ultralaser

Illustration by Richard Scarry

This is how I expected the world to work.

Dr. Gachey with foxglove, 1890

Some of Van Gogh’s best work was done during a period of his life that he spent in a hospital being treated for his mental health problems. I could be wrong but I think Starry Night was among those.

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

All our experiences, good and bad, inform what we create, but suffering is not the price of great art. Suffering is what prevents artists from completing great art.

(I bring to mind this @tkingfisher / Ursula Verson quote about once a week <3)

i used to have a running gag on twitter where i would tweet "i'm going to draw a horse" and then proceeded to draw a horse. here is a compilation

context for boghorse:

i would never lie to you

The Hourglass Sanatorium / Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (1973) 

[letterboxd | imdb]

Director: Wojciech Has

Cinematographer: Witold Sobociński

Performers: Jan Nowicki

She had to be perfect to win, and he can literally do no wrong fuck everything up and still win.

So much like life, she a powerful black woman with amazing credentials had so much experience and a great plan to move forward.

He is a rich white[orange] baby who fails up on everything he does. He bankrupted every business and has never developed land as a real estate investor that's kinda huge. he just licensed his name out to buildings. He doesn't pay his bill and is an adjudicated rapists. Let's everyone know how racist he is constantly. He has never worked a day in his life and doesn't understand the value of a dollar amd yet still the stranglehold he has on American media is something no Democrat has been able to break so far.

Just like american society she fought an uphill battle with for the right side but trump is a powerful shit avalanche going down taking everything with it as he goes

I guess it’s his w/ @alphaxalfa

[Cheerful music in background]

Both: [singing in unison] “This land is your land! This land is my land!”

White person: [interjecting; monotone] “This land is my land! This land is my land! This land is my land. This land is my land.”

[laughter]

2024 election (short version)

aubrey plaza: i’m bi

internet: she has suchhh queer energy

aubrey plaza: it’s because i’m bi

interviewer: are you aware of your largely gay fanbase?

aubrey plaza: yeah i’m bi

gay fanbase: she just can’t stop making movies where she kisses girls!!

aubrey plaza: i’m

interesting.

You finally get to the front of the line for bottom surgery and the doctor is like "OK the last set of penises and vaginas just went out. What do you want instead?" and vaguely waves their arm at a nearby storage room full of non-biological things.

What do you take instead?

this is basically what happened to ash ketchum

At the gender surgeon’s like

instructions unclear I now have a bulbasaur where my vagina should be. my girl's gonna get some Vine Whip, at least.

tshirt cannon

Sous vide machine

Sous vide cannon

who up vagina'ing they dentata

(full article here)

I gotta wonder how much of this is OpenAI and others like them and their general approach to business being:

This isn't an exaggeration. Because OpenAI is publicly traded, they have to be honest with their investors, and have openly said "we have no idea how we will ever turn a profit."

Beyond them, most players in the space are looking to get bought by a Microsoft or Sony and jump for the exits before they realize the sack is mostly full of rocks.

OpenAI has always operated under a "we'll use all this investor money to brute-force the largest datasets possible, make something impressive, show it off, and then wait for more investor money to roll in." A process that is by its nature inefficient and expensive.

Ever notice how there was no Dall-E 2.5? OpenAI isn't interested in incremental improvements to their products because they're making tech demos. It's very impressive on first release, but to this day Dall-E 3 doesn't have basic functionality like seeds, upscalers, aspect ratios, post-generation editing, or even the ability to iterate a previous gen.

If your money doesn't come from your users, then you have no incentive to adapt to their needs and you stagnate.

Midjourney, on the other hand, has neither investors nor these problems, because they're selling a product. You pay X amount, you get to play with the super-advanced etch-a-sketch, the simple process of money exchanged for a service. Because they have users to keep happy, they develop features that conform to their needs and develop in response to their behaviors.

And you can refine a model two ways, by expanding the dataset or by giving feedback to the current dataset's output. An active subscriber base gives you a means of doing the latter, and while very few people have a dataset to rival OpenAI's, many outperform them based purely on likes and ranking feedback from users.

This is why Chat-GPT has to be forced into everything. The main use of this tech isn't to replace artists, despite what OP might think. The use of generative AI as an art tool has always been secondary to its use as a toy, and that's what 98% of the userbase is using it for. Text is just the least fun toy in the box (at least as long as you're not allowing it to go NC-17)

Images, video and sound are the Fighting Frankie Action Figure everyone wants, and Chat-GPT says "Horse 'em!".

One of the most common first prompts on Midjourney is for a happy dog or cat playing in the clouds. These aren't people looking to make commercial work.

The AI products that people are going to wind up using and will have actual utility as productivity or entertainment services? They don't need investment because they have something people want to pay for. And the nature of the investment system means anyone who uses it is unlikely to ever make anything that people will want to pay for.

i dont think fight club was co-opted by the right because they didnt get the satire, it was co-opted because it fuckign kicks ass. they would have co-opted any movie that is that good and has hot sweaty men in it. right wingers aren't aliens, they know a good movie when they see it, the lesson isn't "don't make satire because the wrong people might think its for them" the lesson would be "don't make art that kicks ass" and i'd rather there be art that kicks ass

leftists do this too, like we see a movie that is so good it makes us see stars and then reverse engineer that transcendent beauty into something as banal and explainable as political resonance. we do it with pro-capitalist anti-corporation art, we do it with anti-capitalist pro-monarchy art, this is just a thing that happens in the brains of people who experience great art. why is that the art's problem

just learned today that there was a german monk who was obsessed with witches and women having sex so he wrote an entire book called the hammer of witches where in one part he describes in detail that witches have the ability to make people’s penises disappear and they keep the penises as pets and feed them oats

i’m serious

Because I was reminded of this post just now:

There is an article on JSTOR about this exact thing which is my favorite academic article title that I've come across in the tiny subfield of scholarship around witch beliefs, hunting and trials

The title, ladies and gentlemen:

There is enough talk of penis theft to fill an academic article.

Also if anyone would like an overview of the Malleus Maleficarum in general, Dr. Justin Sledge has a good one here which I think mentions the penis shenanigans (which are pretty much based on a) misogyny and b) a bit of beliefs about magic-vs-humorism) too:

For real though, SO much misogyny going on. Heinrich Kramer was a bizarre extremist even for his time, and despite how influential he is a lot of his contemporaries in the Church, a lot of nobility and even some literal inquisitors hated his guts (despite others "coming around") because his solution for everything was "execution" instead of "repentance".

GOD. still the funniest transition in the show bar none

The amount of knowledge people must be losing out on to the decay of search engines is unreal. If I go try to look up something I already knew about, just to show someone else, I can't fucking find it anymore. I know exactly what to search for. I know terms that CANNOT POSSIBLY reference anything else. Still I get loose approximations and nonsense garbage and in some cases it truly seems like the original sources are gone anyway. Not everything is on wikipedia.

no but citizenship should be automatically granted to anyone who's lived in a country long enough. like sooner or later you hit a point where you've lived here longer than you ever lived in your birthplace but that's not enough to legally call it your home? fuck off with that shit.

hyperfixations are so embarrassing like nooo don’t look I have a crush. on this tv show

lol, lmao.

rofl

we had a big bump when brazil blocked twitter and we got another one this week from block being nerfed and then ANOTHER bump this week from elon maybe getting a cabinet position so, yeah it's hectic on the ole bluesky rn