Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

This machine kills AI

I needed to hear this. A big part of my art block and absence from social media is due to AI. It should be a toy or a tool, not a job.

ID: An image with the words “This machine kills AI,” and a hand pointing down at a pencil. Below it is a post that says:

“Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:

I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations.

Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.

‘Remove the people.’

‘What would you like them changed to?’

‘[dot dot] grass. I just don't want them there.”

They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.

I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.

Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while.

But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time.” End ID.

People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I’d pass it on.

I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?

These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!

SPREAD THE WORD THIS IS FUCKING GOD TIER OH MY GOD, SOMETIMES I HAVE SPOONS SOMETIMES I DON’T BUT NO COOKBOOK OFFERS LEVELS IN THEIR RECIPES THIS ONE DOES!

also found here:

the ebook is FREE here also

🔊 It's Show and Tell Saturday! 🔊

We'd love to see what you have to show! From WIPs to general life updates, what's new in your world this week?

Unraveled some old scarves no one was using and made a scrap yarn play blanket for my toddler niece

shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

It was definitely both.

This is the full documentary. The part giving context to the quote starts at 56:49.

Before he enters the conference room:

Miyazaki: So what's this about?

Kawakami: Our company has been quietly researching CGI. There's something called "deep learning" in ai. We think computers will be able to paint like humans 5 to 10 years from now.

M: If they do that we won't need humans.

After going to the conference and viewing the zombie clip:

Miyazaki: Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is what so ever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel like this is an insult to life itself.

"This is just our experiment. We dont mean to do anything by showing it to the world."

M: I understand."

Ghibli producer Suzuki: So, what is your goal?

"We would like to build a machine that draws pictures like humans do."

S: Would you?

"Yes."

●

It cuts to another office. Miyazaki says, "I feel like we are approaching the end times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves."

●

It then cuts to Miyazaki drawing.

"The only answer is drawing by hand. I won't run from it anymore. It take tremendous patience. It's a lot of work. Really exhausting."

●

I feel like the quote itself is definitely about ai and ableism, specifically the lack of empathy AI has when it's being fed information. How AI can't feel empathy and so art must be done by humans who capable of creating with empathy. How the humans using AI lack the drive necessary to create for themselves and substitute the patience and skill required with AI instead. And it shows.

In short: how supplementing human creativity with AI is an insult to life itself because AI can not supplement humanity.

➸ “This is a sentence.”

➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.

➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”

➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”

➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”

➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”

➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.

“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.

“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”

➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”

➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”

However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!

➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.

If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)

➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“

“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.

➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.

➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”

➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.

“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”

➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.

“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”

need this 🙏🙏

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

I know that a lot of artists are stupid about labor and don't express their critiques of AI in a productive way but I really feel like it's odd that so many people defend large companies taking freelancers work without paying for it as if its the same as the average individual doing it. Like, when I say I think it's bad for Large Company OpenAI to take a bunch of art from middle-class artists who survive partly off of royalties in order to extract massive profit from it, I get replies like "so you think it's bad for me to make my own independent AI model?". I don't understand why there's this refusal to analyze the specific circumstance of a large, capitalist entity essentially stealing potential wages from workers. It's like. I hope someday we get rid of copyright and have a socialist utopia with equal wages, etc, but why should I pretend OpenAI is on the side of that dream? Like I just do not see why I need to apply the same logic to working class people violating copyright and appropriating work freely as I do giant companies. I think if giant companies are going to exist, they should be forced to pay the people whose labor they appropriate. I'm not advocating for copyright lawsuits or any other existing punishment in our system, I'm just objecting to it without planning any formal backlash. But if you even say this is exploitative, people who I generally find really compelling just dismiss you as a pro-copyright idiot.

It's like. I think that Lisafrank 420 by Macintosh Plus is an amazing work that is legally not transformative yet still deserves to exist. And even if it was bad, it would deserve to exist. But if it was made by Universal Music Group and they said they didn't have to pay Diana Ross for it, my opinion would differ. I would not be going "wow anyone who thinks this is shitty is clearly shilling for copyright law." Like UMG clearly knows and cares about copyright law when it benefits them, so their appropriation of her and her team's work clearly takes on a different meaning. Is that an insane take??

Like this is a Twitter Moment I think about a lot. Abigail Thorn is a leftist youtuber who was sad that her content was sold to gigantic corporate entities. She doesn't say she's going to do anything about it, she just is Sad. This person portrays that as her being mad her "intellectual property was used in a way she didn't approve of." But like. She's not out here getting mad at random individuals. She's upset her work got sold to gigantic companies that are transparently against her interests as a human being and a worker. They are the capitalists. The most capitalist capitalists ever. So why should I pretend that this use of her words is the same as other reappropriations? Why should she or I just ignore the context in which Things Happen? Why is the giant corporations purely utilitarian and capitalist appropriation of work somehow more "anti IP"

On my side blog @fantasy-anatomy-analyst I've pretty much given blanket permission for people to take inspiration from my posts and run with it, as long as no one is just straight up stealing my personal work and claiming it as their own. But if I knew that my blog was being used to train some big corporate ai? I'd be absolutely livid. Furious. Sad. That's not the same as allowing people, real individual people, to be inspired by ideas or take an idea and expand on it in their own way.

learning music theory taking me places i don't feel safe in

@miss-m-winks is this why you’re always constructing Elves. Has the Horn done this to you.

I was constructing elves before I ever learned how to play an instrument XD but I did grow up with a professional musician for a father. So perhaps I simply inherited it.

artist tips

don’t save as jpeg

as a former yearbook editor and designer, let me explain this further

if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well

BUT

please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality - this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.

this has been a public service announcement

I’ve replied to this once before but I see it’s doing the rounds again.

This is all utter bullshit.

I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here - if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:

This has been a Public Service Rebuttal.

hey it's probably a really good idea to download a copy of your Master Promissory Note since most of them stipulate that your loans are *specifically owed to the Department of Education* and if you intend to dispute the debt in the wake of the DoE dissolving that will be really good to have

log in and then go to My Documents and download a copy of it. i'm serious. if trump dissolves the DoE entirely it may make the debt uncollectable depending on exactly how they do it, and he's too stupid to listen to lawyers that tell him when he's breaking the law. worst case you have an extra PDF on your computer. best case your student loans go away because you signed a contract to pay DoE and no one else. go download a copy.

Goblin week 2025 was fantastic! I went with a set of weird little salamanders. It was my first time taking part and I had a lot of fun (only got to do 6 days :P)

Official Goblin Post!!!!!!

@miss-m-winks more amphibian goblins!

heck yeah!

I’ve gotta be honest I hesitate to give writing advice anymore because whenever someone tells me your story needs to do xyz I immediately need to write a story breaking all of those rules they just spelled out because I’m just Like That and who am I to further enable other people who are also Like That

"Beginning writers should stick with a human point of view"

Not if you were the weird, biology obsessed kid.

The only writing advice that I think is evergreen is to just try stuff and see what works. Writing is such an personalized process, and the output is unique to the individual. It's so hard to make general practices that won't fall apart when applied to the reality of the diaspora of human experience and imagination.

Basically, first rule of writing is to be yourself and have fun. :>

"Never info dump in your exposition because it's better to convey details in character dialogue" as an extension of "show don't tell" is like. Okay but how are we defining what makes it a bad info dump and is it really always better to do it through dialogue? What is an info dump in this context? Because now some aspiring author might decide this means "never describe things for more than a sentence outside of dialogue" or something, which often just leads to very flat settings. Or character dialogue that feels stilted and out of place because it's replacing the actual exposition.

"Always end every chapter on a cliffhanger even if it's a small one" okay sure. But again, why? Can't your story have some chapters just end and give the reader a break instead of making them have to start a new chapter because you cut things off in the middle of action or dialogue every single time? And also sometimes those mini cliffhangers feel really contrived! It's not always necessary! Sometimes it just feels like a chapter hanging on longer than it should have so it can cut the next chapter in with a cliffhanger.

"No one wants to read ten pages describing a landscape" well maybe I do, huh, how about that.

"Always start in the middle of action" are we sure? Always? Maybe not, actually, maybe some stories really work better if you give them a gentle setup and then get into the action. Maybe actually getting to know the world and characters before the action starts gives the reader more reason to be invested in the story.

Every story is different. Every author is different. If we hold up a lot of old classics to the standards of the most common "top ten tips for new writers" lists I've seen, Lord of the Rings would be declared unreadable and bad because it's slow paced and takes its time with lengthy expositonal "info dumps" about the world.

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

Remember what generative "AI" does, kids: it GENERATES. That means it generates answers to questions based on whatever garbage has been fed into it. Not "goes and looks up the answer." Not "already studied and knows everything." It's just reaching into its sack of word salad and dumping a pile on your desk. Sure, maybe the words fit together to form sentences, but that doesn't make it correct.

a generative AI search result vs the exact article it is citing. the website it scrambled that information from also just happens to include info on winged roaches. gisborne cockroaches are completely wingless. even if it's pulling info straight from one reliable source, there is every chance it'll mash up that info into something false.

If you need a visual, here’s how poorly AI performed when asked to create citations for news articles. And that’s just for citations, imagine what it’s doing when you ask it more complex questions and tasks.

On the cornsnakes subredit someone there used generative AI to "answer" someone's question about what the raised black lump on their corn snake could be. Another person called them out and AI-user responded with "I can do what I want, and what's the harm anyways?"

I stepped in and explicitly detailed everything that the list got wrong, which was about 95% of it, to show why is was harmful. After an hour they deleted their comment plus they deleted most of their comment history.

AI is a lie generator. Don't use it.

If you see someone with a really bad fandom take, I’m begging you to open your emails and write a strongly worded missive to your local government official about something bad happening in your community or country.

If you’re in Canada you could email a rep about concerns about Elon musk interfering in our next federal election.

If you’re in the US the list is endless.

If you’re in the UK you could email about trans health care.

If you’re in Australia, what about dental care in Medicare?

If you’re in Europe, look into some EU initiatives of particular concern. Perhaps something to do with nature and biodiversity? Idk

Just today I emailed my local mla about coal mining in the Rocky Mountains and tomorrow I’m going to pick something else and do it again

Don’t get me wrong I love a fandom wank as much as anyone but perhaps you can take an iota of the energy you’re spending on that and put it towards making sure your elected representatives hear from you on a regular basis

Honestly this seems like a legit mental health emotional de-escalation strategy. New grounding technique just dropped and it's going to revolutionize the world at the rate I see bad takes as a regular tag scroller