it’s just like. this broadcasts loud and clear that the people behind the curtain have no pride or faith in this site at all. that tumblr, as a whole, has no worth or merit unless it’s somehow tricking the larger internet community into thinking it’s actually another site. and the users are supposed to celebrate this? where’s the dignity? where’s the self-respect? where’s the joy? it’s disheartening and embarrassing to be forced to conform. smh.
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.
I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
I was gonna draw something more serious but sometimes u just gotta draw memes
the thing is this dashboard change isnt the end of the world ill get used to it whatever im just fucking dying of embarrassment that its supposed to look like twitter
twitter gets run over by a bus and the next day tumblr comes 2 school wearing her clothes like. oh my god come on
I think non 3D artists should know a really funny thing about substance painter, you can't open files made on a newer version with an old version. So if you buy the steam perpetual license instead of paying adobe 50$ a month, you're screwed after a year if you wanna open other peoples files.
I really think that it’s important to remember @staff are trying to phase out custom blogs! Literally the most fun and interesting part of Tumblr and a very awesome selling point of Tumblr’s entire model.
That’s part of their whole ‘Tumblr’s not easy to use’ bullshit. They’ve been working at it for months now, you can’t even access someone’s custom blog from mobile anymore and like not even on the mobile website.
So yeah that theme and those pages you worked so hard to make unique and interesting? The webcomic hosted on Tumblr in such a way that it basically has it’s own website? The ARCHIVE of your blog that you can pretty much only access from a button on your custom blog? It’ll all go down the gutter if we don’t yell until our voices go hoarse.
This is a BLOGGING website the point of the website is THE BLOGS! I didn’t work hard to maintain my blog and keep the pages on it looking pretty for some hack at RND to decide it needs to go to make way for their ‘definitely not-Twitter’ ideal website. I swear to god the loss of our custom blogs will be the exact last straw for me and I WILL leave.
How i cope with being bad at the game
watching people on tiktok consume borax is uh. something.
having to say “don’t eat borax” was not on my 2023 bingo
Canāt believe in the year 2023 we have to say: do not consume borax. It will not provide a āparasite cleanseā, it does not combat the āevil fluorideā in your water, and it is not a super mineral. It will damage your organs. Also, itās not rated for human consumption so frankly, who knows what itās cross-contaminated with (my personal bet would be arsenic).
Absolutely love when I Google something I've never heard of and find the reason I've never heard of it is because it's been banned in the EU for safety concerns
I used borax on my carpets for fleas. Because it literally eats through their exoskeleton/egg shells and kills them. It made the bottoms of my feet just a little bit hot when I walked over the carpet. Who - who out there comes UP with this stuff in the first place? Like - who's ground zero for 'I must ingest a corrosive salt laundry detergent?'
I use borax to prevent woodworm in my barn. It’s a pesticide, not a nutrient. WTF.
People don't like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn't be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they're basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it's just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like "we're using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can" and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
new alternian custom fonts
just got done making some custom fonts in new alternian! will probably do some more eventually but here's four if anyone is interested!
Like the majority of society Iām obsessed with Nimona
And I rewatched it a million times and one thing always sticks out to meĀ
There are moments when Ambrosius is surrounded by light like a little protective bubbleĀ
That keeps him away from the man he loves more than anythingĀ
Glaze is out!
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
ALTArt thieves already hate it:
Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.
The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222
As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:
&
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash
this is very true
genuine question, i don’t want to be rude, is the answer that we all wear masks the rest of our lives? i wore a mask for the better part of 2 years, and i’m sure most other leftists did, too. even if we could cure covid and no one one else would die from it, there are countless other diseases that humans spread to each other through casual interaction. that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make efforts to reduce the spread of disease, but there are other considerations too.
Truly, you can do whatever you want, but covid still exists, long covid affects ~10-20% of people who get covid, and covid still kills hundreds to thousands of people per week. Despite the fact that virtually no one outside of hospital settings has done PCR tests for ~2 years and the media and government would like you to move on for the sake of capitalism, it still affects people? and the people who are affected are the most marginalized in society. Personally, I would hope that anyone who identifies as a leftist would care for and support those who are marginalized.
Barring rare situations, it is easy to mask and help protect people if you claim to care about disabled or chronically ill people. So many people are essentially being locked out of society right now due to a lack of precautions and is this is perhaps the least safe time in the pandemic for people who are immunocompromised or high-risk.
Yes, other illnesses exist, but these illnesses do not have as serious effects as covid does. Of course, the flu has always been downplayed, but covid is even worse than the flu in terms of viral sequelae - it has neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, etc. effects and at a relatively high rate that most common circulating viruses do not. Also covid is almost entirely spread by aerosol transmission, while other illnesses like influenza and rhinovirus are spread through fomites, so masking is effective.
Even the CDC, which is very covid-minimizing, acknowledges that covid causes long-term health effects.
If genuinely asked, most people who care about covid think unmasking would be fine if there were a vaccine that provides sterilizing immunity or is effective against future variants. There are next-generation vaccines in the works now, in addition to nasal sprays and other prophylactic anti-covid.
I don’t get it, man. why. why do we have to homogenize everything. why does every product have to look and behave and feel the exact same way. why can’t tumblr maintain its individuality? why can’t it lean into the things that make it a unique and refreshing offering instead of scrambling to make it a carbon copy of twitter? sucks, man. sucks.