#Internet of Things examples

[aroaceleovaldez]

underappreciated Nico detail that I like - he seems to be an angry crier! very frequently he's angry when he cries and he cries when he's extremely angry. very AuDHD of him. emotional regulation sucks my guy and he's just going through it.

[egophiliac]

I was wanting to try doing an art piece in the style of the signature spell poster art pieces you create. But I’m not really the best at coming up with a composition for such a thing.

Do you have a process for how you come up with the compositions for them?

oh, awesome! it is an INCREDIBLY enjoyable style to work in; I hope you have fun with it! :D

I'm not great at putting my thought/art process into words, so my apologies if this doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'll try! my first step is always to do a LOT of thumbnails to figure out both the idea and how I want to show it; not trying to do a real sketch or anything, just little doodles to figure out what exactly I'm trying to portray. (I also call these "garbage passes" because they're not meant to be any good, they're just there to throw things out. aha. ha. ...anyway.) I think it's important during that first stage to really focus on the idea and the layout and not to get too bogged down in the actual drawing yet!

I tend to save my final thumbnails, so I'll use 'em as examples (I posted the ones up through episode 5 here if you're interested!) (and, uhhh, spoilers through episode 5 also in this post, hopefully that won't be an issue!)

the main thing I try to think about in composition is balance -- not necessarily in terms of symmetry, but in where each element is placed and how much space it's taking up. remember, empty space is still space! it's also really important to think about the parts that don't have anything in them, as much as the parts that do!

personally, I like to divide things up roughly by both halves and by thirds -- there's a lot more in-depth info out there on why the "rule of thirds" in particular works well visually, but in short, our brains tend to focus on things that are placed closer to imaginary division lines, instead of in the exact center of an image. so even when I'm doing something that is very centered and symmetrical, I try to keep that in mind and generally aim around those for landmarks like faces/eyes (or...where they would be, anyway) and other focal points.

it's not a formula of "the character's face should be in this division of this grid" or anything, more like "our minds like to focus on these areas, let's think about how to use that", if that makes sense! and of course rules are made to be broken, art is lawless anarchy, and so on. but it can be a good starting place for deciding where you want to put things!

(blue - thirds, red - half)

and against the finished versions, because they do usually end up changing a lot (including the empty space of the border):

(...these actually lined up a lot better than I thought they would. :') it makes me look like I do things way more intentionally than I do.)

other stuff I just try to keep in mind is that our eyes like following arcs and paths, which can be a good way to guide the eye:

and frame and control the focus:

honestly, composition is one of those things I feel like I struggle with a lot, so I'm not sure how much of this is helpful or actually makes sense outside of my head. but hopefully it helps a little! it's all just stuff to think about while drawing and not anything hard-and-fast, so don't, like, stress out about making sure things are lining up exactly on the thirds or anything. again, it's more "our brains think these are the dopest parts of the rectangle" than anything else! take advantage of the cool parts of the rectangle!

NOW GO HAVE FUN DRAWING seriously though, it is always super cool that other people like this idea and style enough to want to do it themselves and for other/their own characters! thank you! ❤️❤️❤️

[foolishlyzephyrus]

i find it absolutely fascinating how the gays will latch on to undeveloped or purely structural characters and create all sorts of lore from it. eddie munson? that dude existed as a sacrificial lamb, he was built to be a plot vessel. look what the homosexuals did to him. the marauders? an entire fandom springing from characters that were mentioned maybe once in the source material. those gays turned remus and sirius from tragic parental figures into two besties who were definitely in love.

[nico-the-overlord]

Everytime I get into an mascot-horror type story/arg that presents the company and characters as “some huge thing of the past, now completely forgotten- the main character is uncovering stuff again” I always wonder what’s the online impact of it besides just fully forgotten

On one hand I know not everything is on the internet. A lot of shows and old media really are forgetting forever.

…But on the other hand I just know some, just one of these, HAVE to have someone who was to be obsessed to it to the point of creating some “hey remember this from our childhoods- what happened?” youtube video. Or someone writing and posting fanfic, making art no matter how obscure the franchise was. Or at least someone who DID do that years ago, and that stuff is still floating out there on the internet sphere.

At least with the args I’ve touched upon I haven’t seen the possibility of the main character finding out more (or even finding answers to some mysteries) via some randomly-obsessed internet stranger.

Or going the route of making a post, and video online and trying to find information there. Potentially collaborating with popular youtubers for help. Maybe it’s just because I follow too many youtube commentators who make videos on old/nostalgia content so it’s skewing my perception but…idk

[specialagentartemis]

I don’t even see anything Rowland posts anymore but their smug self-important discourse drama still keeps hitting me with splash damage

[tanadrin]

So when I see things like that EA guy's substack article about how AI energy use is fine and nobody should worry about it, and then I see another article about how coal use is ramping back up to meet AI demands for energy, and both are providing their statistics in the form of hard-to-parse visualizations ... this isn't really a question so much as complaint that someone has to be lying here, and I wish I knew who. It seems like it has to be the AI people, as they have the incentive, but ...

So I have a few of reactions to this.

It would be easier to debate the relative merits of two articles if you had linked me the other one, or at least given me some indication about what its title was, who it was by, and where to find it. Since you didn't, all we have is the bare claim that "coal use is ramping back up to meet AI demands for energy." Coal use for the United States as a whole has been steadily falling from 2007-2023 (the most recent year for which I can find data), and aside from small increases in 2010, 2013, and 2021 relative to the previous year, this decline has been almost completely monotonic.

Perhaps you mean this Register article, about how the lifetime of some coal powers plants is being extended because of data center power requirements? But that's not the claim you made. These are very different claims. "Coal use is declining more slowly" vs "coal use is increasing" no doubt sounds to some people like a small quibble, but I think it's really important, because this kind of sloppy equivocation between two substantively very distinct claims entails very distinct substantive consequences! The amount of power data centers have to consume to cause a coal power plant in one city to remain open longer than originally planned while other capacity is built vs the amount of power data centers have to consume to cause consumption of a resource whose usage has been falling steadily for sixteen years to reverse the trend of decline is a considerable difference. In short, if you saw the Register headline, and turned it into the claim presented in your anon ask, you are a liar misrepresenting the state of the world maliciously. If you simply heard the claim you present in your ask as-is, and repeated it, you were lied to.

If your response to the distinction between these two claims is "ah, what's the difference," and you continue to repeat the claim as you presented it in the anon ask, you are also a liar, and we can conclude that the reason you are confused about which claim is true is that you do not care to differentiate between true and false things. Someone like that would stumble through the world in a fog of confusion, not because the truth is hard (it sometimes is), but because they are uninterested in it.

The article I linked I found interesting because it provided very specific numbers, of the form you could check yourself if you doubted them. Again, you don't tell me which article you read that you felt provided a countervailing claim, is pretty light on numbers and pretty speculative on how future energy trends due to use of AI might look. Notably, a lot of claims about the future power needs of AI seem to be coming from companies promoting AI, and who therefore are publicly bullish about its widespread adoption, since they want to justify their investments in the technology to investors.

Andy Masley does not in any sense seem to be "an AI person"? He doesn't work for Google or Meta or OpenAI, or seem to have special background in this technology. My read of your ask seems to be that you think he has incentive to lie about the power consumption of AI technology, even though (again) he seems to provide a lot of numbers you could check yourself if you were so inclined.

You seem also to think that people who are opposed to the development of AI technology have no reason to misrepresent how costly the energy consumption of AI is. That is silly. People taken in by false claims have a strong incentive not to admit they were taken in by false claims! This might not be lying in the classical sense of "knowingly repeating something that is untrue," but I would not say that people who reflexively cleave to false claims because it would be embarrassing to admit they were wrong are being honest. Indeed, I think a huge amount of the misinformation that gets spread online and in-person is spread by people who are at best apathetic to the truth of the claims they are making, and who are more interested in winning individual arguments on a rhetorical basis.

If someone genuinely labors under confusion as to which of two sets of competing claims is correct, you can of course do the admittedly effortful task of trying to learn more, to see if you can achieve a little clarity on the subject. You don't have to look at two different articles, see that they seem to point in two different directions when it comes to a general conclusion about an issue ("Is AI very bad for the environment?") and throw your hands up helplessly and go "there is no way to know the truth here." I believe in you, anon.

That said, I don't think either the Register article nor the Masley article do point in two different directions. "People wildly exaggerate the energy and water consumption of AI" and "building or expanding a data center changes the local energy economy of a city, especially a smallish one like Omaha" are not even contradictory claims.

Unless, of course, you are not interested in building an accurate model of the world through acquiring information about it, but only in slotting each article you click on or social media post you read into one side or another in a rhetorical struggle, because you view everything through the lens of whether it will help you dunk on someone in an argument later. But those people are really annoying, so please don't be one of them.

[haveyoureadthisfanfic]

Sometimes it's like "yeah, technically I am in the fandom and read fic for this media, but I would never read this specific fic because it's so different from my tastes or from a part of the fandom you couldn't force me to go to"

Sometimes I see a fic and I'm like "oh! I like this fandom :)" and then I look closer and I go "oh that's smut of my comfort character and his father figure" - Mod W

[front-facing-pokemon]

[akimarshmallow]

when you study a person from history, make sure the primary source you're getting your info from isn't from a person who really hated the person you're studying

[storytellering]

I guess I can see how if they (the Sparda boys) weren’t related shipping them would be interesting. I think a better question for me to ask is why incest? You said it was the cherry on top, so why is it appealing to you? Is it a taboo thing or like a dark fantasy type thing?

I’m sorry if I’m being overly nosey. Obviously you don’t have to reply to me again. I just don’t know anyone who likes this type of stuff and I’m curious as of why some people do.

No worries! I chose to answer this more in depth anyway, because I feel like it's a valuable topic to discuss and it's important to understand where other people come from, especially if they naturally tend to have a different perspective from oneself. Still, thank you for being respectful, I can tell you're just genuinely curious and I personally don't mind explaining! Since I have answered a very similar question before on twitter, I'll direct you to my answer there as a first intro to it, and then expand since this is tumblr and I don't have to fit my answers in many tiny character limited boxes. So: like I said in that sp answer, it simply appeals to me, on an intrinsic, personal level. When there's something morally wrong in a potential fictional couple, if I already liked their dynamic, it just draws me more to it - I do think the simple fact of having a taboo aspect plays into it, though I don't know to what degree necessarily.

Personally, when it comes to dmc and spardacest specifically, I do really, really enjoy playing with the demonic aspect of it - there's something deeply, deeply satisfying to me as a queer neurodivergent person who grew up bullied and ostracized all my life and have been treated like a freak and an animal and an other my entire childhood, to imagine a humanoid-but-not-quite species that can shift form at will, and has completely different moral/societal/biological rules from regular human society, and subsequently imagining a character that's been brought up their whole life to believe they were a human and full of fucked up things wrong with them, only to discover that, hey! Actually they weren't human, they were something else just vaguely human looking all along, and all their flaws are actually features among the species they belong with. In that way, I do think it's wish fulfilment, though very much metaphorical and not 1:1 to reality or anything I personally experienced or related to. It just feels good in the brain to play with that. (similarly, it's why dbh as another fandom I've been very into for a long time also draws me - androids are very good for making similar analogies, even if there isn't anything necessarily inherently "fucked up" there by regular irl standards, unless you count two androids of the same model fucking as akin to incest, or want to claim some kind of unbalanced power dynamic in an android/human couple lol) In that way, the incest is simply an extension of it - it's not appealing to me because it's morally wrong or fucked up, but because I like to assign traits that would be repulsive to an average human to the Spardas as a species, and explaining them as instinctual/natural to them (for example of other nonsexual things, also things like a tendency for extreme violence and heightened aggression, cannibalism, territorialism, etc ), so at the end of the day, the incest is more a way to play with the existing dynamics and explore my own hc's, than something I'm into for its own sake (and actually, if we have to be honest, before I got into dmc I was really not that into fictional incest for its own sake lol! Not for any personal disgust reasons like I said, but it was just completely neutral to me, not something that would attract me to a fictional ship for its own sake, but not something that would repel me either. In that way, I do think I enjoy it far more as pack and parcel of their demonic nature than for its own merit.) I understand that to some people, otherwise liking a fictional couple's dynamic might be extinguished the moment they find out/realize that there's something morally wrong were they to be together (age gap, underage, incest, toxicity/abuse, etc). That's also perfectly fine and a perfectly acceptable way to navigate fiction. I just so happen to not really care that much in the realm of fiction. To me, it's always kind of been a given that it was separate from my irl morality, in the same vein some people love horror and gore and splatter media, and some people don't.

[cbge]

Do you have a piece of media that you think about and go "yeah. that's the thing that shaped me into who I am today. THE thingie" You can sense it's influence in stuff that you make now. and it's just there. at the back of the mind. giggling

i would say psychonauts has definitely influenced me most out of everything i've ever enjoyed deeply in my life which is a funny answer because as my wife always points out i haven't even played the second game yet despite waiting for it to come out for over ten years.

i have always wanted (and still to this day am kind of hung up about) it to influence my art style because i'm a huge fan of the art direction in those games but i don't think it has (at least i don't see it), however it did... not shape, because those were things i was already drawn to, but rather helped me formulate a more coherent idea of what i'm interested in most when it comes to storytelling and visual art. i'm incredibly attracted to the concept of the subconscious mind and the ways it can be visualized in a physical way; to the concept of giving a face to a concept itself; i find psychonauts's approach to it extremely fun and clever and i hope to someday achieve the same level of creativity where i could come up with something like... literally anything that game did. mind cobwebs. deep secrets in literal saves that run away from you. figments. emotional baggage. it's all so witty, i could talk about how cool it is for hours despite not saying anything more substantial than just "it's so so fucking awesome".

it's a big reason why i was also a huge fan of the movie inception since it plays with similar concepts and why i'm interested in learning more about freud & jung's work on collective subconscious & the ego. i find it all really fascinating. visuals, man. thoughts and images. crazy stuff

[uncanny-tranny]

Honestly, the craziest part of accessibility is that there aren't many abled people (and disabled people who aren't disabled in Every Way Possible) who wouldn't benefit from any of the accessibility options out there

ALT text has made it so much better to navigate image-based pages! I'm not visually-impared, but tumblr is terrible at loading images, and I'm not always connected to WiFi. People who add ALT text make it easy to satiate my curiosity when images don't load! This, coupled with actually learning how blind and visually-impared people navigate the online world, has inspired me to do my best to emulate the things I find helpful, even if the way it helps me is very different than theirs. Having a sense of scale in how it helps me versus how it actually makes the internet usable to the blind and visually-impared is something I do try to keep in mind.

Navigating a world with accessible options is primarily going to help the disabled, and it's imperative to keep this in mind. I do think, though, that illustrating just how much accessibility impacts even abled people's lives can help inspire people to think, "wow, I can't imagine a world without [accessibility option] and I don't need it, but it makes life so much easier." The more I interact with accessibility options I don't need, I still find it so helpful. I can't even imagine how amazing it is when you do need that accessibility and it's actually provided to you.

I don't think that abled people should only be in it for themselves. Again, accessibility should put disabled needs first and foremost. But I can't help but wonder how many people you can get to understand this by first saying how it impacts them, too.

[madlyn5ever]

nothing irrationally bothers me more online than when fans use nicknames they haven't been told they can use.

It can be a very personal thing and one person can have several nicknames from several people and even the shortnening of their name can be a specific nickname-Esque thing that's personal.

[messy-does-cosmology]

One of the most disturbing and frustrating things I see people do on the internet is when people make various comments about how someone reminds them of someone they dislike, and how they therefore are justified in hating them? "This person reminds me of my high-school bully" but they're not your high-school bully. You get that right? They are an entirely different person.