#also shitload of AI

[bipidin]

For all that I love android, fuck samsung and UI7

[bmpmp3]

oh god genbu and aiko are going to be locked in some kind of purgatory dimension forever

[venacoeurva]

If Tumblr DOES end up scraping our data for training it's irritating but at this point I'm just so tired of this shit I almost can't bring myself to care, really, which isn't helpful but what can I fucking do. I rely on social media to survive, and we keep having to move or the risk of having to move. Other sites will do it, other sites did it, and even if Tumblr decides not to sell data to midjourney and such or this is some advanced hearsay, scrapers would access our blogs anyway as they do any other site, so it feels kind of just... moot regarding training until actual regulation and legal precedents are set in place?

That being said, I wonder if it will fall through if it hasn't already with the implosion of Matt being himself and people lawyering up against him/Tumblr, and the scraping plans and data selling could very likely be a data privacy violation in at least some places

[gallusrostromegalus]

Random question, could you give some ideas on Irish names your family may have in the 1950-60s? I got a character with an Irish grandpa with 9 brothers and sisters (3 brothers and 6 sisters) and I only got the oldest sister name (soairse) and his name (Caine). I guess I could just name the rest some form of jack and Margret since those seem to be popular, but I wanted to see if there were some “interesting” names you found in your family tree that maybe one of the siblings got named after some ancestor?

Firstly for the sake of clarity: I'm American, not Irish. All of my ancestors for the last 4-5 generations have lived here, and while I like learning about the language/music/culture, I am absolutely not an expert. I HIGHLY recommend getting a sensitivity reader, I'm sure someone in the comments can wave at you if they're willing to take on the job.

Second, Triple-check the spelling, pronunciation, meaning and provenance of any names you do choose, and ABSOLUTELY DO NOT TRUST ANY BABY NAME WEBSITES, they're basically all AI slop at best. The best written-down lists and meanings are actually on Wikipedia.

Third: If you want to learn more Irish names, you can look up the names of like, any Irish musician or artist. I think spotify still has Genre Playlists, if you look up "Irish Folk" you'll get a shitload of names of Real Irish people- and hey, if Hirohiko Akari can name all his characters after 80's pop bands, you can make a subtle ref to modern musicians. Also you'll get a bunch of fun music! --- So while I was writing this, I somewhat departed from the intent of this response, and am putting the last point under a cut because the post got long. And weird.

So there is a thing in Irish-american families, and I think it's true in the British isles still where there are "Family Names", where the same set of first names is recycled over and over and over across generations. My dad's family has exactly three male names that they rotate through over the generations: Roy, Emmet and Jack*. In that order, where the son takes the father's first name as his middle name. My great-grandfather was Roy Jack Surname, my grandfather was Emmet Roy Surname, and my dad is Jack Emmet. My sister and I were AFAB, so the names skipped us and my male cousin in my generation is now Roy Jack. In the event that there are more than three living men with the same surname in the family, that's when they start reaching for the Given Names Of In-Laws We Like and might introduce a new name into the lineup.

*Names changed for privacy above and hereafter, but you get the idea.

So if any of your characters are descendants of that grandpa? They may share a first or middle name with one of his siblings. in fact, they may share the SAME first and middle name with a living relative, and be called "Junior" or "Young Firstname" to distinguish them from the relative they were named after.

My mom's family is from England and has a similar tradition: any new girl born into that family gets a name that is based on the name of one of her living female relatives, usually by sharing the same first letter or syllable. Elanor after Eloise, Vivian after Virginia, and also Jenny after Virgnia via 'Ginny' and every variation of Margret ever, which there are way more of than you'd think.

I cannot recommend doing what they did with Male names though: Name literally every boy Bob* for like five generations, and distinguish individuals by middle name (Bob-Howard and Bob-Benjamin) surname (Bob-Jones and Bob-Bailey) or Honorific (Captain Bob, Dr. Bob, Bob Jr.) when yelling out the kitchen window.

Most families have to good sense to not have the same name repeated in a generation, even if it has a shitload of nicknames. A mother and daughter might both be Margrets (with different nicknames), but two sisters or cousins wouldn't be.

If you've got in-laws you like, but their surname didn't carry over to their kids, you can also just use their surname as a first name! "Regan" is a first and last name, as are Riley and Bailey. This works out in some cases but not in others:

I have a pretty rare surname- last time I checked, there's only 14 people with it worldwide. It's similar to two other VERY COMMON Irish Surnames, but spelled different and from a different region. It's also Very Definitely A Surname- nobody would see my surname alone and think its a firstname.

Since I don't want to bandy it about, we'll pretend that it's "Breathnach", which has a similar vibe.

My Iowa family is Enormous and all descended from my Great-Aunt Lilyanne, Emmet-Roy's sister. Being a good catholic girl, Lillyanne took her husband's surname when she married, and most of her descendants still have that surname, and none have Breathnach.

After the last of my grandfathers grandchildren were born my Iowa family was sad- all but one of Emmet-Roy's grandchildren was female, and my male cousin has his father's surname. Assuming that we would all marry and take our spouses names, the Iowa family despaired that that the Breathnach name would die out!

So one of my second cousins decided that she would Carry On The Family Name, by giving it to the son she was carrying as a Firstname.

Yeah.

Being "Breathnach Surname" is bad enough, but this was compounded by the fact that the Iowa family's surname is Thomas.

YEAH.

My poor cousin Beathnach Thomas, who always has to re-do his paperwork because NOBODY ever puts the names in the correct boxes, who had his first name printed on every jersey he ever had because the uniform place went "that can't be right!", who cant buy his own beer because he's had so many drivers licenses confiscated because liquor store owners and bartenders think his ID is a fake, who has to not only spell his name to everyone he meets, but explain it too.

Then I made it worse.

I ran into cousin Beathnach in Bozeman, Montana quite by accident a few years ago, and while catching up, I mentioned that I was married.

"You know, it's a real hassle, but I'm kind of glad I've got the name I do. I'd heard you sister changed her name, and now with you married- I'd be sad to think we were running out of Breathnachs, you know?" he laughed.

I had to explain.

I married the most wonderful man in the world, who has an extremely common first and last name. Which was kind of a problem, because he shares it with some truly rotten people that always come up during background checks and he has have to explain he's not THAT asshole. It also sounds like and is only a letter or two off a lot of other very common names so his mail is constantly sent awry.

My husband will shortly abandon his too-common-for-comfort surname and become the newest Breathnach, taking the total to 15 (the paperwork takes a while).

...So the name lives on through us anyway, and poor cousin Breathnach Thomas went through all that for no reason. He got very quiet, got up from the table and walked outside to the veranda of the restaurant we were in to stare into the picturesque scenery for a while.

"Well, it's not like people change their first names..." he sighed, when he returned to the table.

"...You know how my sister changed her name? She only changed her first name. She's still a Breathnach." I explained quietly.

I've never seen a man look so haunted.

"I know lots of people who've changed their first names, actually. Mostly for transgender reasons, but a bunch because they just didn't like the one they were given." I added, because if he's going to get his world turned over, it's best to flip it all at once.

His brow furrowed at the ponderous speed of a continental collision, approaching the idea with caution. "...I'll have to think about it."

It's been about a year, but since then, I'll get a text from him every few weeks, auditioning a new given name. I do my best to be fair- I give him the meanings of those names, how they're likely to be misconstrued (some are tolerable annoyances, some pose a safety risk), and if he'd be sharing that name with anybody notable or troublesome. The first few were clearly based on Breathnach, but he began to branch out, and the trend of names has indicated that the idea of Naming Himself is causing my cousin to examine himself, and come to some Realizations (TM).

I realize I have gotten completely off-topic from your actual ask, but I urge you to really get into the nuance of nomencalture, because a name can tell a fascinating story.

[bowelfly]

hi, i love your art a lot! do you have a particular go-to with pens/nibs?

thanks and yes! i have a shitload of nibs because i have poor impulse control when it comes to art supplies but my go-to nibs like 95% of the time are the tachikawa T77-2 soft mapping nib for outlines and tachikawa 99 regular mapping nib for crosshatching and almost everything else. lately i've been messing around with a zebra G-nib here and there as well. i have a lot of inks but i pretty much exclusively use speedball super black india ink for dipping. i'm also a big fan of the kuretake ai liner ultra fine brush pen for outlines, clothing folds, etc.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

What do people make of this? I've had a few complaints about AI

What came into my head was how similar things were said about hip hop when it was being formed - when DJs sampled middle 8s from funk and soul tunes, mainly James Brown songs, to create new tunes. They literally took his LPs and played the middle 8s back to back to form a new song. And people loved it.

My head has also gone to shitloads of electronic music where it's standard practice to use samples aka other people's music to create a new song. This stuff is genres unto itself.

And then KLF who blatantly ripped shitloads of songs and didn't pay royalties and got in trouble with the law regularly for copyright

Beyonce has done similar but for her own financial gain

Are these comparisons fair? Do they involve more creativity than the geezer creating AI images? Does greater creativity validate using other people's art?

@sky-daddy-hates-me

People, tell me what you think

[aihoshiino]

In Viewpoint B (thank you for that TL of it, by the way!), Ai says to Kyun that she was a liar even before becoming an idol. Ai also describes herself as a liar in her inner monologue in the flashback to when she was scouted in Chapter 8/Episode 1. Do you have any ideas about what lies/"lies" she could be referring to, or how her self-hatred generates this specific self-perception?

You're very welcome – glad you enjoyed! Viewpoint B is my favourite of the sidestories so I'm really happy I was able to make it more available to everyone else, too.

Talking about 'lies' in OnK is kind of messy sometimes, honestly! I think this is where a lot of the weirder/more off base interpretations of Ai in the fandom come from because people get tripped up by how the story uses the word and assume that it begins and ends with the very literal dictionary definition of like, "an intentionally false directly expressed statement". And while this isn't not part of what OnK means when it talks about lies, there's a lot more going on than that.

'Lies' in OnK are essentially an umbrella term being used to cover a whole shitload of thematic ground via abstraction. When Oshi no Ko talks about lies, it's talking about falsehoods, inauthenticity, the sanitized and manufactured versions of ourselves we wear for social approval, the idea of persona, celebrity culture, idol culture, parasocial relationships, abuse, purity culture, misogyny, art, fiction, mental illness, love, hate and all manner of other things.

"Holy shit, Claire" you may presumably say "That's a whole lot of things for just one word to cover???"

And I would say... yep it is! But that's why just one word is used — because the story has so much ground it wants to cover, some of it needs to be abstracted just to not exhaust the audience. To quote Dan Olson's weirdly relevant video on the NC's The Wall review:

"Abstraction is, counter-intuitively, really efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols bleed into each other. [...] Symbols shift and merge and break apart, juxtaposed and contrasted in order to create an impression of their interconnected relationship in a way that is difficult to do with mere words."

Accordingly, it's a little hard to express this idea without just vaguely waving my hands and going "oooo the vibes" but I think it is something you end up just kind of vibing with when you have spent enough time chewing on the characters and why they do and say the things they do.

In Ai's case, when she talks about 'lies', she is generally referring to the performance of a sanitized and idealized self by omitting the parts of herself that do not line up with her public image. I've previously noodled on this topic in an older post that I still stand by and this basic idea still forms the foundation of most of my Ai analysis: "Really, the biggest “lie” Ai is telling is the one people have demanded she tell: the illusion of an eternally pure and cheerful idol. But being an idol has become so forcibly entangled in Ai’s personhood at the expense of allowing her to just be a human that of course she thinks of herself as a liar for being unable to live up to that image."

To Ai, any failure to disclose her true, ugly self is a lie. Her performance of a self that other people find lovable is the thing she thinks of as lying. It's also worth noting that in both Viewpoint B and her flashback, she's describing her younger self in hindsight and attributing the label of 'liar' to her rather than this being something Ai called herself before meeting Saitou, who went on to completely rewire her brain by teaching her that this performance for social approval was lying and that it was okay and even necessary for her to do it.

I also think Ai's history of abuse at her mom's hands also contributed to this a great deal. I, uh, don't want to go too deep into this in my silly Oshi no Ko meta tag but speaking from experience: growing up with a parent like Ayumi, you get really good at lying. You get really good at saying "I'm sorry", "I forgive you" and whatever the fuck else they want to hear from you just to calm them down and make them happy. You get really, really good at performing the most perfectly sanitized version of yourself possible just to keep the peace. Knowing just how long and how violently Ai was being abused by Ayumi, it's really hard for me to not project that survival tactic onto her.

[lord-shitbox]

joy log 3/8 and 3/9

my books arrived :)

got a lot of my schoolwork for the week & term done…we're almost Through

spent a lot of time just chilling on my beanbag yesterday [migraine.] but it was a nice break from doing Stuff. took a nap too

more progress on my jais wip 😈😈

got another balatro achievement

got in on my coworkers' shits and giggles where they poke fun @ each other & went into actual howling laughing hysterics watching my coworker spill half the drink he was pouring

a few of my contributions to touchstarved server discussion got 5 whole emoji reactions . what the fuck. winning

been listening to a lot of bmth again which is awesome because they are my favorite band

cleaned th deepfryer fast as fuck today

made 2 bomb ass mochas for myself 💪

skated again for the first time in a few days !! I'm very comfortable just skating around & I can comfortably go pretty fast now, getting an even better sense of how tight to lace my skates in each place

oh also I fell over (went up one of those asphalt-sidewalk transitions with a shitload of bumps) while skating today & did a fun little backwards roll over one shoulder as I landed. very enjoyable took no damage 10/10 experience

felt much better today than I did a few days ago. taking the dishes out of my room helped

considering doing commissions again bc college is moneys. it feels…doable?? which is nice. might sit down and work out more of the logistics sometime later

relatedly im gonna draw more shibari. for my own joy & practice but also I could take comms abt it

i think my latex allergy went away ???? my hands have felt perfectly fine and soft and not irritated even when im at work. this is convenient

martingale collar still owns ass ive been wearing it a lot. stim toy

also sibling just up and gave me a collar they never wear so I have 5 collars now

dad made me quesadillas after I got home from skating

i got plany off time to draw more jais tonight 😈😈😈 also that ais & leander art I just reblogged fucks severely its giving me ideas

wore a shirt that fits snug arnd my tits while skating. fuck yeah boobies

in good spirits about my grades. not gonna get my hopes up super high but im almost certainly gonna stay above 3.5

also quite happy with my gender. I think it's definitely masc but in a queer way that makes people stop and think sometimes which is great fun

drew more jais. dumped blood on them. having soo much fun

[myconetted]

i would block the word "ai" if i could, but tumblr's post content filtering appears to be based on like substr(post, blocked_term) and there's no regex so like. i don't think i can, unless i want to also block a shitload of totally unrelated stuff like mentions of "air" or "failure"

and there are so many people being so wrong about ai on the internet :(

[neristudy]

When my teacher in the course asked me - “well, what profession are you going to get after this course” (since arbeit and beruf are two different concepts in German, in the former you just work and in the latter you study to get a profession), and I.

I just didn't know. I despise the 9-5 concept, and I also realize that not everyone has the privilege of working only 9-5s. I hate the concept that part of my week, forever, will be scored as a time when I will always, regardless of mental or physical state, be forced to work.

I love my freelancing. Hell, I just love it, with the way the hours float and I can work in a time when I know I'll be productive, and finish thus work nice and fast…

But to get German citizenship, I will need to work a full-time job for 5 years (3 at best, but I'm not hopeful on that). No freelancing. Because freelancing only counts towards citizenship if it was done for German citizens.

I might be able to fix a workplace with the minimum number of hours I need, and I might be able to develop as a freelancer over those 5 years, that I could jump out of a regular job and never go back to it again, but…. oh. That's still such a shitload of time. And all of this AI bullshit...

Ugh. Okay, we'll deal with that bridge when we get to it.

Maybe I'll be lucky enough to get a job at some flower store where I can keep flowers and not have to worry... haha, that would be nice.

[turtlemagnum]

the new laptop is overall pretty fuckin good, has some really nice features like the camera blocker and the pause/start button on the keyboard, quality CPU, and it having windows 11 has some minor quality of life things that make everyday usage just slightly more bearable. but holy shit the amount of preinstalled garbage i had to uninstall in increasingly obscure and roundabout ways might've given me an aneurysm if i were like a decade older. who the fuck wants mcaffee antivirus??? who the fuck uses xbox game bar??? ohhh yeah michaelsoft i totally wanna use your shitass "AI" copilot so often that it's a core part of my fucking taskbar that i can't unpin like every other fucking program, jesus christ. that thing is NOT the same fucking importance as the searchbar or god forbid the fucking windows button, you jackass shitloads of fuck.

i think the only one i didn't mind just due to the sheer absurdity of it is that the default wallpaper was this jankass low res ad for fucking red bull energy drink. like to be honest that one's just fucking funny, y'know. i'm not an energy drink drinker, but i feel like they're the kind of thing that either you already regularly drink, or you'll never touch in your life, so instinctually it feels like ads for them are kinda just wastes of money. i'm probably wrong, but frankly even if i was an energy drink person i'm also the kind of person where if i'm intrusively advertised towards i go out of my way to avoid your shit out of spite. frankly i'm the kind of person who operates on a bare minimum of 5% spite at any given time, often higher depending on the circumstances, so advertising is typically useless on me

[yournightowl]

Your Nightowl #027

i’ve noticed that the discussion around HK has splintered into three distinct groups.

The first group is the Detectives ಠ_ರೃ- the true crimers, the inquisitive types, the ones looking for a good mystery above all else, even to the point that they’ll ignore the plain answer just to keep the thread spinning a little while longer. It should go without saying that this group is the biggest and the easiest to empathize with. You might need to learn to excuse a little bit of insensitivity here or there, but you can hold real conversations with them and get real responses. i do, however, think that there’s more bleedover between them and the next group than most people would like to admit.

Said group (the loudest group) would be the Theorists. The ones convinced that all of HK’s targets were actually androids, or the incognito operators of cell corporations, or just plain old lizard people. ���(͡◕ ͜ʖ ͡◕)ﾉ Sure. Why not?

 For a big portion of them, this is all just trolling. That’s obnoxious, but whatever- Everyone’s done it, here or there. If you get recognized, you were just being ironic. If you get cornered, it's their fault for taking you seriously. ¯\_( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯ We all know the drill by this point.

Well maybe we don’t all know the drill. Every other day I see people in the media monologuing about how taken aback they are by the swell of conspiracy theories surrounding HK- Like they expected us to have left such childish things behind in the 20th century.

We didn’t. From what i’ve seen with my own eyes, out there in the real world, and back here on the oldnet, it’s only gotten worse. We’re still children.

Which isn’t necessarily a grim thought. I mean, if this is what humanity looks like when we’re fully formed, crystallized, and paying our taxes without our parent’s help? We’re screwed.

One last thing about the conspiracy theorists- their the only ones making money off of this tragedy. It’s not much, of course- Just whatever small profit they can eke out by spending all day on socials, parroting each other's talking points in an accelerating feedback loop that spirals directly to their store page, where you can buy coffee mugs that show how you think the state has secret death camps.

But its still dirty money if you ask me.

Which brings me to the last group: the nutjobs. ( °□°) ︵ ┻━┻

Maybe that’s too harsh. The Crazies?

Freaks is too sharp on the tongue.

But this is the written word, so maybe it’s forgivable.

Whatever you want to call them, they all sound similar.

“Dear hk, please unalive my boss”

“/srs hk should merc my stepdad”

“I want hk to shoot me before i start my next shift and im not even joking at this point”

Obviously, most of these are just people venting, which will always be ugly to see, and hard to read. It’s still in poor taste, but it’s definitely better for them to type it out into the void than to walk around with thoughts like that festering in the back of their mind. “ψ (｀∇´) ψ

But they aren’t all just people venting. Some amount of them aren’t being ironic. Some amount of them like what HK’s doing. They like seeing wrenches thrown in the works, even if the wrenches happen to be innocent people with bullets where their aorta’s used to be. And while this third group is definitely the smallest, it’s also the most naturally private.

I’m not worried that they’re some kind of silent majority or anything, it’s just

They’re silent.

So there could be a shitload of them out there, and even they wouldn’t know it. There could be thousands of HK fanboys out there waiting for a leader to step forward.

Step forward and funnel their frustration into coffee mugs, ʘ‿ʘ hopefully.

Cause otherwise, they might get tired of waiting for a leader.

And they just might get started without one.

To avoid ending on a grim note again, i’d like to instead insert here, in no particular order, my favorite theories about HK is, taken from the most disliked posts on the biggest conspiracy forum i could find.

-hk is an AI possessing random individuals through their Mods

-hk is an assassin working for the Elites to eliminate people found to have high genetic predisposition to resisting authority figures

-hk is a team of State Operatives culling the illegitimate children of powerful CEOs in order to keep them in check (how would this work?)

-hk is an angel of death but not like a grim reaper the beautiful kind biblically accurate

-hk is my cleaning guy who is secretly a robot (that was the entire thread)

International blogger of mystery,

Your nightowl

[walks-the-ages]

The Pro AI crowd will see posts like this, and then go on rants about "students have always been cheating through school, it's not a moral failing to have AI do all of your work through college!"

And its like. Guys.

Why are you paying thousands of dollars for college if you don't actually want to learn any of the things you're spending thousands of your hard earned money to learn???

"its ableist to make fun of people who use AI to write 600 word essays for college" literally what are you talking about. In high school I had to write essays of multiple pages, And you're telling me that someone who has spent thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend college for a topic they're supposedly passionate about, cannot write 600 words on that topic to show anything of what they have learned???

Claiming that not being able to write a 600 word essay is an issue of ableism " because some people cannot physically type 600 words" it's like okay, accessibility accommodations are a thing, they're a thing you don't even need to sign up for when it comes to things like speech to text, which I'm literally using to type out this post that you are reading right now, right on my phone in fact!

A physical inability to type for a long time Is an accessibility issue, yes, but it also has and absolute shitload of completely free accommodations that anybody can download onto their phone or computer and use it anytime.

Not being able to physically type for a while does not give you a free pass to use the plagiarism machine, especially in the context of college, and professional dissertations and assignments where plagiarism can and will affect you for the rest of your life LOL.

If you are someone who is disabled, and you have difficulty typing out 600 word essays, I can promise you there are a million accessibility tools that I will actually help you, including as I said before, speech to text, which I am using to type this post!

But being disabled, or making up a fake disabled person as a straw man defense, will literally never justify using generative AI, let alone passing that off as your own work.

ur future nurse is using chapgpt to glide thru school u better take care of urself

[bug-the-chicken-nug]

sometimes part of me gets the sneaking suspicion that even if the indiscriminate reactionary contingent of AI haters who barely bother keeping their research up to date get their way, they're going to end up congratulating themselves for having ended up with a system that regulates AI usage... with *more AI*. that they just won't even properly realize it's still actually really similar to the AI they so detested, and will defend it as just an "algorithm" or just a "keywords that AI uses" finder, or something like that, because they already don't do proper, un-biased, up-to-date research and keep believing whatever furthers their own arguments anyway. because I honestly just don't fucking know and haven't really heard of a good way that people can actually accurately and fairly determine what's AI and what isn't for the long haul. Its images are increasingly convincing, its text is increasingly convincing, and already, I've seen multiple instances of drama stemming from people jumping to conclusions about real work being AI, or willfully using the accusation to smear something they don't like, or a person they're mad at. this is not the way forward. we have to teach people to adapt and address the *underlying political and economic reasons* why AI is harmful rather that directly demonizing it, while also doing more to push for labor protections and research integrity. (intellectual property is a different matter here. generally speaking, it is *not* a good thing to ask for stricter intellectual property law, because it can and will be used against you by the wealthy and unscrupulous who can afford shitloads of lawyers)

[we-are-houseguest]

sometimes, twice a week, we make ourselves vulnerable. we get a little peek over enemy lines. - david bazan, both hands

well, dear readers, this is it. the final blog post before release. it's been quite the ride, hasn't it? real talk - i always loved reading studio blogs for the bands i was into and maybe i'm just firing this into the void for my own amusement but it's actually been very meaningful to me.

SO. let's geek out about mics and in the box work.

we only used three mics on this whole ep - i dunno if you could tell from the rest of this blog, but i'm very much a proponent of "find something that works and then WORK IT."

this is almost all (maybe literally all?) of mj's vocals and some of my doubles - honestly this is a fantastic mic and it sounds great on both of us.

this is most of my vocals, all of the bass and maaaaaaybe some of mj's vocals? honestly this little motherfucker is so versatile we probably could have done the whole thing with this but hey. variety is the spice of life (and also music). I use a fethead cloud lifter with this to get the gain up without blasting my interface (and because I am very original).

i know the rest of the photos have been of actual, owned gear but hey. if you're here, you know what an sm57 looks like. you also know that it's indestructible and sounds great AND is versatile as hell. this is all my backups on re-run.

i use reaper exclusively and always have - other people have suggested logic and i'm sure it's great, but this is where i started and what i learned, so here i stay.

i honestly use a shitload of the stock plugins - you really REALLY don't need that fancy new thing (it's just prettier and, admittedly, easier to use lol). that said, i *do* have some pretty, fancy new things that i love and i will gush about them forever. SUCH AS:

TITRIK KRUSH. you wanna bitcrush something to death? you wanna bitcrush something just a little? krush away.

a nice, natural, impossibly easy to use verb? look no further than the variety of sound epicCLOUDS and epicPLATE mkII. the interface is MORON simple (complimentary) and it literally always sounds great. high, high praise.

i often use the klanghelm ivgi2 to just kind of nasty up a vocal double, just to give it some textural difference and fill out the vocal space.

i am a huge fan of izotope's neutron for mixing and ozone for mastering - super easy to use but also GREAT learning tools. deep enough that i, as some who knows how to do this, can use this powerful tool to bend the music to my will, but also simple enough that, were you new, you could throw a preset on and play around with it to understand how the tools effect the sound. big, big fan. (also i only have the elements one so i don't use any of the ai powered tools)

there is one big difference between the variety of sound stuff i linked up there and the valhalla super massive, and it's honestly that this shit can get WILD. you CAN be organic and simple with it, but this is definitely for going b-a-n-a-n-a-s. (MUCH like that other stuff, it is SUPER easy to use, however, which is great news).

for any kind of pitch correction, i use waves' tune lt. mj uses melodyne for his vocals sometimes, but honestly i really find this so easy to use and it absolutely does the trick, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and that's it! that's the magic! i'll see you in like 11 days (why did i schedule this post like this...?) OR i'll see you in 10 days at the ep release show, january 30th at green auto (TICKETS HERE!!!!) with our friends in cursed words and sixth grade softball, who are just fantastic. if you're here and haven't heard either of them by some fluke, do yourself a favour and click through. you won't be disappointed.

ANYWAYS! we'll see you next time i have something band related to say and/or we put out new music.

kisses,

~ elizabeth

[stenka-razin]

Ok, Terminator Zero won me back some in the end. It still has issues, but I do think it's arguably the best Terminator thing since T2. That's a low bar, and I think it may oversell how good this is, but it isn't bad. Spoilery stuff below, but I would say worth checking out.

Ok so the best thing is that, while flirting with the same fucking premise all the movies have done, even when they take place in the future, it does pull away from that midway. It sets up another stop the future from changing man vs. robot fight, but it pivots into essentially an open hearing about whether humanity even deserves to survive. It's an angle that none of the movies proper has taken. We created the evil AI, have we tried not making it evil? Have we tried getting it on our side?

The approach to time travel is pretty much the opposite of the original film's stable time loop, but it's much better the timey wimey crap all the subsequent films have pulled. Straight up, you cannot change your past, all trips to the past yield new timelines. It's frustrating for a second, because like, well why the fuck even do this, but they do cover that. Eventually. More on the pacing later. But yeah, the time travel mostly holds. The goofiest part is probably them talking about all the subsequent attempts made to change history which like... well if it never fucking works why did they try it more than 2 times? It also raises the inevitable question, how do you target timelines? Like Malcolm + Misaki, Eiko, and the Terminator all travel back to the same timeline? How does that work? Presumably Malcolm and Misaki, traveling to the farthest point back would make a new timeline. But that wouldn't affect Eiko's future, so when she goes back, why would it be a timeline with Malcolm and Misaki if they weren't originally in her past? Same with the Terminator. You should have three distinct timelines with future people running around. So nevermind, Time Travel is once again dumb. But they don't totally lose me, because thematically they use it to illustrate that the point of life is not knowing the future.

Pacing yeah, I don't know if this is a problem per se, but the way it buried what the fuck is happening was very annoying. I've been jerked around before. You throw a lot of mystery box shit at me, I'm going to assume you have no idea what the hell you're going to do with it all. That soured me at first. I feel like 30 minutes into the first Terminator you had a crystal clear understanding of everyone's motivation. Ahnold is looking up Sarah Connor's and killing them. He's obviously trying to kill Sarah. By the end of the first big fight Kyle Reese is expositing about future killer robots and shit. To it's credit, Zero does pick up all the pieces and gets them together, but I was juggling all this crap in my brain hoping to god this wasn't going to be like Lost or some crap.

Visually? I loved it. So with all the philosophizing, I was reminded of the Netflix Godzilla Anime trilogy. Those sucked. They took what should have been a slam dunk (Godzilla in a medium where you aren't limited with what you can do on a live action set) and gave us virtually no Monster action to look at. This doesn't do that! In fact it does a shitload of cool ass ideas that the live action Terminators don't! The Terminator modifies itself once in the past. The reveal is actually a shock because it's not an A list actor shown way in advance so people will watch the movie. GORE. Ton of gore!! So many cops get got, and it's bloody as hell.

So embrace the unwritten future! Watch a Terminator thing that isn't the same fucking crap again and again. No Connors? No problem! Oh also I watched it in Japanese, but Timothy Olyphant is apparently in the dub so that's kind of cool.

And since you've read to the end, here's a fun anecdote. My friend's dad dated Linda Hamilton's twin sister in high school (they're from the Eastern Shore!). When the family watched the Terminator, his wife fucking death glared his ass all during the sex scene.