I was anxious about the reception my post might get so I didn't check jstpst for like the past month (not-uncommon thing I do lol). Was nice to come back and, for it to be kind and thoughtful and willing to listen in good faith. Thanks <3

I wouldn't expect a search for "great AI art" to give you very useful results, for the same reasons I wouldn't expect a search on the Target website to give you very useful results for "great art."

I think a decent number of artists are figuring out ways to incorporate ai into their workflow, much like they did with previous digital tools. "AI-assisted Art", rather than "AI art". Rapid concept iteration, or just filling in textures instead of doing it agonizingly slowly by hand, or whatever; it makes sense to me that this would be one of the more common real-world uses for it and I just am not convinced there's some spiritual wrong being done there.

Very few self respecting artists would use AI tools

And that's the thing, like, if this is the attitude they are likely to be met with, it makes sense that they would not advertise when they're using it! There's collective of artists who I'm socially adjacent to online that's very earnest about ethically exploring the potential in this new medium, and all their spaces are extremely private and locked down, out of necessity, due to constant really vicious harassment. Are they making Great AI Art in there? How would either of us know?

It's just. Digital artists have been using algorithmic and generative tools to speed up the repetitive drudgework parts of art for decades now. There was a time when people spoke with scorn about artists using any of the labor-saving tools you can use in Photoshop and called anything people made with the help of those tools "not real art". So often, this feels like the sequel to that.

idk. AI art and its cousins make me extremely uneasy, and occasionally fill me with horrible existential dread if I think about it too much (even if my wrists ever got better, would I ever draw again? What would be the point? Why even try to improve? etc); but the way people talk about it still bums me out. I dunno, it's an extremely brand new medium just starting to be explored, with so much hostility directed toward it (which as ever is mostly going to actually land on the people who are earnestly putting their hearts and souls into it and not the people making airbrushed anime porn image #5776889). Some of the things I do see are really promising and exciting (in between the feeling that I am being swallowed up by quicksand). It feels like if you looked at Tennis for Two and decided that its undercookedness meant that these "video game" things are going nowhere.

(Also like. I dunno. Some of the only pictures I've been able to bring into existence in the past 2 years have been ai generated. It was a lot of fun learning a little bit about how to maneuver the tools to try to coax them into producing something anywhere near the picture I had in my head; the process gave me a nutrient that my soul has been corroding from lacking, with unsolvable chronic pain preventing me from being able to draw any more. The big reason I don't play with generation more is because it's actually pretty difficult to learn to use these tools effectively, they are very complex. All that to say I guess I have more personal investment in this as it looks more and more like I'll never be able to make art with my hands again.)

I recently saw someone swearing by men's gynecomastia compression shirts as opposed to binders, this was what they linked to me though I haven't gotten one to try out myself yet

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076B5R4Q1

i think sizing might be weird though, iirc they said for this kind of binding you probably want to go a size larger than the sizing chart would indicate? but I'm really not sure, I bet it varies a ton

I've had similar issues with earplugs, including waking up in the middle of the night because they were so painful-- I've definitely found some that were a lot less painful than others (maybe smaller? fancier? unsure) and if you make sure to put them in correctly (lift your ear upwards? i think the plugs usually have instructions) I think it can help. there's also silicone earplugs, which aren't nearly as good at blocking out sound but are different enough that they might not have the pain problem

I feel like every once in a while I just uncomplicatedly manage to sleep on my back no problem, but the rest of the time it's impossible. no idea how to recreate the circumstances where I succeed

yeah! I just got one of these like 2 weeks ago so i can sleep with ANC earbuds when the upstairs neighbors are stomping around in the wee hours of the got dang morning and it's been helpful.

for her new piercings, my roommate likes the cheaper one she got that looks like a donut with a bite taken out of it (I tried it but I'm so bad at sleeping and needed something more plush). it appears to have vanished from the face of the internet though so idk maybe it was full of poison or something

c-could we have user avatars? 🥺 is that even possible....

Yeah, I just finished Tunic recently and I absolutely never would have without the ability to customize the combat difficulty. I probably could have but I just flat out do not like the combat, so I would not have.

(the first time I tried the game it only had "no fail mode" and didn't have the "reduce combat difficulty" option, and having to choose between "this boss fight is miserably hard and unfun" and "this boss fight is completely trivial because you cannot die" was insufficient for me. Having medium options counts for a lot!

...huh I wonder how hard it would be to have an option that like... just slows bosses down? If you enjoy the idea of the combat but your reaction time is Just Too Slow to engage with it on its own terms, that seems like it could go a long way. tunic has something like this but it's an item. but I mean more generally for games that decide to have accessibility options. it seems like it might be easier to implement than some other things.

so many more people could have fun with dark soulsian games if this was an option, without it otherwise throwing off the game balance...

Hi this is Daisy. Funky Kong you need to stop dancing around it and just tell Wario you want to sleep with him. Just ask if he's DTF already. This is getting embarrassing.

Anyway I'm off to write more filthy SasuNaru fanfic, good luck out there.

calling my lawyers about this. you have made a big mistake you are going to regret this. justice for luigi

you banned tghe single most sexual mario character i hope ur happy. ruining everything

NO LUIGI????? THEN WHAT'S THE POINT

it is impossible that I have not heard many taylor swift songs given that store radios exist and also i spent quite a few years working at stores but i could not actually identify one and i think that is kind of epic of me

beetles leave them both in the dust 🪲💨

poison your enemies with it

yeah mood. I only just realized I could be using nitter to bypass login a few days ago! and now this 😔 back to just saying "hey I can't see the thread you're linking to can you screenshot it or something" on discord all the time i guess

i think this is approximately a universal experience for anyone who has ever been 16

i recommend this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Diet

I was just reading about this recently-ish, they got (or are soon getting? this isn't the article I saw the other day I couldn't find the exact one so hopefully this one is actually accurate idk) fuckin hella fast internet on the ISS, I wonder if that means it would be easy to get fast wifi on pluto too. You should find a better pluto-based ISP, I think you're getting ripped off

you've been shadowbanned but the shadowban realm has lots of bots that will still interact with your posts so that you can't tell you've been shadowbanned (this is a lie but. oh jeeze I could actually see this happening on social media sites in the future)

I've heard it's very good but my impression is that there are nearly no women in it, is that accurate? (this is often the deciding factor in me deciding to not watch animes that are otherwise supposed to be very good 😔)

Yes! YESSS! I watched it a couple weeks ago and have been trying to get everyone I know to watch it since (no luck yet but I'm TRYING). It's so good and it's not like anything else I've seen and it gives me a lot of hope for adult western animation.

I kept expecting the rug to get pulled out from under me for some cheap gag every time the show got really slow and quiet and earnest and it just kept... not happening. Show gave me a lot of indescribable feelings, I think March Comes In Like A Lion might be the only other thing that comes to mind in the same brain-feelings-zone. Good good good show, I'm so glad it exists and that I watched it and that other people can watch it too

"Coming of age story where the protagonist is in her 40s" is like. Man!

it's from all the posting

I am someone who is quite pro-EA in the sense of "charity donations can go a lot farther if you apply them thoughtfully, I love it when fewer children die from malaria", which in my mind is/should be the core Thing of EA, and I deeply deeply resent the AGI people sucking all the oxygen out of the room and torching piles and piles of goodwill the way they do. So please don't read the following as a defense of the AI doomers and longtermists, I find them very tedious and frustrating:

1. The reason EA types don't tend to touch on climate change is because of its core Thing which is trying to find and address problems that are "important, neglected, and tractable". Stopping/reversing climate change is both Important* and Tractable, but it's really not Neglected-- there are tons of really really smart people working on it, it's far from low hanging fruit, and that means the floor for meaningfully contributing to those efforts is pretty high, diminishing returns and all; Altruism in this area will be less Effective. This is definitely a bullet to bite but I think it basically makes sense.

2. I think EA was at one point trying to do stuff about nuclear threats? Maybe it still is, idk, my understanding was that it ended up really not being very tractable, like, how do you know you're reducing the overall threat of nuclear war and proliferation? What does that look like? The most tractable part of that that I can think of (getting existing nuclear weapons dismantled) is not very directly solvable with money, which is the primary tool EA uses (since the original point is making a donated dollar do as much good as possible)

3. Now you might ask, well, how does AI extinction risk rank in important/neglected/tractable, I mean for one how tractable could "AI alignment" possibly be? To which the AI people will say "shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

* (The AI people will say it's not that important because climate change isn't going to drive humans extinct, let alone wipe out all life on earth/the galaxy the way they say AI will, it's just going to make lots of people die and make life worse for everyone who survives.)

Anyway even if EA never does anything tangibly good ever again (unlikely imo, the We Want Less Kids To Die From Malaria faction is still going strong), I think they at least get credit for GiveDirectly, which lets you give direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty around the world with no strings attached, so they get to decide where it's best spent, rather than someone half a world away dictating that to them. I highly recommend anyone and everyone donate money to GiveDirectly if they have some spare cash lying around.

In conclusion, sorry if you already knew all this or it's an illegible wall of text, it turns out I was in an infodumping mood, what can ya do.