yknow AI art has ruined an entire genre of painting to me, i saw one of those smooth anime-realism pieces and immidiately thought ''ugh, AI art'' until i noticed it was posted by an established deviantart user 6 years ago. like ive never been a huge fan of that genre but it looks like a pretty difficult style to master and i feel bad for the artists who specialized in anime-realism only to have their entire market jacked by people typing keywords into midjourney.

I have something to add to this. every single time I look up reference pictures, I get shitty ai generated bullshit. I've actually reached the point where I discovered that pasting this into google gives you a solid filter for 99% of the ai art. typing in -"word" will filter out all results with that word. I might end up making another one to filter out costumes and all that shit for better historical results when looking at outfits for my characters from various time periods.

if you don't put a space before it, it won't work so keep that in mind. if there are any I might have missed that are still coming up in your results, put them in tags. and I'll add them to the original post. if you see this and you end up using it, please reblog so more people, especially artists and charecter designers, are able to find it. Google is becoming rapidly unstable due to the influx of ai art, and it makes me incredibly sad, first of all, that my work as an artist is becoming rabidly obsolete. This is not worth it. Ai art is not worth it.

Here is the anti ai filter, note that this only works for image searches and only serves as a filter for art. due to the amount of ai writing concealed in media, I have no real way to create a filter for that. I hope this helps the art homies who are sick of this shit, and the people who just want to look at human art for a change:

-”starryAI” -”Krea” -”freepik” -”lexica” -”Midjourney” -”hayo” -”storybird.ai” -"Craiyon" -"ai art generator" -"prompt hunt" -"Opendream's ai" -"nightcafe creator" -"arthub.ai" -"open art" -"playground ai" -"PixAi.art" -"Creative fabrica" -”ai” -”Tensor.art” -”Images.Ai”

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

“THAT’S RIGHT TWAS I that set the house ablaze!!!”

Dying.

Every fucking time I know what’s at the bottom and every time I still lose my shit.

I’m so happy this post is back again asdlkfjsa

HAPPY TEN YEARS TO “TWAS I THAT SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE”

$122,000. And the thing is so shodily designed that the accelerator can become that easily stuck. It isn't even all one piece.

$122,000. That's more than my entire household income, and we're 3 adults with full-time jobs.

If you gave that $122,000 to Feeding America, that would provide over 1 million meals.

That's $122,000 more than Tesla paid in taxes.

In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

Hey its been at least 9 years anything changed?

nope! all quiet on the linguistic front. i am a girl now though

Outer Wilds and Signs of the Sojourner illustrations for an article by MerGrazzini on LOOP#03

New alt art for Netrunner! A fermenter. A virus program that if you're patient you can squeeze it out

People... watch out for these things!

The saying applies with more than usual force here: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer: you're the product being sold. (And maybe you're the product being sold even if you are paying for it.)

DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL PHYSICAL DATA AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO COULD THEN SELL IT TO THOSE INVESTED IN USING IT TO SURVEIL YOU AND POTENTIALLY CHARGE YOU WITH CRIMES.

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

I use LibreOffice. It's wonderful.

johnny english really destroyed all movie logic

the funniest part is that he’s not even running

Mr Bean as a Persistence Predator

pretty…

Zoozve, my beloved

"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."

This is my favorite line.

I have learned so many things from this.

@dduane - one for you!

It's a fabulous thing, isn't it! :)

As usual, science is busy being not only weirder and more interesting than we imagine, but weirder and more interesting than we can imagine.

ETA for those who missed it: you don't need to sign any petitions to bring about a happy ending. It's been sorted.) :)

trad and tenid

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick

i immediately thought of this

Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.

Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?

Me: I am going to eat you

lololol "does too"

does it? not for women after childbirth

does it? not if you want to see an effect size of greater than 1 kilo (2.2lbs)

does it? not if you'd like to see a maintained loss greater than 3.3% of your body weight

does it? not for people with type 2 diabetes

does it? not for people exercising for their non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Interactive computer-based reminders to diet and exercise are useless.

I mean, I literally went to Cochrane Reviews, one of the best-respected sources for massive meta-analyses, and I just input the keywords "weight loss" and "exercise," and I'm tooling through the results. Every one of the damn things shows that we do not have high-quality research indicating that exercise leads to weight loss. So no. I'm right, and you need to adjust your worldview--ask yourself, if not for weight loss, then why? Re-read those sources: exercise improved muscle density, insulin sensitivity, and cholesterol. It's good for your blood vessels, it's good for your strength, it's good for your brain.

But it won't make you thin. Maybe two pounds, maybe five, but that's about it. If you're looking at short-term, like a year, sure, you can lose weight--but the effort will almost always result in your body going "oh shit, we're living in a famine" and you will regain it, and now, with your body at a new set-point, losing it will be harder. Regaining will be easier. Welcome to the life-destroying yo-yo.

#then what the fuck are we supposed to do?

Exercise and eat lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains because those things will keep you healthier longer, regardless of how much you weigh, and pick up your pick-axe in the ongoing horribly slow and frustrating fight of chipping away at the idea that being fat is a bad thing that means you’re a bad person. I recommend the book Fat Talk for a good place to start.

Lotta people going “the authors say different things about their data than you do!” Yep. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Means the authors have an axe to grind and they’re ignoring the implications of their own data. Back when I worked as, you know, a coordinator for an Institutional Review Board for an R-1 institution, checking that was my job. So you need to be able to look at data and understand things like confidence intervals and effect sizes. It’s not enough to let researchers tell you what their data mean; they may have lots of reasons to come to conclusions their data don’t actually support.

This is, by the way, one of the most frustrating parts of experimental psychology, which was my background before medicine. People like to believe that they would change their mind based on evidence, but in practice, once you make someone pick a position, they’ll defend it long past the point at which it would make sense to switch. This is why it’s important to repeat and repeat and repeat things: I didn’t believe that exercise doesn’t cause weight loss the first, oh, probably half a dozen times I heard it. I had to get to a point where I was in medical school watching a professor talk about all the data on weight loss and slowly feel it dawn on me that he was saying one thing when he was explaining the data, and then saying THE EXACT OPPOSITE THING when he was drawing conclusions. It was so clear to me that what he had just said was “there is no widely scalable weight loss program that works” and then he said “but we should still be encouraging patients to exercise and eat less to lose weight” as if those weren’t DIRECTLY CONFLICTING.

Also the sheer number of people who respond to this with “but if you literally starve yourself you can lose weight!” Yeah, and die. Is that the goal? No? No, it is not. And you can’t just starve yourself part way to death and then stop, and call that sustainable weight loss. You will have done permanent damage. And the weight will come back. Starvation is never the answer.

Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.

For your consideration: cornfields

Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields. 

Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods. 

I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.

Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.

Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.

TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.

Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.

However.

Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.

“monocultures attract people-eating monsters” is not the take I expected to see today but I’m glad I saw it

The anthropological analysis and discussion on folklore is spot on. 10/10

Corn lore

being so fr when I say that transmisogyny has put feminism back like 50 years

what i thought we had distanced ourselves from was the reduction of women to vaginas and wombs and the ability to bear children. i thought we had progressed past ‘dresses are for women and pants are for men.’ i thought we progressed past the idea that someone is less of a woman if she does not adhere strictly to beauty standards. i thought we progressed past the idea that naturally being comfortable adhering to highly feminine standards is vulgar. but i (sarcastically) guess no one could have predicted that trans-exclusive feminism would be the downfall of all the progress we’ve made

— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.