do you guys think it's possible for a fungus and an algae to on purposed kiss

maybe they will take a lichen to each other

salmon in the river

my favourite piece of "AI art" is something that was not intended to be AI art at all, and was made and posted online as a joke. which is "salmon in the river", from 2023.

this is how the AI apparently understood the above prompt. salmon filets jumping in water.

in this case, not only do i think this is interesting art, but i think it is interesting art only because it was not made by a human. like, this reads to me as art about alienation and commodification, right? obviously we all know that under capitalism products become separated from the labour and processes that created them. you buy a shirt and you don't think about the hands that sewed it, and so on. the commodity form hides its own origins. and food in particular hides not just labour, but life. the animal disappears. like, if you think about how meat reaches you at a western supermarket, typically it arrives on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, cut into shapes that don't resemble the body they came from. a chicken breast doesn't look like a chicken, and likewise a salmon filet does not look like a salmon. many times people actually find it gross or distasteful to see the animal! the filet is literally the shape that says don't think about it.

so the art, then. the filets are appearing in the river, which is where the living salmon would be. the commodity form is occupying the space of the creature. the erasure itself is swimming upstream. that's sick!!! and the wrongness of it, the visual absurdity, is exactly what reveals how much work the commodity form normally does. We're used to seeing filets in kitchens, on plates, in supermarkets. In those contexts, they look right. they look like what salmon IS! it's only when you put the filet in the context of a living animal that you suddenly see how strange it is and how much has been removed. it's good art!!!

AND YET if human artist had made this image, i don't think it would be very good art. filets swimming upstream as a commentary on commodity food culture is fine but it would feel very on the nose in a banksy, makes-u-think kind of way. this would be a human saying "here's what I think about how we relate to what we eat." like imagine this as a political cartoon, right? immediately the exact same image would make me want to fucking roll my eyes. it would be kind of insufferable!! and to me i think that's because it is making an argument. the artist has to be visibly making a point and the finger is always wagging. we live in a society, bottom text. UGH!

whereas, when an AI produces filets in the river, it's not making a claim. it doesn't think and it doesn't care. it is just outputting based on what it's been trained on and based on the prompt. it's saying "here's what salmon actually means in the aggregate of human visual culture." it says something in and of itself that an AI image generator was asked to create salmon swimming in a river, and it produced filets. boneless, skinless, ready-for-the-pan filets, floating serenely through the rapids. and that's because the AI was trained on us. it was clearly not primarily trained on, e.g Coast Salish art like on carved salmon with eyes and spirits or more generally on cultures that really focus on holding the sustenance and the creature together. instead it was trained on an aggregate blob of the internet, including the very massive and alienated western commercial relationship to food. our images, our photographs, our stock photos and food blogs and recipe sites. and in that corpus, salmon is overwhelmingly a filet. when you throw everything into the pile and ask "what is salmon," the commodity form rose to the top.

thus when the model produces filets in the river, it's not really making an error in the same way we would; it's just accurately reflecting what "salmon" means in the aggregate, and putting it in a context that makes it seem incredibly absurd. it literally works as art because it's not A Guy saying eyy, look what you've done, it's just showing what we've done, without commentary or judgment and without even knowing it's showing anything at all.

but then ALSO. was this really an "error" generated by an AI? or was this a human who prompted it to make a picture of salmon filets in a river and posted it as a glitch for internet points? i don't know!!!

and at first this bothered me, because I've been so hard on arguing that the image only works because it wasn't made intentionally. like, that the lack of human intent is what gives it evidentiary weight and what transforms it from trite political cartoon into Good Art.

but i literally think that's still true. if a human made this, if someone deliberately prompted an AI to produce filets in a river and then framed it as an accident for heckin reddit updoots or even legitimately to make a political point, then what they created is a piece of art about the difference between intentional and unintentional meaning. they used the AI as a medium, but more importantly, they used our expectation of AI failure as a medium. The art isn't just the image; it's the image plus the caption plus our willingness to believe it.

either way, the image only works as art if we believe an AI made it, because that belief is what transforms "salmon in the river" from a heavy-handed political cartoon into a piece of evidence about how we see. but only a human could post it and have it work, because the act of posting it as a mistake is also an artistic gesture, regardless of whether it actually was one. the AI can't do that part. it doesn't know what it made or why it's either profound or funny. but a human couldn't do it alone either, because a human making this image deliberately would just be making a statement, and statements are easy to dismiss. the art exists in the gap between the generation and the framing, and that gap is where the human goes.

We all get sad that insects aren't at least dog size and octopuses only live in the ocean and there are no air jellyfish or visibly ambulatory plants and all the giant sea lizards are gone but sometimes you gotta just tell yourself some lifeforms are special *because* they're tiny or they're far away or they helped build the world we have now. We're just the weird ones for being terrestrial macrofauna, and it's pretty special that we evolved brains capable of marveling at things at all.

the purpose of friends is to have people who unconditionally hate your shitty exes & relatives. like maybe YOU have a complex relationship with your father but i sure don't. i'm outside his house with a gun. he's not the unforgivable asshole who raised me he's just an unforgivable asshole

You know what? Forget the discourse. This is no longer my hill to die on.

You wanna ship canonically aspec characters because “aro/ace people can still date/have sex”? Okay, then. LET’S DO IT.  I wanna see an aromantic character with an alloromantic love interest. I wanna see that confession of undying love and the moment when the aro character says they will never feel the same way—not romantically.

I wanna see the asexual character with their allosexual partner. I wanna see that moment when the ace characters tries sex with their partner for the first time because they want to make them happy only to realize that they are 100% sex repulsed.

I wanna see the two demiromantics who don’t even know if what they feel is romantic attraction, but they adore each other and just want to make healthy snacks together and destroy each other at Mario Kart.

I wanna see the two aces who love sensual affection and are figuring out what they define as sexual or not.

I wanna see the romance + sex neutral aroace who happily and consensually does whatever makes their partner happy…but their partner still struggles with feeling undesired. 

Oh, babe. You thought shipping an aspec character would be just like shipping an allo character? 

I also think. in the broad scheme of things. a lot of people pleasers (in the trauma-response sense) know full well that those behaviours Cause Problems. I’ve consented to medical procedures I didn’t want or was confused about out of a fear of upsetting authority (doctors). I’ve consented to sex I didn’t want. I’ve ended up in situations where I’ve been burnt out and overworked and still can’t say ‘no’ to someone when they ask me to take on yet another responsibility. in none of those situations have I walked away going “yeah that was fine and healthy, no problems at all”. mostly I walk away going “jesus fuck I need to sort out this shit and snap out of it”. but it also so happens that moving on from a trauma response that develops over a lifetime.. well that doesn’t just happen overnight. and it can’t be snapped out of just by being told “hey so it actually makes other people mad at you when you fearfully try and please them all the time”. lol

I am constantly thinking about this

This mild Wikipedia sentence is like the understatement of all time

Here are some crazy grasshopper mouse facts for those who are not familiar with the most badass mouse species on the planet

- They are primarily carnivorous, and their diet is made up of not only bugs but also snakes, lizards and other mice.

- They hunt like true predators, slowly stalking and creeping up on their prey before ambushing them. They will sometimes let out a screech as they attack.

- Like wolves, they howl to establish territory and have a specially developed throat to produce louder vocalizations. They will stand up on their hind legs and throw their head back to howl- a sound that can be heard from 100 meters away!

- Grasshopper mouse behavior is linked to lunar cycles and they are more active during a full moon.

- These mice have been hunting bark scorpions and evolving alongside them for so long that they’ve evolved a mutation where scorpion venom that is lethal to other animals is converted into a painkiller in the grasshopper mouse’s body.

noble steed

baby airplane abandoned on tarmac and rescued has not yet molted and so must be held/lifted above the play rug to simulate successful takeoffs for his enrichment and learning

the problem with water is like. it's the cleaning fluid right. that's the obvious part. you stop drinking and you stop peeing and your kidneys are like ough. ough. ough. ough. but you don't die. unless you're not drinking anything At All and not eating watery food either. so all it is is you pee less but you're okay. kind of.

BUT THEN when it gets too hot it starts being the coolant! and suddenly there are so many ways it can get out! you have so many sweat glands and so much skin and they all need to be cooled down before you DIE.

but then. you realize the least obvious one. it's the transmission fluid. it's the fucking transmission fluid. you can't transmit SHIT without your fliud. which is still fucking water somehow.

so now you're LEAKING your transmission fluid out of every goddamn pore and your kidneys are like hey. gimme that cleaning fluid cmon dude. while your pores are like ITS COOLANT. NEED COOLANT. FOR THE FIRE. NEED MORE COOLANT. SO MUCH FIRE. KILL IT. KILL IT MORE. MORE COOLANT. and then. the rest of you. that uses all that fluid to transmit things. it's like hey. hey. hey what the fuck.. i need that. hello? can anyone hear me? hello? it's so dark in here..

and then you drink more water or you die.

I HAVE HER NOWWW

fun behaviors to give dragons that aren't feline/canine based

cause as much as i love dragons purring and roaring i wish there was just more variety in how they would act

and im not saying canine and feline behaviors are wrong or bad to give a dragon (people wouldn't write dragons with those behaviors if they weren't fun in the first place!) but i feel for creatures that are mythological giant winged lizards that you can do more and get experimental with it. often the more unfamiliar behavior the more dragony the dragon feels

queen. icon. she made new colors too

deviantart link so you dont have to go through twitter https://www.deviantart.com/lazymau/art/Very-emotional-emoticons-2-209003358

She actually has a website!