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John Oliver gets it, as usual. AI Slop is one of the best episodes of Last Week Tonight I've seen so far. Gen AI is theft. Those who use it are not authors or artists, they're grifters profiting from real creatives.

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liam making omen be a con volunteer as part of her redemption arc program is actually genius because it teaches one the humanizing, humbling and frankly infuriating position of a customer service job without the absolutely brain-blowing responsibility of serving boomers. like her “clients” would just be dorks and nerds and yeah that includes the occasional leonard, but there is no monetary transactions she’s responsible for. it is just volunteering. that’s a give and a take since she doesn’t earn anything physical from her work, but she does have free access to liam’s wallet anyway so that doesn’t really matter in the end. but anyway liam struck the jackpot of giving her a customer service job with some mercy and i feel like even in that little gesture that rarely gets mentioned in-game, it shows a good deal of characterization for him. he knows the fastest way to become a decent person is to work a customer service job, but has the kindness not to subject her to fuckin mcdonalds

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US defaultism is insane yesterday l said on a discord server “it’s winter but I’m not cold. whyyy...” and they responded “dude it’s summer. it’s july” and then proceeded to DOUBLE DOWN when I explained that they were thinking of the wrong hemisphere

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It seems he just has a take on a particular issue, not a full support of a political party or candidate:

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Without getting caught US politics if I can, I'm used to there being more than two parties. In the unlikely case people want to know what Australian party I vote as number 1:

They are like- never going to win, still going to vote for them though.

I want to get a new email. I've been trying a few, but I somehow managed to break Thunderbird by sending a nightcore as an attachment... I just hate Google more and more, but websites won't let me use a Proton alias. Anyways, anyone good any good suggestions? I pay in AUD and don't want to spend more than $50 a year on an email.

I know my posting has been all over the place, but how do people feel about it? Because if people are interested in degoogleing, I can share what I've been doing.

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Intrigued by the people who say they're into history but cannot stand the thought of hearing about the thoughts, feelings and opinions of people whose values were shaped by a completely fundamentally different environment, and immediately become offended and outraged by the idea that someone whose world was completely different would have a different worldview without being ontologically irredeemable and evil in every way.

Looking up different times, thinking "there better not be any fucking 'it was a different time' in here."

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"you don't owe anyone anything" You are a tar pit. Speak for yourself. I personally owe the cafe employees my dishes put away and my friends a listening ear and small scared insects a cup and a gentle trip outside. Hyperindividualism is a rancid infection borne of capitalism and willfully misinterpreted therapyspeak and I will defy it by continuing to be kind regardless of whether or not it benefits me personally

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this is frying me so bad

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WHY DO PEOPLE THINK YOU LOOK LIKE SAM REICH WHATEVER THE HELL HIS NAME IS YOU TWO LOOK NOTHING ALIKE. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VIBES. (also you two's facial features aren't that similar you both are white guys with completely different styles)

It's very frustrating, but I am learning that a lot of people abstract "suit" to mean "jacket + shirt & tie + pants" and don't see any other differences.

These two looks are effectively identical to a lot of people. Even though the personas these outfits evoke are very different:

All of the other visual language of these garments has been compressed to the point of being rendered meaningless. (Thanks to the folks who have admitted in followups that they truly could not distinguish between these outfits, much less know their physical and cultural functions are for a modern gameshow host style vs a vintage country gentleman.).

It's also why people think I am dressed "Victorian" (or even older) here. They see the "suit" (I am wearing low rise jeans and a casual button up, mostly J. Crew stuff) and the color brown, as those are quickly becoming the only meaningful indicators of "Victorian".

So, these fits are likewise identical to a lot of people (the third is less because of the look of the outfit and more that people are bad at assigning century to fashion. But some will insist I am 18th century nonetheless):

Same thing with beards. A full beard on a man is a full beard, brain shut off. People cannot articulate how the beard changes face shape and I wonder if they can even *see* the differences (For example, Reich has a very bottom-heavy triangle shape with his beard and I have a more diamond shape).

The uptick in this phenomenon makes me wonder if it's fallout from the sheer amount of content people consume, and the speed at which they do so -- instead of broadening their palette, everything get flattened into an increasingly narrow slot.

Capitalism ruthlessly mines aesthetics to sell products, instead of caring about how design communicates culture and other meaning. Context, form, and function are becoming increasingly detatched. Non-verbal and non-written communication is rapidly becoming forgotten, while even the spoken and written word degrade.

And AI, of course, continues to make this all worse. We're losing a lot of cultural language very, very quickly as fashion, music, *everything* is treated as interchangeable and exploitable.

I do not expect people to be able to define what makes *my* aesthetic my own, but I am getting increasingly frustrated at how detatched folks are getting from culture - to understand that art and even the look of functional objects have *meaning* - to the point where people don't even realize how detached they have become.

And what really sticks in my craw is the absolute, arrogant confidence at which some people say all of this stuff is the same, and that any differences are superficial/meaningless and that I should bow to their ignorant, content-rich blandness.

I am at a loss at how to combat this at scale, as an individual. Other than shunning AI and the tech bro mindset, I can only encourage people to be curious about what they consume. And to think critically about what their own tastes mean to them -- being able to articulate what you like and do not like about something (a fashion trend, song, painting, whatever) and be able to learn more about it and its influences.

And above all, create your own art, examine it in the same deliberate way. And if it's art you like just because it "looks cool", I desperately urge you to unpack that, to ask yourself what "cool" even means to you -- does it actually resonate with you, or is it some commercial shorthand you have been spoonfed?

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male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

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I went to IKEA to get some shelves and a bedside table, given I have a bedframe and can't keep putting stuff on the floor. Being an adult is so strange. Income comes in, and I panic like- what now? I just want to save it, but I do like having a functional room. I just need to sell a few things, and I'll be set.

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the thing about caring about ableism and fighting for disability rights, is that you can't center it about just your disabilities. i'm not d/Deaf. i still care whether an event has sign interpreters. i don't have photosensitive epilepsy. i still think that strobing lights are 99% of the time totally unnecessary and serve as a needless barrier to photosensitive people. i can transfer to a toilet mostly independently. i still think that public accessible bathrooms should have lifts and adult changing tables in them. you can't stop your disability activism where it stops benefitting you. that's not activism. that's selfishness

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Technology transparent PNGs

free 2 use

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Here's a very cool umamusume fact that I found on [The site that shall not be named]

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