-Ani Mosity
-they/them/theirs
-queer and emotional
-I like making things, complaining, and complaining about making things.
-donations/tips/gifts: paypal.me/queenofzan
Okay, posting this as my ~official announcement~ that art commissions are open! I’ll be updating my commissions page and. Re-listing it on my blog lol.
Unfortunately I do not feel especially safe taking in-person jobs when I am constantly getting notices about “last-minute replacements needed”, so I would love to have art commissions to work on!
DM me here or email queenofzan at gmail for more information!
I got a copy of a volume of Venus Infers; a leatherdyke quarterly from Abebooks and there are a lot of fun and interesting parts but I think my favourite is actually the personal ads purely because
BTW, just to make sure everyone knows, this isn’t just some internet rando commenting on her observations on the internet.
They are an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University and literally just finished writing The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a book on the history of the computer industry in the 70s.
This tweet isn’t just an observation, it’s the result of years of research and study. And it’s absolutely true.
I’ve definitely noticed that when I see older tech nerds talk about open source I’m filled with a sense of camaraderie and wonder, and when I see younger nerds talk about it my bullshit scam alarms go off
I studied physics. A thing that happens sometimes when people study physics, or maybe it is truly just me, is that they might feel a kinship with the folks who invented nuclear weapons. You study their academic works, maybe read some letters, imagine their personalities in your head (most of them are weird nerds, total assholes, or both, they are physicists after all).
And so it’s very confusing, looking at the AI folks, or the programming folks, or the business folks, jesus. Because physicists have an entire generation’s worth of role models who all made the exact same mistake. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Feynman. They fucked up. Worse than I or you ever will and they’d be the first to tell you. And not because they were dumb. Because they were careless with knowledge. Knowing things is a responsibility.
And so I look at AI and ML projects and I just see people building the bomb. Only their bomb is shitty and lame and that makes it far more devious. They brag about their black box and how powerful it has become. Knowledge is a responsibility and they cede control of their knowledge to an impenetrable, inhuman, unfeeling process. They build a bomb and it is utterly droll.
And so I look at the internet and see the only thing worse than the bomb: pupils that have turned into dollar signs in the blinding glare of Little Boys glory. Because we didn’t stop. No no. Our greatest minds understood their mistake after Hiroshima. But our second or third or fourth or sixteenth greatest took over.
Those are the two main things people learn when they study physics, or at least that I learned. The first: do not invent the bomb, you will regret it. The second: someone nearly as clever as you, but far more ghoulish, will see the bomb only as opportunity and personal glory. Do not make their work easy.
Do Romulans (or Klingons, or Vulcans, or Cardassians etc.) have the same fucked up space experiences Starfleet has?
What I mean is, is there a personal log of some Romulan Centurion looking like this:
Star date: who knows (timeloop??)
Today the transporter turned my commanding officer into an Akaana boar and he subsequently ruined the transporter equipment. We are attempting to get that back online as soon as possible. There is a space anomaly outside with the face of a warlord who died 438 years ago, and it keeps referencing a prophecy. Something about a golden spear. We are waiting to hear back from the Museum of Ancient History.
A Starfleet vessel has entered the Neutral Zone so I have to go.
Also, the walls are bleeding. I think we might be haunted.
I always assumed Starfleet is more focused on exploration and rescue, throwing themselves into unpredictable situations moreso than the others.
But space is weird and dangerous in general, so others must stumble into plenty of shenanigans. Like cloaking device malfunctions. They must be common on Klingon and Romulan ships. Wonder what they look like?
Now I want to see how the Q messes with them.
I can see how they wouldn’t talk about it as much. Any loss of control is probably looked down on as an embarrassing weakness by their fleets. So it’s all classified!
Shared in a public post on FB three years ago, my FB memories just brought this up;
This guy was 67 years old when he started his transition. On the right he is pictured 3 years on T and just recently after his top surgery, so about 70 years old.
It is never, ever, too late for you. I suspect that’s why he shared it the way he did, to show others not to be afraid, if he can do it as a senior citizen it’s okay if you can’t do it as a teen. Live. Survive. And whenever you’re ready, chase your happiness. You deserve it.
[ID: two side by side photos of a white trans man in his late 60s early 70s, with short blonde hair and glasses. In the left picture he’s wearing a beige crewneck, in the right picture he’s grown a mustache and is wearing a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt tucked into bright blue long shorts and a trucker hat. End ID]
I honestly think that the lack of non-sexual nudity in public spaces has done horrific damage to American society.
We deeply struggle to understand the natural diversity of bodies because we only see naked bodies in a sexual context. We are taught that seeing nudity is somehow inherently harmful, especially to children. We struggle to differentiate between sexually suggestive and sexually explicit material.
It fucks up the way people think about and talk about sex ed. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about breast feeding. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about queer folks. It feeds into fatphobia and ableism and is all rooted in this deeply harmful puritanism.
Like, I need people to understand that seeing a bare titty in public is not going to hurt a child. Seeing a man in a banana hammock isn’t inherently traumatizing. I would argue, in fact, that adults treating those things as dangerous and gross and scary is going to do way more damage to a kid’s psychology than seeing the nudity in the first place.
Anyway I’ll never forget that 22 hour bus ride to Alabama to help my friend get married and one of the legs of the journey I was on the bus with my (clearly labelled, well behaved) service dog at my side and people were throwing a huge stink about the fact that I had my dog and then this ancient dude in a wheelchair, double amputee both legs, pipes up and tells them to shut the fuck up and leave me alone because Creed was obviously trained and then once everyone quieted down and I was able to take a seat, asked me quietly if I was okay.
He also could have been a cartoon character because I could have sworn there were little winged hearts floating above his head as he told me he’d always liked dogs but of course now he’s old and can’t walk so he can’t get one anymore but he could tell how much Creed loved me and I him etc etc
He never asked me once what my disability was. He spoke up for me when he didn’t have to. A truly old white man in Georgia saw a young black person with a “dangerous dog” breed and spoke up in my defense.
If you want to claim to be a disability advocate, that means you kind of have to. Advocate for each other. For the next 4 or so hours, this man and I had each other’s backs. Two disabled people on a Greyhound filled with ableist passengers who were not happy we couldn’t exist somewhere they didn’t havr to accomodate. It didn’t matter what our pasts or our diagnoses were. We were stronger together, so that’s what we stayed. Together.
Two people banded together and the rest of the bus shut their mouths. Imagine what we could do with more of us.
i don’t know where the notion that if you don’t give big bucks to an artist then you’re not really supporting them came from, but when people say even a tiny bit of monetary support saves an artist, it’s not for the aesthetic or the gesture of it all. i’ve been able to have actual drinking water on days i’ve been incredibly broke simply because someone bought a brush pack for 2 euros. in the most actual, literal way i could possibly convey this: the SMALLEST amount counts. in practice counts. people-get-to-eat-today counts. especially in this age of everyone and their mother being out to deplatform artists. there’s value in the tiniest of ways
imo the best way to interpret those “real people don’t do x” writing advice posts is “most people don’t do x, so if a character does x, it should be a distinguishing trait.” human behavior is infinitely varied; for any x, there are real people who do x. we can’t make absolute statements. we can, however, make probabilistic ones.
for example, most people don’t address each other by name in the middle of a casual conversation. if all your characters do that, your dialogue will sound stilted and unnatural. but if just one character does that, then it tells us something about that character.
Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.
Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.
You mean like slavery?
No, we’re giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!
Right. Like slavery.
It’s not like slavery!
Can they leave?
No.
Can they refuse work?
No.
So how exactly isn’t this slavery?
We DO pay them!
Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?
No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.
Below URL image reads “fun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. Slavery is.
End description.
I’d also like to add it’s not just private prisons. It’s also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.
-fae
The constitution even acknowledges that it’s still slavery
a hefty chunk of items with that ‘made in america’ sticker are in fact made by prison labor
at the very least anything that is a product of prison labor should be required to have a similar sticker to inform consumers they are taking part of this system, which is difficult to track because prison made manufactured goods include almost the entire uniform of a US soldier, road construction in most southern states, and agricultural goods sold in most stores
this…. looks familliar
Prison is just covert slavery and that’s why they wanna keep so many black people in there for the smallest offences.
This is insane
(Just to clarify, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just giving you more information because you’re right, and I like your blog, and I want you to have sources in case you need them.)
It’s not even covert. It’s blatant and overt. It’s even called slavery in the constitution.
“Slavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime.”
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
People just don’t care because they think it’s all murderers and rapists, despite the fact that the number of violent criminals in jail is so small it might as well be negligible.
As of September 30, 2009 in federal prisons, 7.9% of sentenced prisoners were incarcerated for violent crimes,[39] while at year end 2008 of sentenced prisoners in state prisons, 52.4% had been jailed for violent crimes.[39] In 2002 (latest available data by type of offense), 21.6% of convicted inmates in jails were in prison for violent crimes. Among unconvicted inmates in jails in 2002, 34% had a violent offense as the most serious charge. 41% percent of convicted and unconvicted jail inmates in 2002 had a current or prior violent offense; 46% were nonviolent recidivists.[46]
It’s literally slavery, just dumbass racists and capitalists don’t care enough to figure out why we’re calling it that.
-fae
Actually, no, I got something to add and it’s this video by Knowing Better on Youtube:
Slavery is baked into the US American system so much more firmly than anyone ever really acknowledges.
There’s a very good and very hard-hitting documentary about it on Netflix
Also… even if someone has committed a violent crime, enslaving them is… ya know… still a fucked up thing to do? How is that even in question?
The whole discourse of “well they’re not even all violent offenders” has this weird undertone of ‘if they’re good people they shouldn’t have to be slaves’ that horrifies me. Even if 100% of them were violent, Slavery. Is. Wrong. All humans have rights.
truly amazing how the tf2 models still look good even though they’re made of 3 polygons and a shoelace. this is what stylization can do for you even more so than wind waker
i mean i doubt they’re the EASIER option considering they often take a lot more manpower for development, but yeah they’re definitely the simplest option if you’re a designer and not a programmer. never mind how much the graphics department has to crunch, imagine if you were asked to imagine color contrast in a variety of lighting conditions!
I would call them the easier option for producers, who are the ones making the calls at the end of the day - not only because they don’t have to make design decisions, but because they can more easily measure the number of polygons on a horse’s left nut than decide how well-utilised the same number of polygons are between different stylised designs, and we all know how tech investors love Metrics.
That’s true as far as it goes, but there’s a little more to it than that. AAA studios have a vested economic interest in promoting the idea that hyper-photorealism is what it means for a game to have good graphics because it allows them to exercise a de facto monopoly on “good graphics”.
The single unchallengable advantage that AAA studios have over their independent counterparts is access to labour. You can’t guarantee that a game’s visuals have a competent aesthetic thesis by throwing person-hours at it, but you can shadow-map every individual wrinkle on the protagonist’s horse’s nutsack; thus, by defining the quality of a game’s graphics purely in terms of whatever is the most labour-intensive to produce – which, for the moment, happens to be hyper-photorealism – one arrives at a situation where only AAA games can be said to have good graphics.
It’s that “for the moment” that we need to watch out for, incidentally. There’s nothing special about hyper-photorealism other than the fact that it’s (presently) extremely labour-intensive to produce. The studios are perfectly capable of playing the same game with other approaches to visual design that make similar labour demands; “stylisation” in itself is no cure. The critical understanding is that these approaches are favoured because they’re hugely labour-intensive, which in turn permits the creation of de facto monopolies on their production. The crunch time isn’t an incidental by-product of arbitrary aesthetic choices – it’s the whole point.
(This is a big part of why I’ve never been comfortable with the whole “I want games with worse graphics” thing. Yes, we should challenge AAA labour practices; however, by equating “graphics which are less labour-intensive to produce” with “worse graphics”, we’re allowing the AAA marketing apparatus to define the terms of the discussion.)
