ctrl+f is one of the greatest things to happen to academia and indeed this world

GenAI v. not GenAI round up.

So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.

Pro GenAI websites/Programs:

Neutral ground:

Strong positions against AI:

Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.

LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)

Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.

yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.

Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.

Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.

Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.

Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.

Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.

Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.

Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.

Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)

Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.

Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.

Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)

Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.

But you need a pro website...

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

which will poison the algorithm

Take Away:

The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.

And why not help that along?

I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.

You can add Procreate to the anti AI list. They have vowed time and time again when people ask that they will not use AI in their software.

Will also add that elllipsus has options for sharing work with Betas and getting comments in-line wjth the text, a lot like google docs does.

I know a lot of writers stick to gdocs for thaf specific feature but you dont have to!

The more-radical-than-thou "America has always been fascist" types really make it difficult to point out all of the ways in which America has materially gotten vastly worse for just about everyone within the last year. Like at this point I regard it as basically just a "leftist" way of telling people that they're overreacting and suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome".

Materially things are precipitously dropping for white people, the middle class, and immigrants who thought they had assimilated or escaped racialization. For the Chilean coal miner, the black and brown political prisoner, the Vietnamese child born with agent orange in their blood stream: this is just another turn on the Ferris Wheel of American policy. This is what, "America has always been fascist" should mean. However, even this creates dismissal and is too often used as a thought-terminating cliche instead of a call to action. Internet discourse, which already struggles to create any praxis out of theory, creates an environment where this phrase joins those like, "no ethical consumption under capitalism" and adds to defeatism.

My role models in the black radical tradition will say that America has always been fascist and this is a reminder that there is ongoing struggle and organization. The need to fight and the organization of fighters is not due to whatever recent headline pops up, or President. Under Johnson, Carter, Obama and Trump the answer is the same: get organized. And, especially for white people, seek out existing organizations before you decide you need to reinvent the wheel. Especially when your inventing hobby is trying to overshadow someone's wheel making career or life work.

Similar to, "why is no one talking about ____!?" If I point out that people are, have been, and point out the people and organizations that are talking and doing something about it - I'm not dismissing that ____ is an issue. Still, if I do it wrong or as an empty online argument I'm turning what should be an invitation into a dismissal. There are also those who do not "have ears to hear." And they will always complain on both sides of this.

worst part of anxiety/ocd is that sometimes your fears actually do happen and you have to wag your finger at i like this still doesn't prove you're right asshole. it's like having a venom symbiote except you don't even get to have gay alien sex

so many creatures putting SO much effort into putting ‘special’ fluids that TOTALLY aren’t water through every organ possible to clean them so they can use them again 2 seconds later. like why not simply sit on a damp substrate and pull water through your body by evaporating the extra out pores in your leaves lmaoooo

‘nooo nooo you don’t get it I need the big organ to run the fast firing nerves to run the machines that make the fluid go to work the big organ’. whatever chordate. lol

troubleshooting time: arid area, low on damp substrate. what do?

good question! you could try closing your leaf pores for a while until more appears… sometimes you can also put more tubes down and feel around until you find some. water comes from the opposite direction of the sun unless it doesn’t ❤️ glad I could help!!

omg useless advice from privileged mfs from wet climates as usual... bet you don't even use CAM.

ok first of all i checked your profile and of COURSE its all meadows, say youre a grass who does C4 without saying youre a grass who does C4 100% speedrun challenge. sorry i wasnt blessed with a whole separate sheath of cells for increasing photosynthetic efficiency and nothing else but some of us actually have to adapt and deal with the VERY REAL AND SEVERE effects of photorespiration... literally imagine having 30 foot deep roots posting this. second of all 'plants in wet climates are privileged' you can literally live in water and use CAM??? isoetes erasure per usual on this website, neglected by an angiosperm monocot no less. why am i not surprised

Snorfle snarfle hnarf munch munch

Too chickenshit to do the munch noises myself but

"Block this ad" isn't good enough, I need a feature that directly tells the company "this was so shit that it lowered my opinion of your product"

One piece of pedantry I have zero respect for is people insisting that “bug” must only be used for insects with piercing mouthparts.

That may be the way the scientific terminology evolved, but “bug” having the meaning of “small annoying animal” is ANCIENT English.

It’s where bugbear and boogieman and boggart and hobgoblin etymologically derive from!

Stuff like guerilla gardening, stickering, wheatpasting, lifting, graffiti, pothole-filling and other minor illegal acts aren’t only important for their primary effects, but because disobeying your capitalist programming helps break down the internalized worldview that comes with it

You start seeing society as it is: a collection of flawed, limited, man-made institutions that can be ignored, reshaped, or abolished. You see your environment as something that you’re free to improve and beautify. You see items on shelves as common property which is unjustly hoarded and guarded. You see cops as violent oppressors upholding the unfair demands of the ruling class - but you also see them as human, able to be avoided, fooled, and fought

Practice illegalism daily to see past the smoke and mirrors that make it look like the way things are is the way they must be. A better world is possible

Disobedience is a muscle that requires exercise. If you envision yoursef a resistance fighting and think you’ll start breaking the law once it becomes absolutely necessary, you will not have the skills, the experience, the realism, connections or the courage once the time comes.

The revolution isn’t an event to happen somewhere, someday, somehow.

It is happening everywhere, all the time, and in all of these different ways that each person has access to.

“You are what you do repeatedly,” and what you do now, immediately, prepares you for what you’ll do next.

James C Scott called in anarchist calisthenics. You ave to practise the skill and the fitness of doing things for the collective. Otherwise when the real urgency strikes it’s like someone just asked you to win a game for us in hockey and you’ve never in your life even skated on ice. And not only that, it will feel repulsive whenever someone asks you if you’d like to play hockey with them.

Working for the community should not feel like a repulsive idea that’ll only embarrass you.

the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"

actually sorry. the takeaway is also "the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader"

The takeaway is that James Cameron hired a multi disciplinary team to create the most "alien" culture possible and after years of design what they ended up with just looked like the indigenous population that their Anglo American creators had waged a genocide against decades before. Something unpleasant in the Canadian mind stirred and twisted and managed to summon the ghosts of their own shadow haunted world.

The takeaway is that James Cameron leaned into it. The music they wrote was too foreign sounding, so they substituted "world music" for the Navi - a movie short hand for indigenous sounding. The alien bodies weren't attractive enough to the western male gaze, so Cameron gave them mammalian breasts. This whole narrative about dozens of experts across dozens of fields building the culture of the Navi, while true, is just a distraction from the fact that Cameron designed Pandora and its cute cat eyed blue aliens already.

The takeaway is that dozens of ethnologists, musicologists, archeologists, historians and speculative fiction artists mostly just built baubles and artifacts to be displayed in supplementary materials. A well designed string instrument in the, "World of Pandora," book. A materially sound weaving displayed at the "World of Pandora," theme park. The same colonizer historian who reconstructs Hopi pottery for the Smithsonian, constructs Navi pottery for Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Perhaps you're old enough to remember when the world first met James Cameron's Avatar and the globe was cleaved into two groups; one totally enchanted by this alien paradise, and one that went, "oh so it's Dances With Wolves. Just beat for beat. No it's not Pocahontas, it just looks like Pocahontas because Pocahontas was cribbing the same styles and materials from Dances With Wolves. Come on, Kevin Cosner won the Oscar for Best Picture for this movie it's not an obscure film."

The takeaway is that Avatar is also the dream of white maroonage. The history of colonization is also the history of defection. From James Cameron to Kevin Costner, from the Avatar Fans back to the first Europeans to walk the shores of Turtle Island; people have projected real and imagined freedoms and powers onto the members and first nations found there. That Pandora distills down the dream of a pre-contact, non agrarian and anti-industrial, spiritually rich but materially limited culture and that this distillation just looks like blue Powhatans, well that probably means something.

This is a really good crash course on bad fad diets and the snake oil salesmen who snake oil sells them. You can and should apply this method to any health claim you see on the internet, especially ones that seems to indicate that a handful of supplements or a 4 week diet can fix something modern medicine allegedly struggles with. Once you get the hang of it, you can stop a lot earlier in the process. Unless you love making yourself angry. Or you need evidence to help a naive friend or family member.

You know that surrealist twitter post about the fake Simpsons character?

Evangelion is like that except they’re all from some obscure official media somehow.

Every time a school shooting is perpetrated by a student, there is this discussion around how they were ‘driven’ to this point by bullying and loneliness due to their snotty peers. The truth is that their peers had every fucking reason to want to stay the hell away from them and often that ‘bullying’ was telling the teachers and other students about the jaw-droppingly violent and bigoted shit the kid was saying. The awkward gay kid with no friends who is intensely bullied is not the kid shooting up the school, the sweet nerd with a heart of gold no one has seen yet is not the kid shooting up the school. It is the angry, vengeful, hate-filled kid who has outcast himself from his peers by terrifying the fuck out of them. There were signs. There were so many signs. But every authority figure is afraid to ‘ruin a young boy’s life’ by intervening and fucking doing something.

I agree that the actual and attempted perpetrators of large scale violence like this (school shootings) are usually fascists or those who have a crypto fascist obsession with violence. And I agree that schools are shockingly bad at identifying these risk factors.

I disagree with how this scenario is framed. The carceral justice and community policing it tacitly implies. Especially the fear of, "ruining a young boy's life." This overlooks or is ignorant of the large number of students (awkward, quiet, sweet or otherwise) who are unnecessarily criminalized by existing school policies, especially "no tolerance."

I'll get this out of the way first. Criminalization in schools follows the intersections of power. What these fascistic violence loving children have in common is (usually) that they're white and male - someone check me, but I think it's not significantly correlated with class. Obviously right? These are the "young boys lives," people are interested in not ruining. Let's not overlook the fact that the criminalization of the underprivileged, of the neurodivergent and mentally ill, of black and brown people, begins in school. The anti-violence policies that fail to intervene in school shooting, "until it's too late," have hair triggers for the oppressed.

Yes this should be obvious and OP definitely is talking about the white male fascist school shooters. However, these signs we're talking about, the signs that everyone sees apparently and does nothing about. What are you supposed to do about them? I'll skip to the end. I don't think the answer is increasing surveillance of our students and escalations to the police. These institutions that protect young white men are already failing our brown and black communities.

To point out a problem, "it's the scary boys who are outcasts for a good reason," in this way is working within the milieu of policing. This is a criminological profile. It suggests that the narrative is wrong, but in a way that just suggests different targets for criminal intervention and violence. If the police are getting involved, and they do if this is taken seriously, it's violence.

We cede a lot of authority to a white supremacist society of violence when we address these scenarios as imminent or as already having happened. Fascists are not born and killers are not grown overnight. There's a lifetime of not being a fascist that proceeds and is the majority of not being a fascist weirdo, at least for a young person. I don't think OP believes that violent fascist outcast is a natural type (a kind of super predator that needs additional policing) and OP does not mention policing, they leave the question of what to do open ended. But in a society of violence and surveillance that question has an immediate knee jerk answer and we should be cognizant of that.

But OP isn't addressing a particular killing, they're addressing the abstract always about to happen or having happened shooting. The one we're always talking about in the news. The one that we could have done something about. But we didn't. And we don't. And we never act "in time."

What am I getting at? I think we overestimate how "everyone knew and didn't do anything." We raise the exception as the rule because it makes action feel possible. Most of the time people didn't know and most children, even the fascist outcasts, don't kill people or commit crimes. Our obsession with school shootings, their perpetrators and their identities, is itself a product of the society of violence. OPs post reflects a need for there to be moral clarity in the face of amoral violence. I don't think any kid is a bad person or that a bad person is necessarily the person who ends up doing a crime. The need for a person to be bad is the need for there to be a criminal to criminalize.

To be clear, I'm writing from a position of prison abolition. In a time where we need to be decriminalizing human behavior, posts about school shootings fantasize about and create new criminal identities. I posit that these fantasies do not reflect real existing criminalization, which disproportionately affects minorities, and the criminalization it imagines would also be unjust. It's the guns, it's the fascism, the culture of masculine and often white violence. It's not the children, those are the people we're trying to protect. And part of that is preventive care. I see the, "person who has outcast themself" as a rather nihilistic response that squashes the responsibility of communities into a few moments before and after a gun goes off. Also, maybe it's because I'm over 30 but no you don't have to play with the kid who sharpies fascist imagery and 4chan memes all over their notebook. This isn't about you. I went to public school I know who you're talking about and as an adult I have no ill feelings whatsoever towards literal children.

I'm not asking you to sympathize with fascism, I'm asking you the reader to imagine gun violence differently. Let's consider Baltimore's anti-violence campaigns, both grassroots and the Mayor's Gun Violence Reduction Strategies. These programs are diverse and politically complicated. I'll begin by addressing it from a high level. First off, they found that 50% of homicides among black men were the results of individualized and personal disputes. The mayor led police action involved identifying known and suspected criminals, contacting them through their friends or family, and giving them an ultimatum; stop it or we're going to get you. While the mayor recently applauded his work you may have noticed the lack of connection between the first and second statement.

Grass roots violence reduction organizations like, We Our Us (brought to my attention by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle) claim to have significantly reduced the murder rate through addressing the root cause of gun violence in their communities. By addressing the causes and perpetrators of individualized interpersonal conflict, We Our Us responded to the actual perpetrators of most murders in Baltimore. These programs include education, reinvestment in the community, conflict mediation and resolution, with a dedicated "Stop the Beef" hotline, all without police intervention.

Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle claim that the mayor of Baltimore is taking credit for the work of non-police affiliated organizations like We Our Us and trying to put all of this under the banner of "Gun Violence Reduction Strategies." Overstating the impact of the social ultimatum program and understating the impact of community centered conflict resolution. I believe LBS, but I understand this is an ongoing situation and local controversy.

I am referring to anti-Violence campaigns in Baltimore because they were effective and they cast light on the real vs imagined solutions to gun violence. Knowing who the perps are and getting them is a much less effective strategy than non-police community involvement. There are differences between majority black urban communities and majority white suburban schools and I don't mean to confuse the two, but I think they have additive resonances. If it's possible to address decades of community conflict and basically halve the number of homicides in Baltimore, I think it's possible to get Johnny to stop scrawling swastikas on the bathroom wall before he shoots someone.

In short, America has a white on white violence problem. There are anti-carceral, and non-police solutions. In fact, they might be the only ones.

Personally, I like the idea of Agnostic Gospels: "Lo, and there was a Word, and that Word was Up, or Down, or, fuck, man, look, so God might have had a kid who was also God but also one hundred percent a dude and sometimes a dove and they also were simultaneously hanging out in heaven since the beginning of time, it's a lot to take in, yeah, so maybe just skip it if you want. The important things are don't be a douchebag, be cool equally to the whores and the poors, and otherwise be excellent to each other. You can skip all that shit that Moses said, this cancels that out, look, my friend Johnny the Wet told you I was coming and here I am. Johnny's always damp, but he's also unable to lie, like God will melt him into a flan. Don't worry about what a flan is beyond delicious. Anyway, be chill, live in common, and don't worry about wearing a hat, God doesn't mind and neither does the Big Greasy Josh." The Agnostic Gospels, Book I or II.

Also, I never cared for Paul.

Paul also didn't write everything they say Paul wrote. The academic consensus accepts that several of the Epistles were written by a different writer, although the exact number of true and false Pauline letters is debated.

This isn't to say that the bad stuff is all just pseudo-pauline, which is a claim I've seen before. The entire epistle concept is meant to ameliorate and reconcile differences in the early church, from a universalist and top-down perspective. And this is all coming from a guy who never met Jesus. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that Pauline Christianity is a big point of departure for the Jesus movement.

However, there is no pre-sectarian Jesus movement that we can access if we remove Paul. Paul signifies that the early church was divided and in disagreement and became this way almost immediately. Issues like whether or not Christians can eat meat sacrificed to idols (Corinthians) or whether men can or cannot be circumcized (Galatians) address not merely doctrinal but class and ethnic divisions within the early Jesus movement. The existence of pseuo-Pauline Epistles points to the continued need for church members to hash out differences, new differences that needed new (likely false) Epistles.

Cleaning gets easier when you remember it's a thing you're doing to make your life less miserable, and not a thing you're doing as punishment

a perfect world where people go to play minigolf and say to each other "so. if this is minigolf, then whats golf?" and no one knows because golf hasnt existed for hundreds of years by that point

The tragedy of American politics is that each conservative administration sells more and more public land for golf course development. While the liberal administrations sell less land off, they also never take the golf courses back. So America is just the gradual expropriation of all public land into ecologically disastrous monocultural play grounds for the upper class.