evaconly

[evaconly]

I’m not having a Sims phase idk what you mean

Totally not planning a legacy challenge with @sims4utopia

[evaconly]

they went off with this

[evaconly]

things you DO NOT need to be a man

a dick

he/him pronouns

XY chromosomes

things you DO need to be a man

the swiftness of a coursing river

the force of a great typhoon

the strength of a raging fire

the mysteriousness of the dark side of the moon

^this post was brought to you by LGBT^

Let's

Get down to

Business

To defeat the huns

[evaconly]

see him schmoove

[evaconly]

[evaconly]

huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

[evaconly]

i think a really funny project that a statistics professor could have their class do is like. put a bunch of random, patently untrue demographic statements into a hat. "the most popular tv show among white men ages 24-27 is Bluey." "the majority of business majors are middle children." "bisexual women love hot chips." and each student picks one out of the hat and you gotta like. design a whole study and survey a group of people to specifically achieve that result. you have to prove it true. by whatever means necessary. you have to construct the most biased study possible and wrangle in your exact demographic to make that statement a statistical reality. i think people would learn a lot.

[evaconly]

The thing about the r slur is that people who are using it again are indeed using it as a slur. This isn't a word that is being reclaimed. This is a word that is once again being used 100% as a slur. You're being a bigot if you're using it against others. Straight up. There isn't another argument to be made. Knock it tf off.

[evaconly]

Oh ok so it turns out ive been borrowing grief from the future ! it turns out ive been preparing to lose the things i love rather than basking in the light of them while they last. Maybe i should nt do that

[evaconly]

People underestimate how much it fucks you up to be subtly excluded as a kid. I would try to talk to my classmates and be met with disinterest or annoyance. The one friend I had, who I clung to and nodded along to his every word, had other friends he liked just as much or more. And his other friends didn’t care for me at all.

I look back at pictures from the time and see how separated I was from them. I remember knowing I was different. I remember posing questions about the world to the girls playing next to me and realizing that they had never asked the same ones to themselves. That the ways we thought couldn’t be more different.

I kept myself amused with my own fanatical stories and musings in my head. I would wander the playground on a circular path, imagining a friend and being sorely disappointed when it didn’t feel as real as I’d hoped.

There was a bubble separating me from everyone else, thin, and nearly invisible, but with a pearly sheen you could catch under the right conditions. I knew it was there, they knew it was there, and it changed me

[evaconly]

[evaconly]

I've finally figured out an argument that convinces coding tech-bros that AI art is bad.

Got into a discussion today (actually a discussion, we were both very reasonable and calm even through I felt like committing violence) with a tech-bro-coded lady who claimed that people use AI in coding all the time so she didn't see why it mattered if people used AI in art.

Obviously I repressed the surge of violence because that would accomplish nothing. Plus, this lady is very articulate, the type who makes claims and you sit there thinking no that's wrong it must be but she said it so well you're kind of just waffling going but, no, wait-- so I knew I had to get this right if I was gonna come out of this unscathed.

The usual arguments about it being about the soul of it and creation fell flat, in fact she was adamant that anyone who believed that was in fact looking down at coding as an art form as she insisted it is. Which, sure, you can totally express yourself through coding. There's a lot more nuance as to the differences but clearly I was not going to win this one.

The other people I was with (literally 8 people anti-ai against her, but you can't change the mind of someone who doesn't want to listen and she just kept accusing us of devaluing coding as an art) took over for I kid you not 15 minutes while I tried desperately to come up with a clear and articulate way to explain the difference to her. They tried so many reasonable arguments, coding being for a function ("what, art doesn't serve a function?") coding being many discrete building blocks that you put together differently, and the AI simply provides the blocks and you put it together yourself ("isn't that what prompt building is") that it's bad for the environment ("but not if it's used for capitalism, hm?" "Yeah literally that's how capitalism works it doesn't care about the environment" she didn't like that response)

But I finally got it.

And the answer is: It's not about what you do, it's about what you claim to be.

Imagine that someone asks an AI to write a code and, by some miracle, it works perfectly without them having to tweak it---which is great because they couldn't tell you what a single solitary thing in that code means.

Now imagine this person, with their code that they don't know how it works, goes and applies to be a coder somewhere, presenting this AI code as proof that they're qualified.

Should they be hired?

She was horrified, of course. Of course they shouldn't be. They're not qualified. They can't actually code, and even if by some miracle they did have an AI successfully write a flawless code for every issue they came across that wouldn't be their code, you could hire any shmuck on the street to do that, no reason to pay someone like they're creating something.

When actual engineers use AI what they do is get some kind of base, which they then go though and check for problems and then if they find any they fix them, and add on to the base code with their own knowledge instead of just trying different prompt after prompt until they randomly come across one that works.

People who generate code like this don't usually call themselves engineers. They're people who needed a bit of code and didn't have the knowledge to generate it, and so used a resource.

And there you go. There are people who have none of the skills of artists, they don't practice, they don't create for themselves. When they feed the prompt to the AI they then don't just use the resulting image as a reference point for their own personal masterpiece, and if they don't like it they don't have the skills to change it---they simply try another prompt, and do that until they get something they like.

These people are calling themselves artists.

Not only that, these people are bringing the AI generated thing to interviews, and they are getting hired, leaving people who slave over their craft out of the job.

And that is the difference, for the tech bros who think AI art isn't a big deal.

[evaconly]

WHAT HAS BECOME OF ME

Look, I have known how to edit minecraft skins for a while.

Mishmoshing a bunch of bases together? You got it.

Want me to slightly alter a skin? I'm your man.

Want me to shade something slightly differently or recolor a pre existing skin? You betcha.

However, I just recently taught myself how to shade hair. Not just any hair, but ombre hair. Long, wavy, ombre hair.

And I am OBSESSED. I have made 18 different hair bases, only one of which was not an ombre hair, and 16 of which were made in the last, um, 7 hours? that's... more than 2 an hour, and I don't ever want to stop

The hyperfixation is hitting me hard

[evaconly]

map panther do you see my vision

[evaconly]

[evaconly]

So cool to see the growth!

[evaconly]

Reblogging this because the earworm has returned and I need someone to tell me whether I’m crazy or not

(Side note: I am procrastinating my final project for class and studying for my exams by posting on tumblr rn)

a bit of an unhinged 3am post because I can’t stop thinking about this

I heard a clip from Harness Your Hopes B-side by Pavement on tiktok today, and it became a little earworm so I decided to scroll under the sound a bit.

Much to my dismay, I discovered that a lot of people using the sound don’t understand the lyrical wordplay for words that rhyme with pavement.

Furthermore, some people that knew there were rhymes were using the wrong definitions for some words, which irked me purely because they did not care enough to look into what it actually meant. (Such as bereavement for the line “and I won’t kill your parents and roast them on a spit”. For reference, my understanding, and seemingly the most commonly accepted interpretation, of this line, is that the rhyme would be the word depravement.)

It got me thinking about just how far they went and how many rhymes were hidden throughout the song.

So, even though I got in bed to try to sleep almost two hours ago, I started doing some googling.

The next line of the song is very clearly describing engravement: “and don’t you try to etch it or permanently sketch it”

The following, ailment: “or you’re gonna catch a bad, bad cold”

This is where I think most people tend to stop, but the line “and the freaks have stormed the white house” stuck out to me as a bit odd placement, so I did some digging. Initial google searches were unhelpful, until I discovered a list of words that rhyme with pavement and started combing through definitions. There, I found “abatement” which at first glance, seemed correct. The definition I found in RhymeZone was cutoff, but it read “…(law) the action of a person that abates, or without proper authority enters a residence…”. I went with it, and only when writing this out now did I realize the full definition would not define storming the white house as an abatement. So, back to google. And then I realized that it must be a type of occupation, which led me to the word attainment.

Next up, are the following lines: “I moved into a lighthouse / It’s on a scenic quay, it’s, oh, so far away. / Far away from the beginning.” Now, there’s a lot going on in these lines, so here’s my breakdown.

“I moved into a lighthouse” = displacement

“It’s on a scenic quay” - well a quay is both a dock for unloading shipments and a slang term that means “far away”. I took this twofold. I first went with the word “shipment”, though I’m less certain of that one now. Then, I took the word “distant” for the alternate meaning of what paired with the following bit: “it’s, oh, so far away / far away from the beginning”. (I couldn’t find a better word for the distance from the beginning, but I feel like there may be something I’m missing there.)

The following bit was actually quite tricky to figure out. “The shroud is made of linen” seems like it should be straightforward, however all google wanted to show me was the Shroud of Turin, which was not what I was looking for. So back to RhymeZone I went. (This was not helpful.) Finally, I decided I must be missing something obvious, so i looked up the definition of shroud, which gave me the word “garment”. Considering the use of the word shroud (which is specifically a garment used in burials) and the emphasis on its material, this is what I landed on for this line.

Next there was “The yearling took the purse”. Using first glance, I had no idea what this could mean. However, I quickly connected it with “commandment”. This is due to the fact that a yearling is a year old sheep, and stealing, specifically sheep, came with a hefty fine in the bible.

And, last but not least, “the goth kid has a hearse”. This could be interpreted two ways: the goth kid is dead or they literally own a hearse. I went with the owning one, because the word “statement” made more sense for that than “encasement” made for death.

And that’s how far I got so far. It’s now been 40 minutes of me typing out this post T.T

However, I do want to point out one last thing. Have you counted how many rhymes I found? I did. It’s ten. Ten rhymes for pavement. Why is this significant? Because the line right before all these rhymes is “The reference starts at ten/ Well, show me a word that rhymes with pavement”. I found it ironic that there’s 10 rhymes OR 9 rhymes plus the word pavement (if you skip one shipment) and this was the line prior to all the rhymes, which end off at the chorus.

Anyways, hopefully yall will be better rested than me in the morning. I had fun, now it is time to sleep. Oh and if you read all the way, let me know: an I overthinking this or is it actually that deep? Cause at 3:30am, I feel I can’t be the judge of how sane I am right now lol.