Hey this is really really fucked up. Can we talk about this because holy shit

“People are training artificial intelligence on Indigenous art without the artists’ permission to create inauthentic works, which are selling online on platforms run by companies such as Adobe and eBay.

Indigenous artists in Australia say their work is being stolen and turned into another threat to their livelihoods and cultures while they are already struggling to compete with the tens of millions of dollars worth of fake art produced every year by non-Indigenous artists.”

that weird adhd grey area where your brain is understimulated in some areas and overstimulated in others. i open tumblr for distractions. but i scroll past almost everything bc i’m too stressed to process Reading and Comprehension. i’m in hell.

Hey guys! Just felt like making a comic talking about being bigender/ clearing up some misconceptions. Hope it helps!

Bigender ask blog- @talking-bigender

More detailed bigen masterpost I based this comic on-> link

More information on the bigender flag controversy-> link

man i’m gonna say it that tv head thing that early-teens tumblr had going on was great and i want it back

this shit. this shit ruled. start doing this again

yooo-

I think you guys deserve a continuation

THIS is the bear cave painting i was talking about, the line weight, the proportions, the fine details around the face, and the fact that this all had to be drawn from memory, idk man, it’s incredible to me. if i could meet one person from history it’d be the person that painted this bear 30,000 years ago

Do you think they practiced first? Like, on smaller chunks of rock that weren't part of the cave proper? Or did they really just freedraw this bear? I'm fucking dying to know.

system of a clown. you ever think of that

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

TIL astronaut Jack Schmidt discovered he was allergic to moon dust, which is a thing millions of other people have probably gone their whole lives never knowing.

Imagine being one of only twelve guys ever to have the honour of walking on the moon and then when you get there you're allergic to it.

NASA scientist: you’re back early

Jack Schmidt: moon’s an allergen

NASA scientist: ...what?

Jack Schmidt, loading an epipen and climbing back into the shuttle: moon’s an allergen

if one in twelve humans who have been on the moon was allergic to moon dust, that’s either a one-in-a-million chance or a VERY common allergy

The fact that it’s such a statistically useless sample is DEFINITELY driving a handful of very specialized scientists absolutely crazy

oh this one i know! he's not actually allergic and he's not a statistical outlier. all twelve astronauts reported symptoms after stepping on the moon because lunar soil is fucking nasty to human (and presumably most complex life) biology. moon dust is like inhaling asbestos. it's very fine, chemically reactive, and will hang around in your lungs for months, like a shitty inhaled cloud of glass. which, as it's mostly silicon, it kind of is. glass powder that is ripping up your airways and possibly your dna. see again: like asbestos

A comic about the spectrum of responses to stress - we talk alot about the more extreme ends of this and trauma, but the more subtle and every day responses can be harder to spot. if we can understand our own and other’s responses better, problems Are easier to confront and blaming is less likely to happen :) hope it’s helpful!!

I feel like the conversation around "cancel culture" is inherently disingenuous because half the people in it are defining cancel culture as "experiencing consequences for shitty actions" and the other half are defining it as "online spaces dogpiling people for vague hearsay of a vaguely problematic thing they may or may not have actually done fifteen years ago, and may have been entirely made up by people who have personal beef with them." One is good. One is very bad. But they both get referred to by the same term, and that's...an issue.

Like, if I hear somebody complaining about "cancel culture," what do they mean? Did they say something racist and get called out for it, or are they being smeared and called an abuser by a bunch of te/rfs because they participate in BDSM, and nobody bothered to fact check it before hurling around really serious accusations?

When you're angry at the characters, the story is well-written. When you're angry at the writers, it is not.

the presumption here is that audiences can tell the difference.

presuming they’re not children, the audience can usually tell. ex: when a character does something you don’t like - but it feels like something the character would do - you get mad at the character. when a character does something you don’t like - and the history of that character makes it unbelievable that the character would do that thing - you get mad at the writers.

^^^^^^^^^^^THIS

Listen. Do it for the aesthetic. If you want to fill an entire 20 dollar sketchbook with anatomy drawings fucling do it. If you wanna get lost in the woods and come stumbling home with a bag of dried mushrooms and bones you go goblin dude. You aren't alive to go to work and hurt!! You're alive because bumblebees bump into little flowers and dandelions only open up in the sun! You're alive because cats purr when you pet them and coffee keeps you up all night!! Do everything for the aesthetic!!

This is the only valid guy

Profanitee

A manatee that swears at random times