Siah Sargus

please, untitled document was my father, call me untitled document (1)

Scooby-doo is not a hard concept.

1. Four teenagers.

2. They are friends that deeply care for each other.

3. They solve mysteries.

4. THERE’S A TALKING DOG.

The Pacific Ocean is huge.

If they make an earth flag it should be of this angle to piss off the most amount of people

None Earth with South New Zealand

WAIT

My autistic brother created a new family Christmas tradition

Cute, right?

Well, for whatever reason only known to my brother, he decided that he wanted to put Barry in different rooms of our house and it usually scares the shit out of whomever happens upon Barry; usually the person who finds him is the person that my brother wanted to scare.

So far, Barry has been found

On our dining room table

On my dad's side of my parents' bed

In my parents' closet

Outside their bedroom door (at 5 in the morning and scared my mother shitless)

Near the kitchen door

Near my fucking bed

At the bottom of my sister's stairwell

In our bathroom

And down the hallway

This has gone on for 9 days and it doesn't seem to show signs of stopping. Most of the time we know who gets Barry because it's always followed with a very loud "FUCKING BARRY!!!!!"

My brother is the funniest fucking person I know.

Update:

He found his way into my sister's room.

And my brother is cackling maniacally downstairs.

Holy fuck this doll is creepy

Another update:

The soft glow of the Christmas tree seems to quell his bloodlust

vote to replace the evil surveillance Elf on the Shelf with Barry the Chrismoose

Broke: Elf on the Shelf Woke: Moose on the Loose

people now entering the simply making things up phase of things

not to go Full Crank Mode but at this point, i lowkey wonder if the AI art panic is (at least partially) astroturfed by entertainment industry lobbyists

steamboat willie is due to enter the public domain on new year’s day 2024, and the lobbying efforts of disney/time warner/viacom/etc. were integral to getting the Copyright Term Extension Act passed in the late 90s - but republicans have implied that they’d be more hostile towards any copyright legislation pushed by the mouse now as retaliation for disney (reluctantly) opposing the don’t say gay bill

so if the entertainment industry wants to push for further copyright extension, they’ll need popular support since their usual cronies (or at least the upfront-about-it half) won’t have their back this time

along comes a new tool with potential for abuse and a bunch of greasy annoying techbros hawking it as a way to make easy money off other people’s work, and boom, you have a panic about an already-precarious field (the arts) becoming even more so

in this climate, if a stricter copyright bill is framed as “protecting the livelihood of artists from AI theft,” those same artists will embrace it even though the average individual online illustrator is only going to be fucked over by disney et al. gaining an even bigger legal mallet to crush artists with

okay tinfoil hat coming off, but the point is, don’t be a useful idiot for the mouse

i think a more parsimonious explanation for artists panicking over ai art as ip infringement than "independent artists are succumbing to private property fetishism as a reflection of their material condition as petty bourgeois" is that automation threatens their sense of self and devalues all illustrating labour (whether waged or not) and they are desperately latching onto anything they can to decry and resist it. which would cohere better with the overall grab-bag approach ive seen to stable diffusion antagonism

The AI art debate has underscored that nobody in the history of the universe has ever made a valid point while using the word dudebro

80 years ago if you were writing a song to be recorded and wanted there to be a steady drum beat in it you would hire a professional drummer and bring them to a recording studio. And then drum machines were invented and suddenly you can just tell a machine to provide the best but the effect it had on music wasn’t that drummers went out of business but that more people could had “drums” to their songs and even if it isn’t and wouldn’t ever be exactly the same as using a live drummer one of the biggest impacts it had was making music much more accessible to produce and create for people that couldn’t otherwise afford it but had creative ideas in their head and that’s why early hip hop music has so much electronic sounds in it

a lot of scantily clad women with numbers in ther urls are following me lately. they must be smitten with my devilish charm

gambling with angels is easy. they can't lie but they have addictive personalities; it's easy to clean them out then make them divulge secrets about the business of heaven to call your bets. my dad used to say "hey, watch this" and summon angels to play poker with him with a sort of bone flute he inherited from his grandpa, and they'd be holding horseshit and still want to call him. i'm talking "raise on a two pair" level bad at it, but they couldn't stop trying to win. my dad taught me all the secret names of God before i was out of grade school and i would use them to curse my enemies so they came down with leprosy. you can cure leprosy these days but it still sucks, especially for a child. but they had it coming for pissing me off

AI Art discourse is so hyper-priviledged from the “freelance artist” perspective that creates a ton of false ideas about how art is consumed and produced. I hear this “art without the intent of an artist behind it is meaningless” argument being so dominant and it is just laughably wrong in so many contexts. Most visual art is for-a-purpose! I do not care about the ‘intent’ of the illustrative diagram of capital stock flows in my econ textbook, or the logo for a kombucha company, or the banner image for a WSJ article. They do a job, setting tone or creating a brand or communicating information. 

So much art actually does, like, no job! Those images on say finance articles, its just like…walls of text are scary? So you need to give your eyes a break? But they are fucking cowards and won’t put pics of hot anime chicks in the middle of their discussion of the carried interest loophole so they pretend by making the image ‘topical’ its adding value. That is all it does! Intent of the artist isn’t relevant in the slightest.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch the reality of making big, commercial art. if you are doing say animation in modern toolsets like Toonz they have automated in-betweening tools; you draw keyframe A, keyframe B, you need frames in between to smooth the motion, and the program draws the inbetweens for you. That is AI art! Its been used for years now. Advances in AI  will make that more powerful, you can get better results, draw less frames, etc as that improves.

In animation so much art is made that isn’t in the final product - concept sketches, early layouts, etc. These don’t exist to be ‘intent of the artist’, they are tools to guide a production process. You could absolutely use AI tools to improve the effiiency of that process, its what we *currently* do, its been the history art & technology for the last 3 decades. This kind of art is what the majority of money and time in the art world is spent on - freelance ‘online’ art is just a piece of that world.

This isn’t a statement to invalidate the whole debate or anything (or shitting on freelance artists, I love them). I tend to be ‘pro’ AI art, as much as that framing makes any sense at all (it doesn’t), but there are a ton of other aspects to this debate that are more complex. For example, we have legally decided you can’t copyright art styles, which, fine, I agree, but that does sit in tension with a company being able to legally claim IP ownership of a tool built out of those art styles. Maybe those tools should be open access, the legal regime isn’t built for this scenario - or like the entire scenario of modernity, it all sucks. 

But regardless, in the complexity of this debate I think some really idealized conception of ‘art’ are being bandied about without a lot of evidence to back them up.

y'all ever reach the end of google

I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.

I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.

This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests

@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.

Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches

And THEN.

I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.

HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.

I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."

Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.

I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.

It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research

There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA

Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."

The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.

It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.

I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.

Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.

The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.

Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.

the fact that the technology to produce technically competent illustrations in fairly derivative styles is getting memed as "successfully automating all art" strikes me as, more than anything else, just a really sad picture of what people think art is