#Examples of internet

[bixels]

Wish regular folks on the internet would stop towing the line and continuing to act like furries are some weird, deviant thing nowadays. I’ll be watching Vinny Vinesauce and a hot male furry design will show up in a game and he’ll go ‘oh. Oh god. Oh god chat no. OH GODD WHY. EUGH CHAT STOP. (makes an inhuman noise) WHY ARE HIS TITS SO.’ Like, man, relax. His tits are so because it’s hot, get horny like the rest of us, next question.

[heyimkana]

A compilation of Sung Jinwoo being a soft, gentle, protective, warmhearted gentleman 😌

(Eng Dub because Aleks' gentle voice is unmatched)

[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.

[slutpoppers]

Entei vs Pikachu Pokemon Entei & the spell of Unown

(Ash almost gets offed)

[aingeal98]

Comic characters are both so entertaining and so frustrating to analyse because as someone who usually likes to have all my bases covered before I type something out on the Internet it's like:

Batman is misogynistic.*

*Note 1: I am referring to the late 90s to 2000s version of Batman primarily his treatment of Helena Bertinelli and Stephanie Brown as these are the two women I've read most of however he also treats women terribly on a consistent basis no matter which era I'm reading**.

*Note 2: I am aware that he was written by many different writers over decades and it's hard to pin down the real batman however even his creators wrote him as misogynistic due to how acceptable that misogyny was in USA culture at the time he was created.

**I'm also aware that modern batman tends to no longer be written so plainly misogynistic however I find that instead the misogyny has been transferred over to the narrative, what with the erasure and flattening of some female characters and the flanderising of others all attempting to paper over his past treatment of them so that they can pretend he always treated women normally like he does nowadays, which often downplays their history and what they went through because of him

*Note 3: If batman is your favourite character of all time and the version that lives in your head is actually a champion of women's rights then this is not a personal attack on you and your version of him. This is just me analysing the comics I've read

*Note 4: "But Batman's a hero it doesn't make sense for him to be sexist." Yeah in a perfect world DCs flagship hero would not be a child abuser with a history of bigotry unfortunately Batman is a product of his writers and his company and DC has been pretty shit at this stuff since the beginning. I don't think ignoring and denying it helps either it just minimises what the victims actually go through in canon. They write him badly a lot. It's a problem.

[existennialmemes]

Hey. You. Literally you. But also me, and everyone here on this incredible world wide web: please practice approaching people in good faith

Please don't immediately assume the absolute worst about a person because of a singular post or comment.

If someone posts something that seems wildly out of character, please just ask them for clarification before assuming the worst.

I cannot articulate how upsetting it is to watch folks attacking each other over what so often ends up being a simple miscommunication.

So please. I'm begging you. When something seems Just A Bit Off, give folks at least one chance to clarify themselves before you decide to assassinate their characters.

[firthbetterorfirthworse]

The 2005 Pride & Prejudice is gourmet comfort food at a Michelin restaurant

It is exquisitely crafted

Fundamentally misses the point of the source material

I leave the experience starving

[thekidsfromyestergay]

Everyone wants to see big bands before they blew up but nobody wants to go to basement shows and keep up with the local scene

[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

[crustyfloor]

I need a missile to explode me right now cant do it anymore. That body of yours is absurd...

AGHH ITS BEEN SO LONG SINCE R1 TILL HAS APPEARED

[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

[nevermythologized]

i think there is something really weird and "don't ask don't tell" about the way that we treat celebrities possible sexualities. like it is perfectly normal and okay to assume a celebrity is straight and not invasive at all but to speculate some gayness is seen as a crime. as if the worst thing a straight person could be seen as is gay.

like it is weird overall to talk about the sexualities of people you don't know, but if you are already having that conversation i think that avoiding any sort of possible queerness is rooted in homophobia. i think that it is an ingrained, socially taught, homophobic response to react negatively to speculating that someone is gay.

like billie eilish for example. i always thought she gave queer vibes, i was able to spot this because i am a lesbian and am part of the in-group where we have to rely on "vibes" and implied meaning to figure out if someone is gay. when she "came out" she literally stated that she thought people already knew. maybe straight people didn't know because they assume straight until they are beaten in the face with a rainbow but she thought the queers were in on it. she expressed frustration that she had to explicitly put it out there, that the only way she could actually be seen as queer and a member of this community is by stating directly, to a media source, "i am queer".

i think that is a bad precedent to set! i think we should be more open and willing to accept that tons of people are queer (especially in the performing arts like are you kidding). if you think it is insulting or demeaning to suggest that an artist is queer you need to reflect on your subconscious biases. why exactly is it bad to be gay?

i also think that queer artists who are not comfortable being out to the straight public would love to be acknowledged and recognized by fellow members of the community. queerness is something that is signaled and implied and flagged to members of the group, someone does not have to explicitly state that they are queer to be queer. we need to stop policing identity and we need to stop labeling everyone straight as a default.

this community should be open and accepting. we should welcome queerness and embrace those who are exploring what that means, who are maybe not comfortable with judgemental straight people knowing but still want to find community in being and acting queer.

[front-facing-pokemon]