong. The AI has never had to change this much genetic code before. It has to make up whole entire sections of DNA. The end result is unpredictable, but techbro is confident that if the AI sequenced things well enough that something could actually hatch from the egg, then it's safe.

It is not safe.

Not only do we not understand anything about dinosaur behavior, these technically aren't even dinosaurs. They're genetic mutants. The on-site dinosaur expert brought in with the press to verify Jurassic Park's claims quickly realizes that while some of these dinosaurs are accurate in some ways, a lot of them have hard deviations away from known science. Muscles that aren't quite right, appendages that aren't the right size, things like that. Maybe their brains and brain chemistry are slightly different.

The question remains whether known science was wrong or whether the AI made something up that was never true.

The question is brought up again when we learn a technician within Jurassic Park sabotaged everything intending to steal the genetic learning data from techbro's servers. Techbro says the thief poisoned the data and that's gotta be why there's mutations.

The security systems fail. The thief has left them to their creations. Jurassic Park as we know it happens.

Since a lot of movies have to deal with this, all throughout this, nobody has phones. To prevent leaks, all of their phones were confiscated before they entered Jurassic Park and locked in a security checkpoint. Our techbro, maybe as a sign of solidarity, even gives his phone to the security guy. We could even say maybe they've been having security issues beforehand, to set up the thief hacking everything before he actually does it.

Anyway, since our thief sabotaged the park's own communication channels, a lot of the movie is about getting back to that security checkpoint, breaking in, and getting their phones so they can call for help.

Oh, and also: all of Jurassic Park's vehicles are electric, too, and tied into the security mainframe. Since the park's whole security system was hacked and disabled, none of the vehicles can be operated. The only thing that works are these little golf carts, but they're small, can't go very fast, and offer little protection. Maybe our survivors try one, it gets smashed by a triceratops, and they're too far away from the depot to go back for a new one. So a lot of the movie is them traversing the park on foot.

As they're being chased by dinosaurs through the park itself, they end up deep in the core of a genetics lab. And it's here we learn the dark truth: there is a wide margin of failure. The recently deceased specimens are all kept for study and learning and there's a lot because the AI fails often, and it has to be taught not to do that. We see dozens of disfigured animals. Bits and pieces of dinosaurs, pets, and even, in one tank... human parts. These tanks are labeled "phase 3."

Not only are the mutated dinosaurs not the work of sabotage, this guy's been trying to create genetically modified people. We have our big "what have you done?" moment of horror. One of the last surviving members of the press is going to blow the whistle on this place. It's over. Maybe it's someone we build up as the techbro's new friend discovering that their hero wasn't who he said he was.

Just then, a dinosaur bursts in and kills that person. Drama! Tragedy!

Obviously, the survivors find a way out. Techbro has to live with his own conscious. Multiple people died at his hands on this day and he had a hand in creating some of the worst sins against nature mankind has ever seen.

(Or maybe we stick to the original Jurassic Park book and he dies just before getting on the escape chopper.)

[irishhorse-blog]

One last post about JK and this whole stalker situation.

I’m hearing people say that it’s his own fault this is happening because (a) he does lives from his apartment and (b) he’s famous, so he had it coming. 

Bullshit.

First of all, we don’t do victim blame in this household. 

Second, yes, he breaks the company’s rules when he does unsupervised lives in unsupervised places. He’s rebellious that way, and perhaps a little immature, but - he’s 25. He’s been under the company’s control and constant observation since he was 13. Maybe he’s a little sick of doing things the way other people want him to, and he wants to be under his own recognizance as much as any other young man does. He has that right. Would I prefer it if he didn’t get shitfaced on live? Of course, but that’s his business, not mine. The fact remains that at no point in any of his live streams did he invite fans to come over, ask them to send him gifts, or reveal anything about his address. Some of that can be found in public records, which sort of sucks, but he hasn’t shown anything on his lives that would reveal that sort of data. He hasn’t even really exposed the layout of his apartment. We’ve been in his living room and his kitchen. We sort of know where the bathroom and laundry room are, but that’s it. That’s not enough to say he’s rolling out a stinking red carpet for obsessed fans.

Third, fame is not a license to be dehumanized, stalked, hunted and harassed. I don’t care what your job is - nobody deserves to be treated like this. Celebrities are all still human beings at the end of the day, and they deserve to be accorded with basic levels of respect, compassion and dignity. This is abuse, and nobody - NOBODY - ever asks to be abused.

Also, I’ve seen people saying that he should have accepted the food and eaten it, since turning it away was rude. How soon we forget. There have been attempts made on other idols’ lives (Yunho in 2006 comes to mind) that have involved poison and other toxic/noxious substances hidden in food and drink. He was wise, not rude, to pitch or refuse the food delivery. If someone is capable of going the extra mile to find his personal address and invade his privacy by inserting themselves into his life through a delivery, then they’d be capable of almost anything else. People are crazy. They do things that make no sense, and they do things to harm people they say they love. You can’t govern or litigate crazy. All you can do is avoid it... unless you have help.

And here’s where I think Big Hit needs to come in. Until the responsible person or persons are identified, found, and stopped, they need to put JK up in a different place or give him round-the-clock guards. They need to find out who sent that delivery and then take steps to get the authorities involved. Stalking is illegal in SK, as it should be everywhere. Maybe they need to give that little section of the penal code a bit of an airing.

Lastly, there’s one place JK could go where the sasaengs can’t follow: the military. And I’m not ready to see him enlist just yet. 

[kp777]

By Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams

Jan. 9, 2024

"I won't allow for them to continue to poison my kids," one Gulf Coast environmental justice advocate said.

Climate advocates and frontline community leaders published a letter Tuesday urging concerned individuals to join them in Washington, D.C., in early February for a sit-in at the Department of Energy where they will demand that it end the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports.

Stopping the LNG buildout has emerged as a major priority for the climate movement in recent months, as just one proposed project, Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) facility, would emit 20 times more climate pollution than the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. But CP2 is only one of more than 20 LNG export facilities planned for the Gulf Coast, which would have combined emissions that exceed those of the European Union or 850 coal plants, Stop LNG said in a statement.

"If [President Joe Biden] wants to be a true climate president, his administration will stop the approval of new LNG facilities. If not we'll keep pushing until they do," letter signatory and Gulf Coast environmental justice organizer Roishetta Ozane wrote on social media. "I won't allow for them to continue to poison my kids."

The action is planned for February 6-8 at the Department of Energy. "We're writing to ask you to do something hard but important: Come to Washington D.C. in the middle of this winter, to join a demonstration and, if you can, risk arrest in a large-scale civil disobedience action," the letter—which was signed by several prominent activists including Alexandria Villaseñor, Bill McKibben, Jane Fonda, Rebecca Solnit, and Varshini Prakash—begins.

The planned direct action builds on months of pressure on the administration to stop the planned expansion of LNG exports, including a petition to the DOE signed by more than 300,000 people and a letter to Biden signed by more than 170 scientists. Polling from Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media found that 60% of likely voters would support the Biden administration limiting LNG exports.

"We need the DOE to tell the president the truth: Expanding LNG damages our climate, and economy, and the communities forced to live alongside these facilities."

"It's time to convince the Department of Energy to stop licensing new export terminals for liquefied natural gas," Tuesday's letter reads. "Time after time they've approved these proposals, so the U.S. is now the biggest exporter of gas on Earth—and that volume could quadruple if the industry has its way. There's no bigger climate bomb left on planet Earth."

There are signs the administration is paying attention to the growing clamor and may be open to a change in policy. On Monday, Politico reported that the DOE was reviewing its decision-making process for approval LNG projects to make sure that it was considering the climate, economic, and security impacts.

"This would be smart policy and good politics," Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media posted in response to the news.

The letter states that organizers "need the administration to stop CP2—the next big facility up for approval—and all other facilities by committing to a serious pause to rework the criteria for public interest designation, incorporating the latest science and economics, before any such facility is permitted," the letter reads.

"We need the DOE to tell the president the truth: Expanding LNG damages our climate, and economy, and the communities forced to live alongside these facilities," it continues. "That includes the land, water, and air in Louisiana and Texas, where most of these facilities are built—it's why some of us have fought on the front lines for years. We've rushed kids with asthma attacks to the hospital, seen our fishing spots and beaches polluted with chemicals, and breathe air filled with poisons everyday. We know what's at stake."

The letter writers said that they had committed "to keep this action peaceful in word, mood, and action." Those who cannot travel to D.C. may participate in solidarity actions from their home. Those who do plan to participate should sign up on stoplng.org. They will need to complete online training, including one session the night before risking arrest.

"2023 saw the hottest weather on this planet in at least 125,000 years; we think it is an honor to rise in defense of the planet we love, and the places where we live," the letter concludes. "Thank you for considering joining in."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja

Edition: Jul/Aug 2023

SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

* * *

We’re all familiar with the culture wars that pit progressive Leftists against centrists and those on the Right. In the past, those skirmishes dealt with politics and sociocultural issues and in academia were restricted largely to the humanities. But—apart from the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies and our perennial battles against creationism—we biologists always thought that our field would avoid such struggles. After all, scientific truth would surely be immune to attack or distortion by political ideology, and most of us were too busy working in the lab to engage in partisan squabbles.

We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths. Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.

In biology, these changes have been a disaster. By diluting our ability to investigate what we find intriguing or important, withholding research support, controlling the political tone of manuscripts, and demonizing research areas and researchers themselves, ideologues have cut off whole lines of inquiry. This will decrease human wellbeing, for, as all scientists understand—and as the connection between heat-resistant bacteria and PCR tests demonstrates—we never know what benefits can come from research driven by pure curiosity. But nourishing curiosity has a value all its own. After all, it doesn’t make us healthier or wealthier to study black holes or the Big Bang, but it certainly enriches our lives to know about such things. Thus, the erosion of academic freedom in science by progressive ideology hurts us both intellectually and materially.

Although biology has clashed with ideology at other times and places (e.g., the Soviet Lysenko affair, creationism, and the anti-vax movement), the present situation is worse, for it affects all scientific fields. What’s equally unfortunate is that scientists themselves—helped along by university administrators—have become complicit in their own muzzling.

Here we give six examples of how our own field—evolutionary and organismal biology—has been impeded or misrepresented by ideology. Each example involves a misstatement spread by ideologues, followed by a brief explanation of why each statement is wrong. Finally, we give what we see as the ideology behind each misstatement and then assess its damage to scientific research, teaching, and the popular understanding of science. Our ultimate concern is biology research—the discovery of new facts—but research isn’t free from social influence; it goes hand in hand with teaching and the public acceptance of biological facts. If certain areas of research are stigmatized by the media, for example, public understanding will suffer, and there will follow a loss of interest in teaching as well as in research in these areas. By cutting off or impeding interest in biology, the misrepresentation or stigmatization by the media ultimately deprives us of opportunities to understand the world.

We concentrate on our own field of evolutionary biology because it’s what we feel most compelled to defend, but we add that related ideological conflicts are common in sciences such as chemistry, physics, math, and even computer science. In these other areas, however, the clashes involve less denial of scientific facts and more effort toward purifying language, devaluing traditional measures of merit, changing the demographics of scientists, drastically altering how science is taught, and “decolonizing” science.

Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.

All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.

We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.

“Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.

[ Continued... ]

[merakiui]

May we see the songs on your Azul simp playlist? Pretty please 🙏

Yes, of course! The playlist consists of songs that I think fit Azul's overall character/vibe, so I hope it can be an enjoyable list.

✧ poor unfortunate souls - lollia

✧ onion boy - isaac dunbar

✧ i know - cut capers

✧ xs - rina sawayama

✧ sibyl - wotaku

✧ mafia - wotaku

✧ your love (déjà vu) - glass animals

✧ life itself - glass animals

✧ space ghost coast to coast - glass animals

✧ money - ayla d'lyla

✧ life could be sweet - ayla d'lyla & miss madeline

✧ doin' time - lana del rey

✧ bang! - ajr

✧ boy in the bubble - alec benjamin

✧ mr. saxobeat - alexandra stan

✧ devil i know - allie x

✧ casanova - allie x

✧ simon says - allie x

✧ old habits die hard - allie x

✧ bitch - allie x

✧ sad girlz luv money - amaarae & kali uchis

✧ trouble - annella

✧ 7 rings - ariana grande

✧ grrrls - aviva

✧ casino - azari

✧ shadow shadow - azari

✧ beatdown - baby boys

✧ enemy fire - bea miller

✧ find an island - benee

✧ snail - benee

✧ supalonely - benee

✧ dangerous - big data

✧ chateau - blackbear

✧ make daddy proud - blackbear

✧ be around - blooom

✧ own me - bülow

✧ black madonna - cage the elephant

✧ social cues - cage the elephant

✧ i like it - cardi b, bad bunny, & j balvin

✧ she wants me dead - cazzette & aronchupa

✧ picky - chanmina

✧ why do you love me - charlotte lawrence

✧ ohmami - chase atlantic

✧ swim - chase atlantic

✧ tidal wave - chase atlantic

✧ paint it, black - ciara

✧ solo - clean bandit

✧ r.i.p. gossip sea - cosmo

✧ heart afire - defqwop

✧ casino royale - derivakat

✧ lost in paradise - dj-jo remix

✧ koala - grady

✧ bocca della verità - hiiragi kirai

✧ autophagy - hiiragi kirai

✧ love ka? - hiiragi kirai

✧ razzmatazz - i don't know how but they found me

✧ hat trick - jonathan thulin

✧ king - kanaria

✧ poison berry - kuraiinu

✧ maybe, i'm afraid - lovelytheband

✧ waste - lovelytheband

✧ loneliness for love - lovelytheband

✧ genius - lsd

✧ sex money feelings die - lykke li

✧ hip - mamamoo

✧ oh no! - marina

✧ cry baby - melanie martinez

✧ copy cat - melanie martinez

✧ shut up - mia rodriguez

✧ feeling good - michael bublé

✧ come dance with me - michael bublé

✧ loser - neoni

✧ i~ya i~ya i~ya - neru

✧ yesman - nilfruits

✧ traffic jam - nilfruits

✧ club = majesty - nyanyannya

✧ emperor's new clothes - panic! at the disco

✧ money - poppy

✧ friends - raye

✧ mr. heartache - sekai no owari

✧ soul 4 sale - simon curtis

✧ villain - stella jang

✧ jack pot sad girl - syudou

✧ midnight parade - taisei miyakawa

✧ kirai kirai jigahidai! - takeaki wada

✧ trash and trash! - takeaki wada

✧ junky night town orchestra - 3

✧ the motto - tiësto & ava max

✧ stress fish - tophamhat-kyo

✧ mister jewel box - tophamhat-kyo

✧ kruel kreator - tophamhat-kyo

✧ everything black - unlike pluto

✧ revenge, and a little more - unlike pluto

✧ clown - updog

✧ people i don't like - upsahl

✧ phony - tsumiki

✧ lead your partner - tao tsuchiya

✧ money, money, money - abba

✧ oroka na orca - uratanuki

✧ wolf in sheep's clothing - set it off

✧ the dream granter - vane lily

✧ phantom swing - rigël theatre

✧ breathe (brklyn remix) - mako

✧ mirror - wakakun

✧ big balling - lil hero

✧ sea castle - purity ring

✧ kirari - fujii kaze

✧ shinunoga e-wa - fujii kaze

✧ mood - dpr ian

✧ so beautiful - dpr ian

✧ mr. insanity - dpr ian

✧ nerves - dpr ian

✧ no blueberries - dpr ian

✧ yumekui shirokuro baku - nem (the trio cover + the mv = perfection)

[epyros-sacel-vanid]

The two sides of the scrapping data for AI situation in Tumblr

Ok so, I've been seeing and noticing that apparently people have been having two archetypes of reactions to the news about tumblr selling their data to an AI company yaddah yaddah, you've seen it around so I don't have to explain what that is about, or at least I hope so xD

The two types of responses I've been seeing can be divided into what I call "The artist response" and "The gremlin response", although sometimes there are a mix of the two and I find those hilarious. The artist response is usually often remarked by worry, normally they come from artist and it can be because of the decrease of safe places to post art or about art theft, which all in all it's perfectly logical and normal to worry about such things. They often discuss other sites that could be used or ways to prevent the theft and so on, but the sharing characteristic among those is always that they try to solve a problem they are worried about.

But then we have the gremlins response and I am so sorry artists but this is the one I love, because they tend to go like: "Yeah, this whole thing sucks, but if they think they can use tumblr like that, they are in for a surprise, tons of chaos and all of their computers burning as they try to process the madness of this site. Anyway, here are ten ways to make it worse for them". And I absolutely love that. I may have been a bit disconnected from tumblr this past year and I may only have joined in 2016, but something everyone should agree is that this lovely foolish hellsite of ours has aways been poison to those who tried to profit from it, because the raw unhinged chaos that the users create in here is enough to make cry a big number of influencers if they ever were to try to become a big thing in here.

Stay chaotic and toxic my friends, and let's slay another corporation for the laughs and the memes

[ultimatedaywriter]

Gravedigger's Mania

Emily was about to commit a great sin, but it was the lesser one that she worried about. Her hands shook as she listened to the low clacking of a cane on cobblestones. No one knew her quarry was here; the dhampir liked to move quietly. It kept the assassins away. That was good; she could ill afford witnesses or black knights asking questions. Emily was about to commit a great sin and a lesser one.

 

She held up a picture blurred from the glare of a low lamplight. That was the problem with being a vampire; even the lowest light cast a horrible glare. Her brother was the only one she made out in the picture.

 

It was ok; she barely remembered her parents anymore. At 8, she was turned, and she only aged half the speed each year until she turned 16. That was her problem; she looked so young compared to her aging brother. He might have been 30, but she didn’t like to count. It was embarrassing, 30 years old, and classless. Vincent didn’t use a spell like false data to fool spies like she did. Her brother’s attributes were so low he couldn’t see much of her stats.

 

The clacking was growing closer. Resneck shouldn’t be here. They both knew he was responsible for her brother’s team of gravediggers. Something always went wrong, and it was up to a powerful Dhampir like Reseneck to handle it. Every day sleds of corpses were taken to be buried to purify the graveyard with negative energy. It was the only way her brother could make enough money to keep her alive.

 

Or that was what he thought. The fool thought Emily was helpless. By the time Emily was 15 in the new life, she had already fed off another turned. It was a practice considered forbidden.

 

The door to the room opened, and Resneck entered all smiles. The fool always appeared confident with his rapier at his hip and crossbow at his side. Of course, no one would fight a lvl50 dhampir. A vampire especially wouldn’t challenge them under the sun.

 

At Emily’s meager lvl20, she was no match for Resneck, especially under the sunlight. He was confident enough to come to her home on the poor side of town without bodyguards. Normally a dhampir of the family would have an endless entourage. Still, lately, Resnick had taken to radical claims about the godless theocracy. He had a view on humans that the true vampires didn’t like. But, as one of the voting powers of the republic, the Camazotz couldn’t afford to look weak. So they took their protections away. Someone would have pounced. Emily was only the first.

 

She poured him a cup of tea as the dhampir took his wide-brimmed hat off and placed it on a dusty wooden wrack.

 

“It has been some time since we met. I believe 20 years, by my guess.” Resneck said.

 

Emily sucked on her teeth. She should have expected an insult from the start. Her brother was her greatest pride and shame. It would be better if they parted ways, but the fool was too devoted for his own good. She didn’t need his help. He couldn’t see it. Vincent, the lvl0 classless gravedigger, was the talk of many as his sister; her status was lower than dirt.

 

“We are forever grateful for your magnanimity. Offering a boy of 10 a dangerous job like a gravedigger was quite daring. Some would say you did it more for amusement than charity.”

 

“It's hardly charity. Vincent does good work and hasn’t died in 20 years. If only the boy didn’t have such sticky fingers. Has he saved up enough to give you a hunting tag?”

 

Emily watched the man sip his tea and smirked on the inside. The poison was already taking effect. The purple petals lightly fell from a flower on the table half fallen. It really was amazing how gullible Resnick had been.

 

“Are you expecting something to happen? I noticed you haven’t touched your tea.” Resneck said.

 

Emily smiled and tapped her foot.

 

“How much do you think your original amulet sold for? My big brother has such sticky fingers.”

 

She plucked a violet petal from the rose in the center of the room. Resneck tried to stand but failed to move. His body shook as he tried to hoist himself up on the cane. Emily kicked it, snapping the stick the dhampir had once beaten her brother with until he couldn’t stand. The offending instrument collapsed with the man, never to harm anyone again.

 

“Do you smell that pollen? It's called Nina, after a long-dead princess of the night. It weakens the powers of those unused to its effects. Much like a vampire in the day, you are quite powerless. Fortunately, I developed an immunity to the pollen. It took nearly a decade to become immune.”

 

She approached the beautiful man with dark curls framing his face. Emily grabbed a great handful of Resneck’s luscious hair and yanked him up. She felt her fangs extend and bit the man’s neck. This was the sin Emily had longed to commit, an act of treason that would set her free. At last, she fed from a member of the Camazotz and gained power.

 

A large family like the Camazotz eventually isolated itself and let its prominent members wilt on the vine. It was glorious and terrible. She drank until the dhampir’s heart pittered out and stopped. The body didn’t turn to ash or something silly like that. No, it remained a very dead heavy body, but fortunately, as a vampire, her strength was immense. She took it to a preprepared room filled with rats.

 

She had taken her time and considered what she wanted to use to dispose of the body. Rats were the best she could come up with. So Emily tossed the body to the rats and watched them swarm the fresh meat.

 

The camazotz's blood empowered her more than ever, and she basked in the feeling of superiority. Then reality set in. She used the spell glamour and false data to transform her status page into a copy of Resneck Camazotz. For a decade, she had invited him to tea and studied the man. Every insult had been worth it; the man hadn’t suspected she would bypass his defenses. The idea of a weak turned like her below level 10 managing to harm him was laughable.

 

She unveiled her second sin from under the blanket on her bed. In her bed was a girl who looked like her, altered with a glamour and drained dry by Resnik’s fangs. This was the minor sin she had dreaded. To have a clean break and give both herself and her brother a chance to move on, she had to die for him. He would hate her and bang his fists on the ground, but at the end of the day, Vincent would move on and find happiness.