A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.

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To The Person In The Newspaper - Jordan Bolton

Setara Halloween Hafla 2023

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You'll be happy to know that it is real Assuit. It is heavy as fuck but it was gorgeous in motion.

HOLY SHIT -- THAT'S AMAZING 🤩 I've never seen Assuit done on black fabric! Do you know if she used antique textiles, or is someone making it today?

me, unwinding a green bean vine from where it grabbed onto a tomato cage: look I know that you THINK you've found support, but all you've found is a temporary stop-gap that's is going to fail and ultimately shape you in ways I can't help you recover from. Let go and please climb the pole next to you instead.

Waiting for the day this happens to me.

This is still my favorite comic to date.

Every time I see this it makes me happy

Reblog if you are not a clever man

A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one

Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.

“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”

At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.

Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.

One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”

Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”

She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”

You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.

DELETE THIS POST

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

*clicks play in morbid curiosity*

*hammers reblog button*

I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do

Rejection sensitive dysphoria is wild. Someone will be like “hey just so you know the thing you did was a little bit loud/uncomfortable/insensitive but it’s ok I know you didn’t mean it” and my brain will instantly translate “you should be shot”

The fun other side of this too is when you are afraid of making other people feel that way so you just let shit go 90% of the time even when it’s reasonable and valid to make a comment/critique/etc

I need everyone to see this ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE

I love how Arakawa clearly wrote detailed backstories for her characters and just like… never elaborates on them. I found an old interview where she was asked why she didn’t include a resolution for Hawkeye and Mustangs goals and her response was essentially “cause this story is about Ed :)”

She’s my biggest inspiration.

Grave women, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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/

Opal and glass gold-mounted pendant by René Lalique, c. 1900.

Unique design!