#I tried a little data visualization!

[enigmaticxbee]

X(-Files) and Os

Os - Mulder and Scully are epic huggers. Scully throwing herself half dressed into his arms in the pilot, and his surprise and then acceptance? Scully finally opening up and letting herself cry in his arms at the end of Irresistible and how much he needs to hold her too? Scully folding herself over Mulder in Demons as he crouches on the floor after drilling holes in his head on a suicide mission to find answers before it’s too late and Scully is gone? The FTF hallway scene - you’ve kept me honest, you’ve made me a whole person??? Mulder using baseball as an excuse to put his arms around her in The Unnatural - in a very rare moment of lightheartedness and joy? Scully wrapping herself around him again in another moment of despair at his mother’s death in Sein und Zeit? Mulder tucking her into bed in Requiem and wrapping himself around her and telling her what he felt watching her hold that baby? The way they wrap around each other - and nuzzle! noses! - on the motel bed at the end of The Truth, left with nothing but each other, and maybe that’s enough?? I have nothing profound to say, just that they love each other.

Xs - But what - truly what - did txf production team have against light? Game of Thrones watchers thought they had it bad with that night battle? Try waiting through 5 seasons and an epic bee-block for Mulder to kiss (well, a 1939 version of) Scully in Triangle and to be able to tell that it’s hot, but to see almost nothing! Just shadow! Even my favorite kiss - the jail cell reunion kiss in The Truth with Skinner hovering awkwardly in the background - suffers from this show’s commitment to its dark, spooky aesthetic. Because it’s the little details that I can see that I love so much - their thumbs each caressing each other’s cheeks, the way they don’t want to let go - and I want to see it all. The forehead kisses though, they can never take those away from us.

And I’m still salty that they never kissed in the revival!

* I didn’t include any cut scenes, extra takes, etc. since they aren’t part of the episode, but just know that I have lost minutes - hours - days - of my life watching the FTF outtakes, thank you GA and DD 😘

[yridenergyridenergy]

Vicious August 1998

[reachartwork]

PLEASE JUST LET ME EXPLAIN REDUX

AI {STILL} ISN'T AN AUTOMATIC COLLAGE MACHINE

I'm not judging anyone for thinking so. The reality is difficult to explain and requires a cursory understanding of complex mathematical concepts - but there's still no plagiarism involved. Find the original thread on twitter here; https://x.com/reachartwork/status/1809333885056217532

A longpost!

This is a reimagining of the legendary "Please Just Let Me Explain Pt 1" - much like Marvel, I can do nothing but regurgitate my own ideas.

You can read that thread, which covers slightly different ground and is much wordier, here; https://x.com/reachartwork/status/1564878372185989120

This longpost will; Give you an approximately ELI13 level understanding of how it works Provide mostly appropriate side reading for people who want to learn Look like a corporate presentation

This longpost won't; Debate the ethics of image scraping Valorize NFTs or Cryptocurrency, which are the devil Suck your dick

WHERE DID THIS ALL COME FROM?

The very short, very pithy version of *modern multimodal AI* (that means AI that can turn text into images - multimodal means basically "it can operate on more than one -type- of information") is that we ran an image captioner in reverse.

The process of creating a "model" (the term for the AI's ""brain"", the mathematical representation where the information lives, it's not sentient though!) is necessarily destructive - information about original pictures is not preserved through the training process.

The following is a more in-depth explanation of how exactly the training process works. The entire thing operates off of turning all the images put in it into mush! There's nothing left for it to "memorize". Even if you started with the exact same noise pattern you'd get different results.

SO IF IT'S NOT MEMORIZING, WHAT IS IT DOING?

Great question! It's constructing something called "latent space", which is an internal representation of every concept you can think of and many you can't, and how they all connect to each other both conceptually and visually.

CAN'T IT ONLY MAKE THINGS IT'S SEEN?

Actually, only being able to make things it's seen is sign of a really bad AI! The desired end-goal is a model capable of producing "novel information" (novel meaning "new").

Let's talk about monkey butts and cigarettes again.

BUT I SAW IT DUPLICATE THE MONA LISA!

This is called overfitting, and like I said in the last slide, this is a sign of a bad, poorly trained AI, or one with *too little* data. You especially don't want overfitting in a production model!

To quote myself - "basically there are so so so many versions of the mona lisa/starry night/girl with the pearl earring in the dataset that they didn't deduplicate (intentionally or not) that it goes "too far" in that direction when you try to "drive there" in the latent vector and gets stranded."

Anyway, like I said, this is not a technical overview but a primer for people who are concerned about the AI "cutting and pasting bits of other people's artworks". All the information about how it trains is public knowledge, and it definitely Doesn't Do That.

There are probably some minor inaccuracies and oversimplifications in this thread for the purpose of explaining to people with no background in math, coding, or machine learning. But, generally, I've tried to keep it digestible. I'm now going to eat lunch.

Post Script: This is not a discussion about capitalists using AI to steal your job. You won't find me disagreeing that doing so is evil and to be avoided. I think corporate HQs worldwide should spontaneously be filled with dangerous animals.

Cheers!

[jovial-thunder]

Downtimes, module editor, water temple

Happy summer! There's smoke in Portland but it's not too bad. Bless firefighters. Work on Lancer Tactics continues apace.

This month has been mostly focused on the largest heretofore-untouched section of the game: downtimes and the module editor for designing the sequences between combats. We're not planning on doing anything particularly innovative or new in its design — if you've played Banner Saga, Fire Emblem (gameboy versions), or Rogue Squadron you'll recognize what's going on here.

Repair, level up, have visual-novel-style conversations with companions, do some light choose-your-own-adventuring, and pick & launch the next combat. All pretty standard downtime fare — games have pretty thoroughly explored these patterns as vehicles for narrative at this point.

The unique thing that Lancer Tactics is offering on this front is an editor to make your own entire campaigns. Classic games like Warcraft or Age of Empires had incredible scenario editors, but making anything more than a one-mission map was solely the domain of modders. Over the last few weeks, we've gotten a full basically-visual-novel-editor working ingame where you can orchestrate NPC story arcs, clocks ticking, branching paths, and triggered events for all the stuff that happens between combats.

All of the campaigns we ship with the game are going to be made with these same editors, which'll force us to really make sure that they're solid tools. I think it'd be very funny to someday see someone like completely ignore all the mech stuff and just make a visual novel in this engine.

There's no new preview game build this month because adding this big section of the game means too many things are under construction. I'm happy with how fast we've been able to get this going, but making ingame editors is a lot of unglamorous UI piping and data refactoring work. Fingers crossed that it'll come together enough that we'll be able to get the first version of this editor in your hands in time for the next update

Other Changelogs

Carpenter has started re-making the tutorial level from the demo in this new engine, which is pushing us to add a bunch of stuff to the combat editor. I added triggers for playing arbitrary effects on the map, moving the camera, storing arbitrary data to the battle/module states, enabling/disabling/triggering other triggers, AND/OR conditions, and putting execution limits on triggers.

Triggers can highlight UI or actions (so it can be like "use the boost to get through!" and the boost button becomes all shiny)

New "camera start" zone type

Added a "hotspot" zone type that has a little floating title, and plastered the names of other zones on the map (visual style stolen from some Foundry VTT modules)

Added water, whose level can be set via the editor or triggers.

Added unmounted pilots who can mount up into Shut Down mechs. We continue to plan to not have pilot combat be a part of the core game, but it'll be useful for scenario or scripted sequences.

Added activation pips and template icons to the mini healthbar on units.

A bunch more portrait editor assets from Martina, including facial hair. Here's a check Carpenter did where he tried to recreate some official Lancer art ingame. ✨

Schedule update

Taking a look at our original date for the "bones" of the game ("finishing the battle engine, basic character creation, 2 mechs per manufacturer, and an a 'instant action' mode"), we estimated being able to get it done by the end of November. The emotional milestone for me on this front is getting the game to a complete enough state that I feel OK about swapping it in on the itch.io page.

I've been saying that the 3D cataclysm has pushed us back back about 3 months, and I think that's still holding true. Carpenter and I haven't officially made the call yet, but I think it's likely we'll need that time to port more mech content; here's a graph they made that shows about where we're sitting on the PC and NPC mechs for the "bones" target in terms of mechanics and action icon/sprite. 

(This data is pulled from a big table they made that includes ALL talents/gear/traits where we've been marking things off as we've implemented them. Very handy for tracking where we are.)

That's all for now. Tata!

[musurvivalistguide]

Random thought that just hit me, but do you ever wonder if--during Mata Nui's travels to other worlds--he might’ve taken inspiration from the things he's seen and tried to incorporate them into the little universe inside him?

For example, let's say that Spherus Magna never experienced an Aurora Borealis. Since Mata Nui's systems control the environment and the effects in the sky, that means there wouldn't be a light show happening in the coldest places like Ko-Metru or even on the fake island disguise. All seems normal for him as he's hiding and observing the locals on a planet as usual.

Suddenly, he sees an Aurora that's so captivating that he can't help but marvel at such a natural phenomenon (even if it winds up somewhat messing with the electronic devices/systems he has). Since it's his mission to study other worlds and report back to the Great Beings, why wouldn't he want to show them such a discovery? Why wouldn't he want to share the phenomenon with his inhabitants by adding it to his system's network data to recreate the visual effects just like the stars in the sky?

Cue everyone who lives in or near freezing cold places (like the Shadowed One's species) at high altitudes freaking out when they see a rainbow of wiggly lights in the air the first time it happens and wondering what this means 😂

I dunno, it just seems like if I were a several million foot tall robot who could control an entire universe (including the stars), why wouldn't I want to incorporate something visually stunning into said universe? He created the Makuta, so what's stopping him there? :V

[meowufff]

Okay!

First of all: I am very sorry it took so long to finish this! It had been a lot more data than last time, so I had some trouble to visualize and edit it this time around. I really hope I made it work somehow so enjoy this lil conclusion thingy and feel free to add or mention anything that comes to your mind~

In this survey I have asked a total of 188 people multiple questions surrounding sleep habits, their consume of caffein and its influence on them and got an answer from 104 of these.

So let’s beginning with the average hours per sleep these people had.

Well, as we saw in the last survey I did, most people I have asked didn’t had a good sleep schedule. The average hours that a rottmnt tumblr artist out of 104 get is 6,48 hours per night.

I tried my best to categorize the hours into 1-3; 4-6; 6-7; 7-9; 10+ h/night. The most common one being 4-6 h/night and 7-9 h/night which is a little surprising remembering that only 18% of people of my last survey actually have a “good”-sleep schedule in hindsight that the recommended amount of sleep is 7-9 hours/night.

These numbers could be explained that for a lot of people the amount of hours they sleep depends on factors like if they´re having a stressful time at the moment or how much they did over the day so the numbers itself varied often from 3-8 hours. Of course, no one sleeps the exact amount of hours every single time so the range a lot people mentioned had been partly very big.

Now that we know how many hours most artist sleep per night, we should take a look at how many hours they consider enough to technically get through the day which is 4,94 hours.

Because the answered had been very specific for most parts I decided to categorize them into full 1 till 9+ hours and steps in between as 1-2; 2-3; 3-4; etc. hours, the most common ones being 4 and 5 hours. Which is kind of close to the average amount they get.

So some could take the wild guess that a lot of people are surviving on their minimum hours per night as daily basis.

For my next question I could have been more specific with what I meant. My thought behind that question had been, how many hours are a lot in consideration to a not-so-great sleep schedule. For example, a person who usually gets 5-6 hours of sleep could consider getting 7 or 8 hours as a lot.

Some didn’t answer that part which is understandable as the meaning isn’t that clear. I still got a lot of interesting answers! For example, the average “a lot of hours of sleep” value is 9,59 hours.

Now let’s get to the caffein!

Surprisingly to me, considering the small average hour per night, 53,85% do not consume any caffein over the day and only 39,42% have it included into their daily routine. The small amount of 6,73% of people use it only as last resort.

On the other hand, after reading all the effects caffein has on most of the people I asked I am not as surprised they´re not consuming it regularly.

Talking about the different effects of caffein on people please look at the following two pictures where I tried my best to visualize the different answers as good as possible.

In the first one you can see the descriptions how the people are feeling before consuming any caffein. The bigger the word the more often it had been mentioned.

In the second you will see the way they feel after consuming any kind of caffein.

It is pretty prominent that a majority doesn’t feel any different afterwords which could be an explanation why the amount of people drinking caffein is that “small”. But even if the second biggest word is the usual effect caffein has the one directly after that are words like tired, sluggish, jittery which are most definitely affects no one likes to experience.

A lot of the described feelings could be lined to stuff like ADHD or insomnia or anything else where caffein can show a paradox or even negative effect on someone. I have read that a lot of people still like to consume drinks with caffein in it but not because of the effect but more for the taste.

As someone who needs to drink either very strong coffee or energy to actually feel any effect of the caffein, I found it very interesting to see that people mentioned to enjoy drinking tea as little energy boost.

For me tea, or coke or any other caffeinated soda, has such a little amount of caffein in it that I, for myself, didn’t even had it categorized as something that could be used as little caffein booster.

It hadn’t been a question, but I still noted down the kind of drinks people choose to drink as daily caffein source, which actually shows that coffee is the usual to go drink but again, surprisingly lot told me that they don’t drink tea (or anything else) as daily basis but more randomly whenever they feel like it.

In the end, what can we conclude out of all this messy information?

So, the usual hours you should sleep is put on 7-8 hours per night.

The average hours out of 104 artists in the rottmnt tumblr bubble is 6,48 hours per night with a minimum needed of 4,94 hours to get through the day. The maximum hours got in a night lay by 9,6 hours.

53,85% of these 104 go through their every day without the help of any caffein.

39,42% have caffein included into their daily routine.

6, 73% see caffein only as their last resort and try to avoid consuming any for as long as possible.

Thank you, a lot, for reading so far and thousand thanks to all the people participating in this lil survey again! I had a lot of fun doing this and I hope this little conclusion here is entertaining enough to make it worth having to answer my “few” questions!

If you want to share your own opinion or point out any mistakes I may have made, please feel free to do so~

I wish everyone a happy day and or good night!

If you are interested into my first survey, pls click here :3 Special Thanks to all of the participants!!! @heckitall @triona-tribblescore @butterfilledpockets @crownedcrowrow @pezhead @wraenata @zinovi768 @cokowiii @idiot-mushroom @less-depresso-more-espresso @mightyanxiety @sweeneydino @2aceofspades @mobiitez @onejellyfishplease @titenoute @arrora-art @indieyuugure @tblsomedoodles @theelvishfiddler @tasenwiththerobots @iredoodles @sushixstar @turrondeluxe @signanothername @adorabledrugl0rd @mr-doodles @theastroghost @djpachipikachu @hellishgayliath @frosteaart @godsfaultycreations @koolaidashley @soda-kazoo @tapakah0 @v-albion @sad-leon @angelpuns @sharkfinn @venelona-turtle-den @goatedgreen @graphitehybrid @laseralligator @peach-moths @vangh17a @debb987 @lieutenantbiscute @sunnyyyteaaa @0ransje @manga-toons

[paradoxlemonade]

Mirror Mirror

Fandom: Double Life SMP

Dynamic: Etho & Joel

words: 1313

Warnings: body image issues, insecurity

Ao3: Here!

Summary: Etho doesn't like how he looks. Joel does not know this. Hurt/comfort ensues. (This is my @mcytblrholidayexchange present for @kyleknight! I hope you enjoy ^^)

— — — — —

Joel likes to think he’s a pretty funny guy in his own humble opinion, thank you very much. People laugh when he starts cracking jokes, and those that don’t are probably just peeved that they’re the subject of his mockery—after all, when there’s a punchline, someone has to be the one to get decked. It’s all in good fun!

It’s… disconcerting when someone who’s supposed to be in on the joke isn’t smiling along with it. 

And it’s not like Etho’s even the one on the receiving end! The whole point of the thing is how they—as soulmates—can ruin everyone else’s thumbnails together!

It’s a bit of Etho’s that Joel has always found fun as long as he’s known about it: hiding another layer of visual data in his player code only visible upon lookup is a fantastic prank for messing with one’s friends, since it’ll only show up when they pull his image to build the thumbnail. Etho himself, who doesn’t bother with that sort of menial technicality and just whips out a camera from his back pocket when he spies a good thumbnail, is immune. And sure, sure, Joel doesn’t actually know how to replicate the effect and just went for a plain t-shirt with the face painted on in crooked lines, but it was still funny and would show up on the lookups (And Etho’s pictures, but that’s what hiding the shirt with armor is for).

Joel was grinning like mad as he showed off the creation, hands waving and detailing the concept. Etho gave an affirmation, but he hadn’t seemed particularly enthused with the concept; the mask hiding his face stretched with a smile even as his eyes skittered to the side and hid under knit brows.

So. Joel tries not to let it bother him and simply enjoy the thought of his friends being annoyed with him.

He picks at the hem of the t-shirt as he paces about the Boat Boys (not Small Etho!) base area. The day passes as usual: chaos reigns, problems are caused (all on purpose if asked, mostly on purpose in actuality), and Joel enjoys Etho’s company. Really, the man is a delight—Joel knew of him more than he knew him personally before the latest season, but every new interaction reveals something new about Etho that he didn’t know, and Joel’s actions and mannerisms in turn to him.

Everything seems fine, until. Until, until, until.

Etho removes the secret layer. Joel finds out about it in between sessions and tries (fails) not to take it personally.

It… stings.

The start of the next session and Joel’s ire do not roll in like thunder, but instead stumble in on unsure legs like a fawn. Sure, he’s irritated (and a little offended, and a little hurt), but it’s Etho. So Joel leans on the edge of The Relation Ship and drinks in the sight of the server.

A creaking floorboard from behind him and a gentle wheeze of breath belies Etho’s awaited arrival. 

Without turning around, Joel begins, “I see that you’ve changed your skin?” It’s light as he can manage with a slight chuckle of incredulity, but from the tightness in his jaw, it does little to masquerade much of anything.

“I did, yes—”

“You took the face off? Was it because I—”

“Yeah.”

Joel huffs. “Wow, brilliant.” He pushes off and turns in a single motion, and—

Freezes.

…Any plans Joel has for a polite (but frigid, but pointed, but sardonic) questioning evaporate once he gets a look at Etho’s face.

He looks tired, bags like smudges of coal languishing, shifting with every blink. Every step is upheld with an air of casual nonchalance, but the slight tremble in his fingers betrays him. His pale hair is dull and falls over his scarred eye.

“...You look like a wreck.”

Etho scowls for a bare moment but beats it down to a practiced neutrality. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

Joel snorts. “Considering that I hadn’t asked but you tried to deflect anyways, say that I don’t particularly believe you.” He grabs Etho by the wrist and slides past, leading him down to their chests. “Did you sleep at all between now and the last session? Because your eyebags have eyebags. Bet we could fit a whole stack of items in there.” Before Etho can respond, Joel pops the lock on a chest and picks out a loaf of bread. He drops it into Etho’s hands with a nod of finality.

“I slept just fine. And I ate too, if that’s what you’re getting at by this.” He gestures helplessly with the bread. “I told you, I’m fine.”

Joel shrugs. “And I said I didn’t believe you. I can play this game all day, especially since your face isn’t helping your argument.”

Etho scowls again. “Stop saying that.” 

“Saying what? That you look like you’ve been fighting phantoms? And losing?”

 “Joel, please…” His shoulders are drawn in close and his grip on the bread grows tighter, more desperate.

Joel falters.

“Are you… okay?”

Etho makes a face and stalks back onto the ship. “You don’t need to rub it in, you know.”

Joel trails behind him, his sense of assurance drying up. “You’re gonna need to be a little more specific than that, mate. Rub what in?”

He laughs. Laughs. Something dry, something quiet, something brittle. Etho keeps his gaze trained on the bread crust he picks at aimlessly. “I know I’m nothing nice to look at. I’ve known that basically forever. So you don’t need to rub it in; I already know.”

Joel blinks. He stops following Etho’s pacing and stands in place. What does he say to that? “You’re kidding, right?”

Mm. Probably not that.

Etho gives him an unimpressed look. “Why would I be kidding about this? You’ve been saying it yourself all morning.”

Wait, he thought that… and then Joel…

Oh, goddammit.

Joel rubs a hand across his face letting it trail up to drag through his hair. “You look tired, man, not ugly. You’re not a supermodel—so what? Neither am I. And neither is anyone else that we hang out with. You’re in pretty good company.” His feet finally unstick from the floor and he manages to scoot next to Etho, their shoulders brushing. “You’ve been thinking about this the entire break, haven’t you?”

Etho shrugs, as if it hides the way his shoulders droop with the weight of his thoughts. “I don’t… I try not to think about my face too much. Not ever since”—he waves his free hand at the long, ropy line bisecting his face—“that. No mirrors in any of my builds or anything. I guess your silly t-shirt just reminded me that everyone else is looking at me when I talk to them.”

Joel kinda feels bad for taking that personally, now.

He shakes his head. “If you told me what was up, I would’ve ditched the shirt. Here, like this.” He reaches up with one hand and yanks it off by the neckline, tossing it across the ship in the same motion. It hits the wall and slides to the floor in a crumpled heap. “There, now it’s gone.”

Etho takes a minute to gather his thoughts. After a pause, his eyes trail over to meet Joel’s. “Thanks.”

Joel leans over and bumps him, never breaking eye contact. “Bothering people is fun. Hurting them isn’t.”

The moment passes, and Etho turns his attention back to the bread. He slides his mask down and takes a hesitant bite.

— — — — —

Joel leans back and kicks a foot over his leg. “Besides, I can still think of, like, at least three different people who would throw themselves at you in a heartbeat if they thought they had a chance of getting you into bed with them.”

Etho chokes on a mouthful of bread.

[lensman-arms-race]

Headcanons for techfolk vision

Cameras

As we can see from the episodes themselves, Cam vision is very similar to human vision! One way it differs is that when Cams are physically hit or shocked, their vision greys out with scanlines and other artefacts.

You can see a real-life example of this in this video, in which a skydriver drops a video camera and it keeps recording until it lands (in a pig pen!)

As the camera tumbles, it spins faster than its sensors can keep up with, resulting in the video turning into a series of diagonal lines. Most digital cameras record in a 'sweep', going from one edge or corner to the opposite one. It looks as though this camera records in a diagonal sweep.

This also means that Cameramen possibly don't see things like propellors and hummingbird wings as a blur, as we do - they'd see it as a choppy effect, depending on how the movement syncs with the Cameraman's framerate.

Here's a bird appearing to hover perfectly because its wings happen to match the camera's shutter speed:

As far as Cameramen are concerned, that's probably just how birds are! They don't see bird wings as a flippa-flappa or propellors as a rounda-rounda blur.

Presumably, Cameramen cannot perceive the chimerical colours, which are colours humans can see thanks to how our retinas form afterimages:

Soundkind

I headcanon that Soundkind primarily perceive the world through echolocation. It's not really possible for humans to grasp what this 'looks' like. We've all heard of Thomas Nagel's essay 'What is it like to be a bat?' But at least a bat is a mammal like us, so it'll have mostly the same neural pathways as us. It's not outside the realms of possibility that bats 'see' the world in the same colours as us, but the colours are triggered in the brain's perception by wavelengths of sound rather than light. But Soundkind aren't even animals! Who knows how a tech brain processes this data?

I also headcanon that the Soundkind can see with light to a degree, just not as well as a human, Cameraman or TVman. Their vision is low-res and is heavy on the reds (hence their use of red as an emblematic colour), similar to a human with tritanomaly.

Here's Tri-Cam, approximately as a human or Cameraman would perceive them (from this SketchFab model):

Here's how Soundkind might 'see' Tri-Cam with echolocation. (I took the 'matcap + surface' version of the model to get just the contours without textures, then noodled with it a little in GIMP.)

Here's a scene approximately how a human or Cameraman would perceive it (source):

And how it might look to a Soundkind using their visual processing - mainly red (achieved using a tritanopia simulator), and low resolution:

Here's another 3D model, a bit more colourful than Tri-Cam, as a human or Cameraman might perceive it (source):

Putting together the above info, here's how a Soundkind might perceive it using their echolocation overlaid with their optical vision:

TVs

TVs are primarily optic-based, like humans and Cameras. Their vision overlaps less with the human range than the Cameramen's vision does. TVs see further into the infra-red than humans and Cams (unless said Cams have specialised thermal vision), and their vision has much more of a purple cast, hence their use of purple as an emblematic colour.

TVs can see even in complete darkness (by our standards), because everything above absolute zero gives off IR radiation. However, an environment of absolutely uniform temperature would appear blank, because there would be no differences in IR for the TVman to see. In addition, TVs can't see the temperature of stuff behind glass - they would only see the temperature of the glass itself (same as the limitations for real thermal cameras).

My infra-red headcanon is purely based on the fact that TV remotes are usually IR-based (more modern ones use Bluetooth).

...I don't have a speculative image to show, because to my surprise I couldn't find good quality pictures online of the same scene taken with RGB and with thermal (so I can combine them the way I want them). They were all either postage stamp-sized or they didn't align properly. Hopefully you can imagine something!

This video shows something a bit like what I'm thinking of:

The video shows that the thermal cam has something called 'MSX', which combines the thermal image with the light image, giving you the thermal imaging info combined with the surface patterns from the light imaging info. However, my headcanon is closer to 'human vision (but a bit more purple) combined with a black-hot greyscale thermal image', as opposed to the purple and yellow mess seen here.

[tangibletechnomancy]

How To Use AI To Fake A Scandal For Fun, Profit, and Clout

Or, I Just Saw People I Know To Be Reasonable Fall For A Fake "Ripoff" And Now I'm Going To Gently Demonstrate What Really Happened

So, we all know what people say about AI. It's just an automatic collage machine, it's stealing your data (as if the rest of the mainstream internet isn't - seriously, we should be using that knee-jerk disgust response to demand better internet privacy laws rather than try to beef up copyright so that compliance has to come at the beginning rather than the end of the process and you can be sued on suspicion of referencing, but I digress...), it can't create anything novel, some people go so far as to claim it's not even synthesizing anything, but just acting as a search engine and returning something run through a filter and "proving" it by "searching" for their own art and "finding" it.

And those are blatant lies.

The thing is, the reason AI is such a breakthrough - and the reason we memed with it so hard when DALL-E Mini and DALL-E 2 first dropped - is because it CAN create novel output. Because it CAN visualize the absurd ideas that no one has ever posted to the internet before. In fact, it would be a bigger breakthrough in computer science if we DID come up with an automatic collage machine - something that knows where to cut out a part of one image and paste it onto another, then smooth out the lighting and colors to make them fairly consistent, to make it look like what we would recognize as an image we're asking for? That would make the denoising algorithm on steroids that a diffusion model is look like child's play.

But, unlike the posts that claim that they're just acting as a collage maker at best and a search engine at worst, I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it (and stick a pin in this point, we'll come back to it later). I'm going to ask you to go to Simple Stable (or Craiyon, or the Karlo demo, if Google Colab feels too complicated for you - or if you like, do all of the above) and throw in a shitpost prompt or two. Ask for a velociraptor carousel pony ridden by a bunny. Ask for Godzilla fighting a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man. Ask for an oil painting of a capybara wearing an ornate princess gown. Shitpost with it like we did before these myths took hold.

Now take your favorite result(s) and reverse image search them. Did you get anything remotely similar to your generated image? Probably not!

So then, how did someone end up getting a near perfect recreation of their work? Was that just some kind of wacky, one-in-a-million coincidence?

Well - oh no, look at that, I asked it for a simplistic character drawing and it happened to me too, it just returned a drawing of mine that I never even uploaded, and it's the worst drawing I've done since the fifth grade even just to embarrass me! Oh no, what happened, did they change things right under my nose, has digital surveillance gotten even WORSE?? Look, see, here's the original on the left, compare it to the output on the right - scary!! They're training on the contents of your computer in real time now, aaaagh!!

Except, of course, for the fact that the entire paragraph above was a lie and I did this on purpose in a way no one could possibly recreate from a text prompt, even with a perfect description.

How?

See, some models have this nifty little function called img2img. It can be used for anything from guiding the composition of your final image with a roughly drawn layout, to turning a building into a dragon...to post-processing of a hand-drawn image, to blatantly fucking lying about how AI works.

I took 5 minutes out of my day to crudely draw a character. I uploaded the image to this post. I saved the post as a draft. I stuck the image URL in the init_image field in Simple Stable, cranked the init strength up to 0.8, cleared all text prompts, and ran it. It did exactly what I told it to and tried to lightly refine the image I gave it.

If you see someone claiming that an AI stole their image with this kind of "proof", and the image they're comparing is not ITSELF a parody of an extremely well-known piece such as the Mona Lisa, or just so extremely generic that the level of similarity could be a coincidence (you/your favorite artist do/es not own the rule of thirds or basic fantasy creatures, just to name one family of example I've seen), this is what happened.

So from here you must realize that it is deeply insidious that posts that make these claims usually imply or even outright state that you should NOT try to recreate this but instead just take their word for it, stressing ~DON'T FEED THE MACHINE~. It's always some claim about "ohhh, the more you use them, the more they learn, I made a SACRIFICE so you don't have to" - but txt2img functions can't use your interaction to learn jack shit. There's no new information in a text prompt for them TO learn. Most img2img models can't learn from your input either, for that matter! I still recommend being careful about corporate img2img toys - we know that Facebook, for instance, is happy to try and beef up facial recognition for the WORST possible reasons - but if you're worried about your privacy and data harvesting, any given txt2img model is one of the least worrying things on the internet today.

So do be careful with your privacy online, and PLEASE use your very understandable knee-jerk horror response to how much extremely personal content can be found in training databases as a call to DEMAND better privacy laws ("do not track" should not be just for show ffs) and compliance with security protocols in fields that deal with very private information (COMMON CRAWL DOESN'T GO FAR OUT OF ITS WAY, IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GET ANY MEDICAL IMAGES THE PATIENTS DIDN'T SHARE THEMSELVES HOLY SHIT, SOME HOSPITAL WORKERS AND/OR MEDICAL COMMUNICATIONS DEVELOPERS BETTER BE GETTING FIRED AND/OR SUED) - but don't just believe a convenient and easy-to-disprove lie because it aligns with that feeling.

[wonderwithin-us]

The dream you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

Guess who got their phone broken 💗 but it's alright, it's all ok now & I noted down all I did in the past 3 days. My exams were a little bad, really bad to be completely honest, but it's alright, it was my first time giving exams this semester and I learnt what I need to do.

11th of July, 2023 💕

100 days of productivity — day 5, week 1

Economic exam preparation ~ I was so confused, there were so many concepts I'd missed because of my sickness but I tried YouTube and notes online. Procrastination really did get the best of me. I need to lessen my use of insta, seriously, I think Tumblr is more safe in that regard.

Microeconomics — Introduction & Consumer's Equilibrium

Statistics — Introduction & Organisation of Data

I need to work on my graphs, practice more and overall concepts of microeconomics. Also, clear up my concepts on stats. It's easy, but revision is needed.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

12th of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 6, week 1

Economics exam, yikes. Next exam was Psych the next day, so I was really nervous because I wanted to score well in it! ❣️

However.

Procrastination got to me, again. I studied for a while then thought it was too easy and I could do it at night, which, evidently, I couldn't.

I think rather than seeing easy topics as something to skip studying or take easy, I should put more effort in them so I can get them perfect and let it pay back to me.

What is Psychology? & Methods of Enquiry

I need to work on my basic concepts, esp in ch-2, and notes. Visual learning works best for me, and making my own notes is essential to my learning 📖

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

13th of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 7, week 1

Dear god, I think my psych exam was the most terrible. Which hurt me the most.

I really did lose hope after this. Not only did my incredibly unclear concepts and no notes not help, but the exam was extremely tough, the questions were really vague and I didn't understand them, and the worst of all, I literally forgot I had a whole section to do as objective even after rechecking. I lost 5 marks from that, maybe more.

That really hurt.

Tomm was English exam! I had seen what had happened in the last papers, so I really worked hard here.

I mostly focused on literature, since the creative writing formats were mostly very easy and took less than an hour.

Chapters with details are hard!

Anyways, I was really anxious until the end, and kept a few detailed chapters to the morning after to revise.

I really need to work on studying chapters I've missed before the exams come. It was so messy and frustrating trying to understand all these chapters with online notes and summaries, especially when the chapters are so open ended and the teacher is so strict with answers 💌

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

14 of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 8, week 2

WAR!!! IS!!! OVER!!!!

Final exam day, I was nervous but it was actually quite alright!

I absolutely need to work on my speed, though.

Also, I almost always exceeded the word limit in answers. So, I need to practice my creative writing more, not just in my head, but actually on paper, and be more perfectionist in my answers in literature.

I went out with my big brother to eat street food and it was all very lovely 🍝

I also wrote a lot of poetry, which I'm really quite proud of. I also received some really good news! 💕

New week! The first week was really, really overwhelming, and I don't want my future self to end up like that again. It was exhausting and hurtful and I want to get better.

In the end, I've got a lot of stuff to work with and I'm really proud of my self to survive all this! ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* I hope nothing but peace upon my future.

[ouroboros-hideout]

WIP WHENEVER

@chevvy-yates tagged me for this. Thank you a lot 💚

This will be a huge wall of text aswell, since I am not really of the „visual“ side of creating atm.

Writing // Worldbuilding

I'm still writing the next two chapters for my fanfiction, but would rather briefly introduce my other OCs here (yes, Aon isn´t the only one by now). Maybe I can create all of them ingame at some point, depending on how stupid I´ll act with modding etc. when I start. Since things can change quickly in the story while I'm writing, I wouldn't say that everything is 100% set in stone, a lot of it isn't finished yet. But it's a good base. Most of them appear in my „Like Napalm“ fic. Some of them will be in my main GARMR fic aswell. So prepare for half backed character data entries and some rambling.

Gan

Gan Tomobataar, or Iron as he is usually called, is a mysterious man. Many stories surround the Mongolian giant and it always depends on who asks him whether he affirms or denies these tales. It is therefore uncertain which of them are true or fictional and he really enjoys keeping his past in the dark. He is said to have served in an elite military unit. The metal teeth that earned him his iconic nickname are said to have been lost in numerous boxing matches as he tried to turn pro to make a better life for himself and his family, and he is allegedly a descendant of Ginghis Khan (which is probably one of his favorite rumors). One can assume that his closest confidants have more clarity, but none of them would dare say a word about it. Undeniably true is that he has two brothers, of whom he is the second-born. Together with them, he leads one of the largest nomadic clans in eastern Europe and Asia. The Tomobataar nomads are divided into three large families, each led by one of the three brothers. Iron's family stays mainly in Mongolia and Russia, but he would also travel to more distant parts of the Soviet Union for profitable contracts. He doesn't have many vices, but one of them is definitely greed.

By sheer luck, at least that's what he claimed, he picked up Aon on the street when she was trying to flee Moscow on her own. He promised to protect her from the Secret Police and other bounty hunters if she proved to be a useful member of his clan. However, his methods for testing her worth would put the young woman to the test.

Yakov

Yakov always had problems finding his place in the world. He grew up in St. Petersburg, studying or an education other than working in his father's car repair shop were never an option financially, but the young man always yearned for something greater than being stuck in the alleys and streets of his childhood. He decided to join the military when he was old enough, but was discharged immediately after basic training for insubordination and general unsuitability. What remained for him was to work in his father's garage until he died after a long illness. Yakov tried to keep the store running on his own for a while, but he found it difficult to do good business without proper management and eventually had to sell the store. This was followed by a relatively dark period. He saw himself as a failure, was unable to find a new job and drank away the money he had received for the workshop in the bars in his neighborhood. One evening, a man came into his local pub. His car had broken down outside, he wouldn't get any further that night and kept him company for a few hours. The next day, Yakov repaired his car for the man called Gan and left the town with him to live with the Tomobataar nomads.

Gregori

Gregori's mother, a singer from New York, came to the Russian capital for a gig and met a military officer there. The two got together and the result was little Greg. Shortly afterwards, however, the couple fell apart and she took her son back to America, where he spent most of his childhood and youth being raised by babysitters and nannies, while the singer preferred to spend her time on tour or in the recording studio. Gregori at least inherited much of her creativity, starting to make music himself at an early age and drawing a lot. Just what small children do when they need to keep themselves busy.

When he was 16 years old, his mother died of an overdose. As she never bothered to write down a testament or anything similar, her entire fortune goes to her greedy manager, who leaves Gregori penniless.

The boy, who has spent his whole life sheltered without much contact with the outside world, is left with nothing and doesn't know exactly what to do. So he scrapes together the last of his money and buys a ticket to Moscow, where he tries to find his father, but in vain. He quickly goes off the rails, barely speaks a word of Russian, is recruited by a gang and gets exploited. An arms deal with a group of nomads goes wrong, a shootout ensues and Gegori is the only one left of the gang because he hides instead of fighting. Yakov, who was on the other side of the deal, takes pity on him and eventually takes him to his new family where he tries to find his place within the group.

Anna

Anna grew up with the Tomobataar nomads from an early age. Her parents were killed in a botched mission when she was just four years old. Iron, who in a way blamed himself for this, took on a guardianship for her and looked after the little girl like the apple of his eye. As the years passed and Anna grew older, the relationship between her and her foster father changed. He became increasingly demanding, punished misbehavior and put the still young girl under pressure. Aon, who had already earned her place in the clan by this time, could not tolerate this behavior as she herself had grown up under similar circumstances. No one else in the clan interfered with Iron's "parenting methods", which is why she ended up doing it. Anna and Aon then became inseparable and she naturally followed her later when they left the clan along with many others.

Anatoly

Anatoly, or Tolik as Aon calls him, belongs to the Russian working class in Moscow and cannot claim to own much. As a boy, he dreamed of studying mechanical engineering in order to open his own workshop or business. A dream that his father would never have been able to afford in this life. So after school, Tolik started working at his father's scrap yard on the outskirts of Moscow, not an easy job. He regularly drives into the city to pick up old components and scrap metal from SovOil and other big corporations, where he meets Alyona one day. The two strike up a conversation, exchange banter and hit it off straight away, which over time develops into a teenage love story. Aon spends a lot of time with him at the scrapyard, where she can test and improve her skills on old machines and has a place to hide from her hated stepfather. He, in return, benefits from the knowledge she brings with her from university, and his dream of building his own big thing soon becomes her dream too. Together they consider leaving the city at some point and make plans for the future

unnamed_chromed_up_terrifying_SovOil_Secret_Police_agent

Yea well, I don't know yet how to call him. After Aon has fled Moscow, the officers of the normal police force give up the search for her, as it theoretically no longer falls within their area of responsibility. However, since Kristof claims that Aon stole the data he wanted to sell to Petrochem, SovOil is naturally very interested in finding her and the data chip. So they send a Secret Police agent after her, who, together with a small unit, tries to track her down. He actually already had a kind of "Easter Egg" appearance in my other AU. He would have been the agent sitting next to Kurt if he hadn't switched the cards on the table. Funny how differently things can go. Anyway, he doesn't really have much of a backstory other than he used to work for the KGB and is a bloodthirsty hound dog who chases Aon halfway across the country (spoiler: and finds her). If I were to compare him to another character from movies etc, he would probably have the closest vibe to Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds. The character was very well written, even though I would probably make my namesless_pig a bit younger than him. But since he'll be pumped full of cyberware anyway, it probably doesn't matter much in the end. It's just supposed to be a fucking horrible character and Aon's nightmare.

Robert Walker

Robert is one of the key-characters in my main fanfiction. I haven't thought about him in depth yet, but the general concept is there. He's a British journalist and photographer who wanted to go high by exposing wrongdoings in society. For him, there is nothing more exciting than achieving "fame and notoriety" as a whistleblower. He's not necessarily stupid or doesn't know what he's doing, he's just unlucky. He gets into trouble with the wrong people and upsets the even worse ones, which is why he has to flee the UK and ends up in NC. There he tries to start over and stay out of trouble. However, he soon develops an "unhealthy" obsession with Kurt Hansen. He is incredibly fascinated by him and spends every free minute in Dogtown so that he can perhaps take a photo (or two, or ten) of his idol. At some point, he goes so far as to seek direct contact and wants to interview him. Kurt is flattered at first, but has little desire to reveal information about himself in some strange blog or gossip magazine. But that didn't stop Robert from continuing to stalk him and even trying to become a member of Barghest. At some point, Hansen got too pissed off and gave him the choice of leaving Dogtown or catching a bullet. Robbie chose the second option. After all, he hadn't forbid him to camp outside the gates of Dogtown, had he?

Technically I could tell something about Aon´s mom and her stepfather too, but I don´t have that much yet. So will keep em for the next WIP together with the other OCs for my main fic. There will be three more. A general, a corpo guy and the last is still up for discussion with my brain. Considering somekind of warlord or a netrunner.

Art

I tried to do something different than a full rendered piece of artwork. I am not yet confinced that I like it. I like, that it was finished really fast lmao but...I dunno.

Aon and Tolik - 2055

But happy that Aon is actually recognizable in the end. During the process she looked so much like So Mi at a point that my brain went: WHO ARE YOU GIRL. But I like the long hair. Will give it back to her in her 2078+ appearance. Not exactly like this, but longer than her normal style.

Not quite sure about Anatoly tho. I mean, he looks like this in my head, but I will reconsidere if he will get some cyberarms. He is poor like a mouse, so probably can´t afford expensive tech like this, but he feels kind of „empty“ without anything.

Congrats and huge thanks if you read this far. Brainrot stronk!

Tagging some ppl aswell. Everyone else is invited too to show off some awesome stuff ofc, no pressure as always!

@blackrevell @olath124 @cyberholic77 @cybervesna @pinkyjulien @theviridianbunny @therealnightcity @wanderingaldecaldo @miss--river @barghestapologist @kdval @streetkid-named-desire @aggravateddurian @androgymess

[enigmaticxbee]

X-Files Solve Rate

Although I tend to think of X-Files episodes and cases as open-ended - the Flukeman surviving somehow in the sewer, perhaps to return one day… - perhaps Mulder and Scully solved more cases than I give them credit for. In Tooms Scully tells Skinner that their case solution rate of 75% is above the bureau standard - and according to my calculations their solve rate really was 75% at that point in season 1! Of course it didn’t stay that high, and the more mytharc cases the worse their rate becomes since those episodes often end with an empty warehouse, no alien fetus, and their informant dead on a bridge. Of course it depends on how you’re counting a “solve” - I usually went based on whether they could write a report to Skinner that wasn’t just a giant shrug emoji - but I do wonder how often they actually got any kind of conviction…

Season 1: 71% - off to a great start! Of course they shut down the X-Files anyways…

Season 2: 64% - not as good, but there were a lot more mytharc episodes, including a major unresolved abduction arc.

Season 3: 54% - not great, but there were several two-part mytharc episodes which mostly go unsolved, as well as several MOTW cases like Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ which are classically unresolved.

Season 4: 58% - I assume Skinner’s reaction at the end of El Mundo Gira applies to all their post case meetings, whether solved or not

Season 5: 45% - even worse! Of course I’m unfairly including the two episodes set pre-X-Files in Mulder and Scully’s solve rate. But uhh, there’s not much argument against shutting down the X-Files in this data (sorry 🙈)

Season 6: 68% - actually if you look at the second half of the season when they get the X-Files back they’re at 80%!

Season 7: 73% - their best season solve rate since season 1 - think they’re working extra hard to prove that getting romantically involved won’t affect their work? Happy agents make successful agents!

Season 8: 62% - Scully and Doggett actually do pretty well with the MOTW cases in the first half of the season, but the mytharc-heavy second half brings down their average.

Season 9: 84% - with Scully’s help Doggett and Reyes do surprisingly well. Although I miss the classic who knows what really happened endings of the early seasons.

Seasons 10 and 11: 67 and 75% - even more starkly continuing the trend of resolved MOTW cases and unsatisfying conclusions to the mytharc episodes.

[accessibleaesthetics]

Image-to-Text AI

I wanted to discuss image-to-text AI, what it's good at, what limitations it has, and how you can use it to help make accessibility easier.

How It Works

To demonstrate how this works, I'm going to use the image from this post.

This photo shows a sleeping kitten laying on desk beside a computer, in between the keyboard and the mouse. There is also a corner of a frame of some sort in the upper right corner of the image. Text displays in the center of the image and reads: my coworker got her new kitten to work and the little nugget was just too tuckered out from being adorable all day.

Image-To-Text AI

Image-to-text AI is basically the exact reverse of the famous (or infamous, depending who you ask) text-to-image AI that has taken the world by storm since early 2021. There are a ton of websites for this, some free, many not. For simplicity, I chose to use the image-to-text feature built into Microsoft Word.

When I paste an image into a Word document, the program automatically generates alt text for it using Microsoft's AI. You can view this alt text in the Alt Text panel when editing the document. It will add "Description automatically generated" to the end of the alt text for transparency though, so if you want to keep the alt text it made, make sure to delete that. You can also edit the alt text directly to make it more accurate.

Microsoft's AI came up with "A kitten sleeping on a desk text to a computer mouse." Honestly, not a bad description at all, except it's missing one important thing: the text overlaying the image. This is because Microsoft's image-to-text AI, like many AI of this kind, does not have the ability to transcribe text directly from the image. However, there is a technology that can.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that dates back to the 1970s, possibly earlier depending on how you define it. While it's application and accuracy have grown extensively since then, the core function remains the same: recognizing text in an image and transcribing it into a true text format.

I took the photo from the previous section and put it into a Free Online OCR Image To Text Converter.

It recognized there was text on the image and transcribed it exactly. Very useful, but it doesn't give us any info about the actual image outside of that.

Limitations

Now, the examples I used above were kind of an ideal situation. AI is not as good with more complex images. For example, I tried putting in a screenshot of a tweet from nym™ (@aretteepls) with a photo of The Sphere at the Venetian Resort in Los Vegas. It is currently displaying a image of SpongeBob's face that fills the entire globe and glows very brightly, turning the night sky's clouds a tinge of yellow. Above the photo, the actual tweet says: The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob.

Microsoft's image-to-text AI came up with "A screenshot of a phone." Defintely much less impressive than our first example, but AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. Things like "screenshot of a phone" or "screenshot of a computer" are not uncommon when AI recognizes that you're giving it a screenshot of something on a screen, but can't make heads or tails of what's in it beyond that. And once again, it has no OCR capabilities, so none of the text on the image is transcribed.

But even OCR isn't infallible. The output for this image from that same website I used earlier would be:

nym ,M @aretteepls The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob

The trademark symbol is kind of faint on the screenshot, so the OCR struggled with making that out, transcribing it as "comma M" instead. The less clear the text is visually, the less accurate the OCR output is going to be.

What Do We Do With This?

AI is best when used in conjunction with human aid, and image-to-text AI is non exception. I think the best way forward with this technology is to use generated descriptions as a starting point, not a replacement for human-written ones. And of course, we need to be careful what programs you use to generate the descriptions, especially with art. Programs like Chat GPT have image-to-text functions, but there is no guarantee that an image you upload to it for that purpose will not be used to train it's text-to-image AI as well.

Unfortunately, the more ethically-sourced a training data base for AI is, the more limited it will be compared to it's less-ethically sourced counterparts.

But there are legal precedents being put in place around this, and many text-to-image AI programs now have explicit and detailed terms of service for what you can and can't do with its output, as well as what you should be uploading as input.

So, for the time being, be very cautious with how you use this technology especially when describing others' art. And even with your own art, read through terms and conditions before uploading your work to a website. I think the Microsoft Word one is fairly safe though.

I also think it would be great if someone developed a image-to-text AI that could incorporate OCR to make the end result more informative.

[fardreamer]

SENGEN HEADCANONS

note: there are spicy headcanons in this :)!

general:

❤️ senku sometimes is messy when he starts tinkering and experimenting. gen often sneaks in behind him and puts things away as senku keeps moving around.

❤️ as stated in another post of mine, senku is an aggressive big spoon cuddler with gen. once he gets settled and is comfortable, he’s not moving. gen pretends to hate it but he does love it.

❤️ gen is phenomenal at back massages.

❤️ senku, when cuddling, prefers to lay atop gen. gen loves it because it means he gets to kiss senku a little easier, play with his hair, and tell him how cute he is.

love languages:

*note: i make a distinction here between how they prefer to receive love, and how they prefer to give love. i know not everyone perceives love languages that way.

🌼 gen, as anyone can imagine, loves telling senku how intelligent and beautiful he is. he saves the sweeter compliments for when they’re alone, but will proudly proclaim how much he loves senku (especially if it’s to embarrass him). his second is physical touch, followed by quality time. he actually prefers physical touch to receive love.

🌼 senku, on the other hand, is strongly split between acts of service and physical touch to give love, which means gen and senku unintentionally spend their days with passing pats to the back, stray kisses, standing as near to one another as they can, etc. that is how he prefers to give love. he claims he has no preference on how he receives love, but gen can tell that he enjoys spending time together, even if it’s just gen napping near him while senku works.

🌼 being that love languages are somewhat like data points, which clear parameters for what constitutes each one, senku was surprisingly on board with love languages and makes a point of meeting his “goals” of giving and receiving love each day. the power of science.

emotional:

❤️‍🩹 as smooth and well put together gen can be, he does need more consistent attention than senku realized. in the beginning of their relationship, there were plenty of fights and miscommunications because gen felt unloved or ignored, and senku was wrapped up in whatever new goal he had in mind.

❤️‍🩹 similarly, senku felt some tension whenever gen chose to spend time with others. not that he was particularly jealous, only in that he hadn’t realized how much he’d come to enjoy having gen by his side, even for mundane tasks.

❤️‍🩹 both are fierce secret keepers. gen was the first to talk, and confided in senku some of his biggest fears. that opened the door for senku to do the same, as sharing his vulnerabilities do not come easily to him whatsoever.

spicy:

⭐️ gen, initially, thought that he would be a more dominant top with senku and assumed that his lack of experience would mean he needed a lot of guidance. turns out, senku needed guidance in being dominant and topping, because he easily fell into that headspace.

⭐️ both of them are switches. just depends on the day. gen prefers bottoming and senku prefers topping.

⭐️ senku is a service top, through and through. gen tries to get him to be a little more selfish but it rarely works.

⭐️ gen loves the spectacle and drama of cute lingerie and visual aids. senku didn’t understand it until gen started wearing his favorites (particularly, a cat costume).

⭐️ while he may never actually verbally admit this, senku’s goal during sex is to make sure gen cums twice. if he doesn’t, he feels a bit like a failure, despite gen’s satisfaction.

⭐️ gen adores edging and extended foreplay. senku loves it the most when gen is submissive and bottoming.

[allthe-everything]

to all my babes out there trying to get a job, got some tips for y'all. i'm updating my resume and realised that what i do might help some people, and not everyone knows about ATS parsing. gonna be long, will add a tldr at the end

so, first things, instead of MS office, i use libreOffice as my document creator/word processor. stop giving microsoft your money - libreOffice is free and open source, and it's amazing. go get it. saves you money too and god knows we need that. but, i'm sure you can do this in publisher too, i just don't know all the buttons

onto techniques: instead of creating my resume in libreOffice's equivalent of word, i use the equivalent of microsoft's publisher - the thing meant for you to make cards and flyers and whatnot. essentially you just pick a size document, and get to throw things (pictures, text boxes, charts, whatever) onto the page where you want them. since it's geared more towards artsy things, it's a lot more flexible with formatting than word (moving images in word? just don't).

essentially, every snippet of information i put on my resume is one text box. each job with its description, each project i've worked on, etc gets its own text box. this is great in a couple ways: it means that if you want to change the formatting of your resume, you can just move around text boxes instead of fucking around with copy/paste all day. the second thing is that when a machine tries to read your resume, internally it'll read that pdf and see blocks of related information that's more precise than giant paragraphs you'd get in word. make your section titles their own text boxes (like experience, education, skills, etc) so they don't get lumped in with the real info.

i'm not gonna talk about "resume words" or "clean formatting" bc tbh i'm bad at that and i think recruiters are dumb sometimes for wanting "no templates, but only format it this one particular way". but get all your info there, arrange it how you see fit, and THEN. then we get sneaky.

in libreOffice, you can name and add descriptions to text boxes. "what!" i hear you say. "that's so weird why would anyone do that!". and i say "well, if a human is reading your resume, it doesn't matter what the text box thinks it is. but it's a machine reading your resume! you want to speak the machine's language." the name is less important than the description, in my opinion, but you can name the boxes too. what you're gonna do is select a text box, click on "format" at the top bar, then "description". and you're gonna add in the alt text box what this text box is. if it's a list of skills, write "skills". if it's education, write "education". this info won't show up visually to a human reading the doc, but it helps machines categorise the data, just a little bit better. in the description part of this, you can also try adding the key words from the job description so the machine sees them but a human really can't find it unless they really look. this isn't something i've been able to test thoroughly, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

i'm still working out all the kinks myself, and picking apart what the ATS does in terms of parsing your resume, but when i started doing this my resume was better parsed whenever i applied to jobs. which, bonus, less retyping your resume into the bullshit job app.

tldr; fuck microsoft, use libre office instead. use libre office's drawings app or ms office's publisher app for ease of use. in libre office, click text box, go to format -> description and add a description of what the text box contains. test and retest your resume in an ATS parser online to make sure the machine reads your resume correctly.

i wish this wasn't how things are, but since we're here might as well figure out hacks. if anyone else has info to add, please please do. it's rough out here.

[baronfulmen]

Why you should clear your brain’s cache and cookies

A Rant About Shrooms, AI Art, Trauma, and Appreciating Life

Hey look at this image.  You shouldn’t trust evolutionary psychology people because it’s often Just So Stories people make up, but that doesn’t mean we should throw out the baby with the bath water so let’s talk about the evolutionary importance of ✨PATTERN RECOGNITION ✨

Okay so the tiger in the picture above is trying to hide so it can eat us, and we’re trying to see it so we can avoid being eaten.  Great.  Cool.  That means there’s a VERY important part of our brains that has evolved to look at noisy images and play “find the tiger”.  (It works for non-visual stuff too, we’ll get to that.)

This is also how AI-generated art works, basically.  You give a computer some random static and then say “somewhere in this image is [insert prompt], find it” and it tries very hard to do so, like when you point out shapes in clouds to someone.

Our brains work via committee, so the part that’s doing that kind of pattern recognition and visual processing isn’t really any smarter than something like Google Deep Dream which you can hand a picture of some dude and say “FIND THE DOGS” and it’ll give you this:

People have compared images like the one above to being on shrooms and, having now taken shrooms for the first time I can say I get the comparison.  What’s important, though, is WHY this seems to be the case.  So far as I can tell (I’ll say this disclaimer once, I am some random dude on Tumblr and this is an anecdote, not scientific data - your experiences and brain chemistry may vary, do your research, I am not endorsing anything illegal, etc.) what happens on shrooms isn’t you being high, in the traditional sense.

Some drugs interfere with your perception and processing of the world.  That’s what I was expecting, and for a moment it’s what I thought I was getting.  But instead, I think what the shrooms did was delete my brain’s config file.

So now you’ve lost all the built up definitions and stored patterns, and you look at the walls and your brain no longer knows if there’s something important in all the detail.  Is there a tiger hiding in there?  WHO KNOWS!  And it takes all those little swirls and textures in the plaster or paint and starts over-processing all of it looking for patterns.  This means you don’t so much “come down” from being high, but finish re-calibrating.  At some point your brain is all, “Hey I’ve determined that’s just a normal texture for the ceiling to have, I’m not going to look that closely anymore”.

Okay but what does that have to do with trauma and appreciating life?

So glad you asked, hypothetical reader.

As I mentioned above, it’s not just visual stuff that we look for patterns in.  From an evolutionary standpoint it’s super valuable to be able to say “hey I ate that plant and then got sick, those are probably related and I shouldn’t eat that anymore”.  But there’s two big problems with that.  The first is that as with the visual processing that one part of your brain on its own isn’t smart.  It’s an algorithm, not an entire brain, so it fucks up sometimes.

I know a guy that couldn’t check his mail, because he’d been in really bad debt for a while and the fear of losing his home and the hounding by debt collectors  traumatized him so badly that his brain said “Man every time we look at the stuff that comes in the mail we get SO UPSET!  Better avoid looking at mail!” which meant when someone put envelopes down on top of the groceries (meaning he’d have to pick up what might be bills to get to the food) he found himself thinking “maybe I should just order pizza” even though he knew how stupid that was.  Trauma is a bitch, y’all.

The other thing is that sometimes the pattern was valid but is simply no longer useful.  The context has changed, and now it’s getting in the way rather than helping... but your brain doesn’t have a reset button.  Well, not a built-in one... but turns out this shit does the trick:

This is a PB&J&M sandwich I ate yesterday.  Ignore the chipped plate.  It made me feel kinda queasy all day, and at first I was disappointed.  I felt a little floaty and wobbly and things did start to look a little interesting, and I was having a nice time, but it wasn’t the mind-blowing experience I’d been hoping for.  And then the shrooms finished deleting all my stored patterns.

You know that stoner thing where they’re like “dude this cat is, like, so soft.  Why can’t we all just love each other and pet cats?” and you roll your eyes at them?  Yeah, well, the thing to know is that’s not them being stoned, that’s them seeing the world with a fresh perspective and realizing that, yeah, cats ARE soft and we don’t appreciate that enough and man why CAN’T we just relax and love each other?

In other words, it’s not distorting your perception - it’s resetting it.  You get to experience that wonder and joy of seeing things for the first time, and it’s lovely.  There are so many details that your brain files away as unimportant - it’s busy checking for tigers, who cares about appreciating the grass?  I had a great talk with my daughter (side disclaimer, she’s an adult and I was totally lucid by then and I cleared it with my designated babysitter first) and got to really see her as an adult for the first time.  Kids grow up a little at a time and it’s wild to be able to wipe out the “yeah, yeah, that’s your kid, you know what they look like” thing and SEE them, see how they’ve grown and what they really look like as a whole adult person.

I also realized I wasn’t being fair with her.  She’s had issues I won’t go into here, she’s done some dangerous or irresponsible shit like most kids have and I was still filled with parental anxiety about that and was viewing her through that filter.  What is she up to?  Is she acting squirrely?  She hasn’t been home for a few days and now she’s all manic, is she safe?  Is she fucking up?  Am I fucking up by letting her fuck up?

And with that filter erased, I could see... she’s a good kid.  She’s manic because she has ADHD and decided she doesn’t want to take meds.  She has some issues, but she’s an adult now and those aren’t my business anymore; those are now her adult issues that she can work on in her own time and her own way.  I can finally look at her as... not a peer, she’s still my kid, but as a complete adult person that I don’t need to fix and can just love and support.

It’s like Marie Kondo came into my brain and was like “hey does this pattern you’re viewing everything through spark joy?  No?  Okay let’s thank it for its service and send it on its way.”

And this is why people use shrooms to treat trauma.  I’m not saying it’s a magic cure-all, I’m not saying that it will work for everyone, but... man it’s pretty great to clear things out.  That sense of wonder and appreciation is already fading, but it’s not that the shrooms are wearing off - the wipe was an event not a condition - it’s just the normal process of my brain filing things away as “not a tiger” and ignoring them again.

It’s like those power washing videos.  You scour off the accumulated grime, and then the grime starts to build up again but at least you get it nice and clean for now and were reminded that, hey, that can look pretty nice.  I can see why people say not to do them too often, as wonderful as my experience was there just wouldn’t be a point in doing it again right away.  Maybe in a few months, who knows.

Final thoughts and warnings

I was queasy the whole day, longer than most people seem to experience.  It didn’t bother me much, I never felt like I was in danger of throwing up although I know people who have.  If you’re worried about it there are ways around that, it’s caused by the actual mushrooms rather than the active chemicals so you can (supposedly) make a sort of tea and strain out the actual mushroom bits. 

I tried watching some of those trippy videos, and that was a mistake.  There was too much visual stimulation and the disconnect of “wait it looks like we’re flying through a psychedelic landscape of fractals but it feels like we’re just sitting in a chair” made me feel antsy and uncomfortable.  Turns out it’s better to just look at something fairly boring and let your brain over-analyze it.

Have a babysitter.  My wonderful supportive wife was mine, and I ended up not needing one but frankly that might be my own strange brain.  I’ve always had a strong separation between the main “thinking” part of my brain and the rest, so there wasn’t really any chance I would mistake my altered state for normal life.  Better safe than sorry though, especially at first.

Do your research.  Don’t go for the highest dose you can in search of some crazy trip - the best thing is the mental refresh, not seeing the walls move.  I took 3.5g, just for reference.

Plan for it to take up your whole day AND to be kinda tired the day after.  Think of it like taking a sick day, you’re going to want to spend most of the time just laying back and dozing on the couch.

Be in a good mood, and a place that makes you feel good.  Lots of people suggest being out in nature, I can imagine that would be really nice.

Be extremely cautious when combining shrooms with other things.  Don’t do it on purpose - it’s not needed, I promise - and do your research if you’re on anti depressants because while it seems mostly safe there’s theoretically a chance of having a bad interaction like serotonin syndrome.  My own research has implied that’s probably not an actual concern but I’m just some guy on Tumblr and you shouldn’t trust me.

Don’t use drugs if you’re under 20, don’t do illegal stuff, don’t blame me if you fuck yourself up.  I will not under any circumstances assist anyone in obtaining shrooms.  All I’ll say is they’re legal in some places and if you don’t live in one of those places you’re on your own.  While they do grow naturally in some places, so do mushrooms that will fucking kill you - and it can be hard to tell the difference.  Don’t eat random mushrooms, ever.