Okay so I did some research, very basic research, on the user base of tumblr and how many of us there are.
There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.
Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.
If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.
If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.
If we want this to work, we have to make it work. We can even make it into a game. Just how long can we outlast the other social media sites?
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying.
It needs to be a holiday. Pick a date a few weeks from now, and just make it Crab Day. Maybe a Saturday as a lot of people are paid on Fridays. Just in case this post becomes more popular than any I’ve had before, lets set the date as the last Saturday in July (which for us in 2023 will be July 29th.)
On July 29th, gift as many crabs as you can without breaking the bank. Post crab memes if you cannot afford a crab.
Tumblr can pull this off. Tumblr likes doing things like this.
I love to use my disability “as an excuse.” Fuck yeah my disability is an excuse. It’s the most valid excuse I have. I’m not helping you lift that box/etc because my disability would make it fucking painful. Not wanting to be in pain is a good enough reason. I’m not going to put myself in pain to comfort your sensibilities.
Yes I’m using my disability as an excuse because I refuse to hurt myself for you. If you’re mad about it you can cry! ❤️
Happy disability pride month.
In honor of my chronic pain flareup that I could’ve avoided by asking my wife for help here’s your reminder to say no to stuff when it is safe to do so!!Ask for help!!
This month practice saying “I can’t do that. It would hurt me.” or “can I have help with (x)?” Start with a friend or family member who you feel comfortable asserting your boundaries with and keep saying no.
That doesn’t even seem like an excuse to me. Maybe the word excuse has overly negative connotations to me, but not wanting to do something that does/could potentially cause you pain seems pretty reasonable baseline
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.
Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
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 onpainterly 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 replacedthe front-endcode 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
I saw a post the other day from someone who was distressed that a parent had found their system tiktok and I can’t stop thinking about it
If you are scared about someone, particularly an abuser, finding an account, don’t share identifying information, especially not videos of yourself.
I grew up in the early days of the internet and online safety PSAs which were often laughable but deeply ingrained the idea that the internet can be dangerous so never give out identifying information.
And while I think some of those ideas are rather extreme, it’s really jarring to see how much things have swung in the opposite direction.
If you are posting things you don’t want people in your life to see, don’t post things on an open platform with identifying information such as your face, your name, or where you live.
This is especially important if you’re concerned about abusers finding what you post.
I know the internet has changed drastically and it’s a lot more common for people to post identifying info, but if you’re still in a position where people in your life seeing what you post could be dangerous, please be careful. Find places or ways to post that are separate from your IRL identity. Keep yourself safe.
tiktok is also extremely dangerous for things like this because the algorithm shares videos with people who are geographically close to you. so even if someone isn’t a part of your side of tiktok, your video could end up on their for you page anyways because of location.
You probably shouldn’t talk about your private mental health information - particularly with more stigmatized mental illnesses - on accounts that have your actual face on them.
Beyond just parents, employers and schools and stuff can find that, too. (Is it illegal in the US to discriminate based on mental health? Yes. Does that, realistically, stop anybody if you can’t PROVE that’s why you got fired/didn’t get hired? No. Particularly not in states with at-will employment laws.)
Some random person on the street who recognizes your face doesn’t need to know the specifics of your trauma and mental health. It’s none of their business, and it could be dangerous for you.
It’s always important to take into account the people who will see the content you post online. This doesn’t just apply to things like “Would you parents be proud of the thing you’re posting?”
It’s a legitimate safety concern the amount some people share, both from risks of people either close or far from you having information you might not want them to know, and the fact that it can open you up to more undue harassment.
Just the other day I was chatting with an older woman about this exact thing. She’s retired so she enjoys going on almost-daily walks around her neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods. Well she told me that it was really weird that in the newer constructions where the younger families live, EVERYONE has their blinds closed all the time. In fact she can tell a younger family lives in a house based on the simple fact of whether or not their blinds are closed in the middle of a sunny day. It’s to the point where she can’t even tell if they’re even HOME and available for a visit to welcome them to the neighborhood!
When she said that, I realized that I do that too when I live in a more publicly visible apartment. I told her that I think it’s because of the internet. Younger people feel like we’re constantly being watched, observed, and JUDGED for merely existing. So when we’re home, we just want to be alone, unbothered, and unobserved because it’s the one place we can control that. She was very surprised to hear that I felt like that and she was VERY concerned for us young folk (and to be honest after talking with her I became pretty concerned too…)
People from her generation will have their blinds open all day, hang out on their front porch, and randomly visit/enjoy random visits from neighbors and strangers. If a stranger knocks on my door it’s scary and if they want to stay and chat? It’s a huge inconvenience and it feels super awkward and weird and I’m stuck wondering why exactly they’re talking to me, when just a few decades ago welcoming someone new to the neighborhood was just what you did! In fact to not do so was rude!
It made me really worried that as the Panopticon sinks its teeth deeper into our psyches, we are losing the very essence of what makes us human and got us this far as a species: community. I find that being on the internet for hours a day tends to almost trick my brain into thinking “I’ve been social all day, my social need is full” when in reality I’ve only talked to one, maybe two people I know from my real life all day, and only for short bursts, not REAL conversation.
I find it hard to have the energy to invite friends to hang out, and when I want to I feel like I’m a big inconvenience for asking them to take a break from their busy lives for me (not that they would ever say that’s the case, but it’s this nagging feeling internally). I feel like while we used to be a series of large islands of local community, our islands splintered apart and started drifting away from each other. Now your island is just you, your immediate family, and maybe a couple close friends. Those living physically closest to you feel like they’re miles away and unreachable, to the point where you might as well not even bother.
I guess I just have one question for you: Do you know the names of your next door neighbors?
That makes me think about how the rate of paranoia of being watched must be so much higher now than it used to be and must only be increasing, which is very concerning,,
ALT
