#still experimenting so i have a fast pipeline

[kokokulto]

Dinner time! 🍽️🥘 Sorry Octavio, it’s hard to say no to Callie. 

[TEXT]   Callie: Hey Grampa, can we have crabby cakes tonight? Octavio: Sorry squiddo, we already had those. We’ll have curry instead. (Callie then makes a really sad face) Octavio: !! Cap. Cuttlefish: So, what’s for di— Callie: CRABBY CAKE!

[imsobadatnicknames2]

How can you consider yourself any sort of leftist when you defend AI art bullshit? You literally simp for AI techbros and have the gall to pretend you're against big corporations?? Get fucked

I don't "defend" AI art. I think a particular old post of mine that a lot of people tend to read in bad faith must be making the rounds again lmao.

Took me a good while to reply to this because you know what? I decided to make something positive out of this and use this as an opportunity to outline what I ACTUALLY believe about AI art. If anyone seeing this decides to read it in good or bad faith... Welp, your choice I guess.

I have several criticisms of the way the proliferation of AI art generators and LLMs is making a lot of things worse. Some of these are things I have voiced in the past, some of these are things I haven't until now:

Most image and text AI generators are fine-tuned to produce nothing but the most agreeable, generically pretty content slop, pretty much immediately squandering their potential to be used as genuinely interesting artistic tools with anything to offer in terms of a unique aesthetic experience (AI video still manages to look bizarre and interesting but it's getting there too)

In the entertainment industry and a lot of other fields, AI image generation is getting incorporated into production pipelines in ways that lead to the immiseration of working artists, being used to justify either lower wages or straight-up layoffs, and this is something that needs to be fought against. That's why I unconditionally supported the SAG-AFTRA strikes last year and will unconditionally support any collective action to address AI art as a concrete labor issue

In most fields where it's being integrated, AI art is vastly inferior to human artists in any use case where you need anything other than to make a superficially pretty picture really fast. If you need to do anything like ask for revisions or minor corrections, give very specific descriptions of how objects and people are interacting with each other, or just like. generate several pictures of the same thing and have them stay consistent with each other, you NEED human artists and it's preposterous to think they can be replaced by AI.

There is a lot of art on the internet that consists of the most generically pretty, cookie-cutter anime waifu-adjacent slop that has zero artistic or emotional value to either the people seeing it or the person churning it out, and while this certainly was A Thing before the advent of AI art generators, generative AI has made it extremely easy to become the kind of person who churns it out and floods online art spaces with it.

Similarly, LLMs make it extremely easy to generate massive volumes of texts, pages, articles, listicles and what have you that are generic vapid SEO-friendly pap at best and bizzarre nonsense misinformation at worst, drowning useful information in a sea of vapid noise and rendering internet searches increasingly useless.

The way LLMs are being incorporated into customer service and similar services not only, again, encourages further immiseration of customer service workers, but it's also completely useless for most customers.

A very annoyingly vocal part the population of AI art enthusiasts, fanatics and promoters do tend to talk about it in a way that directly or indirectly demeans the merit and skill of human artists and implies that they think of anyone who sees anything worthwile in the process of creation itself rather than the end product as stupid or deluded.

So you can probably tell by now that I don't hold AI art or writing in very high regard. However (and here's the part that'll get me called an AI techbro, or get people telling me that I'm just jealous of REAL artists because I lack the drive to create art of my own, or whatever else) I do have some criticisms of the way people have been responding to it, and have voiced such criticisms in the past.

I think a lot of the opposition to AI art has critstallized around unexamined gut reactions, whipping up a moral panic, and pressure to outwardly display an acceptable level of disdain for it. And in particular I think this climate has made a lot of people very prone to either uncritically entertain and adopt regressive ideas about Intellectual Propety, OR reveal previously held regressive ideas about Intellectual Property that are now suddenly more socially acceptable to express:

(I wanna preface this section by stating that I'm a staunch intellectual property abolitionist for the same reason I'm a private property abolitionist. If you think the existence of intellectual property is a good thing, a lot of my ideas about a lot of stuff are gonna be unpalatable to you. Not much I can do about it.)

A lot of people are suddenly throwing their support behind any proposal that promises stricter copyright regulations to combat AI art, when a lot of these also have the potential to severely udnermine fair use laws and fuck over a lot of independent artist for the benefit of big companies.

It was very worrying to see a lot of fanfic authors in particular clap for the George R R Martin OpenAI lawsuit because well... a lot of them don't realize that fanfic is a hobby that's in a position that's VERY legally precarious at best, that legally speaking using someone else's characters in your fanfic is as much of a violation of copyright law as straight up stealing entire passages, and that any regulation that can be used against the latter can be extended against the former.

Similarly, a lot of artists were cheering for the lawsuit against AI art models trained to mimic the style of specific artists. Which I agree is an extremely scummy thing to do (just like a human artist making a living from ripping off someone else's work is also extremely scummy), but I don't think every scummy act necessarily needs to be punishable by law, and some of them would in fact leave people worse off if they were. All this to say: If you are an artist, and ESPECIALLY a fan artist, trust me. You DON'T wanna live in a world where there's precedent for people's artstyles to be considered intellectual property in any legally enforceable way. I know you wanna hurt AI art people but this is one avenue that's not worth it.

Especially worrying to me as an indie musician has been to see people mention the strict copyright laws of the music industry as a positive thing that they wanna emulate. "this would never happen in the music industry because they value their artists copyright" idk maybe this is a the grass is greener type of situation but I'm telling you, you DON'T wanna live in a world where copyright law in the visual arts world works the way it does in the music industry. It's not worth it.

I've seen at least one person compare AI art model training to music sampling and say "there's a reason why they cracked down on sampling" as if the death of sampling due to stricter copyright laws was a good thing and not literally one of the worst things to happen in the history of music which nearly destroyed several primarily black music genres. Of course this is anecdotal because it's just One Guy I Saw Once, but you can see what I mean about how uncritical support for copyright law as a tool against AI can lead people to adopt increasingly regressive ideas about copyright.

Similarly, I've seen at least one person go "you know what? Collages should be considered art theft too, fuck you" over an argument where someone else compared AI art to collages. Again, same point as above.

Similarly, I take issue with the way a lot of people seem EXTREMELY personally invested in proving AI art is Not Real Art. I not only find this discussion unproductive, but also similarly dangerously prone to validating very reactionary ideas about The Nature Of Art that shouldn't really be entertained. Also it's a discussion rife with intellectual dishonesty and unevenly applied definition and standards.

When a lot of people present the argument of AI art not being art because the definition of art is this and that, they try to pretend that this is the definition of art the've always operated under and believed in, even when a lot of the time it's blatantly obvious that they're constructing their definition on the spot and deliberately trying to do so in such a way that it doesn't include AI art.

They never succeed at it, btw. I've seen several dozen different "AI art isn't art because art is [definition]". I've seen exactly zero of those where trying to seriously apply that definition in any context outside of trying to prove AI art isn't art doesn't end up in it accidentally excluding one or more non-AI artforms, usually reflecting the author's blindspots with regard to the different forms of artistic expression.

(However, this is moot because, again, these are rarely definitions that these people actually believe in or adhere to outside of trying to win "Is AI art real art?" discussions.)

Especially worrying when the definition they construct is built around stuff like Effort or Skill or Dedication or The Divine Human Spirit. You would not be happy about the kinds of art that have traditionally been excluded from Real Art using similar definitions.

Seriously when everyone was celebrating that the Catholic Church came out to say AI art isn't real art and sharing it as if it was validating and not Extremely Worrying that the arguments they'd been using against AI art sounded nearly identical to things TradCaths believe I was like. Well alright :T You can make all the "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a catholic" legolas and gimli memes you want, but it won't change the fact that the argument being made by the catholic church was a profoundly conservative one and nearly identical to arguments used to dismiss the artistic merit of certain forms of "degenerate" art and everyone was just uncritically sharing it, completely unconcerned with what kind of worldview they were lending validity to by sharing it.

Remember when the discourse about the Gay Sex cats pic was going on? One of the things I remember the most from that time was when someone went "Tell me a definition of art that excludes this picture without also excluding Fountain by Duchamp" and how just. Literally no one was able to do it. A LOT of people tried to argue some variation of "Well, Fountain is art and this image isn't because what turns fountain into art is Intent. Duchamp's choice to show a urinal at an art gallery as if it was art confers it an element of artistic intent that this image lacks" when like. Didn't by that same logic OP's choice to post the image on tumblr as if it was art also confer it artistic intent in the same way? Didn't that argument actually kinda end up accidentally validating the artistic status of every piece of AI art ever posted on social media? That moment it clicked for me that a lot of these definitions require applying certain concepts extremely selectively in order to make sense for the people using them.

A lot of people also try to argue it isn't Real Art based on the fact that most AI art is vapid but like. If being vapid definitionally excludes something from being art you're going to have to exclude a whooole lot of stuff along with it. AI art is vapid. A lot of art is too, I don't think this argument works either.

Like, look, I'm not really invested in trying to argue in favor of The Artistic Merits of AI art but I also find it extremely hard to ignore how trying to categorically define AI art as Not Real Art not only is unproductive but also requires either a) applying certain parts of your definition of art extremely selectively, b) constructing a definition of art so convoluted and full of weird caveats as to be functionally useless, or c) validating extremely reactionary conservative ideas about what Real Art is.

Some stray thoughts that don't fit any of the above sections.

I've occassionally seen people respond to AI art being used for shitposts like "A lot of people have affordable commissions, you could have paid someone like $30 to draw this for you instead of using the plagiarism algorithm and exploiting the work of real artists" and sorry but if you consider paying an artist a rate that amounts to like $5 for several hours of work a LESS exploitative alternative I think you've got something fucked up going on with your priorities.

Also it's kinda funny when people comment on the aforementioned shitposts with some variation of "see, the usage of AI art robs it of all humor because the thing that makes shitposts funny is when you consider the fact that someone would spend so much time and effort in something so stupid" because like. Yeah that is part of the humor SOMETIMES but also people share and laugh at low effort shitposts all the time. Again you're constructing a definition that you don't actually believe in anywhere outside of this type of conversations. Just say you don't like that it's AI art because you think it's morally wrong and stop being disingenuous.

So yeah, this is pretty much everything I believe about the topic.

I don't "defend" AI art, but my opposition to it is firmly rooted in my principles, and that means I refuse to uncritically accept any anti-AI art argument that goes against those same principles.

If you think not accepting and parroting every Anti-AI art argument I encounter because some of them are ideologically rooted in things I disagree with makes me indistinguishable from "AI techbros" you're working under a fucked up dichotomy.

[lsd-astronaut]

Hello!! I hope you don’t mind me asking but could you do a fluffy Crowley x Demon!reader x Aziraphale fic (or headcanons)??

Maybe something like what it’s like all being in a relationship together?

(Also if it’s not too much to ask can the reader use a cane to walk around? Maybe because of something relating to when they fell and became a demon? If not that’s okay!!!)

First of all, I love you and I could kiss you in the mouth right now. I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR AGES THAT CROWLEY WOULD HAVE CHRONIC PAIN BC OF THE FUCKING FALL. I refuse to believe for one moment that you can fall all the way from Heaven, land on the ground and be all “hey guys i’m fine!”

Aziraphale x Demon!Reader x Crowley

Please like and reblog<3

Warnings: chronic pain, but nothing else, this is just good old fluff

• You were an archangel along with Crowley, with the same obligations in making the cosmos✨ so you both met Aziraphale at the same time

• When Azi told you both that the project was destined to close in a few thousand years, you were the one that proposed to fill a complain to God (and crowley seconded you)

• Cue a war and a Fall later, Crowley and you are in Hell, but in different departments so you don’t see each other much

• In fact, you didn’t see Azi and Crowley for the first time since the Fall until the crucifixion of Jesus

• You stood beside them in silent reverence to this poor soul lost for all of humanity

• “What sort of mother would wish this fate upon her own kin?” Crowley and Azi turned to you with confused expressions (although Crowley gained a lot of respect for that comment hehe)

• After some idle conversation, and Crowley convincing Aziraphale not to just smite you right there and then, you three decide to traverse the world

• Centuries pass, and Crowley and you stay around humans (you love their way of living, and he likes children so everyone wins)

• You like to read everything you can get your hands on, to Crowley’s chagrin

• “Now I have two bookworms. What have I done to deserve this?”

• It’s circa the year 1000, in the new continent that these curious people called Vikings have discovered, when Crowley and you decide to experiment a human thing that you had wanted to try for a long time

• Your first kiss is messy, and there are more teeth than anything else; besides Crowley insists it feels slimey

• However, she can’t help but to accept he got a bit aroused by it

• Practice makes better, as they say, and so you do

• Although you spend the most time with Crowley, your relationship with Aziraphale also evolves throughout the years

• The “we have a mutual but I still don’t like you” to “maybe I do care about you” pipeline, if you want

• You take him to all kind of food places and bookstores, and he warms up to you a lot

• Introducing him to classical music was your proudest moment, and also the pettiest as Crowley had crossed you a bit beforehand

• The first time you kiss Aziraphale (or rather, he does), is one time you both were a bit tipsy during a masquerade ball in Paris in the 18th century

• He is a bit unexperienced but he gets the hang out of it really quick

• The three of you “confess” to each other in 1941, after the magic show fiasco

• Crowley looks nonchalant but you can see behind his eyes, he was worried sick he would be separated from both of you

• You make sure to give him extra cuddles that night

• Fast forward to 2008 and you work in Warlock’s house along with Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis, you being Warlock’s governess (like this is the fucking 1800s or smth lmao)

• It is at this time that the two of them notice you limping a bit every day after all chores have been done

• You insist that it is nothing and that you are perfectly capable of walking

• However, Ashtoreth happens to see you during one of your bad flares

• She immediately helps you to sit down on the bed, and looks at you expecting an explanation

• Her no-nonsense glare deters you from making up an excuse so you tell her the whole truth

• When you had fallen, you hadn’t landed correctly and had broken your legs on impact

• Miracles hadn’t done the full job and so you had been forced to endure the pain of the bones repairing themselves not quite right

• You had learned to mask the pain after centuries of practice but some days were just worse than others

• The next day, Ashtoreth gifts you a cane adorned with a snake head with little wings

• You proudly use it every day forward

• After the Second Coming, the three of you go to live in South Downs, finally able to be yourselves together

• There is still so much stuff to learn about everything, but you’re immortal and you are not alone, so why the hurry?

• As the sun sets on the horizon, you lean your head on Aziraphale’s shoulder as he reads one of Jane Austen’s books, and Crowley’s head is on your lap, already snoring softly

• You will be okay

I just wanted to say, I’m sorry if this is not what you asked for exactly as it is my first time writing for these two and I haven’t written either in two years so I feel I’m very rusty. I forgot ab the chronic pain until almost at the end, and I talk more about the history of you relationship than the actual relationship in itself lmao

Still, I hope you like it!

[kitkatt0430]

role reversal AU with Barry and Iris? :)

So I've written a couple of these before - and I no doubt will again. [I Know (Do You?) and Hurry Up (To Slow Down)] I do enjoy a good role reversal for these two. :D

So in a role reversal specifically from Iris' point of view, I think she'd initially promise not to tell Barry when Joe asks, but quickly realize from Barry's interest in metahumans and the Flash that keeping him in the dark is pretty cruel. Instead of trying to gaslight him about it or talk him out of investigating, Iris would come clean. Forewarned is forearmed and Iris wants him to be safe about things.

Depending on how long it takes for Iris to tell him, Barry may or may not be upset about it. But if he's upset? He gets over it pretty fast. Iris has always been amazing and his hero and so he's so proud of her for being everyone's hero now.

Eobard is not thrilled. In retrospect he realizes that it isn't that surprising that Iris West had the right genes to become a speedster considering Wally West is destined to become a speedster. Or was destined. What does Eobard know. Maybe Linda Park will become a speedster. *he's waving hands wildly while Gideon wonders if she can get smoke to come out of his ears if she says yes*

since Iris was still in college getting her Masters degree at the time, there would be focus on her trying to maintain her GPA while juggling Flash duties and frustration with EoWells perhaps not respecting her class time, maybe her pointing out that she's not exactly getting paid for her Flash work inspires him to create an internship for her so that she does get paid and can't complain about that anymore.

Because, honestly, Iris doesn't have the Jitters job anymore. it's not her fault she couldn't work while in a coma but what are the odds a part time barista job would get held open for her that long?

There's so many ways things could play out relationship wise. I've done both the Westallen and Westhallen routes, but why not some Barriscowest? Or Snowestallen? Snowest & barrisco? Thallen and Newsvibe (is that what Iris/Cisco is called? that's what I'm going with) There are a lot of possibilities and I do enjoy so many different ships.

Iris and the pipeline... I don't know where she'd stand on that. I'd like to think she'd be against it and so that's the track I'd take writing another one of these AUs, because Iris is the voice of reason. But canon probably would have put her on the pro pipeline train if she hadn't been sidelined like she was. :/

I think Iris would probably try harder to talk things out with the metas. Not always a good idea, but she's much more likely to try to de-escalate a situation than Barry is. So she'd probably be able to talk Shawna down, but trying to empathize with Hartley would likely end with him taking advantage of her sympathy. Though she'd also be less sympathetic towards Snart since, unlike Barry, she doesn't really have the experiences Barry has that made him empathize with Len.

Iris would be tempted to go back in time to save Nora because she loves Barry and she wants him to have his mother. Whether or not she actually does it depends on how her conversation with Henry goes. He was not in favor of changing the timeline to save Nora even though he no doubt wanted her to have a chance to live, so he might be able to talk Iris out of it if he can articulate his feelings on the subject well enough.

a lot of this has focused on Iris, but I think Barry would settle well into back up. He'd probably still get a chance to be a battle couple with her similar to the incident with Tony in canon. Maybe the return of Becky Cooper turns out to be a bad thing when she turns out to be a powered stalker with a crush on Barry?

Barry's also got a pretty close friendship with Cisco and Caitlin already by the time Iris wakes up, which I think would factor into Iris ultimately deciding to tell him pretty quickly. Keeping the secret would not only be potentially putting Barry in danger but damaging his new friendships and Iris wouldn't want to do that to him.

[puppetology]

Sorry if someone asked this before, but what mediums do you use when you do your traditional art (mainly the later chapters of Deathsitter)? Do you typically add anything digitally after you draw it out? Everything about it is just so pleasing to look at!

(so many apologies for taking such a long time to answer, I was out of the country and just now getting a chance back home to look at some messages) So, for DeathSitter chpt6 and intermission 2, I've been experimenting with a number of traditional mediums-mostly because I have no clue what I'm doing and I need to learn lots of things fast- But most consistently, I've used mainly acrylic paint, liquitex brand. I've been most recently laying panels out on hot press watercolor paper with pencil, and sometimes I ink things with black deleter ink or microns (I'm unsure yet if I like painting right on top of my sketches or inking first). After I battle the painting process, I scan the panels and digitally touch them up with clip studio. The scanner isn't able to pick up really bright pinks or fluorescents, so I always have to color correct the scans (I try to match the painting by messing with the tone curve and levels, and then I try to punch it up to something I feel looks more vibrant and interesting). I paint out any fuzz or eraser markings left on the painting, and then I correct bigger mistakes like wonky looking faces or missed details and inconsistencies I'm lucky enough to catch. I'm also not skilled enough yet to make my traditional work look crisp and sharp in focus areas, so I use digital ink to sharpen areas that blur a little too much for my taste. I'm still learning, so I'm sure my production pipeline will continue to change as the comic goes, but for now, that's the general idea! I hope that helps and answers your question, sorry again for the late <3

[princess-dirt]

Long Rant, please ignore... or don't

Growing up, my mom would tell me how handsome I was, how I'd have to be careful with girls because of how many I'd have to deal with. She told me this as early as elementary school.

Of course, she couldn't have been more wrong. I grew up with undiagnosed adhd and likely autism. I had social anxiety and horrible self-image issues. I never cared how I looked, but hated how I looked. I was socially awkward and could barely talk to girls. That's to say very few girls ever approached me.

I was thinking about this, and only now have I really connected the dots. The patriarchy and heteromormativity of the world fucking sucks. Like I grew up and every good thing about my appearance that my mom would say never materialized. No wonder I suffer so bad from self-image issues. I had my mom pushing it down my throat that I should have a girlfriend, but also to be careful of girls, but also that they'd be all over me, but also that I have to make the first move since I was a guy.

I think the worst part about all of this is that when I was in high school, the lack of any romantic relationship really fucked with me mentally. I already had a pretty shit childhood, so it was frosting on the cake. It got so bad I fell down the alt-right pipeline and was a few months away from becoming an incel.

But I watched MLP. This show was the first time I was ever really taught empathy, and it changed my life. Fast forward senior year, and I've been experimenting with how I look. I have alt and queer friends, I'm learning about myself.

I spill my heart out to my mom about everything and how trapped and hopeless I felt about relationships. Like 20 minutes she listened to me. I was crying and desperate for any bit of advice from my parent.

"So are you gay?" My mom asks sounding almost annoyed.

Which leads to me begging her to listen to me and to take what I am saying seriously.

"Well, how do you think I feel?" She says now sounding angry.

This same conversation happens a half dozen more times. Each time I become more desperate for any hint my mom cares at all.

"You just need to approach them and be nice."

"You should try harder."

"Are you calling me a bad mother?"

"I didn't raise you this way!"

Now, both of my parents are brainrotted by Fox News. My dad is mentally ill while being the most toxic man ever, never being emotionally available for me ever. My mom still thinks I just need to try harder and that girls will just throw themselves at me. Her state of delusion is horrifying tbh.

It sucks because they will both die never having known their son. They'll die never knowing I use he/they, never knowing I'm pansexual, never knowing I crossdress, never knowing I cosplay, never knowing me, the pansexual nuero divergent femboy. And I don't feel bad over it.

I know my story about this kind of shit is way more common that I'd like. I've seen tik toks with very similar events I've mentioned with 100s of 1000s of likes and comments.

To think a generational gap could have such destructive consequences. My only solace for this is that I was able to overcome their horrible parenting.

It seems to me that as each day passes, the only way I'll remember my parents when they are long since dead is the mental scars they've left. I hate it, but I love my parents. They tried their best, but their best failed me and my 3 brothers horribly.

Anyways, back to watching Vampire Dormitory. It's a gay ass anime about some twink and a vampire.

Edit: finished episode one, the Twink was girl. I feel so betrayed.

[sirenemale]

Not to have ai art thoughts but I really don't think you can make guides up on spotting ai art, every one ive seen just points out weird anatomy / lighting / clothing folds as the Tell like that's not something all artists do anyway because no one is a master of that and even the rendered styles it trains off aren't flawless by that definition. And unlike the photoreal images that can and will be used for propaganda, ai art stuff you only really need to look at the source to see it's ai, not the art itself. Most ai art people are pretty forefront about it being ai, or it'll be a result from one of those ai sites, or it'll be an art account that has only uncaptioned work in various styles that are clearly not drawn by the same person, right. That's the tell, I don't think anything good will come out of trying to analyze peoples art for strange mistakes when there's a far more surefire way to tell if it's generated or not. Also still goes for the wider issue of people being caught up on what real art is, and the soul of art or whatever or how anyone can do art, which is true but also not, because disability exists and impacts people. When it hits the point where it is pretty and indistinguishable everyone who knows its ai will still use its aesthetic value as the critique, which is just falling back onto real artists these tools were trained off. And while I agree that our individual limitations and experiences are what makes our art unique to us regardless of what we're making, I ljterally just don't think calling the mean average result of uncountable artists "devoid of feeling" is enough of anything.

Like the gigantic issue is the way it's both training off and exploiting artists, and being used to replace them. and the way things are so fast paced now and based on rapid consumption, even if it's not taking the place of people it's still making real people and artists with lives and disabilities and issues compete with a machine that can produce endlessly and within seconds and then be sold just as fast without the complexities of people holding up the pipeline. At this point they're feeding data to data they want the consumer and producers to be growing in a clean statistic way they have something now that doesn't even really need market testing. There's no way for us to keep pace there when it was already hard before it. And while it's easy to joke about it being ugly or mass market slop, and I've done it too obviously there's a lot to rag on, but your core argument can't be that it's just ugly or isn't convincing it leaves you open to the idea that you would turn around on it if the aesthetic of it is Good enough by your standard, which is what these companies already realize that's why they are rapidly improving it 😭😭

[dreamingquinn]

Thinkin about gender and spirituality

Preface: I don't have a real point to this. I just remembered you can basically post anything to tumblr.

My ex-mother in law said something to me the first time we met. "I've never understood queer relationships. You need the masculine and the feminine to balance eachother out... But I suppose that's why gays tend to have one masculine partner and one feminine partner."

This woman was a huge name in the druidic community of the UK. She is polyamorous. She told me that she remembered past lives and regularly saw the dead, animal and human. But she couldn't wrap her head around the idea of something outside of heteronormativity.

And she wasn't the only one in my life like that. I was basically raised a little heathen but I still grew up white in the US. Christian overtones policed my thinking and the thinking of those who influenced me. Most of my non-male partners have been feminine in their gender expression, and in turn I acted more and more masculine. I tried to fit a role based on expectations rather then what I (or even my partners) wanted.

Now I'm with someone I expect will be for life. They are 'masc' in that they are Butch. Not divorced from their womanhood even if they do not embrace that part of themselves the way someone who really enjoyed more 'typical' femininity would. Meanwhile I just bought two skirts for the first time since middleschool and I'm becoming even more comfortable with the term 'agender'.

I'm still a spiritual person, more now then when I knew and had access to people with connections in the 'neo pagan' movements. And yet every fucking time I see people talking about spirituality I still see people stumble over the ideas of the 'masculine' and the 'feminine' in nature.

My ex-MIL also said once that I should be careful not to anthropomorphize things. That my experience with a specific tree feeling safe when I was a child in need was probably just me projecting.

On this one thing, I actually agree with her. We project a lot of bullshit onto the natural world. And onto ourselves. Especially in the spiritual community. What is masculine about the sun? What is feminine about the moon? Nothing. They are objects in space with mass and gravity. Why would that make them any less magical? They still have a huge impact on our lives. The sun's impact is generally more overt. The moon's is more subtle. We can talk about these things in how they relate to us, I don't think that's unreasonable. You can't experience the world except from your own perceptions. The sun is hot and brings life but also can cause damage and death. The moon and night is cold but gives us the tides which effects us just as much but usually in ways we either live far from or don't directly think about/see.

The problem really comes in, I think, from how we don't just say 'the sun is masculine and the moon is feminine' it's how that inevitably leads us to imposing that duality onto people. People pose anthropomorphized ideas onto things that are not human and in turn try to use it as a mirror or a measuring stick to hold up against themselves or other humans. And not all cultures even believed these things or have lines drawn this strongly, I know. But I can only talk from the experience I've lived. The presence of strict ideals that specifically Christian-fascism (current and historic) have given us are so pervasive in people like me that they go completely unquestioned. Every book I read, including my ex-MIL's did nothing to question it, and in many cases actively reinforced it.

It's really no wonder that there is a fast and ugly pipeline of 'witch' to 'right-wing' if the people who position themselves as outside the mainstream culture are still just recreating it in the spaces they make.

[dancingbluelight]

holy moly so I got a lot of responses REAL fast so here's a second poll with more options!!

‼️disclaimer‼️ I realize that the other poll was pretty romance negative which may not align with the experiences of romance positive arospec people BUT I figured that if you are arospec but romance positive, it's possible you might still relate to one of the negative options.

(this poll is also mostly negative)

please reblog if you answer so that there's a bigger sample size :D

ps the responses to the last poll made me realize I am probably not arospec but just plain aro and also possibly loveless so thats cool

[canmom]

Animation Night 145: Brid Bard

...Bard Brid? Sorry, the line’s not very clear here. Say again...

Oh, Brad Bird?

OK, so. Imagine there’s a really dad-like guy who directs movies. Someone for a lot of nostalgia for his childhood during which, Cold War not withstanding, he was impassioned by witnessing The Jungle Book (not unlike a certain Richard Williams) and encouraged by supportive parents to pursue animation. And it went well. Really well. Our boy Brad got an ‘unprecedented’ internship at Disney with Milt Kahl(!) off the back of his film The Tortoise and the Hare, had a chill time at high school, then went to CalArts on scholarship where he studied alongside John Lasseter (keep an eye on him. not just because he might sexually assault somebody but also because he’ll be in this story later), Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

In short, about the most direct and uncomplicated route into animation you can imagine.

Brad Bird joined Disney (their investment paying off) in 1978, working on films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, but soon clashed with the studio heads who he judged not to be upholding principles he believed Disney represented. (He would be vindicated in a way by Don Bluth throwing down the gauntlet a few years later and kicking off the ‘Disney Renaissance’.) One of his last contributions must have been to The Brave Little Toaster, where he worked alongside the future founders of Pixar.

There followed a few years in which he moved to the SF Bay Area (perhaps not so gentrified back then(?) but Bird definitely had money), pitching projects left and right. One of his big passions was to adapt the comic book The Spirit. Mostly he tried experiments that didn’t pan out, like making a CG film at Lucasfilm with Ed Catmull, later founder of Pixar. He worked on The Plague Dogs (AN 86) until he got fired again.

Nevertheless, his reel of hypothetical films did catch the eye of Steven Spielberg, who absorbed Bird into his company Amblin Entertainment in order to expand his short film The Family Dog, co-created with Tim Burton, into an episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories. (Family Dog would later spawn a disastrous spin-off series in 1993, but by this point Bird had moved on). I think it’s worth noting this one because it gives a sense of what sort of original ideas Bird is working with: a dysfunctional suburban family as seen through the eyes of their dog. ‘Dysfunctional suburban family’ would be the centre of... almost every single one of Bird’s works since.

Bird continued to work under Spielberg’s wing, still clashing with execs; he got straight-married in this time to film editor Elizabeth Canney. Things seemed to be going well enough, despite his frustrations - until his sister Susan was killed in a murder-suicide by her estranged husband. This understandably fucked with him pretty hard. After a few years of depression he recovered, enough to take an invitation to work on The Simpsons in 1989 after Matt Groening was impressed by the cinematography in Family Dog. (Seriously he’s connected to just about everyone in the animation industry!) He continued on the Simpsons throughout the early 90s, working part-time to ‘oversee the script-to-animation pipeline’ and introduce this same filmic sensibility, as well as contributing to other animated sitcoms like The Critic and King of the Hill.

Let’s fast forward to the end of the 90s. As we’ve discussed... many times on this webbed site, this is when the steam of the ‘Disney Renaissance’ was about to run out, and the new CG era was about to begin. Our boy Brad, meanwhile, is struggling trying to juggle being a Dad(TM) with spending all his time making animated films. Which leads to Brad writing... a story about a suburban family strained by one of them being a superhero, yeah.

But Brad wouldn’t get to make this film just yet. Instead, his successful pitch was something called Ray Gunn, a scifi story about a detect in an Art-Deco retrofuturistic world. This movie also did not get made... but it’s because Warner bought up the studio Turner that was making it, and shut down Ray Gunn. Instead, they offered Bird a different animated film with a nostalgic bent, adapting childrens’ book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, which was in its turn written to help his children cope with the death of his wife Sylvia Plath (yeah that Sylvia Plath!). Bird liked the pacifist themes of the novel, but while the children’s book has the feeling of a parable, he gave it a concrete setting in the 50s, and centered the story on the paranoia of the Cold War, seen from the point of view of an innocent boy.

So with this first movie we see start to see the major preoccupations of Brad Bird come into play (though he did not write the screenplay in this case). The Iron Giant comes in the middle of a brief handful of traditionally animated films made by Warner to ride on the coattails of Disney; the others include Space Jam and Osmosis Jones. They were by and large not very successful; The Iron Giant was the one critical success but failed for blah blah marketing y’know reasons. Like most of Bird’s films, the core relationship is a father [figure]-son one, in this case beatnik artist Dean who lives in a junkyard and ends up becoming surrogate father to nine-year-old protagonist Hogarth.

The themes of the film are pretty on the nose: in an idyllic American small town (Bird explicitly referred to Norman Rockwell and sitcom character Ward Cleaver) masking severe paranoia falls a harmless alien robot. It’s viewed as a threat by everyone but the social outcast and the child. The military get called in, gung-ho to throw around their toys; by the time the townspeople figure out that they’ve been huge cunts, a missile is in the air. What saves everyone is the fact that our nine-year-old protagonist has gone to the effort of teaching the Giant good old American values, so it goes and intercepts the missile in a heroic sacrifice... undercut with a final hint that it can regenerate. In fact Bird originally planned an ending where full scale war breaks out between the US and USSR, but ultimately this was softened.

What sells it is charming character animation. The production seems to be the opposite of most animated film stories: meticulously planned, prevised and storyboarded, while making effective use of cel-shaded CG for vehicles and mecha scenes, putting it among the first works to experiment in that direction. In another anime-like touch, the animation of the film was divided up by scene rather than by character.

And, within the American full animation tradition, it’s probably one of the only films to address the Cold War at all. Of course there are others from other countries! When The Wind Blows is probably the most direct; anime is rarely directly about the Cold War (the Future War 198X controversy excepted) but it’s implicit in most works that deal with sci-fi and military themes such as Akira. And in modern times, now that it’s History and serious animated dramas are more accepted, you get films like Funan about the Cambodian genocide. In the USSR... it’s complicated.

But in America... while animation studios were recruited en masse to produce WWII propaganda, for the most part animated films from the 50s through to the 80s don’t really touch on the war. They adopt mythological past settings, or tell stories closer to home. Perhaps by the time of The Iron Giant, with the war over, and the specific setting now 50 years in the past, it was considered safe enough.

The characters of Bird’s film are very much archetypal. It’s kind of a fable about the Cold War, and in the final edit of the script, a reassuring one. The ‘illusion of life’ animation techniques are used to imbue each character with enough charm and specificity but they are largely defined by their roles. I’m not saying this to criticise; this is precisely the model of film that American animation specialises in and it uses it to very good effect. Ultimately though because it’s a fable, you can only take so much from it.

Despite the commercial failure of The Iron Giant, it did finally give Brad some clout as a director. A certain John Lasseter to a new studio that was making serious waves in animation... yeah, you know them, it’s Pixar. I wrote about early Pixar back on Animation Night 75, so go check that out if you like.

At Pixar, Bird ended up directing the studio’s sixth film, finally getting a chance to follow up on his pitch for The Incredibles which features... that’s right... a suburban family with a beleaguered father in a setting designed to nostalgically reference a mid-20th-century American aesthetic. Mmm.

By this time, Pixar movies had started to establish a formula. The characters would be some kind of high concept centering on characters like toys, bugs, monsters or fish that wouldn’t face the limits of rendering humans. Usually they would center on a duo of male characters who would start off at odds and but gradually build a bond over the course of the film. They’d be suitable for kids but have enough comedy to amuse adults. There would be a villain to overcome, and a wider sphere of quirky buddies to support the main duo. Women would be almost nonexistent. At this time, it seemed that Pixar could do absolutely no wrong; their films were basically always hits.

But even so, I remember when The Incredibles came out. It hit the nerd sphere like a bomb. I remember all the memes about Edna Mode (voiced Brad Bird) shouting ‘no capes!’; I also remember the articles that argued that the film was in fact Objectivist propaganda.

Looking back, it’s hard to entirely disagree with them! The thrust of The Incredibles is that an ungrateful public rejects the special superheroes, leading to an end to their romantic days of vanquishing evil and staging dramatic fights on top of trains; now they’re all caught up in the banality of the capitalism. Bob, aka ‘Mr Incredible’, works in a miserable cubicle as an insurance salesman; Helen aka ‘Elastigirl’ is an exhausted suburban housewife trying to rein in somewhat estranged superpowered teenagers. The pencil-necked bureaucrats of Society, you see, have denied them the chance to exercise their special abilities as they did in the romantic past.

But lo! There is a new supervillain after all; it is Syndrome, once a starry-eyed young superhero, who after a rejection by Mr Incredible, came up with a plan to create a high-tech scheme to sell gadgets that would make just about anyone be able to use superpowers - even if, the arc words declare, ‘if everyone is special, no-one is’, a sentiment that basically goes unexamined further. However, his plan to stage a superhero battle to sell these gadgets backfires resulting in an out of control robot. Luckily, the Incredible family have been united over the course of their adventures and can defeat the robot, society reevaluates the superhero issue, and the captains of industry heroes can assume their proper roles of being naturally better than everyone.

It is, looking back with adult eyes, a very strange narrative to be pushing; it’s possible to see the feelings that Bird must have put into it but damn lmao dude’s got some shit to examine. But as a film it’s technically pretty much impeccable, with memorable sequences that got memed about as much as any animated film from the 2000s. It opened ‘families amirite fellas’ as an avenue for Pixar to tell stories about, which they’d dig into much further later with films like Inside Out.

But I won’t spare too any more words on The Incredibles, since I’m not actually planning to show it tonight. No, the other film of Bird’s I’m planning on showing is...

Ratatouille! A film whose influence lasted so long that you’ll get an extended parody even in 2022′s Everything Everywhere All At Once. As far as Pixar high concepts go it’s pretty up there, centering on a food-loving rat Remy who befriends a chef and hatches a scheme where he will give instructions by tugging on his hair while hiding under a chef’s hat. This concept was not due to Bird but to Jan Pinkava, director of Geri’s Game, who had developed the film for years; Bird was pulled in to attempt to salvage what Pixar saw as a hopelessly mired production. Bird, with some reticence, took the established design work, but rewrote the script into something that better fit his tastes in filmmaking. Pinkava for his part refused to comment, but left Pixar not much later.

So the Brad Bird angle enters in the secondary plot, with Remy’s relationship with his dad who doesn’t understand his artistic passion for food. The story is probably what you’d expect given these elements! ‘Probably’ because... I actually haven’t seen this movie, it’s like the one major gap in my knowledge of ‘classic’ Pixar films.

Since Ratatouillie, Bird departed animation and started directing live-action films, including an episode of Mission Impossible that breaks the formula (unless it’s got some kind of dad arc I don’t know about), and Tomorrowland which gets back on the 50s nostalgia train. I haven’t seen any of them so I can’t really comment too much except to say that it sounds like Tomorrowland doubles down harder on the vague Objectivism angle lmao.

But rather than an explicit philosophical conviction, which Brad Bird the self-described ‘centrist’ doesn’t particularly seem to have, it seems more that it’s just a channeling of not entirely examined frustrations about his difficult time getting established as a filmmaker. Bird, it seems, grew up basically being told he was a one of a kind animation genius, and entered the animation industry with a lot of romantic expectations which were frustrated by its reality. It’s easy to read his films as mostly being about how people didn’t understand clever Brad Bird.

Bird is a bit of an odd case in another way. Like basically all animators he rails against the ‘animation is for children’ stereotype of the medium that just doesn’t seem to break, yet his films are very much about archetypal characters with very clearly defined, abstracted arcs. Perhaps that’s just what he’s able to make. But he doesn’t seem to be interested in pushing the envelope anywhere particularly weird or discomforting. Beyond his ambition to bring live action cinematography in to animation, his ‘superpower’, once he got to exercise it, seems to be that he’s very good at planning. His scripts are tightly focused, his productions are on schedule, and he’s the guy you call in when old Jan isn’t finishing his movie on time.

Still, all these criticisms aside, he’s one of the major influences on the subsequent decades of CG films, and his films are consistently very solid. So if you’d like to join me - with apologies for the late start - we’ll be watching The Iron Giant and Ratatouille over at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see ya there, films start in about 15 minutes!

[orpheuslament]

as someone who personally experienced the cis lesbian to trans fag pipeline idk if it applies to you but in my personal experience i took a while realising i was gay instead of still being attracted to women in someway bc i really clung to my identity as a lesbian since it kept me connected to an idea of womanhood i was scared to give up yet bc it felt all too much too fast and i know everyones experiences are different but i do truly believe more than just me has to have felt that way

NO BECAUSE SAME? i tried so hard to maintain a connection w "womanhood" whatever that is even when it became clear i couldnt bc i was so scared of the alternative & being a lesbian was kind of like a crutch to me. like oh im not 100% a girl but im a lesbian so it makes sense yknow? i see you. we see each other

[the-kings-of-games]

Hi! Just wanted to say helloooo and that I only recently started shipping Kizuna (I hadn't met Crow yet and I am still on season 1 *sobs*) BUT THEY ARE SO CUTE RAHHHHH I love seeing your stuff pop up on my dash, makes me smile! So yeah- *awkwardly runs away* Ok ok, and I gotta ask a question. Was Kizuna your first-ever ship involving one of the bois or did someone/something change your mind about them??????

ASDAFHLAGDSAFDSAFDSASADRYWASDA I'm so elated to have you in my inbox and to answer reply, @bibookdemon.

Firstly, hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. :D I'm so glad that you ship Kizuna too, omgssssssssss. I've been here so long, and a new Kizunashipper around is just great. (New friend maybe???) I'm always excited to interact with a familiar reader and a Kizuna fan. QwQ Just knowing you exist makes the past three years in rarepair hell worth it. So thank you so much for reading my fics, whether it's a dozen or just one!!! And I'm glad to see you in my notifs tooooooooooo, omgs. \(^3^)/

Second, to answer your question: Kizuna was not my first 5D's ship because as you pointed out, Crow doesn't show up yet until halfway through S1, so my first choice was Kingcrab because I love childhood friends to lovers trope very much. Also, I love their dragons and how much they contrast each other; the details in the character design makes me melt. I love Jack and Yūsei; however, when Crow finally showed, I just went THAT ONE, lmao. My favorite type of characters include tough redheaded characters with happy-go-lucky attitudes who wear headbands (shout out to Lavi Bookman and Kyan Reki!!! And also Kagami Taiga because I love him too!!!)

The thing was though, even when I first saw him and got into him (immensely), I was actually on the fence about adding him with Kingcrab. I think it was because I only had a little experience with polyshipping prior, but the love was growing quickly. My first few Kizuna fics were actually gen. Whatever their relationship is like they are definitely cute and they love each other!

Then I had this epiphany and created the headcanon that Crow is a genderfluid he/him dfab, and then I wrote a Kizuna smut piece and then I wrote ~100 Kizuna fics and now we're here. I dropped through that pipeline fast and hard. That headcanon is my most favorite YGO headcanon, and it really opened a lot of door for exploring Kizuna and their relationship. My Kizuna fics have some of my best writing currently, lmaolololol, because I just wrote so much for them. (When you write a bunch, something is bound to be actually good, you know?) And the thing about that Crow headcanon? People actually like it. :) That makes me super happy.

Though I only have a handful of regular readers, I very much appreciate them all and recognize most of them. ^^ What more, I had two people reach out to me because of my writing, and we became good friends. 🥺🥺🥺🥺 I'm think I'm doing pretty good with Kizuna.

Third, thanks for asking, and for reading my fics!!!! I hope to keep reaching out to people to spread the Kizuna love! I hope to keep seeing you around!! Feel free to come talk to me if you like. I'm also shy, it's okay.

[elytrafemme]

im here to ask a system question. warning: it might be dumb or ignorant or too intrusive or something cause i dont know what words are. ignore and delete if you want ,or answer with thumbs down emoji so that i go away for a bit

i started saying i was nonbinary online for anonymity or whatever and then i realised hey.... i like this a little too much. fast forward a year and im being theythem'd left right and center by my best friend, and i gave myself a name that i adore, and i want to do a lot more coming out to a lot more people because all i can think about at the moment is that im not a girl or a boy. im just a guy. i never expected people to be okay with this and im scared i cant live my whole life as a nonbinary person or that im just being stupid or something.

is this sort of happening with you as a system right now? not the online anonymity part i mean. but is what youre telling us Mare Enjoyers spilling into your real life? do you tell people? do your friends know? are you terrified about it all the same way i am?

i know being part of a system isnt the same as a gender crisis and its sort of ridiculous of me to phrase this question as if it is, but youre a hugehuge inspiration for me and id like to know how youre living life. or whatever

i guess im asking because this gender stuff feels like my brain is being rewritten. or electrified or something. and i wondered if being part of a syystem is a bit like that too? thanks. if you want to you can tell me to leave or die or something. thank you thanks

anon. rattles you like a maraca. im not going to tell you to die for asking me a well intentioned question 😭 like you're okay i promise, hands you an autumn leaf i found outside <3

that being said i worry i can't give you an adequate answer because im not sure how to make an apt comparison here? my experience with gender myself has been kind of all over the place but mostly boiled down to "i'll just let people find out through some means and we'll go from there"

a little diff from your experience but there are similarities maybe? also i totally get the like, staying anonymous to oh Shit gender pipeline .and im glad you have a lotta supportive people in your life; i think so long as you've got yourself, and you've got a support system, you can live the rest of your life the way you want to! i mean all you really need is yourself but its nice having people to affirm it. so i think u will be okay :D <3

the system stuff is. weird. because okay i do have a thin thread that ties this account to my IRLs and that thin thread is that my closest friend follows this account. which has been kind of a risky maneuver but ultimately my thing is like, if xe finds out then... xe finds out? and we move on. me and my best friend have the benefit of familiarity and also knowing when to let sleeping dogs lie, so i'm not really worried about that.

what DOES scare me is other people IRL finding out, which is kind of different to any of my experiences with sexuality or gender or anything. because for better or for worse i'm sort of an open book, i have a pretty expressive face i've been told and i'm in a pretty accepting school so i just kinda. let shit happen.

of course having a dissociative disorder is really different though because that could legitimately get me into some really shitty situations in a psychiatric context. one of the things protecting me here is the fact that it's more like... i "have" a "dissociative disorder". i might share many characteristics with OSDD-1b, but i'm not going to diagnose myself and my therapist isn't going to diagnose me and both of our reasonings boil down to wanting to prevent me from getting labeled or hospitalized or sterilized or whatever the hell the modern psychiatric biz is still justifying as appropriate measures.

the 'rewritten' part of what you said REALLY resonates, because i think the hardest part about not having my IRLs know is less like ... it's not really that i need them to know about the others. sure it'd be nice to explain the joke that i laughed at out of nowhere (to them) and say that it was klav sassing me about something, but that's not really necessary when i have you all here?

it's more like. well. i myself, as in me, mare, am the host. but i don't know if i was the host forever. most of my mental health recovery has been purposeful and good and hard work on my part, sure. but there was a weird point in time where i had this barrier i couldn't bypass, and one day i just woke up and did. and it just so happened that when i got to that place, i also became more aware of the others (though i hadn't known it was them at the time). a lot that leads me to think i haven't been the host forever.

and i don't need people to know that, exactly. our memories are the same, there's a few blocked out periods but those aren't really the memories i want to recall with anybody IRL anyway and i'm sure they aren't interested in thinking about it either. it's just... there's a very strange grief with knowing that you aren't exactly... the same person? that has been here the whole time. it's very weird. like really fucking weird. and it's kind of hard to live sometimes knowing that i can't really reference who i was before i was 16 without the thought of "that wasn't you."

in the end, the reason that i'm part of a system is because i underwent trauma and my brain needed a way to cope with it. people aren't supposed to be able to tell when me and dahlia switch during school because dahlia fronts when i'm distressed and unable to function, so it's just an attempt to keep me functioning, not her trying to say hi. et cetera. in the end, my classmates aren't really having these weird meet and greets with my alters -- they're around to keep us all afloat.

maybe someday i'll tell people in real life about them. but at the end of the day it's all just one large coping mechanism, with a shit ton of cons and a lot of mental fuckery. and of course it's not just a coping mechanism to ME but it would be that to other people. does that make sense? it's just like any of the other vague coping mechanisms i've mentined to people to explain why i'm so happy so frequently despite everything.

so to summarize all that, i am pretty terrified of people IRL finding out. it could get me into some really yikes situations, and it's also just fucking complicated to explain. but if i did explain it, i would just frame it as a coping mechanism, and i'm sure over time people would stop caring so much.

i've been rambling kind of a lot because this is sort of complicated. it's inevitable someone finds out at some point; i just hope it's in a setting where we're alone and i can explain.

coming out as being part of a system is probably less terrifying than the experience of being part of a system, so it's all uphill. and i think some parts of explaining it would be more terrifying than others, so it's all relative. uphill and relative.

sorry this is rambly, i was thinking about all this just this morning actually? it has a lot of facets to it. saying that i'm not the same person that has always hosted is probably infinitely harder to admit than saying "yeah i have a part of my brain that holds my desperation and helplessness so that in my day to day life i don't feel those emotions as much."

would i like to be open about being a system to everyone? maybe, but it's not necessary. if i'm marrying someone then yes, i'd like them to know. but if we're close friends, or just friends in general, all i really care about is my friends knowing that i'm okay. and that i'm getting through life. the means of how i'm getting through it aren't really relevant to the conversation, imo.

hope you're welll, anon, sorry for rambling this much. and if my IRL following this account does see this, i'm okay lmao also my homeocming fit is so good you're gonna love it ok see u later love u. and i don't know, really, but. yeah. i don't know exactly.

TLDR yeah it's terrifying, but hopefully i have some kind of safeguard against bad consequences following coming out. i am sure if i explained to people in my life they would eventually understand, though some parts of it would be harder to phrase so i would probably leave a few things out. if i'm marrying someone i would probably let them know but otherwise i don't think it's necessary my friends know my coping mechanisms, just that i'm coping. it's not just a coping mechanism to me, but it would be if i were to explain it.

[timetocode]

Displacement Profiler for node.js

I get hired to do performance work on node / javascript applications and I’ve had a little trick up my sleeve for about a decade that may be of use to some of y’all. I’ll be writing about node but the concept applies to a great many things. One can even measure across languages...

I discovered this trick partially by accident when I made a node game loop and experimented with setImmediate, nextTick, and setTimeout (nextTick can freeze an application indefinitely btw). The most interesting loop is the one using setImmediate, which in my case just incremented a counter by one and queued up the loop to run itself again infinitely.  As I watched the console scroll by counting the number of ticks, I came to a simple realization: these numbers that I was seeing were what it looked like for the event loop to count as fast as it possibly could, using 100% of the CPU resources allocated to it. Looking at the CPU usage confirmed this. setImmediate however *does not lock up the event loop* all it does is schedule work for the next tick. In fact, I would argue that setImmediate and nextTick are in fact transposed and misnamed in node or v8 or wherever it is that they actually live. I don’t think this is much of an argument, I’m pretty sure this is a known mistake but hopefully I’m not misremembering. IN ANY CASE; setImmediate spins as fast as it can but doesn’t interfere with other events. So one one can make a setImmediate loop and have it counting inside of an application that is already doing its job. What you’ll find is that the speed at which the setImmediate loop runs depends on how much other work is being done in that thread. And there we have it: a displacement profiler. You can change a piece of the application and run this profiler before and after and end up with a “volume” change in the CPU usage -- thus measuring something that was perhaps very elusive before.

I call the profiler by this name per the famous story about Archimedes. He was given a task about figuring out if a crown was made of solid gold and he wasn’t sure how he was gonna figure it out. At some point he was getting into a bathtub that was full to the brim and when he got in water spilled out everywhere... he realized that the amount of water that spilled out of the tub was equal to the volume of the part of his body that had entered the tub, exclaimed, “Eureka!” and ran through the street naked to tell everyone what he had figured out. He had realized that he could measure the volume of the crown, weigh it, and figure out what material it was made out of -- or at least compare it to solid gold which would be enough to answer the initial question. This same notion of volume or displacement applies to CPU usage and thus provides an alternative method of measuring performance (an alternative to a traditional profiler that measures the timings of functions).

Let me say that the CONCEPT is more interesting than the specifies. The idea of measuring the “space” available on the cpu outside an application’s workload instead of measuring the application workload itself is a potentially very different way of seeing things. I don’t recommend starting with it, do the obvious stuff first. But when things remain obscure after looking at the obvious stuff, consider this approach. A lot of applications these days are asynchronous monstrosities without a clear pipeline of work being done... instead it’s all evented i/o! Using a displacement profiler combined with a stress test one can really get a feel for the capacity of an application. One is not going to get the same answers by counting the milliseconds spent in the hot path functions and multiplying by that by the hypothetical number of users at launch time. ALSO if one expands the displacement to multiple threads (saturate them, ideally !) one can even measure the hidden load of the application -- e.g. what is happening out of the application’s main thread but still nevertheless consumes cpu on the machine, such as filesystem i/o or the cpu component of network i/o. We might not think of node or javascript as traditionally multithreaded, and it isn’t, but there are c++ threads or whatever doing stuff during a lot of the i/o and not measuring that (and only measuring the javascript) is going to cause problems when trying to figure out how much load a heavy i/o program can take.

Another thing to note about this technique is that data collected one day should not be compared to data collected another day or even much later in the same day. We may be measuring the displacement of an application, but we��re also measuring the displacement of  *everything* that uses CPU. And this is something that is pretty much constantly changing on most machines.

I hereby write this thing here and release it to the world so that no fool may attempt to patent it. The existence of this concept is ancient I would hope no one would attempt to own it. And I’m not just talking about Archimedes. Anyone who opened up 10 copies of a video game because they wanted to see how some other program they made behaved in lag was essentially onto the same idea. GOODLUCK. HAVE FUN

[viviskull]

@ask-experiment-1006-theprototype : x

“Then you have to try harder. Things are tense enough without your rambling.” He growled lowly, he wasn’t in the mood for someone to panic when he was trying to keep calm himself. It didn’t help at all.

“I am going as fast as I can to trying to fix this rusty pipe..!”  He near whispers shouts over the loud hisses of pipe’s steam as it breathes its harsh breath against the orange mechanic’s white tank top front.  It had already been bad enough this friend of Vivi’s had carelessly tossed him up onto the big pipelines just to hang onto one of them for dear life, just so he could fix it from leaking out this odd red gas the other kept grumbling about, and to make matters worse the pair of them were being hunted.  By what, he didn’t even know since he and his wife had gotten separated in their escape to find an exit (more like he wanted to leave the dangers of this out of date factory, but he cared too much about his friend’s safety that he couldn’t quite leave her here to die either).  “It’s going to be quite difficult to seal this thing shut when it's still running its cycle through to the spirits know where..!”

Plus, while his wrench normally came in handy when it came to tightening the bolts to his own van’s engine, he wasn’t even sure if he had enough gears to even work this pipe shut when his toolbox of spare parts had been dropped in the other’s throw.  Yeah, he always had something on him in case of emergencies, but people sometimes expected too much of him when he had to countless times prepare for life or death situations like this.  Hanging tightly onto a pipe while he had to fix it was a new problem for the bucket list though!

Oh yeah, he’s hanging by a thread.  The grip on the only pipe he’s holding onto tightens with a death grip.  He characteristically retracts into himself a little as he grits his teeth. 

“Is there even a reason as to why I’m stuck up here?”

[chancontrarian]

Musings [for lack of a better title] On — My Unique Voice

I mean, you want Judy Garland, you go to Judy Garland. But if you don't want Judy Garland — maybe I can fit the bill?

They [successful creatives] talk about writing the music or stories that you want to hear or read, and it would be impossible to write for teen girls as a whole, as a singular demographic, so I write for girls like me — like I was. I was a weird kid, just like a lot of kids in a lot of different ways, but you can mad libs the details and come up with a lot of universal emotions, like rejection and loneliness and disillusionment and disenfranchisement. The powerlessness of youth still crushes me; they places the hopes of the future on your shoulders before you can even drive a car. So, maybe there's not a weird kid out there reading Sherlock Holmes and listening to Petrushka. Maybe there's a weird kid out there reading and listening to me. It's not impossible, and while I can use my voice I feel obligated to do so.

I never had a single vision or message that I felt like I needed to share. I'm the projector lightbulb; I illuminate. I don't necessarily think of myself as a vessel for the muse but I also know that my message is intrinsically a part of who I am; my experiences and my stories shape the stories that I tell, and I have been touched by too many various artists and authors and musicians to think that there isn't room for one more authentic voice. That's the other part about writing for youth — about writing for your own inner child. You can't lie to them, and you can't disappoint them. It's like — you can't change the universal truth, you can't paint a picture of false hope. But I think of myself as a translator of the truth, painting a picture in different colors so it becomes clearer. There's a sortof running joke about neurodivergent people taking someone's sad story and making it about ourselves, because that is how we relate to someone, we say "I had similar feelings when—" but surely that is what makes us such excellent creative artists, because we see the patterns in the kaleidoscope of the universe and connect the threads and fit the jigsaw pieces together.

You know, and the pieces are all different and the pipes go in all different directions. My sortof Bing Crosby to Leonard Bernstein to Fiona Apple pipeline is not likely to be replicated, and each piece serves a different purpose. I guess part of the trick of finding your message is finding what role you want that message to play. Am I making someone feel heard in their hurt, or am I making them feel hopeful? Am I with them when they cry, or when they drive with the windows down? I think the role the most important music played for me, and what I try to replicate, is emotional education. I didn't understand Stormy Weather until my own heart was broken, but Judy made me feel it. It's almost like a vaccination, a brush with heartache to immunize you against the real thing. You know, when you're young there's a lot of information being thrown at your brain very fast. The maturation process of the human brain is fascinating, not to mention all of the variables socialization can throw at you. I found explanations and definitions for things I didn't even know I was questioning in my favorite books and songs. That's the illumination. There's more than what you see on the surface. Go deeper into life.