it's almost almost christmas

this is a confession to the star wars fandom because I have to get this off my chest. last summer just for fun I taught myself to read aurebesh and. you fanartists have Got to Continue putting the most Hilarious stuff into the background of your art because it is literally my favorite thing

here’s a couple of excellent things I’ve read since I started keeping a list just last month:

- “I hate drawing lightsabers”

- “Idk what to put here”

- “stupid fucking sign”

- “eat paste, it’s good”

- an entire news article on a phone screen which I actually found really impressive

- a few funny misspellings but the best one so far was ahsoka somehow becoming “asock”

- wanted poster of obi wan that read “wanted for fashion crimes”. the caption translated it as “wanted for high treason”. like blatantly lying to my face. love it.

- door on a ship was labeled “cake storage”

- “shopping list: frogs, hair gel, lightsaber polish”

and my personal favorite:

- “if you’re reading this you’re a fucking nerd”

BARBIE (2023) + CAST INTERVIEWS

want more of whatever’s going on with maomao and jinshi

Sometimes a monarchy is just a gay guy and his emotional support mean lesbians

a couple years ago, they made a little beach in my suburb of montreal.

it goes from the photographer to that bunch of trees. yep, no more.

it's ridiculous to anyone who's ever seen the sea, but. well.

our winters go from october to april. so at the first rays of sunshine...

we are starved, okay

it’s ridiculous

to anyone who’s ever

seen the sea, but. well.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

just saw a chart with the gender options "male" "female" and "part-time/other" and i think i get what they were going for but i'm obsessed with the concept of part-time gender. clocking into my shift at the gender factory and brother i am not getting paid a living wage

If you want to escape Florida, I have a proposal for you!

Or really if you just don’t want to be wherever you currently are in the US…

Hi there! I’m Benji, and even tho I don’t post here much anymore, I still want to do what I can to help my LGBTQ+ family who are concerned for their safety in this messed up world we’re currently trying to survive in.

So here is what I’m proposing: come work at Girl Scout camp in Washington state with me this summer! Here is why:

A little bit about me and my experience:

I’m agender transmasc and use they/them pronouns. I’ve been a Girl Scout since I was in first grade and have worked at Girl Scout camps since 2005. I moved to Washington to work at Camp Robbinswold in 2014. I was the assistant director there for 3 summers and was actually working there when I began my own transition! I took a few years off, and returned last summer to Camp River Ranch as the assistant director again. I’m reprising the role yet again this summer, though our staff is splitting the summer between Camp River Ranch and Camp St. Albans, so I am excited to add another GSWW camp to my resume!

Girl Scouts of Western Washington has been leading the nation and setting the standard for all Girl Scout councils in regards to justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion. In 2015, a donor requested their $100.000 donation for camper scholarships back because GSWW insisted on including trans girls in their membership numbers. The #forEVERYgirl campaign was launched to re-earn those funds and did so three times over. Not only does GSWW accept trans girls as members and campers, but allows nonbinary and transmasculine youth to join! Not only do we accept them, but Camp Robbinswold will be running its second LGBTQ+ camp this summer!

Anyway, feel free to message me if you have any questions, or go ahead and check out the link for details, available positions, and to apply!

Happy Camping!

-Benji “Link” Mitroi

Okay, I've got one I'm curious about:

Add in the tags if you feel like your favorite Pokemon is unpopular/an uncommon favorite.

My favorite is Ninjask, and I've only had a couple other people say it's also their favorite.

BASIC BITCH SPOTTED.

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “do not stand at my grave and weep” after the poem by mary elizabeth frye. the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

Glaze is out!

Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?

Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.

Art thieves already hate it:

Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.

The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222

As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:

The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)

It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).

Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).

It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.

The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).

It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)

It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)

IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).

Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)

The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)

When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.

Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)

The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles

From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)

You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

whats that story about this dude that really wanted to have sex with a clown and get a pie to the face while climaxing

I heard every time he bounced on it, it squeaked.

wait i found the story actually [link 1] [link 2]

Check out my ongoing comic Crow Time. It has crows, and also neat pantheons of epic beasties.

OK NEW POLL