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To yes-and, I will say, I feel like it's going to be impossible to unfuck this without organizing the labor of small online artists, given they're the ones that are driving this moral panic and the ones with the least organizational backing to protect them, and the one who need unification under a single banner the most due to being constantly turbofucked by their own atomization.

And, if I may be a bit mean here, part of the blame lies on online anti-copyright/anti-anti-AI leftists totally dropping the fucking ball on these labor issues. Just like, a total void of actual organizational work being done for the demographic of working-class-to-lumpenprole online creatives who are begging for something, some banner to fight under against the horseshit.

And, if I may be significantly meaner, I will say I think one of the underlying reasons of many is that they do not value the labor of online creatives and think it is worth protecting, whether it be due to personal grievance or a thin leftist veneer over the same "Get A Real Job" shit that everybody's shitty parents says. This is gleaned from multiple conversations I have encountered.

That, and another underlying cause I have noticed is they do not think it is worth it or even possible to organize for control over or labor on online spaces by way of online spaces (the only means by which these things are possible) because they're cynical from previous bad experience and don't want to bother trying or they fundamentally don't value online spaces.

And this isn't just me, Cory Doctorow has noted that he gets this shit over the tech issues he talks about. And the leftists who are a part of the problem get real fucking defensive when you loudly point this out.. Which I, as a fellow anti-IP leftist, point out as an invitation for those who do actually want to change things to pick up a shovel and start organizing.

I will note, there's elements you could probably use as a starting point to take inspiration form, like the New Old Web movement and the labor organizing efforts of gig workers, but that's a ramble for people more in-depth knowlegeable on these issues than me...

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

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2025 Commissions Pricing

Testing postybirb by also re-announcing commissions cross platform. If you’re interested my dms are open to discuss details - Also this is the second post bc I bungled the first oopsie.

Posted using PostyBirb

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...While this is probably dumb, anyone else surprised Tumblr didn't make the fact that the Terror Claws Skeletor figure's wearing what looks like a binder into a meme?

Like, I mean, given this is both the trans website and the funny skeleton website, I'm genuinely slightly surprised.

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everyone say thank you ancient south american and mesoamerican agricultural heroes for tomatoes

everyone say thank you ancient central and south american agricultural heroes for beans

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[error]heart

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I still think it's funny that Piglet's Big Game going viral shows that, actually, you can make a work of horror with the Winnie The Pooh characters that feels fitting to the original work.

It's just that the people doing it after the book went PD were really, really bad at it!

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Hans Larwin - Death Directs the Bullet, 1917.

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You could probably guess why the Jason Todd costume is on there, but for context on why I chose the Big Penny despite its prominence, watch this to get a context on the obscure loser villain it originall came from (Hint: It wasn't Two-Face)

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now feels like a good time to reiterate that Iranians have been martyred by america + israel already, both empires that possess nuclear weapons, and that Iran does not have nuclear weapons. so now is not the time to joke about america getting nuked-- any retaliation on Iran's part is justified and the only way we escape this situation, but Iran is not going to nuke us, because the entire premise that Iran has nukes is how america justified bombing them and also the exact same rhetoric we used against Iraq and how we killed my countrysmen when there was again no evidence of nuclear warfare. New York City is not going to get fucking nuked. go listen to a podcast or something

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anyway you should always remember that all those foreigners you see dying on the news are just as real people as you are who have just as much interiority as you do. there is nothing about you that makes you more important and it is by pure chance that you are not in their position. in fact, this holds for all of history. every person, no matter the horror of the fate that befell them, had just as much interiority as you do. i feel like some people haven't fully internalized this.

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...Well, since you're asking in good faith, in a broader spectrum, South Park basically shifted edgy transgressive comedy towards right-libertarian grievance culture compared to previous more progressive manifestations, in a way that made them prime for far-right takeover.

Like, if you look at the actual ideology behind it, it's not "Both sides," it's a very specific sort of privileged libertarianism that gets angry at anything that inconveniences it or anyone who actually believe in changing the status quo.

Lore Sjoberg pretty consisely skewered that with his comic on Shutupicrats, and I'd assert that ideology almost inarguably turbocharged the cultural conditions and "shutupicrat" reflexive reactionary mindset that gave us 4chan and later Gamergate and later... this mess.

In addition, while this is more antecdotal, I know of a lot of people who's bullies and shitty peers as kids took a lot of influence from South Park, and while it's sometimes unfair to blame a work for its fans, I'd say in this case...

If one of these options made you very mad, feel free to dig yourself deeper in the reblogs.

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...I do kinda wonder who owns the rights to the original monsters from the show.

Cause, you'd think it'd be Hanna-Barbera, now Warner, but another thing makes me less sure.

Because, you'd think the Godzilla: the Series ones from the 90s would also be owned by its own production company at Sony.

But the Toho website's subsection where they basically let people post what's essentially legitimatized fanfic had sections for the monsters from that series. Meaning that presumably they have some sort of legal ownership of them, at least in part.

And, for further reference, CH Greenblat wanted to include this show-original character, created solely by HB for their I Dream of Jeannie animated series, in Jellystone, but couldn't because of rights conflicts"

Meaning, presumably the parent company that produced Jeannie has some rights stake in that, meaning also that might be the case with HB's Godzilla series...

...Also, appropos of nothing, here's a really good fan-animation by Vrahno of Godzilla fighting one of the more memorable monsters from that show, Axor, in the style of the classic movies:

Godzilla really, really, REALLY does not like vegetables!

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I had $86 stolen from me. Sure it's not much money for a lot of people but it's something I needed. Please help if you can

PayPal.me/tominova

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The wide man!

Dear old Wallace, the town undertaker (funeral director, mortician etc)

Always brings such an feeling if intense doom and unease wherever he enters a room. Always appears when you least expect it too. He moves in silence.

He will rarely come down into the town, often preferring to stay up on the hill near his funeral directors and the church. But will sometimes make an appearance wandering through the town like a lost soul. Ideally on a chill foggy kind of day.

He's pretty much a walking bad omen, even if he doesn't intend to unsettle anyone.

A man of very little words, almost none in fact. Preferring to save his breath for speeches to give at funerals and wakes.

Some more Winklesea (game idea of mine) character stuff to add onto the idea pile.

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Thought: Do you think some people in the Pokemon world grind up evolution stones and add them to their food/drink ala colloidal silver IRL?

Further Thought: Do you think over time it ends up physically altering them ala the way colloidal silver use over time turns people blue?