@shootingst4rpress / shootingst4rpress.tumblr.com
I’m Christian and respect the order of creation as God intended it but I’m not gonna lie if I could take a massive vat of agar and grow an alive shopping mall made out of red blood and meat and feed it living human bodies to make it expand larger with more shops and amenities, Without hesitation, Without question I would do exactly that
July is Disability Pride Month: we want to acknowledge all the disabled Palestinians in Gaza who are currently unable to access care. Over the past 9 months, dozens of hospitals have been severely damaged or destroyed entirely, hundreds of healthcare workers have been killed, and the Israeli government has blocked almost all aid from entering Gaza. This has left disabled Gazans with extremely limited access to vital healthcare. Additionally, many people have become disabled due to the genocide itself, through injuries, starvation, and trauma.
Donate to Gaza Medical Tent
Donate to disabled Gazan children
hey. can i come over and explode into viscera in your living room ?
MAN some of the things i miss the most about blaseball were the really small things. like "the inning is now an outing" and how wins and runs were physical objects with weight and how you could click on your peanuts to eat them and how items like the Skate Board was depicted as a wooden board with the Skate element or the Iron Glove was pictured as a clothing iron. and the silly random chance stuff like Socks Maybe getting Theoretical Shoes or Fish Summers being the first player to get launched from the Salmon Cannons or Sutton Picklestein having the returned mod proc the same election they got necromanced in. It was all just so fun and silly and now its gone
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Jasmine: Hi. You're gonna want to hear this.
Omnia: Hello, everyone. I'm here to deliver the worst news of my life. There has been a report talking about how, by September, it is estimated that 2.5 million people in Sudan are going to die, due to hunger and malnutrition and sickness. And you can probably understand that we as the Sudanese people feel very helpless, as we cannot do anything to change the situation or the outcomes. However, it has been stated, even in the report itself, that the only way we can tackle such an issue is by supporting local initiatives and community kitchens.
Jasmine: Now that you've heard from somebody on the ground and from the experts, I'm here to tell you how you can help. In the report that Omnia mentions, they say that this 2.5 million represents 15% of the population of Darfur and Kordofan, two of the areas they believe are the worst affected by this hunger crisis.
This is where HRRDS comes in. They are a Sudanese organization working in South Kordofan, supporting some of the most vulnerable people, including raising funds to feed people across South Kordofan. You can make a one time donation. You can make a monthly donation, if you like. Whichever you choose.
If you want to help people in the Darfur area, you can donate to Sudan Solidarity Collective. They are supporting emergency response rooms and community kitchens in Darfur and across Sudan.
This hunger crisis is affecting the entire country, and especially the conflict zones, which includes Khartoum. Khartoum is the capital city/state. It includes Khartoum, Bahri and Omdurman. And Khartoum Aid Kitchen has been raising funds to support community kitchens across the state.
I urge you all-- particularly people who have been talking about, "Why isn't anybody talking about Sudan? Why isn't anybody doing anything about Sudan?"-- to engage with this, to donate. And, listen, times are tight, money is tough-- flip that over, you know what I'm talking about. If you cannot donate, then please absolutely share.
Saw a tweet that said something around:
"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"
I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.
i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.
something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:
and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!
i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?
ah. well. nevertheless!
what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.
most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.
but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.
but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!
so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!
this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."
it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.
nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!
nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.
AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).
to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?
then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!
this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.
(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)
i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).
jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!
there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:
“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”
this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.
so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.
if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.
THE CANON VOICE OF GRUMBOT EVERYBODY???
chatted with a stall owner at pride, took their business card, checked our their neocities which leads to their tumblr, scrolled down, immediately saw art by siegfried linafication. w
post cancelled we're not only mutuals in law by sieg but also by zeph
important clarification this is the first and only stall we went up to so far
ultimate conclusion our zines are getting gay married in the fall love wins
guess who was selling at a pride market today, clocked two people as being mcyt fans and treebark cosplayers, and then got an all caps tumblr ask an hour later and was like ‘THAT WAS ILEX?’
Hey remember us and our zine full of amazing art by incredibly talented artists? If you felt like you missed out by not buying it last year, rejoice! MOONSAULT: A Pro Wrestling Fanzine is available to download now for FREE on our itch.io page.
Follow this link, to get the full pdf (minus one page) entirely free of charge!
for the fanon swap: how about cyborg False or fae Cleo?
CYBORG FALSE CYBORG FALSE AHHHHHHHHHH
wolf false....... pretty please beeper
Theres 100% a growing attitude among leftists that spend all their time logged on that reading theory is either not worth it or is "elitist" and its incredibly bizarre. The left is not some club you join by watching YouTube videos all day, we're a very large group of people who base our beliefs on complex, fact-based understandings of class analysis and economics, theory exists to clarify these things. Anti-intellectualism in the form of talking like theory is just two old dead white guys is both counter-productive and actively stupid
Tiktok is not theory, tumblr is not theory, Twitter threads are not theory. Get some short beginner recommendations and start reading, its easier than you think
Yo i have an incredibly valuable resource for those of us with adhd that would like to commit harder to the good fight and want some theory as guidance! It's called Audible Anarchist, and it's available on Youtube or as a podcast wherever you get podcasts. it has audiobooks of basically the biggest names in the anarchist canon. Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin? yep. Anarchism and Other Essays? yep. Socialism from Below? yep. plus more and more every week!! arm yourself with the knowledge to save our sorry asses folks.!!
I've gotten a couple additions like this on this post
And like. I'm also adhd, and I don't love marx, but there are other ways to get theory and read it or listen to it and using adhd as a shield to avoid learning how to read theory is not great! I gotta say! But I understand that we aren't always taught how to do that so here's some simple tips and tricks I use for reading theory painlessly
Adhd is a bitch but please don't let it stop you from acquiring a deeper understanding of the world we live in and the world we want to build
If you are also looking for cheap physical copies of classic marxist lit, the maoist run Foreign Languages Press has saved me a lot of money. They have everything from short beginner theory to advanced marxist and maoist pieces, as well as modern theory, and everything is in 8 different languages including arabic.
While we continue to donate to personal evacuation funds, I think it is crucial to keep in mind that these individuals as well as millions more in Gaza are currently actively in need of basic necessities like food, water, shelter, and medical care. Keeping this in mind, and recognising that there is no way to know when the border crossing with Egypt will reopen, I think our attention should also be on raising funds for organisations currently on the ground who will have the widest impact on the lives of Palestinians who are still enduring the genocide in Gaza.
Below are some verified donation links of organisations that are currently providing assistance for the people in Gaza directly:
Taawon has launched a campaign to provide support in Gaza through food parcels, shopping vouchers, fresh produce, water bottles and shelter tents.
Watermelon Relief is a project initiated and implemented by a group of activists in Gaza, who work to provide aid to displaced families in Gaza through meals, support and activities.
World Food Programme (WFP) managed to provide assistance to more than 1 million people in Gaza in May by delivering food in shelters, makeshift camps and shops.
Life for Gaza is an initiative through which the Municipality of Gaza aims to provide basic necessities for the people of Gaza such as water projects, waste collection and the reconstruction of roads.
Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) is working to plant farmlands in Gaza through their "Revive Gaza Farmlands" project, through which they had already started planting vegetables, fruits and leafy greens in Gaza.
Purchasing eSIMs is one of the only remaining ways to keep Gazans connected with the outside world, to get their stories out or even enable them to call for help after Israeli strikes.
The Sameer Project is a donation based aid initiative that provides tents, cash aid, diapers and formula for displaced families in Gaza.
Care For Gaza is an organisation that works to provide essential aid such as food packages and cash to deliver to displaced families in Gaza.
Palestine Children's Relief Fund, through their "Gaza Relief and Recovery" campaign, plan to provide essential medical supplies and treatments, as well as food and clean water.
Mutual Aid for the People of Gaza is a fundraiser managed by Mona in Gaza, who personally purchases and distributes basic supplies including food parcels to families in Gaza.
Help Gaza Children is another grassroots effort operating on the ground in Gaza to support families with food, water and clothing.
Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) provides medical supplies and supports healthcare services in Gaza.
Gaza Wound Care is a medical team in a tent in Nuseirat, providing care to children and supporting pregnant women.
Children Not Numbers is an NGO dedicated to providing medical care for the children in Gaza including delivery of medical aid and medical evacuation for children.
As a rule of thumb, don't reblog donation posts or people asking for donations unless they've been vetted and reblogged by Palestinian bloggers. We usually go to lengths to verify this shit because we know scammers have been faking to get people to send them money, using the urgency of our genocide as bait.
It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.
Accounts don't just randomly spring up on tumblr without gofundmes while asking for someone to help them create a campaign. Fuck out of here with that shit.
I'm also gonna stop listing the reasons why I recognize something is a scam. It's becoming more and more clear there is 1 person behind this STRING of scams and they're leaving less trails behind but it still reeks of them and their MO.
DO NOT TRUST ANY GOFUNDME OR REQUEST FOR CROWDFUNDING THAT PALESTINIAN BLOGGERS HAVEN'T VERIFIED.
At this point I'm fine receiving a bunch of inbox messages asking me to vet x y z so y'all can avoid this shit. But please have some critical thinking!
People are exploiting our situation.
Whether you wanna read the whole thing or not idc.
The person this was about deleted the 4th or 5th scam account they made and are definitely gonna make a new one soon. I don't want anybody falling for this anymore.
every little bit helps.
AT&T/Bell Telephone Company employment opportunity ad, 1972.
i think im a homunculus
This is an extract of an email from 20 years ago that mirrors the sentiments of millions of people today. Shock. Horror. Disbelief. Despair.
There's been 20 years of this /more/ than 20 years of this. It seems unimaginable that this is our reality. I hate how relevant and relatable these letters are.
#Rachel Corrie #Free Gaza #Free Palestine 🇵🇸
