My ideal street layout, wide sidewalk, wide bike lanes, and a 2 lane road that only allows streetcars on it. Yes I know this a bad drawing, I made it in a hurry

Are those (black circles w/ small things) supposed to be eg cafe chairs?

If so, they’re posing an accessibility issue due to blocking the sidewalks. Recommend your street layout allow for outdoor seating without blocking sidewalks.

Agreed. The foundation is sound, but there needs to be plenty of space to walk by seating without getting run over by a bike. Seating that hugs the walls of the nearby structure, and open storefronts that let people and services flow seamlessly between the commercial spaces and the sidewalks would be an improvement here.

I actually shrunk the seating to make there be more space for pedestrians

If the tracked area is for trams/streetcars only, may I recommend that you make it green track?

Not only does it add much needed greenery to public spaces, but it also reduces heat at street level, reduces the running noise of trams and dramatically improves water drainage at street level. It even goes as far as reducing the damage to the tracks caused by the material expanding and buckling in high heat by simply keeping the rails cooler and better displacing heat.

It doesn't even have to be grass! Different species of plant, local species or hardier, low-maintenance species can be used, and furthermore, it tends to reduce maintenance costs of the tracks, as soil is easier to dig up than concrete or tarmac, and so the tracks can be accessed and worked on easier.

Obviously, if you want the street to be able to accept buses along with trams/streetcars, or other rubber-tyred vehicles, then a hard surface is necessary, but if it's light rail only, then green track gets my vote.

Already made the edit, I hope you enjoy the green tracks and their flowers. This image is very green

Redoing the color of the bike path to make the street less fucking green

I love the idea of green tracks, but in this case they are not a good choice:

You still need the possibility for rubber based vehicles like Fire Cars or Ambulances to pass the streets.

You can't just put them on tracks because they need to be as mobile as possible to allow maximum efficency.

Okay removing the grass due to firecodes

Urbanism pride flag lol

we still need green so maybe put flowerpots in the middle of the sidewalk? Like rectangular ones that only take up maybe a fifth of the sidewalk width, and their intermittent, maybe one between every other set of trees.

The street planters have come in

Honestly if you want some good green space you should consider bioswales between the bike facilities and the "street", which would help replace some of the lost drainage/filtration function from de-greening the track

The bios have been swaled

@puddlebrigade Okay the tables have been moved and reduced to be more accessible and some planters have been moved

@professionalchaoticdumbass Green is back in fashion

The large dark green dots are trees

Is it too soon for this?

Yes, you aren’t even on the current version

Sidewalk seems a little tight tbh

Sidewalk widened. Goal achieved

@i-use-oxford-comma The benches have been added and @prawnhubpremium The dragon is opening a shop

We are making a good street

How about adding breaks to the bioswales to make it easier to cross the street?

Better for people with mobility issues and also means EMS personnel won't have to lift the stretcher over an obstruction. Back injuries are the number 1 reason people leave the field.

Bioswales have been broken up and the planters have been moved

I like that people are making use of the tables and the dragon has found a human to lay down with him

what a fine thing for a dragon and a human to find: each other

Trashcans next to benches?

Also I'm assuming the green dots are symbolic representations and the actual trees are tall enough for their branches to meet and give actual (dappled) shade to the entire street.

There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

There once was a man from Verdun

There once was a man from the sticks Whose limericks stopped at line six. They were fine till line five Then they took quite a dive — But the problem is easy to fix If you just ignore the last line, it doesn't even follow the rhyme scheme oh god I've really lost control of this thing I'm so sorry...

There once was a man

From Cork who got limericks

And haiku confused.

There once was a man from the sticks

Who liked to compose limericks

But he failed at the sport

Because he wrote them too short

@limerickshere

There once was a fellow named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He replied, "Yes, I know-- It's because I try to squeeze as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can."

June Egbert shenanigans :]

Ultimately the debate over changing the minds of our oppressors with angry words versus kind words is meaningless because it rests on the assumption that people in power will be swayed by words at all. In reality, people who have power over you have limitless ways of tuning you out or reinterpreting your words to death. It's often the case that they won't actually hear you unless there are material consequences for not doing so.

Sorry about going on a huge journey under your post... There’s a somewhat more useful framework that’s sometimes used in organizing, where you first mentally divide society into 5 groups:

To get closer to your goal, you can pursue different strategies for each group:

Now this is all just theory, it's not going to apply to every situation. If you're a union preparing strike action, some of this is gonna be different. But it can be a helpful tool to plan what works.

Yeah, agreed. And a lot of the time people think that someone ‘on our side’ who isn’t mobilized yet just doesn’t feel bad enough about what’s happening yet so they need to bombarded with more content about how deeply fucked up everything is. When in reality all that misery often just pushes people away and what they actually need an entry point, a way to experience that they can take action and that action does create change.

isekai about a nyc apartment block getting teleported into a fantasy realm, and how this group of people who previously have only had incidental contact with one another come together to build a vibrant community in their new circumstances. there's a season-long arc about introducing bagels and pizza to the fantasy world that gets into the details of sourcing ingredients, developing new technologies, and learning how to work with supernatural substitutions.

Clarifying question: just the people or the buildings and animal life too?

And does it include random people on the street at the time of the transfer?

oh the whole thing for sure, im picturing the whole city block with a crust of sidewalk just dropped onto the outskirts of a small medieval village. im thinking theres probably a corner store and a couple other things included too, so youve got the people who work there or were shopping at the time of the transfer too.

i hadnt thought of animals but having a whole thing w pigeons would be awesome too; have new york feral pigeons meeting with tamed messenger pigeons of the era, a raccoon that was sleeping in a trash can eats a magical necklace and starts talking. love it.

fucking love this. an army of monster rats descend upon the kingdom, led by a single subway rat under the banner of a half-eaten pizza crust

But they do not anticipate the rise of the Hero, their one, true, and most worthy foe—

THE BODEGA CAT

The Australian Ballet is doing Alice in Wonderland again and on one hand I’ve seen it before, and on the other, their Queen of Hearts has my favourite costume in anything every

It’s just this and her court pushes her around the stage on wheels and every act it gets taller until she towers over everyone

Also in act 3 (I think) it swings open at the front and her husband is sitting inside reading a newspaper

I saw this again on Tuesday so here are some things I’d forgotten about:

here’s a video

more. (btw this is a parody/reference to the very famous “rose adagio” from sleeping beauty)

the Caterpillar is pretty neat too

(all of these videos are from the Royal Ballet’s productions in 2014 and 2017)

Finally an adaptation that makes feel like I’m going to have stroke, it’s perfect

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.

Art 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:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

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/

Picnic with cows

(via)

Butch wearing a dress. Does this count as crossdressing.

cross dressing is when you are any gender and wear any outfit

my favorite piece of avatar lore i’ve ever learned is that piandao apparently also deserted the Fire Nation military, but instead of going on the run he just. went back the Fire Nation. built a fucking mansion about it. and then when the army sent 100 guys to arrest him, he kicked the shit out of them so hard they just fucked off forever.

jeong jeong is out there in a hut in the woods living his most bitter life meanwhile piandao is sitting in his palatial estate sipping tea, fully daring the fire lord to fuck around and find out. bad bitch behavior

expanding on this, i think it’s significant that the fire nation as an imperial power promotes its actions as benevolent: it says, ‘we are going to improve the world’, and frames its violence as a regrettable necessity. that’s how empires work.

but, crucially, jeong jeong rejected his entire nation, and piando rejected the nationalism.

jeong jeong decided that fire had nothing to offer but destruction, pain, suffering. he lives in a hut as an aescetic. if art and culture and beauty is only available on the other side of a burning fist, he’ll have none of it. he’ll live an utterly uncultured life, as wretched as any unenlightened foreigner the fire nation has set out to conquer, because his own culture is abhorrent to him.

piando looked at the whole mess and went, ‘the culture is great. even the violence can be a meaningful art. it’s the imperialistic overreach that fucking sucks.’ so he went home and continued to practice martial arts, calligraphy, architecture, music. he loves his country and he loves his culture. he lives as a nobleman at the heart of an empire and, while he refuses to participate in the brutal ugliness of a century-long war of conquest, he certainly appreciates the beauty that kind of power can provide.

it’s been two years, but i think that an icon like her deserves to be known about by more people.

her name was freddie oversteegen and she, at the age of fourteen, along with her older sister truus who was 16 and their friend johanna “hannie” schaft who was 19, was a part of the netherlands most famous all female resistance cell which was dedicated to fighting the nazis and dutch traitors.

among other things, they are known to have blown up bridges and railroads, smuggled jewish children from concentration camps and, as the tweet mentions, seducing nazis and then shooting them with guns that they had hidden in their bike baskets. freddie is quoted as having said that they “had to do it.” and that it was a “necessary evil, killing those who betrayed good people.”

though freddie and her sister truus were both lucky and survived the war, hannie schaft wasn’t. at the age of 24, hannie was caught and around three weeks later was executed by nazis, only 18 days before the netherlands were eventually liberated. she was shot with one only wounding her, and, before the final shot, hannie is quoted as having told the executioners: ik schiet beter, which translates to “i shoot better.”

though she didn’t survive, hannie is recognized as a national icon and a face of the dutch resistance, with her story even being retold in a movie from 1981 called “the girl with the red hair.” along with this, truus also founded the national hannie schaft foundation in 1992, on which freddie served as a board member.

freddie, at the time of her death, was 92 years old and the last surviving member of the resistance cell, with truus having died two years earlier at the age of 92.

though these women and all that they did played an important part in the dutch resistance, they are often overlooked in history outside of the netherlands. it’s important that they are remembered and that their work to save people isn’t forgotten. it’s incredible what they did, especially given how young they were, and they deserve more recognition than what they’ve gotten.

“I shoot better” Holy shit an icon

Editing? Oh you mean fic patching.

some others i found in the notes

Liv Tyler's Bunny Voyage

#homestuck spoilers but good luck getting spoiled on anything from it 

basically, yeah