#not the reviews but the actual product images

[bildadthemidwife]

So I stumbled upon a link to some Crowley-style sunglasses on Amazon, and these were the styling suggestions that Amazon presented along with them:

And I agree, Crowley would absolutely rock this ensemble, thank you.

[seventh-district]

laying here in bed at 5pm on the 4th of July listening to the storm outside and seriously debating bulk-buying 90 coffee cakes. as one does

[kaijutegu]

Beating the Heat while Fat: A Summer Survival Guide

Summer is (almost) here and it’s going to be hotter than ever. If you’re fat (like me), you know how much hot weather sucks. Specifically, we get to deal with fun issues like underboob sweat, chub rub, skin fold sunburn, and more. And while I like to take a body neutral approach to everything, this can be hard in summer thanks to exclusion and neglect.

The thing is that not a lot of people really... talk about these things, though, because that would interfere with our image of summer. Not a lot of companies are marketing their stuff as a solution to fat people’s problems, because that would be acknowledging that fat people might actually want to go outside during summer.

Having been fat for many a summer now, I want to share some of my resources for enjoying summer! These are all based on personal recommendations and things I have directly experienced. Please feel free to reblog and add on with your experiences and recommendations!

However, if your commentary is even remotely fatphobic, you will be blocked and your comments will be deleted. This post is not for you, and nobody is actually interested in what you have to say!

Back and Underboob Sweat

Two words: Gold Bond. Gold Bond fixes this. It comes in powder, stick, and spray form. I’ve used the powder in shoes, but not on my body. They’ve recently released an invisible form of the spray, which I’m very excited about.

Spray this under your breast tissue or other skin folds, or on flat areas of skin like your lower back that tend to sweat. Some of their powders have aloe in them, which is delightfully soothing for the skin.

Make sure that if you’re sensitive to scent, you buy one of the unscented versions. The “fresh” scent is nice, but it is a scent!

When you’re using this type of spray, do it clean but dry. Don’t do it right after a shower- give your skin a chance to dry off. Lift your breast or skin fold, spray underneath, and then hold it for a couple of seconds to let the spray dry down.

You can also use other types of powder, like body powder or baby powder. There’s mixed evidence about talc-containing powder and its link to cancer, but some people do find talcum powder more irritating than talc-free powder, so whether or not you use this is up to you.

Do keep in mind that this is NOT sunscreen! Apply your sunscreen first for areas of exposed skin.

Chub Rub

Dealing with the tops of your thighs rubbing together is extremely unfun. There are a couple of ways I like to deal with this!

Slip Shorts

I actually reviewed a bunch of these a few years ago. Slip shorts or bike shorts are perfect for wearing under dresses or loose-fitting rompers as a way to stop your thighs from rubbing. As a bonus, if you’re using bike shorts, sometimes they come with extra pockets to stash stuff in.

Friction Sticks

If you’re wearing a swimsuit and don’t want to wear shorts, or just don’t want to wear shorts, period, then a friction stick is another good way to avoid chub rub! I have a couple, Bodyglide and Gold Bond.

If you’re buying Bodyglide, they have one that’s just as good, Bodyglide Outdoor, that is sometimes cheaper. There’s a Bodyglide “For Her” which I’ve never tried, but that’s usually more expensive and let’s be real, do you really need to moisturize your inner thighs? I think not!

There’s also creams you can use but I find those messy and less effective than the sticks. You might like them, though! Experiment with products to find the one(s) that work for you.

Friction sticks can also stop foot blisters. Rub a little on your heel, toe, or wherever you get hot spots. 

Dealing With Sweat

I sweat, you sweat, we all sweat. Humans were meant to sweat. Sweating’s a good thing. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun, and frankly I hate being sweaty. Typically, fat people sweat more than thin people, for several reasons related to the way we thermoregulate.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to make summer sweating less annoying. I’ve written about this before, so you can check out that post for some of my favorite tips for dealing with sweat. Here’s some of the highlights.

Evaporative Cooling

A bandanna or other wrap filled with water crystals can do AMAZING things. You can make this yourself really easily- if you can’t find water crystals, you can just use Orbeez. They sell little 99 cent packs of those in the checkout lines at some stores and at the dollar store, and you can make several cooling wraps with one packet.

You can also get evaporative cooling towels, like Frogg Toggs. I don’t like those as much because they tend to start smelling a little funny, but they’re great for larger area coverage.

Using these will help cool you down and will do the same thing that sweat does– without being sticky.

Hair

If you have long hair, get it off the back of your neck. I used to put it up in a bun with a bun former, but now I just use claw clips. They’re cuter and easier! Seriously, this will help you so much. Get the hair up and away from your skin, you’ll feel so much better.

Hand Fans

I always have a hand fan with me, but not one of the little battery operated ones. I’ve tried a lot of those! I even took one up a mountain once, and it was the only reason I survived. But they never provide the same level of breeze that my folding fan does.

I use this one because it’s cute, and you can get cute ones for a couple bucks on Amazon. I do prefer fabric to the stiff paper ones, just because they’re a bit more durable- I’ve had mine for years now. It’s good.

I’m also not a huge fan of those fans that go around your neck, but I’ve seen many people enjoying them. If they work for you, great!

Hydration and Electrolytes

Carry water with you when you go places, and if you’re gonna be out for a while doing anything strenuous, take some electrolyte tablets with you. I like Nuun because I think they taste good, but there’s lots of brands out there.

There’s no one mineral called electrolyte, just so you know. Electrolytes are a group of minerals that includes sodium, potassium, and chloride as the primary (or significant) electrolytes. Electrolytes are important because they have a natural positive or negative electrical charge when dissolved in water. This electricity is how your nerves transmit information and how your cells make your muscles contract, so low levels of electrolytes can cause some serious issues. Different electrolyte imbalances have different symptoms, but common symptoms include nausea, fatigue, confusion, tremors, muscle spasms (cramps), and dizziness.

If you’re feeling those as you’re moving around outside, get somewhere cool, drink some water, and either eat some food or add electrolyte tablets to your water. This will help stabilize you quickly!

Skin Fold Sunburn Prevention

Everybody should wear sunscreen, period. End of story.

But if you’re applying sunscreen by yourself and you have skin folds, it can be a pain to reach them! This is especially true for any folds that form on your upper back or around your upper arm.

These areas can burn and be very painful, especially if you’re in swimwear or a sleeveless top. It’s also VERY easy to forget that these areas need sunscreen!

If you don’t want or don’t have someone to help you apply those areas you can’t reach, spray sunscreen can be a way to get those areas. If you don’t like the spray or want heavier coverage with a cream, then use a lotion applicator!

If the stick style doesn’t work for you (like if you have shoulder mobility issues), the strap style asks for a different range of motion. If you can’t find one that works for you at a big box store, look at a pharmacy. These are often sold as disability aids or for elderly people with a reduced range of motion.

But honestly, one of the most important things about this is just knowing your body. Know where your skin folds are and think about how they move as you’re applying sunscreen. Get underneath them- as you move, those areas can be exposed to the sun, too.

So yeah, that’s my best advice for beating the heat while fat. If you’ve got other tips, feel free to share them!

[heyaheiya]

hi sweetie, I love your work (◍•ᴗ•◍)

here's my request: pro hero katsuki x influencer quirkless reader. like how started the relationship and maybe some headcanon like hand placement, if there's pda in some events or awards, what he would answer if some1 ask him about his relationship, etc.

I hope you like my request, thank u and have a great day 💗

Omg I love the idea of katsuki with a famous non pro hero partner.

You were surprisingly popular for what you did. Makeup tutorials, reviews, grwms, ootd, vlogs. A part of your popularity was how it seemed you lived the dream life, inspiring teens all across Japan to strive for your aesthetic. (Wonyoungism lmfao).

You officially met Katsuki when you were asked to be the main interviewer on this year's annual Pro Hero Billboard Chart red carpet. When you read the email offering you this once in a lifetime opportunity, you slammed your laptop closed and sped walked laps around your bedroom. You were just a random person who posted silly footage of themselves. But now you were going to be on national TV, being on screen with the most famous faces of Japan. You were shitting yourself.

The company in charge of everything didn't really give you anything to prepare, not terrifying at all!! You spent days researching the heroes, trying to dig deep to find actually interesting things, rather than the repetitive "What made you want to be a hero?". A part of you really wanted to find embarrassing and creepily personal things to entertain the audience, but you quickly found there was a reason why you weren't a detective. 3 days straight, you attempted to stalk the heroes, and nothing. NOTHING!

The event was coming up quickly, and you had absolutely nothing. Your thick stack of cards, all decorated with the iconic design, were blank. You cried for 7 hours.

Eventually, you wrote down some questions, but rereading them, they were the most pathetic excuses for questions ever. You were spiralling. The next day, you were probably going to bomb, have no chemistry with any of the heroes, broadcasting hours upon hours of awkward tension, ruining your reputation and career, destroying the image you had spent years creating for yourself. You cried. A lot.

With a blink of the eye, you were at the red carpet, all dolled up, with less confidence than ever before. Great. The first hero you were stuck with was Deku. You assumed production noticed your panic and decided to throw you a bone.

"So, Deku, if you had to describe your pre-hero days with one word, what would it be?"

"Hmm," he took a second to think, "Bad."

Huh. No, Deku, No!! You were supposed to be the easy one! You cried internally.

"What? A nice, handsome boy like you? I bet you were popular in middle school!"

"I was bullied horrifically."

Damn.

Eventually, you'd managed to get past Deku, Red Riot, Sun Eater, and more. And it was awful. Just one more until your break. Just one more.

Praying to get an easy one, out walks Dynamight. Why do you hate me, God????

He was tall, brooding, and bad with interviews. You were hoping he'd just kill you so you wouldn't have to live with the memory of fucking up infront of the country.

"So- Dynamight. What inspired that name?" Fake it till you make it ig. You grit your teeth in discomfort.

There's a long pause before:

"Dynamite."

"Yeah, what inspired it?"

"Dynamite."

"Dude I just wanna go home, please don't make this harder."

"FUCK! DYNAMIGHT COMES FROM THE ENGLISH WORD DYNAMITE! I JUST CHANGED THE SPELLING OF "MITE" TO "MIGHT" CAUSE ALL MIGHTS FUCKING COOL AS FUCK!"

"Don't yell at me! :("

Dynamight's PR team advised him to keep his answers short and to hold in his anger until he was off screen. You'd assumed he'd been holding in his sass for the past 5 hours, so it was only natural he'd blow up soon. (Like dynamite lol)

As soon as you got home from that shit show, you quickly noticed how your name was trending on twitter.

Welp, time to see how badly I ruined my career. Goodbye fame, it's not like I spent years on you..

You slowly scrolled through your tag, skimming the posts about you. However, the more you read, the more you realised people didn't hate you. In fact, the most popular video of the night was you and Dynamight's interview. And people were.. SHIPPING YOU???

You avoided anything and everything for around a week, not even opening your blinds to let in the light. The only contact you had through those 7 days was your ugly orange cat. That was until you got a knock at your door.

That's weird, I only ordered food 2 minutes ago.

You pulled the door open, saw Katsuki, and slammed it back closed, a tuft of his fluffy blond getting stuck between the door and the frame.

"FUCK ME DEAD!"

"Sorry!!"

You yanked the door back open and looked up at the man. The commotion made your cat, Miso, perk up in fear and scratch at the tall beast of a man.

"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! First you avoid me like the plague, then you assault the shit out of me!"

"I'm so so sorry (ToT)"

------

Headcanon time 😼😼:

This man has his hands around your waist 24/7.

However, in the privacy of your own homes, he'd be a massive cunt and keep you in a headlock, knowing you can't do anything about it. He'd stop in a second if you asked him to.

At first, he wasn't big on pda. He felt it ruined his tough guy reputation. But his PR team begged him to keep a hand on you at all times, noticing how it kept his hashtag trending. Although he makes a big fuss, he secretly likes showing you off to everyone, and showing how you're all his.

Whenever he's asked about you, he insults the shit out of you.

"Huh, y/n? Never heard of them."

"They're an influencer? Yeah, no I only keep up with actual relevant people."

He means it with love. And he makes sure you know it, smothering you with love when he gets home.

Despite him bullying you about your only real job being promoting brands in your videos, he constantly buys you stuff. You make sure to show them off in your vlogs too.

Hope you enjoyed <33333

[suzumori521]

I've created some merchandise!

I've registered several merchandise items using illustrations from past event giveaways and new artwork. Purchases from outside Japan are also available.

To purchase and ship products from outside Japan, registration with "WorldShoppingBIZ" is required. For more details, please check here.↓↓

⚠️ Attention SUZURI is a service that allows you to create and ship goods on the website by uploading images. Therefore, I do not have the ability to physically check the actual products. Please be sure to carefully review the product information and preview images in detail and make your purchase only if you are satisfied.

[evilscientist3]

so do you actually support ai "art" or is that part of the evil bit :| because um. yikes.

Let me preface this by saying: I think the cutting edge of AI as we know it sucks shit. ChatGPT spews worthless, insipid garbage as a rule, and frequently provides enticingly fluent and thoroughly wrong outputs whenever any objective fact comes into play. Image generators produce over-rendered, uncanny slop that often falls to pieces under the lightest scrutiny. There is little that could convince me to use any AI tool currently on the market, and I am notably more hostile to AI than many people I know in real life in this respect.

That being said, these problems are not inherent to AI. In two years, or a decade, perhaps they will be our equals in producing writing and images. I know a philosopher who is of the belief that one day, AI will simply be better than us - smarter, funnier, more likeable in conversation - I am far from convinced of this myself, but let us hope, if such a case arises, they don't get better at ratfucking and warmongering too.

Many of the inherent problems posed by AI are philosophical in nature. Would a sufficiently advanced AI be appreciably different to a conscious entity? Can their outputs be described as art? These are questions whose mere axioms could themselves be argued over in PhD theses ad infinitum. I am not particularly interested in these, for to be so on top of the myriad demands of my work would either drive me mad or kill me outright. Fortunately, their fractally debatable nature means that no watertight argument could be given to them by you, either, so we may declare ourselves in happy, clueless agreement on these topics so long as you are willing to confront their unconfrontability.

Thus, I would prefer to turn to the current material issues encountered in the creation and use of AI. These, too, are not inherent to their use, but I will provide a more careful treatment of them than a simple supposition that they will evaporate in coming years.

I would consider the principal material issues surrounding AI to lie in the replacement of human labourers and wanton generation of garbage content it facilitates, and the ethics of training it on datasets collected without contributors' consent. In the first case, it is prudent to recall the understanding of Luddites held by Marx - he says, in Ch. 15 of Das Kapital: "It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments." The Industrial Revolution's novel forms of production and subsequent societal consequences has mirrored the majority of advances in production since. As then, the commercial application of the new technology must be understood to be a product of capital. To resist the technology itself on these grounds is to melt an iceberg's tip, treating the vestigial symptom of a vast syndrome. The replacement of labourers is with certainty a pressing issue that warrants action, but such action must be considered and strategic, rather than a reflexive reaction to something new. As is clear in hindsight for the technology of two centuries ago, mere impedance of technological progression is not for the better.

The second case is one I find deeply alarming - the degradation of written content's reliability threatens all knowledge, extending to my field. Already, several scientific papers have drawn outrage in being seen to pass peer review despite blatant inclusion of AI outputs. I would be tempted to, as a joke to myself more than others, begin this response with "Certainly. Here is how you could respond to this question:" so as to mirror these charlatans, would it not without a doubt enrage a great many who don't know better than to fall for such a trick. This issue, however, is one I believe to be ephemeral - so pressing is it, that a response must be formulated by those who value understanding. And so are responses being formulated - major online information sources, such as Wikipedia and its sister projects, have written or are writing rules on their use. The journals will, in time, scramble to save their reputations and dignities, and do so thoroughly - academics have professional standings to lose, so keeping them from using LLMs is as simple as threatening those. Perhaps nothing will be done for your average Google search result - though this is far from certain - but it has always been the conventional wisdom that more than one site ought to be consulted in a search for information.

The third is one I am torn on. My first instinct is to condemn the training of AI on material gathered without consent. However, this becomes more and more problematic with scrutiny. Arguments against this focusing on plagiarism or direct theft are pretty much bunk - statistical models don't really work like that. Personal control of one's data, meanwhile, is a commendable right, but is difficult to ensure without merely extending the argument made by the proponents of copyright, which is widely understood to be a disastrous construct that for the most part harms small artists. In this respect, then, it falls into the larger camp of problems primarily caused by the capital wielding the technology.

Let me finish this by posing a hypothetical. Suppose AI does, as my philosopher friend believes, become smarter and more creative than us in a few years or decades; suppose in addition it may be said through whatever means to be entirely unobjectionable, ethically or otherwise. Under these circumstances, would I then go to a robot to commission art of my fursona? The answer from me is a resounding no. My reasoning is simple - it wouldn't feel right. So long as the robot remains capable of effortlessly and passionlessly producing pictures, it would feel like cheating. Rationally explaining this deserves no effort - my reasoning would be motivated by the conclusion, rather than vice versa. It is simply my personal taste not to get art I don't feel is real. It is vitally important, however, that I not mistake this feeling as evidence of any true inferiority - to suppose that effortlessness or pasionlessness invalidate art is to stray back into the field of messy philosophical questions. I am allowed, as are you, to possess personal tastes separate from the quality of things.

Summary: I don't like AI. However, most of the problems with AI which aren't "it's bad" (likely to be fixed over time) or abstract philosophical questions (too debatable to be used to make a judgement) are material issues caused by capitalism, just as communists have been saying about every similarly disruptive new technology for over a century. Other issues can likely be fixed over time, as with quality. From a non-rational standpoint, I dislike the idea of using AI even separated from current issues, but I recognise, and encourage you to recognise, that this is not evidence of an actual inherent inferiority of AI in the abstract. You are allowed to have preferences that aren't hastily rationalised over.

[iwonderwh0]

I don't think androids store memories as videos or that they can even be extracted as ones. Almost, but not exactly.

Firstly, because their memories include other data such as their tactile information, their emotional state, probably 3d markers of their surrounding...a lot of different information. So, their memories are not in a video-format, but some kind of a mix of many things, that may not be as easily separated from each other. I don't think a software necessary to read those types of files are publicly available.

Even if they have some absolute massive storage, filming good-quality videos and storing them is just not an optimal way to use their resources. It's extremely wasteful. I think, instead, their memories consist of snapshots that are taken every once in a while (depending on how much is going on), that consist of compressed version of all their relevant inputs like mentioned above. Like, a snapshot of a LiDAR in a specific moment + heavily compressed photo with additional data about some details that'll later help to upscale it and interpolate from one snapshot into the next one, some audio samples of the voices and transcript of the conversation so that it'd take less storage to save. My main point is, their memories are probably stored in a format that not only doesn't actually contain original video material, but is a product of some extreme compression, and in this case reviewing memories is not like watching HD video footage, but rather an ai restoration of those snapshots. Perhaps it may be eventually converted into some sort of a video readable to human eye, but it would be more of an ai-generated video from specific snapshots with standardised prompts with some parts of the image/audio missing than a perfectly exact video recording.

When Connor extracts video we see that they are a bit glitchy. It may be attributed to some details getting lost during transmission from one android to another, but then we've also got flashbacks with android's own memories, that are just as "glitchy". Which kinda backs up a theory of it being a restoration of some sort of a compressed version rather than original video recording.

Then we've also got that scene where Josh records Markus where it is shown that when he starts to film, his eyes indicate the change that he is not just watching but recording now. Which means that is an option, but not the default. I find it a really nice detail. Like, androids can record videos, but then the people around them can see exactly when they do that, and "be at ease" when they don't. It may be purely a design choice, like that of the loading bar to signalise that something is in progress and not just frozen, or mandatory shutter sound effect on smartphones cameras in Japan.

So, yeah. Androids purpose is to correctly interpret their inputs and store relevant information about it in their long term memory, and not necessarily to record every present moment in a video-archive that will likely never be seen by a human and reviewed as a pure video footage again. If it happened to be needed to be seen — it'll be restored as a "video" file, but this video won't be an actual video recording unless android was specifically set to record mode.

[streda]

Buster Keaton

Born Joseph Francis Keaton on October 4, 1895, was an American director and actor who became famous for various comedy scenes that are still repeated in films today. You may recognize him from the nickname "the man with the stone face". He is known as a director, screenwriter and actor in famous silent comedies such as "The General" and "The Navigator".

Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in Piqua, Kansas. His name Joseph didn't come out of nowhere, it was a family tradition from his father's side. The nickname Buster was invented by Harry Houdini (a friend of his parents) when little Buster fell down the stairs and instead of crying or reacting in any way, he got up and moved on (The nickname was also a reference to the fact that he often caused trouble as a child). At the age of three, Keaton began performing with his parents in The Three Keatons. He first appeared on stage in 1899 in Wilmington, Delaware. The act was mainly a comedy sketch. Despite his run-ins with the law, Keaton was a rising and relatively well-paid theater star. He stated that he learned to read and write late and was taught by his mother. When he was 21, his father's alcoholism threatened the reputation of the family actor, 20, so Keaton and his mother Myra went to New York, where Keaton's career quickly moved from vaudeville to film. Keaton served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in the United States Army's 40th Infantry Division during World War I. His unit remained intact and was not broken up to provide replacements, as had been the case with some other late-arriving divisions. While in uniform, he contracted an ear infection that permanently damaged his hearing. Keaton was such a natural in his first film, "Butcher Boy," that he was hired on the spot. Finally, he asked to borrow one of the cameras to see how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel room, where he disassembled and reassembled it by morning. He appeared in a total of 14 Arbuckle shorts, running into 1920. They were popular, and contrary to Keaton's later reputation as "The Great Stone Face", he often smiled and even laughed in them. In 1920, The Saphead was released, marking Keaton's first starring role in a feature-length feature film. After Keaton's successful collaboration with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Productions. He made a series of 19 two-reel comedies, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922).

The more adventurous ideas called for dangerous stunts, performed by Keaton at great physical risk. During the railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr. (gags written by Clyde Bruckman), Keaton broke his neck when a torrent of water fell on him from a water tower, but he did not realize it until years afterwards. A scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr. required Keaton to stand still on a particular spot. Then, the facade of a two-story building toppled forward on top of Keaton. Keaton's character emerged unscathed, due to a single open window. The stunt required precision, because the prop house weighed two tons, and the window only offered a few inches of clearance around Keaton's body. The sequence furnished one of the most memorable images of his career. Aside from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Keaton's most enduring feature-length films include Three Ages (1923), Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The Cameraman (1928), and The General (1926). The General, set during the American Civil War, combined physical comedy with Keaton's love of trains, including an epic locomotive chase. Employing picturesque locations, the film's storyline reenacted an actual wartime incident. Though it would come to be regarded as Keaton's greatest achievement, the film received mixed reviews at the time. It was too dramatic for some filmgoers expecting a lightweight comedy, and reviewers questioned Keaton's judgment in making a comedic film about the Civil War, even while noting it had a "few laughs." it was an expensive dud, His distributor, United Artists, insisted on a production manager who monitored expenses and interfered with certain story elements. Keaton endured this treatment for two more feature films, and then exchanged his independent setup for employment at Hollywood's biggest studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Keaton's loss of independence as a filmmaker coincided with the coming of sound films (although he was interested in making the transition) and mounting personal problems, and his career in the early sound era was hurt as a result.

I guess that's it for Buster's success.

Keaton died of lung cancer on February 1, 1966, aged 70, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Despite being diagnosed with cancer in January 1966, he was never told he was terminally ill. Keaton thought that he was recovering from a severe case of bronchitis. Confined to a hospital during his final days, Keaton was restless and paced the room endlessly, desiring to return home. In a British television documentary about his career, his widow Eleanor told producers from Thames Television that Keaton was up out of bed and moving around, and even played cards with friends who came to visit the day before he died. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, California.

Keaton was presented with a 1959 Academy Honorary Award at the 32nd Academy Awards, held in April 1960. Keaton has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: 6619 Hollywood Boulevard (for motion pictures); and 6225 Hollywood Boulevard (for television).

Three Ages (1923)

Our Hospitality (1923)

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

The Navigator (1924)

Seven Chances (1925)

The Cameraman (1928)

Go West (1925)

Battling Butler (1926)

The General (1926)

College (1927)

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

Spite Marriage (1929)

-¤-

[kerubimcrepin]

Dofus: The Production - reviewing the artbook

This post won't go too deep in detail, it's just my commentary on the artbook — but the next (or, well, one after the next), post will be me doing some actual research outside of it. I recommend you to buy the artbook, and go see its contents for yourself, if you're curious about it. (or download it. It's been scanned to hell and back...)

God, this makes me deranged and insane. Even being baby does not stop Kerubim from loving Joris's jokes... I'm insane...

This part of the artbook has always scared me because like... Does he kill people in Dofus 2, Tot?. Does he.?

Epic events is a funny way to refer to this movie's unending barrage of traumatic events, but man, we were kinda robbed of cool draconic winged Joris. That's sad.

I won't include too much art from the artbook if I can help it, but I wanted to report that this is a very good art and theres a lot of love and um and they love each other and um and [CAR CRASH] [GLASS SHATTERING] ‘GOOD LORD!’ [GENERAL COMMOTION] [BABY CRYING] ‘WAAAAH WAAAAH’ [YELLING] [POLICE SIRENS] WEEWOO WEEWOO [HELICOPTERS] ‘WE’RE REPORTING LIVE-‘ [EXPLOSION] ‘MY LEG… MY LEG…’

I wish I knew what the fuck Tot meant by this. However, knowing that Pupuce is Kerubim's pet, who just liked her owner's kid more than her owner, has fueled some of my headcanons for years and years:

This version of his armour matches the one we could see in the Dofus Manga. :)

I find it quite fascinating that at one point, it was considered for Julith to be an osamodas huppermage, considering it was theorized for some time that Joris might be an osamodas.

I wouldn't call her a tender mother, but eh. She's more of a... "very loving yet despaired mother who doesn't even know her son" mother. A "wants to get back the past which will never return to the point of putting her son into the torture nexus" mother. A "has love in her that is so mentally disturbed" mother. AND I LOVE HER FOR IT!!

I know that her being an alcoholic is a retcon that Dessous did, but its such a good one. I think it's a good show of her decade of slow slippage of sanity. Comic retcons win over Tot's ideas for all Joris-related media once again.

This post was made by "I love Kerubim's dead family from Dofus Heroes Kerubim and Bakara Alcoholism Lore from Dessous de Dofus" gang.

These two huppermages from the movie's concept art were reused in season 4 of Wakfu. Though it would be easier to say what in season 4 of Wakfu isn't reused stuff considering the "shoestring and a piece of chewed gum" budget it was made on...

God, him petting a pupuce is the most important part of the artbook, save for perhaps...

THE KHAN & THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT & JORIS UNDERAGE DRINKING SCENE

The fact that this was cut is the biggest personal tragedy of my entire life, and I am NOT joking.

Apparently, in this tavern, we were supposed to learn more of his backstory, — like how his father was a gobbowler, but sadly (or happily, if you really hate Khan) it was cut.

But listen. Khan would go to some sexworkers to stare at them and do nothing. He's that much of a loser. He would take a 10yo as his drinking buddy.

This is where my headcanon that he buys Joris booze post-movie comes from, btw.

Compared to the movie's exaggerated visions of Kerubim crying, these images feel like something Joris would remember seeing in real life, something he'd want to avoid.

It feels more real, than just his panicked visions.

[commandtower-solring-go]

Hell Dive into Collective Action

So if you haven't followed the Helldriver's 2 drama, I'll give you a quick rundown. About a week ago Sony outlined a plan which required all players to link their existing in-game accounts to the Playstation Network. Including players on Steam.

This decision was met with severe negativity. Not only would this force many users to make PSN accounts just to play one game, it would limit access to the game for 118 countries. This resulted in a targeted review bomb.

(image from Kotaku)

Review bombing is nothing new. Historically it has been used as a form of guerrilla activism used against digital producers where the product is distributed online. It is done by a large group of people leaving negative reviews on the product.

It has a long history of not working.

However, what stood out about this moment is that this bomb actually achieved something. Sony has since gone back on their word.

(image from @Dexerto on X)

Such an accomplishment has not gone unnoticed by the fans. What only a week ago was seen as the death of one of the strongest fan bases in recent history, has become a badge of honour.

The imagery of the steam review timeline and the subsequent increase in positive reviews is marked proudly on their skins

(image from @helldiversmedia on X)

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (December 3-9, 2023)

I made a frame from this shot Wikizilla's Image of the Week. No regrets. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, I love ya. When I was a teenager, explicit queerness was anathema to most big-name franchises. Those dominoes have been slowly falling, often in lower-profile tie-ins first, and to me this is a huge one: 69 years without a queer live-action Godzilla character are over. And Cate's the main protagonist of the show! I'm not under the delusion that media representation will cure all society's ills, but it sure doesn't hurt. Now, the non-Tumblr parts of the fandom are being completely normal about this, right? Right? Whatever, that's why you'll never get rid of me here. Cate had a couple more sweet moments with May in this episode, and Mariko Tamaki wrote episode 7, so don't expect her to stop kissing girls. Hopefully she's learned a valuable lesson about cheating though.

"The Way Out" is also another gift to those of us who have always wanted to see more of the ramifications of a world where Godzilla exists, from underground towns for the super-rich to ruined cities where federal troops shoot looters and harass people experiencing homelessness. And the show continues to find ways to use kaiju to talk about COVID, from Cate and Kentaro's exchange about San Francisco truthers ("It's easier than waking up every day and thinking, at any moment, the same could happen to you") to the blink-of-an-eye speed at which the threat went from on the news to her front door in the flashbacks.

As I foretold, we got a Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire trailer, an amusing contrast to the weighty Toho flick and Apple show already fore of mind. It's Adam Wingard unbound, that's for sure. The human cast seems pared back, a longstanding Monsterverse problem, and the kaiju fights were far and away the best part of Godzilla vs. Kong, so hopefully this approach will play to his strengths. But that movie also had excellent VFX, and some of the shots in here are rough. There's time to fix them, at least... which probably can't be said of Godzilla's design. I like that he's pink (did some Warner Bros. executive take the wrong message away from Barbie?) and sporting a thagomizer on his tail, but his proportions are uncanny. And I see Kong found the Infinity Gauntlet; good for him.

I am, of course, not done talking about Godzilla Minus One. It added over 200 screens and made $8.3 million in its second weekend in the U.S., a minuscule drop considering that its $11.4 million opening "weekend" spanned five days. Almost a third of all tickets sold this weekend were for Godzilla or Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, remarkable in a market so allergic to foreign imports. That brings its total to $25.3 million (more by the time you read this). With an avalanche of Christmas blockbusters on the way, its grip on premium-format screens is about to slip. Still, I see it hanging around theaters for a while. I have never seen the fandom so united in praise for a film before, and it's making plenty of new fans.

Some of those fans are in high places. Variety leaked that it's on the 20-film shortlist for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars (to be narrowed to five nominees), something I, again, never expected to read about a Toho Godzilla film. Alas, it's locked out of this year's Best International Film category due to the quirky nomination period.

Much has been made of how great the film looks on a $15 million budget. I have two caveats, one in each direction. No one is quite sure where the $15 million figure came from; Yamazaki said at a recent con appearance that he only wished he had that much to play with. (He has yet to divulge the actual budget, just that it was above ¥1 billion.) Now, unions in the Japanese film industry are much weaker than in Hollywood, so a given production budget goes a lot further in Japan. All the same, I doubt that alone explains Minus One looking better than most superhero movies made for twenty times the cost. I'll offer a couple more reasons: Yamazaki has extensive visual effects experience (he's been the VFX supervisor of all but one of the live-action films he's directed), and the film's big effects scenes aren't as busy or lengthy as many of the Hollywood counterparts. I don't know if Disney will ask Yamazaki to direct the next Star Wars movie (that would require there to be a next Star Wars movie), but the studios here should be taking notes.

the sphinx, a blog with a ton of American Godzilla rarities to share, has outdone itself—behold a continuity and dialogue script for the U.S. version of King Kong vs. Godzilla! Included in the download is a detailed comparison with the film. No huge differences, apart from the script giving the secretary added to the U.S. version a name, but a fascinating piece of history all the same.

The Minus One incarnation of Godzilla (MaiGoji?) has joined Godzilla Battle Line, accompanied by [SPOILER]. To be honest, my enthusiasm for this game has been flagging, and I'm not caught up on the strategies developing around these two, so I'll just refer you to Sir Melee's channel as usual. This Godzilla's also doing a collaboration with the Japanese mobile game Fleet of Blue Flame.

Tiffany Grant, Asuka's original voice actress, will narrate the audiobooks for the Neon Genesis Evangelion: ANIMA light novels which explore an Instrumentality-free path for the show. Seven Seas Entertainment published them in English from 2019 to 2021, which, to be honest, was also news to me.

This one's for my fellow library workers: the obscenely popular Who HQ nonfiction series for children is publishing a book about Godzilla next June. I don't know if this will have quite the same impact on today's young Godzilla fans as the Ian Thorne tome had on Gen Xers and Millennials, what with the Internet and all, but it's certain to be more factual. Expect illustrations instead of licensed photos, and not just because of Toho.

I can finally talk more about the Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers mobile game without fearing a DMCA. Not that there's much to talk about; it's freemium through and through and I'm not sure I know a single person who's excited for it. Interesting to see some critters from the comics break into another medium, at least. Here's the trailer.

[lean-mean-demon-genevieve]

I’m not interested in defending celebrities, to be so for real, but I am interested in a crumb of whatever drugs this blogger is on. This kind of standom delusion must feel amazing. 💊💊

It’s so funny to me when stans go after each other and fail to realize that they are all engaging in the same kind of “Nuh-uh! That other side sucks the hardest because of all this very biased data I’ve compiled” type of arguing. I’m also not interested in warring with any stan blogs, but this was just so egregious and needed to be debunked. So let’s unpack:

Right off the bat, this blog has used the word tokenize incorrectly. This means to use someone as a symbol of inclusion or compliance with regulations, or to avoid the appearance of discrimination or prejudice.

I think they are intending to refer to the kids being a commodity to exploit in the overall branding of the family; that they are being objectified. And one only has to skim the Instagram feeds of Danneel and Gen to see which family is more heavy-handed. “Danneel’s entire Instagram use to be solely about that.”Based on what, exactly? Danneel’s very first post is of Jensen and JJ, yes, and her identity as wife and mother is (gasp) very much on display ever since. But…that’s to be expected, right?! After all, sharing those parts of their family life on socials is exactly the whole point and why anyone initially followed. It is that behind the scenes peek into the family lives of J2 that drew people in. It’s not as if either of these women has much of a fan base on their own and neither of them were acting at the time their IG accounts launched.

A quick side-by-side of the 2 accounts at about the same point in time (2017/2018) shows little differences in themes of content:

This blog further claims that “Genevieve and Jared are intelligently including their children where needed” and doing so in “genuine, selfless ways.” *snorts* At the time of this writing, Danneel has 458 posts and Gen has 1,833. Now, I didn’t review each post but the few tags I saw included in family photos were Disneyland and Warner Bros when they visited in recent years. I did not see multiple paid partnership ads featuring the Ackles children. I’m open to anyone proving me wrong, because by sheer volume my argument will still stand. In a random sampling of 2021, we have a string of posts of the Pada-kids that double as ads to varying degrees. Here are just a few examples:

Now you might say, “ok but these are products for children and families…that still seems pretty thoughtful.” Except that one need only scroll a little farther to see the kids included in brand deals for adult supplements, exercise gear, cleaning products, and even shampoo.

All of these products still fit in the “items that help me be a great mom” theme of the Now & Gen era, but this is still blatantly using images of the kids for profit in ways that the Ackles just have not done. What is shown here is just the tip of the iceberg and does not include the other attempts at branding on the failed Now & Gen blog or the YouTube vlog. So I’m not sure how the Pads have only used the kids “when needed” when this family was never going to go hungry without these endorsement deals.

Comparing the volume of likes on Gen’s IG posts that contain the children vs those that do not makes it seem likely that someone has been paying attention to the trends and has concluded that utilizing the children in ads has more earning potential. This is the current climate of social media marketing. These outcomes are in fact considered.

The idea that kids should be allowed to “earn money or have a brand” if they want is actually incredibly irresponsible. Protecting the safety of children that are a part of family content creation was a popular topic over the last year. There have been several examples of families who lost the plot in their efforts to market their children in order to achieve financial gain. What an asinine claim to make for children in general when Google is right there. And I love a link, so here’s a few: X, X, and X. It’s too early to definitively summarize the harm that the Pads might be causing their kids with all the exposure. Even when parents are not intentionally exploiting, their children are too young to consent to this type of “work.” Their brains are literally not developed enough to consider the long term pros and cons. All of this sets them up for potential harm, the risk of which makes none of this a need.

“What’s wrong are self-centered, clueless parents who only show off their kids to benefit off of a certain image.” (Pretending I can’t see the self-centered bit because woooo boy…Gen…😬) But aren’t both families posting photos of their kids to “benefit” off of their image of “family?” It’s baked into the Spn and even Walker marketing. The fandoms have been referred to as a family almost since their inception, so it only makes sense that fans were interested in the leads and their own growing families. Again, both families have benefitted but the Pads have benefitted all the way to the bank. And some Padalecki stans are quick to point this out as a win. If the above blog wants to congratulate Gen on her shrewd sense of business and use of capitalism, then that is a whole other thing and they should just come out and say that without making anyone out to be a saint.

One should take note that nowhere in here have I said that Danneel or Jensen are better people than anyone. I didn’t praise them for anything or proclaim their intentions are always pure of heart. How could anyone know that, except by virtue of the faith that comes along with extreme fandom? And that faith isn’t the same as screenshots, numbers, and patterns.

As always: Pedestals aren’t for people. Hold everyone accountable, even your faves. They will survive.✌🏼

[mangedog]

tumblr blackout protest: masterpost

original post proposing the blackout

current plan is:

48 hour blackout (june 30th - july 1st, PDT time zone)

see what the response is from staff (if any)

organise an (actually organised…) longer blackout.

keep going - and increasing the length - until we get the response we want

update: how did the blackout go?

current suggestions for demands:

reverse the recent image viewer update

scrap the new users 'for you' page default setting

let us turn off tumblr live indefinitely ( -> here's a response from 2 staff members about it)

increase efforts against spam / porn bots

make reporting abuse and hate speech as easy as reporting as reporting spam

let us go nuts show nuts again… for real this time ( -> there are app store/USA law issues with this one, so it's not entirely in tumblr's hands)

remove flashing ads, including not accepting blaze campaigns for posts with flashing in them

commit to improving usability and accessibility, and listening to users!

more transparency on staff working on issues raised by users ( -> staff does have a github but seems to be more dev focused than user issues focused)

other posts:

a few notes on the protest

some issues users have

delete the app on the 30th!

on volunteer work & what goes into running tumblr... and why our demands might not work

the strike should be kept at 48 hours... this time. (and a suggestion for mastodon in the meantime)

response from staff members (cyle, kat & zingring)

boycott tumblr products (and why the indefinite blackout suggestion had nothing to do with disability month; though it was an oversight on my behalf)

some criticisms... and some suggestions

the current goals

on demands, communicating with staff, and suggestions for communicating with participants

complaining to staff hasn't worked (so far)

leave negative reviews on the app store

initial suggestion to make it indefinite

let's use this post as a place to discuss how the blackout should work, how long it will go for, our demands, how to communicate best with staff, and what happens if it doesn't work.

a response from zingring (staff, COO) said:

"We actually are talking very recently (since yesterday) about instituting a public bug tracker, and it could be GitHub. We are also talking about publishing a community wishlist."

so it's already working!

(number of times staff has rejected a blaze campaign for the original post: 5)

[jupiterswasphouse]

WASP REVIEW - WAR WASPS (METROID PRIME)

[Image IDs: Two pieces of official artwork for the War Wasps from Metroid Prime, the first from the remaster while the second is from the original game /End IDs.]

This is actually the first wasp I'm covering from a game I haven't played, although I do plan on getting around to it, so forgive me if I misinterpret! With that out of the way, my first impression of these alien wasps is that, visually, in terms of shape, especially with their stinger sticking out in the way it does, they most resemble ichneumons, with the remaster version especially looking like Megarhyssa greenei!

[Image Source: bugguide.net | Image ID: A photo of greene's giant ichneumonid wasp, a large brown, yellow, and black ichneumon wasp with translucent wings and an exceptionally long ovipositor /End IDs.]

Except for a few details of this wasp's silhouette that are clear in both the remaster art and models in a good chunk of the games from what I can see, that being the almost beetle elytra-like protrusions above the translucent wings on the thorax, the spines on the abdomen and thorax, the lack of a third pair of legs, and, perhaps most obviously, the bird-like eye shape and beak they have for a mouth.

Although the last point is notably different in the art of the original game as well as the species shown in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, which has no legs as well as a rounder head with 9 eyes, in three groups, each almost resembling how the ocelli are assembled on the top of a real world wasp's head.

[Image ID A screenshot of the War Wasp from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes /End IDs.]

Although, the resemblance to ichneumons seems to be entirely visual, as ichneumons are solitary, and these guys are eusocial! They build hives and mainly attack in defense of the hive, this hive being built over existing crevices and made of whatever material they can get their hands on, gluing pieces into place with "adhesives secreted from their abdomens", a process which is seemingly similar to how a honey bee (actually technically, taxonomically another eusocial wasp itself, bees having evolved from other wasps as a sister lineage of Ammoplanidae) would produce wax from its abdomen, similarly sharing the aspect of "royal jelly" production with bees.

[Image ID: A 3D render of the hive of a War Wasp colony from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes /End ID.]

In fact, they're possibly even more than eusocial, as the logbook entry for the green and red variant found in the Hive Totem of Tallon IV, Ram War Wasps, states: "The War Wasps are the only species on Tallon IV to evolve a true hive mind", as well as "Striking from all sides as a single intelligence, they can fell huge organisms". Although it is unclear whether the consciousness of the War Wasps being a hive mind is true for all species or just the Ram War Wasps, as both regular War Wasps (Prime 1 and Echoes both being different) and Barbed War Wasps display notably different behavior.

On the topic of said behavior, however, on top of the ramming behavior of the Ram War Wasps, the standard War Wasps in the original Metroid Prime seem similar to notable stinging eusocial species of wasps, namely Vespids, in that, upon spotting a threat to the hive, they divebomb and attempt to directly sting the threat. Although they're a bit more territorial than even eusocial Vespids, as, in the real world, you would be able to get fairly close to their nest without being attacked if you know what you're doing (See a previous ask I received for more information about my experience with this), while War Wasps attack from much, much further away!

Meanwhile, the standard War Wasps in Echoes and the Barbed War Wasps in Prime 1 actually fire projectiles, a feature found in very few wasps, namely ants like some Formica wood ants and yellow crazy ants (Ants having evolved from wasps in a similar way as bees, taxonomically being wasps). Although whereas these ants spray acid, the projectile firing War Wasps fire beams of pure energy (Standard, Echoes) or their stingers (Barbed, Prime 1).

The logbook entry for Barbed War Wasps states: "This insect can propel the tip of its stinger up to 20 meters. The stinger tips regrow seconds after launch and contain an acidic compound designed to predigest prey". Obviously, while shockingly efficient and fascinating as many things real wasps do possess, this isn't something found in real world wasps. Even the aspect of predigestion is something more akin to assassin bugs, who inject venom via their "beaks" to predigest the prey that they hunt.

In conclusion, however, being aliens, I can't exactly rank them on their merit of being "accurate to real wasps", instead, it's best I score them just based on how neat I find them! and honestly, I find the War Wasps to be very interesting, it's clear the writers of Metroid put quite a bit of thought into how they behave, and they just have cool designs!

-

Overall: 8/10

-

This wasp was suggested by @coleopterabyte , leave your wasp review suggestion in the replies, tags, or askbox!

[mariacallous]

Stories about AI-generated political content are like stories about people drunkenly setting off fireworks: There’s a good chance they’ll end in disaster. WIRED is tracking AI usage in political campaigns across the world, and so far examples include pornographic deepfakes and misinformation-spewing chatbots. It’s gotten to the point where the US Federal Communications Commission has proposed mandatory disclosures for AI use in television and radio ads.

Despite concerns, some US political campaigns are embracing generative AI tools. There’s a growing category of AI-generated political content flying under the radar this election cycle, developed by startups including Denver-based BattlegroundAI, which uses generative AI to come up with digital advertising copy at a rapid clip. “Hundreds of ads in minutes,” its website proclaims.

BattlegroundAI positions itself as a tool specifically for progressive campaigns—no MAGA types allowed. And it is moving fast: It launched a private beta only six weeks ago and a public beta just last week. Cofounder and CEO Maya Hutchinson is currently at the Democratic National Convention trying to attract more clients. So far, the company has around 60, she says. (The service has a freemium model, with an upgraded option for $19 a month.)

“It’s kind of like having an extra intern on your team,” Hutchinson, a marketer who got her start on the digital team for President Obama’s reelection campaign, tells WIRED. We’re sitting at a picnic table inside the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, and she’s raising her voice to be heard over music blasting from a nearby speaker. “If you’re running ads on Facebook or Google, or developing YouTube scripts, we help you do that in a very structured fashion.”

BattlegroundAI’s interface asks users to select from five different popular large language models—including ChatGPT, Claude, and Anthropic—to generate answers; it then asks users to further customize their results by selecting for tone and “creativity level,” as well as how many variations on a single prompt they might want. It also offers guidance on whom to target and helps craft messages geared toward specialized audiences for a variety of preselected issues, including infrastructure, women’s health, and public safety.

BattlegroundAI declined to provide any examples of actual political ads created using its services. However, WIRED tested the product by creating a campaign aimed at extremely left-leaning adults aged 88 to 99 on the issue of media freedom. “Don't let fake news pull the wool over your bifocals!” one of the suggested ads began.

BattlegroundAI offers only text generation—no AI images or audio. The company adheres to various regulations around the use of AI in political ads.

“What makes Battleground so well suited for politics is it’s very much built with those rules in mind,” says Andy Barr, managing director for Uplift, a Democratic digital ad agency. Barr says Uplift has been testing the BattlegroundAI beta for a few weeks. “It’s helpful with idea generation,” he says. The agency hasn’t yet released any ads using Battleground copy yet, but it has already used it to develop concepts, Barr adds.

I confess to Hutchinson that if I were a politician, I would be scared to use BattlegroundAI. Generative AI tools are known to “hallucinate,” a polite way of saying that they sometimes make things up out of whole cloth. (They bullshit, to use academic parlance.) I ask how she’s ensuring that the political content BattlegroundAI generates is accurate.

“Nothing is automated,” she replies. Hutchinson notes that BattlegroundAI’s copy is a starting-off point, and that humans from campaigns are meant to review and approve it before it goes out. “You might not have a lot of time, or a huge team, but you’re definitely reviewing it.”

Of course, there’s a rising movement opposing how AI companies train their products on art, writing, and other creative work without asking for permission. I ask Hutchinson what she’d say to people who might oppose how tools like ChatGPT are trained. “Those are incredibly valid concerns,” she says. “We need to talk to Congress. We need to talk to our elected officials.”

I ask whether BattlegroundAI is looking at offering language models that train on only public domain or licensed data. “Always open to that,” she says. “We also need to give folks, especially those who are under time constraints, in resource-constrained environments, the best tools that are available to them, too. We want to have consistent results for users and high-quality information—so the more models that are available, I think the better for everybody.”

And how would Hutchinson respond to people in the progressive movement—who generally align themselves with the labor movement—objecting to automating ad copywriting? “Obviously valid concerns,” she says. “Fears that come with the advent of any new technology—we’re afraid of the computer, of the light bulb.”

Hutchinson lays out her stance: She doesn’t see this as a replacement for human labor so much as a way to reduce grunt work. “I worked in advertising for a very long time, and there's so many elements of it that are repetitive, that are honestly draining of creativity,” she says. “AI takes away the boring elements.” She sees BattlegroundAI as a helpmeet for overstretched and underfunded teams.

Taylor Coots, a Kentucky-based political strategist who recently began using the service, describes it as “very sophisticated,” and says it helps identify groups of target voters and ways to tailor messaging to reach them in a way that would otherwise be difficult for small campaigns. In battleground races in gerrymandered districts, where progressive candidates are major underdogs, budgets are tight. “We don’t have millions of dollars,” he says. “Any opportunities we have for efficiencies, we’re looking for those.”

Will voters care if the writing in digital political ads they see is generated with the help of AI? “I'm not sure there is anything more unethical about having AI generate content than there is having unnamed staff or interns generate content,” says Peter Loge, an associate professor and program director at George Washington University who founded a project on ethics in political communication.

“If one could mandate that all political writing done with the help of AI be disclosed, then logically you would have to mandate that all political writing”—such as emails, ads, and op-eds—“not done by the candidate be disclosed,” he adds.

Still, Loge has concerns about what AI does to public trust on a macro level, and how it might impact the way people respond to political messaging going forward. “One risk of AI is less what the technology does, and more how people feel about what it does,” he says. “People have been faking images and making stuff up for as long as we've had politics. The recent attention on generative AI has increased peoples' already incredibly high levels of cynicism and distrust. If everything can be fake, then maybe nothing is true.”

Hutchinson, meanwhile, is focused on her company’s shorter-term impact. “We really want to help people now,” she says. “We’re trying to move as fast as we can.”

[ableism]

Okay as promised to my instagram followers: My Review Of The Substance 2024 ❇️ Spoilers ahead! Tread carefully!

To qualify myself… I’m a body horror buff. If you ask me to list my favorite movies, 80% of them will be about people experiencing horrific transformations and acts of fantastical violence. Body horror is kind of my whole thing! I love French New Extremity, I’ve seen every Cronenberg, I can only get off if something nauseating happens to somebody’s body. I’m very drawn to body horror as a vessel for visualizing experiences of sexual violence and desire(re: Crash 1996, Titane, Hellraiser) or dysphoria/dysmorphia (also Titane, Being John Malkovich ((I will fight you to death, it IS body horror, die mad)), Tusk) but I think a lot of the genre leans into the ways our lives and bodies are altered by technology and the possible consequences of these extremes (The Fly, Crimes of the Future 2022, Tetsuo the Iron Man, and you guessed it, Titane AGAIN).

Immediately I’m thrilled by how The Substance hits every single one of these genre concepts. It makes the concept feel more suffocating and inescapable than other films that deal singularly with their messaging. Elisabeth is trapped by perceptions of her body on all sides; she takes the drug because she’s been deemed undesirable and devoid of value by the same people who made her famous in the first place. To escape this, she creates (through a disfiguring and grotesque process) a conventionally desirable vessel. The chase to obtain beauty is worth the most violent of undertakings. For her prime self, it generates more self loathing and degradation of her self image. For the secondary self, she continues to experience profound amounts of objectification, still valued only for her desirability, her youth, her performance of childlike naïveté. I saw an excellent review that stated The Substance holds the viewers accountable through the scenes of full nudity and salacious dancing to interpret the way we’ve been trained to default to a sexual view of bodies, physical movement, behavior. We’re made complicit in Elisa/Sue’s dehumanization.

The Substance depicts dysmorphia through body horror in the most articulate way I’ve ever seen. Logically, the viewer knows; This is not how aging works. This woman is not decrepit and wasting away, she’s just middle age. But in the digital age, youth is capital, and youth is sexually desirable and attractive. It may not be the reality of aging, but this is how we’ve been conditioned to feel about the natural course of our lives. The solution is not self acceptance. It is products, procedures, adapting diets rooted in a culture of systemically encouraging disordered eating. Elisabeth’s body becomes worthless, just a source to be used as a fountain of eternal youth. Her pain, deformity, depression, are all irrelevant if it means she can temporarily experience youth. When she tries to stop the procedure, deformed into a funhouse mirror of what an elderly person actually looks like, Sue beats her to death in a blind rage. Her appearance makes her worthless. Her perversely obtained youth is the “only good part” of her. The metaphor frankly could not be clearer and Im not… shocked per se to see people not getting it online, because I know media literacy just isn’t for everybody, but it’s straightforward and concise. That isn’t to say that The Substance isn’t full of other commentary and room for interpretation.

A lot of people in me and D’s screening were laughing during the Mostro section of the film. I spent a decent chunk of it crying! Again, media literacy isn’t for everybody, and I’m the ideal audience for this one with the existing body of knowledge to appreciate what was done here, but we still found it quite distasteful. It’s terrible and grotesque and is the most robust and “bashing you over the head” part of the metaphor. To make it abundantly clear what was being said: The best version of yourself that you could ever be is the person you are, and the person you have always been, exactly where you’re at.

At her most fantastically deformed (HUGE credit to the practical effect work in this movie, which we’ll talk about a little more in a second), she wishes she could just go back to who she was before any of this happened. None of it was worth the terror, and now she’s trapped in a monstrous body, with the same soul and character she had the entire time. It offers the sense that her body is simply something that is now happening to her, rather than just existing, or being contended over, as previously seen. It’s a level of constant infliction she could not have imagined. Loss of control is a large theme of The Substance, the point being clearly that you cannot stop the natural progression of your body’s changing, and intervention only worsens your ability to perceive your body as your own. She dresses up to perform anyways. She tries to curl her few strands of hair. She stabs earrings through her almost inconceivable skull. She just cannot stop trying to be beautiful. It’s all she’s ever been allowed to be. When she goes to perform, she is screamed at in horror by the audience, while calling out “It’s still me! It’s still me!” to no avail. Nobody ever cared who she was or how she felt, only what her body could do for them.

That’s my general plot analysis but for Other Bullshit… I cannot gush enough about the homages paid to Cronenberg in this film, and the follow through on visual language borrowed from Carrie and The Shining. It was viscerally satisfying and just a lot of fun for horror enthusiasts. The director spends so much time being totally original, while still occupying the sandbox Built by other pioneers of the genre, and I absolutely loved seeing a female director in body horror taking up the space to say “You did this, it was incredible, and here is the fresh and enthralling ideas I’m bringing to the table.” It was a body horror movie my beloved Cronenberg could not have made. That’s not to decry his skill and vision, but to praise The Substance for its bold direction and fierce representation of uniquely woman-centered body horror. To hype up my favorite little things, I adored all the flies buzzing around in the beginning of the movie before she undergoes any transformation, I love that the catalyst for her taking the drug is getting into a car crash, I love that all the sets full of evil male directors are stylized after Kubrick’s Shining (because FUCK that guy! I piss on his grave!), I love love love that the beheading at the end is the same as the head pop scene from the beginning of Scanners, and I just cannot get over the Mostro suit. It’s sublime, and the actresses deserve joint best actress Oscar’s for what they accomplished in them. Holy fucking shit! Oh my gd! Wow!!!! It’s the same feeling at the end of The Fly, but with such a fresh take, the same sharp attention and reverence for practical FX work, and drawn out for much longer, with much more modern capability to enjoy the suit for longer, from more angles, with more gritty detail. It’s not trying to emulate or elevate anything. It’s just a perfectly present and challenging addition to the genre at large.

I love that none of the men in this movie were fully formed human beings. They’re the most uncanny and robotic part of the whole film. They question and belittle the personhood of the women they encounter, so the director takes the time to strip them of theirs. It’s really not about the men here. Hell yeah! I’m also glad that there was no sexual assault scene in this film. I don’t mind this content at all and I’ve seen many done in an incredibly visceral way, I’m pro-depiction of everything and anything, but The Substance didn’t need one. The whole thing is an act of sexual violence. It’s stronger that way and was the perfect decision. And since you knew it was coming… The Substance is one of the best , if not the best, addiction allegory I’ve ever seen. The other you, the real you, is just a life source for the impostor, It takes and it takes until there’s nothing left. I felt it strong and will definitely be looking for more readings on the same page so I can expand more at some point, but I found it very clear through the visual language of IV drug use, tooth loss, aging, etc. that there was a strong point on addiction being posited in The Substance.

So that’s my enthusiasts review!!! If i was unclear: Go see this movie. If you’re a sensitive soul or new to/unsure about body horror and specific types of gore, Please check online for trigger warnings, because it is a very graphic and brutal piece of film. I’ve seen pretty much every indie horror released in 2024 and as much as I did enjoy Longlegs and Cuckoo, The Substance blows them both out of the water. We’re in the age of women in horror and I love it!! It’s fucking awesome!!!! Go watch The Substance and then eat a bug. Stay vigilant I love you 🦩