Untitled

Wildlife in North Carolina. December 1982. Illustration by David Williams.

Internet Archive

What's this? A rainbow milkweed locust (Phymateus saxosus) from Madagascar. Quite an arty insect, right?

Warm summer mornings are finally here ☀️🐦

little bird is spoiled for choice.

music is gershwin's so am i.

https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947

Here’s the whole video. It’s called “Don’t Be A Sucker” and it’s 17 minutes long.

don’t just scroll past this actually watch it, it’s only 2 minutes long. If you re-recorded this today word for word with modern actors and places, it wouldn’t even look out of place as a PSA

300,000 notes and i can’t find a transcript

Transcript: (sorry for the language!)

Speaker: “I see negroes holding jobs that belong to me! And you! I’ll ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s gonna become of us real Americans!”

Hungarian man with clear foreign accent: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.”

Young man: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.“

Speaker: “What are us real Americans gonna do about it? You’ll find it right here in this little pamphlet—the truth about negroes and foreigners! The truth about the Catholic Church! You’ll find…” [audio grows quieter as camera shifts to the onlookers]

Hungarian man: “You believe in that kind of talk?“

Young man: “I dunno, it makes pretty good sense to me.“

Speaker: “And I tell you, friends, we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without… without what?“

Other man: “Yeah? Without what?“

Speaker: “Without negroes, without alien foreigners,”—the young man is nodding, following along—“without Catholics, without Freemasons! You know these…“

Young man: “What’s wrong with the Masons, I’m a Mason.” Looks to European man worriedly, “hey, that fellow’s talking about me!“

Huungarian man: “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it.“

Speaker: “These are your enemies! These are the people who are trying to take over our country! Now you know them, you know what they stand for. And it’s up to you and me to fight them!” A bunch of the onlookers in the vicinity wave him off like he’s crazy and turn away, “fight them and destroy them before they destroy us!”

Speaker: “Thank you.“

One man in the now somewhat awkward crowd: “claps“

Young man: *is visibly uncomfortable*

Hungarian man: “Before he said Mason, you were ready to agree with him.”

Young man: “Well yes but, he was talking about… what about those other people?“ *the pair sit down on a park bench*

Hungarian man: “In this country, we have no ‘other people.’ We are American people, of course.“

Young man: “What about you? You aren’t American, are you?“

Hungarian man: “I was born in Hungary. But now, I am an American citizen. And I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin.”

Young man: “What were you doing there?“

Hungarian man: “I was a professor at the university. I heard the same words we have heard today. But I was a fool, then. I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics. But unfortunately it was not so. You see, they knew that they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.”

A film created for folks in case Martin Niemöller was too subtle.

I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

Their company summary reading as "AI Powered Community Moderation" really stood out to me, as at first glance it's not what they market themselves as. But after reading through the rest of the post, and seeing their list of 'customers' on their website it's obvious what's going on. The apparently unmoderated, highly dangerous chat service where they throw extremely vulnerable people (and presumably the people who want to take advantage of them) at each other in the name of 'mental health support' is not their product. Their product is a bot that crawls social media content to flag posts for moderation. The chat service is just a data harvesting ploy. They need a large body of example text of people experiencing mental health crises to train their bot on. The chat service lets them harvest that.

This company is selling a tool to help social media companies automatically detect at risk users and provide them with links to mental health services. Which sounds perfectly fine until you realise that it's building that tool in the most breathtakingly irresponsible and immoral way imaginable.

Holy shit. Great catch.

I hadn't mentioned this in my post - but it messaged me just a day after I posted about PTSD for the first time. Didn't know if that was a coincidence.

That's so skeevy they're hitting people up with this data harvesting shit right when they're going through something tough.

So lots of people in the tags are asking "how the fuck is this legal" or "is this legal"? And honestly - I can't say for sure - I'm the wrong type of nerd to be asking. I only know a bit about US law, nothing about other countries. But my guess with US law? It's looking iffy, leaning towards illegal.

While every user did have to agree to the terms and conditions, a minor (under 18) must have the consent of a parent or guardian to a contract for it to be legally binding. There was no parental consent on the chat line. The service seems largely used by minors (or at least the number of questions about parents, teachers, and school bullying hinted at that), who would not be bound by the contract I quoted in my first post - which is a good thing because did you read that shit?

Also - There's a law called COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection (full legal text) (summary) which applies to websites that either are targeted to children (under 13) or are aware they may have young users, and is about protecting children from unethical business practices.

And who is Koko targeting? I'll let them speak for themselves:

And what does COPPA say a service must do to comply with the law?

Well, they sure don't seem to be doing 2-5.

6 and 7 are also questionable.

So what can we do?

The FTC is the US government organization that investigates COPPA violations, and you can:

Ah yes, the ol “B-17 survivorship bias” lesson

Okay but this is a hilarious explanation

Wildlife in North Carolina. August 1970. Cover illustration by Sallie Middleton.

Internet Archive

I like em both! ~ : )

They’d look nicer if they were real photos and not AI generated images.

I understand the suspicion, given how swirly and melty especially the art nouveau pictures look, but none of these are AI-generated!

Top left: staircase located in the Hoover Building, in Perivale, Greater London, designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners and built in 1933.

Bottom left: railing of a staircase located in the GE Building, part of the art deco Rockefeller Center complex in NYC, designed by Cross & Cross and built in 1933.

Top right: staircase in Reök Palace in Szeged, Hungary, designed by architect Ede Magyar and built in 1907.

Bottom right: staircase designed for (I believe) a private client by Yuri Moshans, a Latvian artist.

patience

@headspace-hotel

Tweet

What the fuck

This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?

omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:

iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.

i’m about to say something that will absolutely get me hate

this is what Taylor swift sounds like to me

Pressed flower collage of a comet moth, by Helen Ahpornsiri

DAMN THATS A GOOD IDEA

botanical moment

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

“buy secondhand only” in response to this is such an egregious misunderstanding and it’s doing the exact fucking thing that is implicitly being criticized by this tweet, which is that individual consumer choices are totally disconnected from the global production of consumer goods and therefore moralizing about making the Correct choices and imploring people to go to fucking goodwill instead of tj maxx is meaningless

Slave labor and borderline slave labor allow cheap junk to be made for so little that some companies can make up for the loss several times over by claiming it on insurance, getting government subsidies, or even selling certain things as scrap or filler to other industries. Companies are so frequently part of some vast network of brands owned by the same entity that they can waste a billion dollars without batting an eye. Just saturating a market with *your* unsellable shit can be seen as advantageous if it helps push out a competitor. Someone buying one new pair of shoes for $20 can mean they just covered the manufacturing cost for 500 pairs. Passive boycotting isn’t going to work ever again at this point. The only ways any of this can change will unfortunately require vastly, vastly more work from more people than just telling Twitter to stop buying pants or switching a fast food chain to paper straws.

Funny how as economic inequality increases capitalist society starts to look more and more like the dysfunctions we associate with the Soviet Union. Like, “socialism is bad because it causes production to become decoupled from demand” is one of the biggest right-wing and libertarian anti-socialist talking points.