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this got plenty likes on tiktok so i thought i'd post it here too
Stranger Things ships / duos as texts but Jonathan is in 80% of them
Reblogged pencildragons
It really says something that a lot of monogamous people consider polyamorous and aromantic to be "opposites" but every polyam person I know took one look at aromantics and said "they're just like me for real"
Poly folks x aro folks in the sense that "alloromantic heterosexual monogamous people view love and sex as an entirely different entity than me, and that makes life kinda strange"
Reblogged sleepy-steve
A very funny aspect of Season 5 finale is Steve basically saying to Jonathan, “Yeah, I know it’s not in the cards for me and Nancy. I was pissing you off for fun.”
Reblogged thevastnessof
hey. don’t cry. crush two cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in pasta of your choice ok?
PEACE AND LOVE!!!!!!!!
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I find it so funny that whilst the rest of the party were making plans of what they would do when the battle finishes, Dustin and Steve are making a suicide pact in the basement like imagine Lucas or someone walking in during that shit and just having to be like ‘you guys aren’t actually going to kill yourselves right, RIGHT’
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something something “you die, I die” going from Dustin’s dramatic way of saying that he’s not letting Steve treat him like a little kid/ he’s trying to prove himself to Steve
TO
If you die, I can’t go on living. you’re the most important person in my life, so if you die, it’ll only be because I died protecting you first.
AND THEY BOTH SAID IT TO EACH OTHER
Reblogged jackironsides
AI Nuance
I've been working on an essay for like 6 months. With as bad as I have been feeling, I've only been able to write a few paragraphs at a time. But I finally finished it. Though I'm not even sure my audience will be into it.
I am really tired. And I don't think this essay is controversial. It's about megapixels and Ks and resolution.
But there is one part where I talk about AI upscaling tools. And I differentiate push-button AI cost cutting versus AI tools made for artists and scientists. And that the tools are good, but the push button solutions are slop.
The AI tools I use either reduce tedium and are an accessibility assist or they do something that is not achievable otherwise.
To give you an example of "not achievable otherwise"...
Sinners was very popular. I thought it was a refreshingly original movie with beautiful art direction. And the twin effect used generative AI. But the art was not separated from the artist. Nothing was used to replace an artist. It was not a push button solution.
Michael B Jordan had to do all of the twin scenes multiple times including one pass where he wore this "halo" rig.
I can't imagine acting in that.
They used all of these cameras to create training data so they could perfectly deepfake his performance onto his body double's head.
The behind the scenes never say this is AI. They don't say the word deepfake. But that is what it is.
To be clear, this involved more artistry and effort than plopping a CG head onto him (which is difficult in its own right). It is an immensely complicated process and I believe there is only one dude in the world who can currently achieve photoreal results. Disney literally hired him from his YouTube videos to improve young Luke Skywalker for his Grogu training scenes.
They did not push a button and his head appeared on the double. This was a grueling, expensive artistic process. But they would have never achieved this level of realism using traditional methods. They didn't just deepfake his head, they deepfaked his performance.
Spider-Verse uses AI to help create ink lines in the animation. They train it with their own artists. But it allows for them to do the effect without every single frame of the movie being manually inked.
Photoshop is now riddled with AI tools. Some people may not even realize they are AI. But any automatic selection, the remove tool, neural filters, and any time you use gen fill to remove a drunk uncle from a wedding photo, that is an AI tool. Lightroom has AI masking, noise reduction, heal, and background blur.
I try to only use AI tools that were trained on licensed images, but now Photoshop is introducing 3rd party models as an option and I doubt many users will realize they were not trained on Adobe-owned stock images.
I use AI upscaling in my photo restoration. 100+ year old photos are usually soft to the point of being blurry. People want to print them. Often much bigger than the originals. So I created an upscaling workflow to help increase the detail. It is a pain in the ass. It is not a push button process. And I often have to fight the tool to get a good result. And, to me, that makes it feel like an authentic artistic tool instead of a push button shortcut. It's not doing my job for me, it is just allowing me to do something impossible otherwise.
I think of AI as a tragedy. When I see these good things it is capable of, especially the scientific/medical applications, it makes me sad how corrupted the technology has become. I want to change the policies and regulations to mitigate the bad and elevate the good. This could even be an opportunity to restart nuclear energy production.
I guess my question would be... is acknowledging there are positive applications of AI tools going to be a huge headache?
Do people understand the nuance between push-button slop and tools meant to reduce tedium and expand artistic possibilities?
Or is it... "all AI is bad" and I should just remove that section of my essay?
Despite some of my defenses above, if I had a button to destroy AI, I'd probably push it. In its current state, I do think the bad far outweighs the good. I am in the "AI is bad" collective, but my brain does not allow me to ignore nuance.
Just like I use a smartphone that had problematic labor used to create it, I don't see much point in abstaining from using helpful tools that will exist no matter what I do. Especially if they make my life and disability a bit more accessible.
I just don't want this essay I worked on for months to be dragged down by arguments about AI. I don't have the energy for that. Like, when I feel better, I'd love to have conversations about this. I'm happy to explain and defend my position. I'm happy to have my mind changed if someone makes a compelling argument.
But I'm just not up to all that in the context of this huge thing I've written.
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Do you wonder. Sometimes. If Steve’s up late on nights he can’t sleep, alone and cold. Do you wonder. If he thinks back to that elevator, back to Dustin saying “If you die, I die” and lets it swirl around in his mind. Thinks about how the reverse is true, always. Thinks about Dustin destroying himself getting into fights. If you die, I die. But if I die, you die.
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steve teaching robin his evil white boy ways is very important to me. he's boosting her up into a girl's window. she's wearing backwards baseball caps and popped collars and sunglasses inside. sitting on the roof in lawn chairs. throwing random stuff off high places.
the first time she does a keg stand, he cries.
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oh. oh that’s it. steve is grieving eddie just as violently and deeply and wholly as dustin is. that’s the crux. oh. oh they’re both shutting down & acting backhanded because that’s how steve responds to grief and dustin learned how to be a man from steve? oh. okay. sure.
hey duffers? literally kill yourselves.
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spoilers for wake up dead man!!
having wicks symbolise jesus, comparing himself to jesus in that big speech, implying that his father was god and that he was preparing to fall and rise again, having him be the one that was leading the flock, etc, and then actually have him 'rise' from the dead on the third day and 'die' again after having been betrayed by someone close to him - already fantastic, i was totally on board
having the plot twist be that samson, the one that was probably the most separated from wicks' church, the one who was said to truly love and care for others the most, the one willing to sacrifice for those he loved, the CARPENTER (who uses nails on good friday to essentially make his own coffin), actually ends up as the one rising from the dead on the third day to be killed by someone close to him - also fantastic
Reblogged exitwound
i love charlie brown so much. what a miserable little child.
Charlie Brown, undaunted, seeks tenderness and fulfillment on every side: in baseball, in building kites, in his relationship with his dog, Snoopy, in playing with the girls. He always fails. His solitude becomes an abyss, his inferiority complex is pervasive—tinged by the constant suspicion (which the reader also comes to share) that Charlie Brown is not inferior. Worse: he is absolutely normal. He is like everybody else. This is why he is always on the brink of suicide or at least of nervous breakdown: because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives...
– Umberto Eco, On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’
