sung4ji3
I'm a self-educating amateur that wants to make stories. https://linktr.ee/sung4ji3 —————————————————————————————————————————————————— 21. He. Autistic, so let me know if I say/do anything weird/rude. I respond ASAIC. I want to have conversations with understanding, not arguing. I like asking nonpersonal questions, sorry if I get nosy.
198 posts
Latest Posts by sung4ji3
we are in a media literacy crisis
ChatGPT is running out of money because they haven't actually figured out how to make money with the plagiarism engine they created.
Like to charge, reblog to cast.
The vulture capitalist hedge fund that bought and subsequently destroyed Toys R Us now owns Overdrive/Libby.
They have already begun making it worse/less usable and they have a chokepoint monopoly on the delivery method of ebooks borrowed from public libraries in the US.
A fun thing about capitalism is that rich people can buy something a lot of people love and depend on, and then destroy it for fun and profit, and there’s not really anything we can do about it.
Wow. I saw this coming from 5 years away. I remember finding the site's awful stability fishy long ago, and then promptly told to shut up and "be grateful" that the site even exists and is free. Artfight sees high traffic in only one month of the year, the thousands of dollars should have been covering that without it short-circuiting every 30 seconds. Regardless of whether something is free or in "good fun" or not, you should never, EVER just take everything at face value and silence suspicion
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had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:
12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it's configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those.
printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don't work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you're trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the "element zapper" (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you're browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you're just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it'll revert everything back to its original state.
fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft's restrictions. haven't used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft's 451 error but it seems to do the trick.
archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)
and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.
I am saying this as an independently published author who would not be able to make rent without people supporting my writing: Universal information piracy is an unqualified good for humanity.
well anyway. the copyright system exists to commodify art and expression and process it into more money for larger companies, and it is actively detrimental to efforts for preservation, open education, and creation. everyone reading this is morally obligated to hoard and share data because we live in a world that is hostile to the idea that books or music or movies or scholarship have inherent value independent of a DRM stamp and ticket price. btw fuck hachette, harpercollins, wiley and penguin random house.
as promised, the transplanting tutorial
most sources make transplanting sound incredibly difficult, but transplanting young seedlings from areas with sparse dirt, like a driveway or roadside, is actually incredibly easy and can get you some great stuff. Once I worked out the method, i've had a very high survival rate
it took me like a month of trial and error to figure this out so you don't have to.
Feel free to repost, no need for credit
audiobooks are so good actually
I will say, not a fucking fan of the point I see from some leftists that "Actually specialized artists shouldn't exist as a field, art should be something you do after working all day in the community garden."
Like, A) that would fuck up so many artforms that rely on specialized skill and time it's not even funny and B) Denying "inefficient" art resources and time that being allowed to focus on it brings because you don't consider it "real" labor is already what happens under capitalism, and the results speak for themselves.
Like, I get that there's a deep and abiding working-poor anger at the Middle Class Professionals that are so often the face of art-as-profession and the way they turn skill/polish from a ceiling into a floor for access, doubly so if you're a member of said working-poor denied access to that field.
But like... sweet genius
...With Gettyimages and Adobe; two of the most scummy companies in their fields; bringing out their own paywalled AI trained on "ethical data," (IE, officially licensed from the mountains they own) I hope we can use this opportunity to step back and stop talking about the AI art debate in terms of copyright and "theft" and more in terms of corporate exploitation and labor rights.
Because, like, the results will be the same with regards to jobs if megacorps end up using Adobe's or Getty's model in the way they'd use; say; Stablediffusion and Midjourney; without a labor pushback they'd still use it to kill jobs.
And even with the "compensation system" they talk about, which they'll conveniently use as an excuse to keep it paywalled and closed-source, I bet you my bottom dollar they're talking about a Spotify-type model. Which, if you're familiar with the music industry, you do not want a Spotify-type model.
The difference is, if Stablediffusion gets sued out of existence, you won't be able to access the tool without a paywall. And both Adobe and Getty Images have very high paywalls.
Whereas Stablediffusion, by contrast, is very much open-source and free. A lot of people run it independently online for anyone to use and if you have a PC that can run it, you can use it offline; no strings attached. Which means you can do it and tweak it as you wish, doubly so if you already have art skills.
And it's awfully suspicious in this state that Getty is in a lawsuit to try and kill SD over the "stealing" claims in a way that would leave their product as a paywalled monopoly at their whims with no Open Source alternatives.
Like... at the very least don't get played by their talk of "ethics," because even if they're licensed, in my eyes they're far less ethical than SD I'd assert, due to creating a precedent for putting this technology behind a corporate walled garden in a way that keeps other creators from using it while still killing traditional artist jobs dead if we don't push back as a collective labor force.
you do not want copyright law to treat visual art in the same way that it treats music. you don't want that. you really seriously truly do not fucking want that. I can't emphasise enough how much you really do fucking not want that.
it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.
the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.
torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.
This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.
There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!
What I’ve learned from twitter’s recent epidemic of ADHD denialism is that a lot of people don’t want to believe a neurological condition can control your life because they can’t reconcile that possibility with their belief in a soul. It terrifies them to think the physical meat in their head might be more powerful than what they define as their “real” self.
I will say, while the way it's been talked about in other posts is a bit... judge-y, I do think anybody that offers commissions should give out clear guidelines for whether or not you're allowed to use their work in AI img-2-img stuff, even if it's just "ask me, it's on a case-to-case basis," along with standards for how they're allowed to use it if they do.
Because, whether you hate or are okay with the tech, it's vital to at least have that info out there, so people know what they're getting into and they don't get caught unawares.
As an aside, this also goes for Creative Commons projects, given how I got into… a kerfuffle over one, which was resolved amicably but having a policy about this (Which they're trying to do now) would be wise for other organizations trying to avoid kerfuffles with this tech!
And like, thinking about the other post talking about this, it's not the wisest idea to handle this by demanding they pay extra if you find out they are without permission because "Well now you have to pay as if you asked for perpetual rights," because like, unless you're a professional, most of y'all can't afford a lawyer, and enforcing that kind of shit takes lawyers.
Just say they're a shitty commissioner, refuse to do any more commissions for them, warn everyone else about them, maybe put them on a public "Don't sell your labor to this shithead" list, and be done with it.
Marc Garlasco, former Pentagon analyst and UN war crimes investigator, current military advisor
"We conducted 50 airstrikes on #Saddam and the 'deck of cards' and never killed a single one of them."
...as a copyright minimalist, it really pisses me off that so few people in my corner bother to try and come up with very good solutions to "How do artists make a living."
Like… so many of them just fucking default to "use donation models supported by true fans uwu" and while that can work, even most of the top fucking eschelon of creators on Patreon are basically making poverty wages, and most people who make a living have to treat it as one of many income streams, because again, it's not fucking enough.
Not at the scale artists need, and the way some people in "my" corner ignore that to moralize while failing to come up with better solutions infuriates me.
Like, you'd be surprised that I could be called relatively conservative on my current demands wrt copyright reduction, specifically for reduction back to 56 years in the US (Life + 50 in the countries where applicable) and massive expansion of fair use.
This is because these are things that are doable now without fucking over artists.
I want more, but I am painfully aware that'd be a much bigger project because you'd need to overhaul so much about how we economically handle art as a society, and it pisses me off how nobody's looking for those solutions beyond platitudes!
I've seen a few decent ideas. A "Mario Kart" version of copyright, where the larger in scale a works' rightsholder is the less protection it gets, was suggested by one person, I'd say mutually-supporting collectives based around Creative Commons works (Think akin to the SCP Foundation) would be a good start, as would long-term income-y government art grants that require the stuff produced under them to go into the Public Domain.
Even beyond that, the Peer Production License is also a great way to open up your ideas as well without making them vulnerable to corporate exploitation, that's worth looking into.
But like, we need more of those, and it does piss me off that people supposedly in "my" corner call artists entitled babies for pointing out the problem here!
It's the big obstacle to actually getting shit done, stop calling artists fascist for wanting moral rights Patricia and come up with something that actually works!
...I feel like we could all have a more mature conversation about the nature of art if we realized that a lot of people view the answer to the question of "Is this art?" is based on "Do I perceive this as interfering with the production of art I make/want to see exist?"
Like, legit, that's the barrier for most people from what I can tell, and a lot of paradoxical behavior starts to make sense when you look at it like that.
You may have seen a fundraiser going around looking to hire a lobbyist to go to DC and lobby against AI art - it's been boosted by pretty big names, after all.
This fundraiser is explicitly allying with groups like uhhh Disney, Universal, and the RIAA - and the person who's running it is a crypto nerd who's a big fan of NFTs.
I'm not going to be the one to pretend that AI and AI art has no problems - that's why I started a group for ethical AI use, after all. But I think if there's gonna be an opposition to AI you can probably do better than laying your lucre at the table of some of the most litigous, anti-fandom corporations in existence? If you're interested in getting Metallica 2.0: No Fanart Allowed Boogaloo, this is where it's going.
(And this isn't even getting into the problems with the fundraiser itself, which seems to be built like 90% on misinfo and outright lies about how AI works)
Original post on twitter
Cheers (and remember that if you are weird in the replies I will block you!)
since I already reblogged about it here's a less informal, more concise way of putting it:
THE INTERNET ARCHIVE IS NOT GOING TO DIE. ONLY CERTAIN BOOKS ARE AT STAKE NOTHING ELSE. DONATE WHAT YOU CAN FOR THEIR COURT COSTS. THEY STILL HAVE AN APPEAL TO GIVE
You may have seen a fundraiser going around looking to hire a lobbyist to go to DC and lobby against AI art - it's been boosted by pretty big names, after all.
This fundraiser is explicitly allying with groups like uhhh Disney, Universal, and the RIAA - and the person who's running it is a crypto nerd who's a big fan of NFTs.
I'm not going to be the one to pretend that AI and AI art has no problems - that's why I started a group for ethical AI use, after all. But I think if there's gonna be an opposition to AI you can probably do better than laying your lucre at the table of some of the most litigous, anti-fandom corporations in existence? If you're interested in getting Metallica 2.0: No Fanart Allowed Boogaloo, this is where it's going.
(And this isn't even getting into the problems with the fundraiser itself, which seems to be built like 90% on misinfo and outright lies about how AI works)
Original post on twitter
Cheers (and remember that if you are weird in the replies I will block you!)
Roasted this man for coming for me on TikTok for criticizing publishing's exploitative payment structures but thought what I had to say was worth posting here as well
Read this & be mindful of those partaking in Ramadan.
Btw if you're pissed about the Hachette Book Group suing the Internet Archive, you can tell them how you feel. The least we can do is tell em we don't like what they're doing and that we'll take our business elsewhere (🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️) if they actually manage to burn down the library:
HachetteUS / HarperCollins / HarperCollinsUK / penguinrandom / PenguinBooks / WileyGlobal / randomhouse / penguinusa / PenguinUKBooks / PenguinRandomCA / PenguinClassics / PenguinTeen / harperteen / harperbooks / HarperFiction / HarperPerennial / HarperCollinsCh / HarperChildrens / HarperAudio / Harper360 / Wiley_Chemistry / WileyHumanities / WileyHealth / WileyEconomics / WileyPolitics / WileyPsychology / WileyEcolEvol / WileyNeuro / wileyearthspace / WileyEngineer / wiley_finance
If you're unsure what to say, you can refer to this article: https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive
What Do You Think You’re Doing? by Kaiser Caimo
Part 1 of 4.
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
(Part 4)
An aggressively ugly digital zine about making art. Available in full as a pdf for free/pay what you want here: https://gum.co/lUpii
I like being able to make what I want. I like this ugly dying website. I like that the largest and most accessible archive of my work as an artist is a page of the internet so obscure it might as well be the palm of my hand.
What Do You Think You’re Doing? by Kaiser Caimo
Part 3 of 4.
(Part 1 here)
An aggressively ugly digital zine about making art. Available in full as a pdf for free/pay what you want here: https://gum.co/lUpii
There’s a nasty winter storm that’s going to hit most of the central regions of the US tomorrow (21 December 2022), especially tomorrow night. Please check your local forecasts if you live anywhere west of the rocky mountains, even down as far south as Texas. In some areas of the Plains region, windchill is likely to be -50F to -70F. That is so cold that you will develop frostbite in minutes. You will lose extremities without protection if you are exposed to windchill that cold. -70F is “surface of Mars” cold.
My part of the US is going to be below freezing all next week. This is normal for some. Not so normal for others.
If your area is likely to be impacted by the storm, please prepare now. The most important thing is staying warm and staying inside until things warm up outside. Specific tips I can offer, as somebody who regularly deals with cold winters are:
Put blankets over windows and doors. This will help your house retain heat.
Stay well-fed. Buy food now. You will get hungry faster because your body will burn calories to stay warm.
Stay hydrated. If your lips are chapped you’re probably dehydrated.
Stay dry. Remove wet clothing as soon as possible. It is better to be naked than wet when it is cold.
If it is going to get below freezing for more than an hour or two, run your water at a trickle or drip to prevent your pipes from bursting. The colder it gets the faster your pipes will freeze.
Here’s the weather forecast for this storm:
Yall help my friend out https://gofund.me/4e6148e1
Just a bunch of useful websites
12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.
My Fridge Food – No idea what to make? Tell this site what ingredients you have on hand and it will give you recipes to cook.
Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.
Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.
Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.
Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.
LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.
Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.
Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.
CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.
Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.
Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.
Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.
Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.
My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.
Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.
Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.
Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.
Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.
Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.
Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.
Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.
This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.
Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.
BitWarden – Free open source password manager.
Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.
ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.
Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.
Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.
Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.
myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.
DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.
Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.