therobotmonster

[therobotmonster]

"Because I said so" straight up isn't as good an answer as you think it is.

[therobotmonster]

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

[therobotmonster]

The Email I sent my state representative

Represenative Povenzano,

Before we begin, I'd like to first complement Connie on her excellent response on the telephone. I have spoken with people from Lankford, Mullin and Hern's teams today, and while Senator Mullin's was polite, only Connie was understanding, eager to help, and ready to go above the minimum. As our congresspersons and governor lack the courage to provide an email address for the public, I ask you forward this to their offices.

I have lived my entire life in the state of Oklahoma, my grandmother came here on a covered wagon. Like a lot of Oklahomans, and Americans, I'm struggling. I should, most likely, be considered disabled, but rather than go on disability I work from home, self employed, with a few assists from the state and federal government to go along. One of those is SNAP, which is more essential than ever with skyrocketing prices.

I was not sent any renewal notices or alerts. As such, I had to call in to OKDHS to get renewed. I was on the phone for a total of three hours before I was able to speak to anyone. Once I was able to, the young woman I spoke to was kind, helpful, considerate and effective. The entire process was complete in minutes. This tells me that they are woefully understaffed for the call volume they are receiving.

Now, for someone like me, I can spend the time listening to hold music for three hours. But what about my best friend's widow (he was killed by a lack of adequate medical care in 2020) who works a normal day job and gets a thirty minute lunch? What about the single mom that works the register of the Dollar General across the street? Or the other poor, hard working people that live in my apartment complex, where our rents just keep going up despite the conditions just getting worse?

Oklahomans rely on these programs, and these cutbacks are killing us.

And it can't be good for the people working those jobs either. These are devoted civil servants who do a generally thankless job day in, day out, dealing with stressed, often angry people, and they've been nothing but helpful every time I've dealt with them. They deserve pay appropriate to the difficulty of their job and enough staffing to deal with the needs of the populace and keep stress levels low.

They're the best part of the government, people there to help other people and make the system keep working, like the garbage men, the DMV workers, the teachers. But the funding only seems to go to the parts of the government that enforce and kill, rather than those that help and protect.

The program that made Cox not gouge me and provide internet (required for my work) at $20 a month was wiped out. My rent has gone up $100 dollars in the last year. The power bills have spiked. Everything is more expensive, and all of it for what? ICE and tax breaks for the rich? I have to fear getting thrown out of my apartment and put on the street every month so Elon Musk can become the world's first trillionaire and the white house can have a tacky ballroom?

Real people are dealing with real problems here. We need help, not speeches and insincere nods to religion.

We're Americans and Oklahomans. We're supposed to look out for our neighbors and do the right thing despite the risk, not let fear and indifference rule us because that path is easy.

[therobotmonster]

Thank you to everyone who helped.

Barely got the rent dealt with thanks to a lot of help from folks, now I find out my food assistance got cancelled without a renewal notice going out, and if it's fixable that's gonna take weeks.

GFD.

Things have been tough...

For most people, and I’m one of those. My rent has gone up, my alternator in the car has died (I can’t even focus on that yet, sigh), and this has been on a chain of setbacks and illnesses both with myself and my family. Energy and food prices… it all piles up.

On top of this, my depression (and covid fog probably) has been extra rough, keeping my freelance work slow.

Anyhow, I could use help and any is appreciated. I need $300 to make rent by the 5th and basic expenses beyond that. 

My Ongoing Gofundme

My paypal.me

My DrivehtruRPG shore. (d20 and royalty-free fantasy and sci-fi stock art)

Thank you. I am sorry to ask. 

[therobotmonster]

I wonder if the powdered micellar casein they sell for weightlifters would work.

Slime to plastic?

I have a lot of slime. It comes from being into the Zuru & Treasure X toy oeuvre. I can't stand touching the stuff due to sensory issues, but I also don't like the idea of throwing away a bunch of goo that might be useful somehow.

So I've got jars upon jars of brightly colored ooze like some 1980s cartoon mad scientist.

And like one of those mad scientists, while digging through my stuff I stumbled across an experiment I thought failed, only to find something unexpected:

I had taken a blob of slime, mixed in baking soda as it's a slime thickener, and wound up with a ball of baking soda-covered slime that didn't seem very thick at all, and I just threw it aside and forgot about it in the experiment shelf.

Now it's plastic.

Through a combination of the extra baking soda and time, it's become a tough, rubbery material. Water doesn't seem to melt it immediately but it does de-shine the surface a bit. And it holds detail very nicely. Still stinks a bit though.

The smaller chunk I cut off one the side I then sliced in half and re-glued with clear (red-clear, it's what I had) PVA glue. While you can see the break, the weld is basically perfect because the glue is the same material.

Problem is, I have no idea how much baking soda I used, or how long it's been sitting in the project closet, so I don't have a yardstick for how long it takes the slime to dry into this kind of stuff.

Current plan is to experiment with various combinations of baking soda, borax and slime until I've got something tutorial-worthy.

If anybody has suggestions/knowhow in this regard, I'm open.

[therobotmonster]

There’s being queer/lgbt+ and there’s not being that and then there’s a grey area in between the two and I’m still inviting those people to the party tbh

[therobotmonster]

Slime to plastic?

I have a lot of slime. It comes from being into the Zuru & Treasure X toy oeuvre. I can't stand touching the stuff due to sensory issues, but I also don't like the idea of throwing away a bunch of goo that might be useful somehow.

So I've got jars upon jars of brightly colored ooze like some 1980s cartoon mad scientist.

And like one of those mad scientists, while digging through my stuff I stumbled across an experiment I thought failed, only to find something unexpected:

I had taken a blob of slime, mixed in baking soda as it's a slime thickener, and wound up with a ball of baking soda-covered slime that didn't seem very thick at all, and I just threw it aside and forgot about it in the experiment shelf.

Now it's plastic.

Through a combination of the extra baking soda and time, it's become a tough, rubbery material. Water doesn't seem to melt it immediately but it does de-shine the surface a bit. And it holds detail very nicely. Still stinks a bit though.

The smaller chunk I cut off one the side I then sliced in half and re-glued with clear (red-clear, it's what I had) PVA glue. While you can see the break, the weld is basically perfect because the glue is the same material.

Problem is, I have no idea how much baking soda I used, or how long it's been sitting in the project closet, so I don't have a yardstick for how long it takes the slime to dry into this kind of stuff.

Current plan is to experiment with various combinations of baking soda, borax and slime until I've got something tutorial-worthy.

If anybody has suggestions/knowhow in this regard, I'm open.

[therobotmonster]

You need both.

ok i think what gets me about the kind of post that's like '[children's media] has child soldiers, where are their parents!!' is that those stories really and truly aren't for people who'll think about that, they're for the people the children's age, who don't, for the most part, want to be kept safe or told they're too young to participate in the world, they want to be given a sword

[therobotmonster]

Beyond having misinformed and credulous people in their ranks, there is no serious similarity to AI moral panic and anything like GG or SP beyond them being very vocal in their prefered mediums, especially since the anti-AI crowd (IP maximalists not withstanding, since you also omitted them in this instance) is almost entirely a left-wing movement, while those other moral panics you mentioned were entirely conservative reactionary movements. Even comparing anti-AI people to Satanic Panic peddlers and GamerGaters feels borderline slanderous (and this coming from someone who isn't at all happy with their lack of nuance and half-baked ideology), especially in an era where those very same people who peddled in those two moral have essentially won this decade politically. If they really were just like each other, why haven't right-wing grifters latched onto anti-AI sentiment like how they co-opted free speech activism in the 2010s? If anything, neoreactionaries are far more likely to be extreme pro-AI than progressives, though this is admittedly more the vault of the shifting dominance of factions in the culture wars than anything to do with the underlying technology or even the industry (again, in spite of how Libertarian and reactionary Silicon Valley is)

I hate these moral panics too, even the ones led be well-meaning but Dumb Liberals, but at the same time, it'd be better if for once in this century, the winning side of the culture war wasn't the one backed by the right-wing bourgeoisie.

I think you might need to re-read the comparison. They were moral panics, and they've got grifters. Wherever you have people up in arms about something, there are people there to push it.

I didn't say they were just like each other. I said they produced a similar secondary economy of hate-slop youtubers and other scammers. Anyone can grift, riding and stoking the audience's outrage to produce clicks and views.

But they had other similarities too: the same willingness to lie, bend truth or just not do research in order to get a story, there's the 'the enemy is both strong and weak' aspect with is absolutely an anti-AI panic thing, there's the brigading, harassment & threats, the conflation of lone tweets by nobodies with the will of an entire group, and, most importantly, the fact that it's a money and power grab being disguised as astroturf independent of the grift-economy that goes along side it.

"It's different because its left wing" doesn't really fly. It's a moral panic, it's built on lies, and lies require liars. There's nothing left wing about anti-AI sentiment at its principles. It's reactionary and fear based and it's goals align with major media corporations.

And the grifting in the Anti-AI side isn't a hypothetical. Glaze and Nightshade's study data has resisted replication and they do not appear to work in any verifiable way beyond the lowering of the image quality. Artshield claimed to stop scraping, but it was literally just using stable diffusion to burn a SD watermark into the image so some bots would skip it, while ensuring that any system designed to detect stable diffusion watermarks would report the image as being AI.

It isn't a coincidence that if the anti-AI crowd got what they were screaming for, Disney, Nintendo, Discovery, and the rest would have access to the tech while no one who competes with them does. All their talking points just happen to mirror the ones from the Copyright Alliance and the ones that RJ Palmer spreads? Could be a coincidence, more likely the astroturf is real.

And as the right hasn't co-opted the anti-AI position for the same reason they did co-opt the free speech position: they were just reacting to the pick the strawman liberal had already taken.

And some elements of the right, like the Catholic Church, have been critical of AI, for the same reactionary 'soulless' complaints I've seen from supposed lefties.

I'd suggest going to my AI art blog @Deepdreamnights ' AI discourse tag., linked here for ease There's a lot of context to all this.

[therobotmonster]

I need to close $200 in the next four hours (it is presently 8:00 central), literally any help is welcome.

Things have been tough...

For most people, and I’m one of those. My rent has gone up, my alternator in the car has died (I can’t even focus on that yet, sigh), and this has been on a chain of setbacks and illnesses both with myself and my family. Energy and food prices… it all piles up.

On top of this, my depression (and covid fog probably) has been extra rough, keeping my freelance work slow.

Anyhow, I could use help and any is appreciated. I need $300 to make rent by the 5th and basic expenses beyond that. 

My Ongoing Gofundme

My paypal.me

My DrivehtruRPG shore. (d20 and royalty-free fantasy and sci-fi stock art)

Thank you. I am sorry to ask. 

[therobotmonster]

See, this guy gets it.

[therobotmonster]

I have 8 hours. Tiny amounts add up. Anything helps.

Things have been tough...

For most people, and I’m one of those. My rent has gone up, my alternator in the car has died (I can’t even focus on that yet, sigh), and this has been on a chain of setbacks and illnesses both with myself and my family. Energy and food prices… it all piles up.

On top of this, my depression (and covid fog probably) has been extra rough, keeping my freelance work slow.

Anyhow, I could use help and any is appreciated. I need $300 to make rent by the 5th and basic expenses beyond that. 

My Ongoing Gofundme

My paypal.me

My DrivehtruRPG shore. (d20 and royalty-free fantasy and sci-fi stock art)

Thank you. I am sorry to ask. 

[therobotmonster]

you can tell things are bad when this type of article is coming back...

[therobotmonster]

I know the cult that I was raised in made the mistake, at least with me, of being VERY into 'the whole bible' and actually reading scripture.

Our kid's bible books were also illustrated by Basil "Fucking "Creator of Lena Hyena and Mad Magazine Staple of the Grotesque" Wolverton, so that didn't help.

Between the omnicide (the flood), the multiple genocides (Sodam, Gamorrah, etc) and the plagues of Egypt I was frightened out of my mind, which was of course the idea. Somewhere around the war-crime dowry of god's favoritest boy, David, that shifted from terror to terror plus:

That conversation didn't go well for me, but TLDR, the answer was 'yes.'

So I totally get where 4F (FFFF? Fury?, don't know what to call ya.) is coming from. I distinctly remember feeling hope for the first time in years when I saw Ghostbusters, because the idea of technology being able to beat spirits was a game changer.

The next Saturday, while I was sitting in a hard middle school auditorium chair listening to a sermon instead of watching cartoons like my friends, the only image in my head was this:

I mean, there's a reason all the JRPGs end like that.

OH SNAP THIS IS GONNA BE EPIC :D

[therobotmonster]

As someone once defaced:

L’avant-garde se rend pas.

this guy posted this video called “unethical money making hacks” and was like “i’m selling bullshit art!” and he was buying prints from kmart and covering them in joint compound and making interesting shapes in the joint compound and then selling it as “textured wall art” like sorry bro that’s just regular art you made art i know it feels like bullshit but you’re actually just making art rn

[therobotmonster]

You'll note that the immediate reaction of the DARE program to the studies showing it was to try and quash and suppress the truth.

Boy howdy does that seem familiar.

This is, of course, because the people running the DARE program were there to get paid more than they actually believed in their goal. They only moved on to other methods when it was undeniable and the choice was shift gears or find new jobs.

A lot more people in the Anti-AI side are getting paid than we know, and I'm not even talking about guys like Palmer. Moral panics bring out the grifter in everyone who needs attention to thrive. The Satanic Panic was big business for christian grifters, gamergate was huge for grifters, and the anti-AI moral panic isn't any different.

And while I'm here, the DARE effect isn't just hitting people using AI in "productive" ways. Seeing stuff that's AI assisted that's enjoyable, cool, or resonant has the same effect. A whole lot of "AI, ew, slop!" types in the Analogue Horror community seem to have turned around after Angel Engine hit 'em.*

That's just gonna keep happening.

Things like the Film Theorists deliver a hostage-video-message mid video to mollify the anti-AI types is also going to keep happening, but it will fade out over time.

oh right now that it's past midnight and i can post pictures again i can crosspost this from bluesky, which i will do now to start another wave of Discourse

[therobotmonster]

Brave Saga (Takara - GBC - 2001)