blue-mer-studios reblogged
Now come the days of the King! May they be blessed.
@lotr20 day seven: HAPPY 20TH ANNIVERSARY, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING! December 17, 2003
blue-mer-studios reblogged
make your brand look low quality in one easy step
something interesting about willy wonka experience scam is that some were tricked by ai art. goofballs loved to say ai 'art' will make EVERYONE professional artists but when you see an add with ai art your brain already thinks 'this is a fake company'. it already signals 'cheap'
what scoundrel techgoofs never seem to understand is that most successful art that buds like is not entirely about technique it is about taste, and you cannot fake taste. the ai art my look 'technically' proficient, but it also evokes 'scam' 'cheap' and 'things i block on twitter'
art is usually about EVOKING something, and skill of HOW to evoke these feelings is predicated on empathy, which these goofs often lack. will be interesting to see companies realize how much selling out human artists cheapens their brand on a VISCERAL level, where the true marketing lies
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.
(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)
Everyone reblog! Spread the word so more and more artists learn that in addition to Glaze that coats art against ai scraping mimicry there's also an offensive tool now, able to skew and poison data pools.
Now poisoning will need many artists to nightshade their art and it's most important to get this ou to those the most at risk of being scraped. Reblog!
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Male Scifi and Fantasy writers: Look at this !Strong! female character! She can fight and solve puzzles, and ends up with the sidekick not the hero! Isn’t she a great character?
Everyone: No, she’s one-dimensional and still only exists to please the hero’s ego
Male scifi and fantasy writers: You’re never happy! This is how characters are written! Besides, it’s much harder for us to write women because we are men!
Terry Pratchett: *creates a female character who is literally the embodyment of a dog, sets her up to be the love interest of Protagonist Hero Man.* *writes her as clever, emotionally tortured, lonely and powerful* *uses her to explore difficulties of bisexuality and masculine dominated workforces*
Terry Pratchett: *Creates a pair of old witches, one of whom is a virgin and the other who has slept with lots of men.* *makes them best friends, never dismisses one lifestyle of the other, explains lifestyle choices based on characters history and personality, uses this to develop each character as the books progress*
Terry Pratchett: *Writes Sybil Rankin* *makes the powerful rich lady heavy set but beautiful, never plays her by her looks, develops her as she ages, acknowledges the way society views such people and then spits on their attitudes* *does it again with Agnes*
Terry Pratchett: *Writes a book about an entire army secretly being women, creates complex female relationships, introduces same sex relationships completely naturally*
Terry Pratchett: *takes old joke about female dwarves and uses it to explore gender identity without making it seem forced or unnatural, carefully discusses some of the issues and complextities whilst still making funny and witty observasions and maintaining genuine fantasy tropes*
Terry Pratchett: *DOES THIS ALL OVER AND OVER AGAIN, DEVELOPING CHARACTERS AS HIS VEIW OF THE WORLD DEVELOPS AND CAREFULLY APOLOGIZES FOR EARLY MISTAKES*
Excellent note by @spiderleggedhorse
Terry’s writer superpower was always Thinking Things Through. All the way through.
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Ecosocialist praxis
I support you poison Ivy
Reblog if you support Poison Ivy
That’s my girl.
Important context:
So. Yeah, Neil Gaiman.
It’s true.
blue-mer-studios reblogged
I feel like something that doesnt get talked about enough is how fast fashion is coming to hobbies as well. Sure, you can sew, knit, and crochet something better than youd buy in store, but good luck finding quality materials
Want a fabric that doesnt fray from being gently caressed? Want yarn thats not 100% plastic and splits if you touch it wrong? Good luck finding that if you dont have a genuinely good crafts store near you.
Go on any thread where people are trying to figure out where to buy fabric. 50% of it is people saying big stores are servicable, online stores work, or the like, and the other 50% are talking about how bad the quality is or how the quality of a website dropped because it was bought out
Were running into a problem where fast fashiob is so integrated into society that even the ability to make your own, comfortable and long lasting, clothes is being threatened by capitalism
Oh yes this
Also it begs the question: if your fabric, trimmings, beads, trinkets, yarns are all made in the same factories as fast fashion, can we really talk about it being "handmade" and "sustainable"?
I went to the Craft market, where people sell their own craftwork, and there were some beautiful earrings, but I could tell they bought the parts on aliexpress, such as wires, beads, pendants, then put them together into a product. Is this custom work?
No shade on anyone, just an observation and food for thought
I Have Thoughts about all of this, but these two posters summed them up.
there are fabric thrift stores that you can get your materials from that are often older materials of better quality at much lower prices. Here are some online ones off the top of my head:
one vendor told the Craft Industry Alliance that earlier this year, Amazon told vendors to upload their fabric on Amazon.com in one, three, and five-yard increments, despite the fact that wholesale fabric is sold by the bolt, which can contain as much as 100 yards each
blue-mer-studios reblogged
you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this
lots of people are reblogging this and tagging it #piracy—i should clarify, this is not piracy! ripping DVDs and CDs to have your own copy is fully legal, because it’s your legal right to do what you will with your property individually. it only becomes illegal if you then distribute that file on the internet.
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Do you have any recommendations on what to do when you can’t write?
I’ve been struggling to write for years, but telling stories is all I want to do. I have ideas and plots and characters all figured out! But actually getting the words onto paper? I just can’t do it. There’s a mental block or something getting in the way.
I want to write, I so badly do. I want to tell my stories! But no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I love the story, the words never work properly. I can day dream scenes up perfectly, but as soon as I’m near paper the words all vanish.
I guess what I’m actually asking is: how did you defeat the blank page?
Well, first of all, I can confidently tell you that your storytelling per se is working just fine. You just told me a perfectly cogent story right there, in writing. So that's good to know.
Now let me put your mind a little at rest by telling you something reassuring about the Writer's Brain:
It's not the sharpest knife in the block, if you take my meaning. It can be tricked. It can be fooled. It can be bamboozled into working when it doesn't want to... sometimes with embarrassing ease. (And this approach is, by and large, far preferable to sitting around over-analyzing one's interior life to figure out what went wrong with your developmental process somewhere in the dim lost past. Just hornswoggle the silly thing into working and then do the analysis later, if you can be bothered.)
Sometimes just changing something basic in the process the Writer's Brain is expecting is enough to make it lose the plot (so to speak...) and let you get on with work. And in your case I'd say, more or less immediately: Have you tried telling the story to yourself out loud, recording it, and then transcribing the recording?
Because this problem is a commonplace among storytellers. Sit them down in the pub and give them tea or a drink and start them going, and you'll get half an effortless hour of hilarious prose about What The Cat Did In The Middle Of The Night or When The Neighbors Were Fighting In The Street Again Yesterday. But show them blank paper, or an empty screen, and (now that the pressure to perform is suddenly in place) they freeze.
So try doing an end run around your writing brain. Borrow or otherwise procure a little recorder of some kind. (Or if you've got a smartphone, add a voice recording app to it.) Go get comfortable somewhere and get yourself into that daydream state, and then—making sure the recorder's on—start talking.
It doesn't have to be perfect unblemished prose. The pursuit of that comes later, after draft zero-minus-one. Just tell the story... or some of it. Or a fragment of it. Even a few paragraphs is a triumph, in a situation like this. You may, during the recording, have to talk yourself into the story stage by starting out talking about something else first. Let that happen.
Then when you're done recording, listen to it and transcribe it (typed or handwritten, as you please).
And maybe a day later, do this again. And a day or two later, once more. And so forth.
You're going to have to keep at this, because your Writer's Brain may start suspecting what you're up to, and try throwing spanners into the works. (Its favorite being "Oh, this isn't working, I may as well give up..." Pay no attention to that nagging little voice behind the curtain. Just keep doing what you're doing. Persistence is a superpower.)
The thing to keep reminding yourself, as you settle into this process, is that sooner or later the WB's resistance is going to flag, because you really do want to tell stories. It does too. What you have to teach it is that—to coin a phrase—resistance is useless. :)
Anyway: give this a try. You'll need to be doing this daily for at least a couple of months to find out whether it works or not. So let me know how it goes.
(BTW: once you've broken through the barrier, you may well find that dictation is a good routine way for you to generate your first draft. At that point—should you feel inclined to go a little higher-tech than recording and hand transcription—let me recommend Dragon Anywhere. This is a month-to-month subscription version of Dragon's flagship text to speech program—the one @petermorwood and I got Terry Pratchett to use when he started having difficulty typing. I use Anywhere a lot, on days when it's easier to write stretched out or lying down than it is sitting up. It transcribes what you say, and then you can just email it to yourself and cut-and-paste it into your writing document. Very handy.)
Hope this helps!
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Most oddly named town in each US state.
i love small towns in America.
trans-ami-green
like to slap his bald head reblog to slap his bald head
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Jennifer Connelly as Sarah Williams in Labyrinth (1986)
★★★★☆
“Sarah is an imaginative teenager who wishes for the goblins from her favourite story to take away her baby brother Toby. When her inadvertent wish comes true, she must solve an enormous otherworldly labyrinth in thirteen hours and rescue Toby from the castle of Jareth, the Goblin King.”
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Reblog if you or someone you know is ace… I’m trying to see something
blue-mer-studios reblogged
Your exhaustion is not shameful. It is not a moral failure to be physically, mentally or emotionally tired. It is okay to be overwhelmed. You're not inferior to anyone just because it's hard for you to keep up with a fast-paced life.
blue-mer-studios reblogged
In the early 70s Sesame Street was created with an eye towards educating poor, inner-city children for free, and became a massive hit with all children. In 2016, faced with going off the air forever after facing conservative efforts to destroy public broadcasting since basically its beginning, new episodes became a timed exclusive for premium cable network HBO. In 2022 HBO Max, newly merged with and taken over by reality TV channel Discovery, removed Sesame Street episodes and spin-offs from streaming as a tax write-off and scheme to avoid paying residuals.
Sesame Street's official YouTube channel is uploading the episodes for free, btw. A lot of creators are rebelling against this bullshit.
As always, America, PBS has you and your kids' backs.
I also want to put in a plug for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, spearheaded by GBH in Boston to preserve and make available public funded programming from around the country. More than 7000 public television and radio programs are available to stream through the website, with more than 40000 hours of programming archived and available to researchers and educators through the Library of Congress and GBH itself.
blue-mer-studios reblogged
“I know Michael Sheen is a hundred percent sure that Aziraphale falls in love with Crowley, and that moment occurs when the bomb drops on the church.” (Douglas Mackinnon)