Clarkesworld Magazine has published their stance on generative AI. For you who don't recognize the name, this is the SF magazine that had to close their short story submissions earlier this year because they were being flooded with AI written submission.
It's the annual cost that really makes it for me.
That $429 million is for 20,000 writers. When shared out it's really not very much at all.
"Ah but Bacon," you say, "it's not much shared out, but added up, nearly $500 million is a lot!"
And yes. It is. To a normal person. However to these huge studios no it isn't. Warner Bros paid their CEO $250 million last year. He is 1 guy. They gave him the same amount as it would cost to increase the pay of ten THOUSAND writers.
And that is just one single studio. The AMPTP is made up of nearly 350 studios and networks. They can afford to pay these writers what they are worth.
happy pride month from your neighborhood gray!! I forget that asexuality has been severely misrepresented and that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is as a result so here is an overview of what asexuality is, what it’s not, and how acephobic is represented. there is so much more to asexuality than just this. I didn’t even mention the medicalization of asexuality!
I highly rec scretspiderlady on Twitter because she writes a lot about the ace experience and has many comprehensive threads. I also rec Yasmin Benoit, a Black aroace lingerie model who is fighting misinformation about asexuality and shedding light on racism within the asexual community. if you’re interested in more resources feel free to dm me!
EDIT: I updated the slide that refers to asexuality as “aspec” to “acespec.” The term aspec refers to the a community as a whole – both asexuals and aromantics – while acespec refers to the asexual spectrum and arospec referes to the aromantic spectrum. You can see this mirrored in the terms acephobia (experienced by aces), arophobia (experienced by aros), and aphobia (experienced by both aces and aros). Thank you to those of you who tagged this post with their correction!
EDIT 2: now with a text-only option!
explain why in the tags. consider:
- Miss Piggy knows karate
- Animal is at least 60% feral
- Sweetums is the size of a grown man
- Gonzo does extreme stunts and considers torture fun
- Uncle Deadly threw a man off a roof once
- Constantine has a bear trap for teeth
- Crazy Harry causes explosions and is also called. Crazy Harry
I forgot to list the Swedish Chef in the notes and Tumblr won't let you edit posts with polls in them, so:
- The Swedish Chef has been known to carry knives and in at least a few cases a blunderbuss. Also he has human hands
I require your expert advice
None of the easy ones on here. Like I could maybe take Janice?
Floyd, you could also take Floyd.
Looks like some lawyers submitted a document citing court cases that didn't exist and probably lifted large chunks of it wholesale from an LLM without review or editing. When asked to provide copies of the nonexistent cases, the lawyers submitted some "opinions" that also look like they were generated by an LLM. I think there's a good chance one or more of them will be disbarred. 💩👍
If you're doing skilled work, LLMs will not be able to do your job without you. If you're making something novel I'm not entirely sure they would even be helpful.
I find it really amusing that people keep calling ChatGPT the plagiarism machine because there is about a 0% chance that ChatGPT is even as good at plagiarizing as the average high school student.
This popped up on the r/Lawyers subreddit and there are so many people who think ChatGPT is in any way useful as a research tool, even if they know that it doesn't research and use sources and understand the difference between truth and falsehood the way humans do.
It's an Eloquent Bullshit Generator. And while some aspects of law involve eloquent bullshit, it's at least purposeful eloquent bullshit in that you are only bullshitting specific things, instead of random things that do not need to be bullshitted like "what is the name of the case I am citing" and "what state are we in." Your average sovereign citizen who thinks the Magna Carta is relevant law in the U.S. is more capable of producing a cogent legal argument.
(Off-topic, but "LLM" in law means you have a master's degree on top of your normal JD/LLB degree, often because you're focusing in some specific area of study like taxes. So talking about how LLMs are terrible was a weird thing for me to read until I realized what it stood for here.)
Oh tragic. Youtuber Shadiversity, who has had some interesting thoughts about swords and Historical European Martial Arts, has outed himself as a raging conservative on his media critique sidechannel, where he froths constantly about the "woke agenda" and how oppressed he is for being a Christian who just wants to raise his children completely ignorant of any other way of life!
I learned this buffered by a video by Jack Saint with a slightly complicated backstory. (Basically, Shad made videos criticizing the Mario Brothers trailer and movie. Jack made a video about conservatives flipping their shit about the movie, and Shad was one such example. Shad made a two-hour reaction video saying how DARE Jack, this infamous duplicitous dishonest LIAR, imply that he's conservative or sexist or bigoted! And while we're here, Shad has some thoughts he needs to share about how awful unfeminine women and antiracism and modern sexual degeneracy are!)
Anyway, the Jack Saint video has kindly cut the relevant Shad footage down to the shortest duration possible. There's one clip early on they left uncut so they couldn't be accused of "removing context" that convinced me that having to watch more of these hot takes in their raw form would physically destroy me.
Ah well! At least we'll always have Jill Bearup.
Update: GOD DAMMIT
I was not able to watch all of any of these because video like this is deeply inaccessible to me as a medium but I did manage to suffer through the intro which was honestly worth it for the moment of Saint remarking that the other guy clearly was assuming he (Saint) wouldn’t sit through a two hour video: “but I did. And I have NOTES.” A+.
with thread and fabric being very very labour-intensive in pre-industrial times I wonder how much of the cost of a ship was in its rigging. even a small sail is a lot of fabric compared to clothes, and it has to be quite high-quality. and even a small boat needs a decent amount of good rope.
from what little I've read, it seems like it, I read an article ages ago estimating the cost of manufacturing textiles (helping a friend write a Viking romance novel) that stated that time spent on sailcloth spinning, weaving and sewing was the primary limit on Viking ship production. Can't find it now and I was not the most rigorous researcher back then, but I can find this, which estimates a single sail worth of fabric costing 270g of silver before sewing even begins.
Some very good information in there! Here's a more or less direct answer to my question in the op:
According to Anna Nørgård, from the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde, a wool 61 square metre sail, woven in a twill with 8 threads in warp and 5 threads in weft, would take c. 4,148 hours to spin and weave. The preparation of the yarn, warping, and set-up would add another 830 hours. Altogether, it would take her c. 5,000 hours, or 416 days to make such a sail if she would work twelve hours a day (Nørgård 2016). However, if weaving in a tabby the spinning and weaving would only take c. 3,477 hours, excluding the 830 hours needed for preparation of the fibres, warping and set-up.
But this is only a small fraction of the textiles needed, because the 33 Vikings crewing the ship need clothes, and in the North Sea, quite a lot of them:
Apart from the clothes they wore, it is likely that each crewmember brought at least one extra set of clothes on a journey. Based on archaeological analyses of textiles in combination with experimental archaeology, it has been estimated that each crewmember had a minimum of clothes representing more than 6.5 kg of raw materials, or 30.5 square metres of fabric, which would have taken 3,343 hours to spin and weave (Table 2). Furthermore, well-made nautical clothing, possible of leather, and sleeping covers would have been necessary for survival. If all crewmembers would have brought the same amount of clothes and outfits, this equated to 215 kg of raw material, requiring more than 11,000 [sic] spinning and weaving hours (Table 3).
(There's a 0 missing in the last sentence of this paragraph, it should be 33*3343 ≈ 110,000 spinning and weaving hours; Table 3 has the correct number.)
This was also striking:
The need for raw material was still substantial; c. 331 kg of raw material equates to wool from 331 sheep. According to modern calculations these sheep would need 33.1 hectares of well-fertilised pasture (10 sheep/hectare (Bender Jørgensen 2012; Fag undated). Even if the Viking Age sheep were half the size of modern sheep, and only used half the pasture, more than 16.5 hectares were needed (20 sheep/hectare).
This fits kinda nicely with one of the conclusions from Bret Devereaux's series on textiles, which led me to this question. With minimum comfort meaning one new full set of (Roman) clothes per year, Devereaux concludes (emphasis his):
Using the average of Aldrete and Fischer’s figures (erring a little high to account for Fischer’s lack of preparation time) we might figure something like 2,683 hours to produce our 220,000cm² minimum requirements. Our upper ‘comfort’ level might be three times this or 8,049 hours. [...] Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). [...] A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort
Another way to put this, I guess, is that one woman working her hardest can keep herself and one other person comfortably clothed. Or, it takes half a year for one woman to comfortably clothe one person for a whole year. That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it: fibre and textile work is overwhelmingly done by women and overwhelmingly what women do in these societies, and women are half of all people.
With 7.35 hour working days it takes ≈ 680 working days to make the sail from before. So even at half a woman-year of labour per sailor, clothing the crew of 33 is substantially more work than making the sail. But actually these Vikings are bringing ≈ 450 woman-days of clothes each, so it's an even bigger difference. That's almost 2.5 times more than the comfortably clothed Roman; Devereaux's estimate is 66 m² for comfort for a Roman family of six, so 11 m² per person, less than the 30 m² per Viking in Andersson Strand by the same factor.
I mean, obviously the Vikings need to be dressed much more heavily travelling the North Sea than someone farming near the Mediterranean does. But with the estimates in the previous paragraph, if Mediterranean sailors dress roughly like people on land, clothing the crew dominates rigging the ship in terms of textile work.
This does make me wonder what minimum/comfortable standards of clothing looked like in Scandinavia compared to in the Mediterranean... in the colder climate it's going to take more to stay warm, it's as simple as that.
I think someone commented on Devereaux series on making iron that behind every Roman legionary there were a dozen woodcutters fuelling the furnaces and forges that make his sword. I guess the upshot of all this is that behind every Viking raider there are three women keeping him warm and dry.
(Hmm. I'd still want to know how much woodworking labour goes into the ship. Andersson Strand doesn't say anything about ropes for rigging either. But man, pre-industrial textile production SUCKS, the crew's clothes probably come out the vast majority anyway.)
Ah, this NYT article makes references to the idea I mentioned earlier, that time to make sails is the main limit on manufacturing
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.
Tracking down that claim leads me to this 2012 article on the introduction of sails to Scandinavia, which I think must be the thing I read way back then (it's behind a login wall so I've rehosted it here)
Their number includes the time spent to weave the cloth as well, they estimate 20 hours to weave one square meter of sailcloth putting the number at 50 000 work years to spin and weave all 1 million square meters of the 11th century fleet.
Experiments indicate that a good spinner can produce 30- 50 m yarn per hour using spindle and distaff. For a wool sail of 90 square metres, that would mean 4.800 hours of spinning – two and a half modern working years.2 As regards weaving on the warp-weighted loom commonly used in the Viking Age, weaver Anna Nørgaard inserts on average 25 wefts per hour. It takes 20 hours to weave one metre of sailcloth, and she estimates that it would take almost 3.200 hours to make the 157 metres needed for such as sail. The total consumption of time for spinning and weaving is 8.000 hours or four and a half modern working years. This does not include the time needed for harvesting the wool, or finishing processes such as fulling (Nørgård 1999, 8). Still, it would make the one million square metres of the Viking fleet represent some 50.000 years of presumably women’s labour.
This one is really good, detailed tables on resource estimates including land usage, time, and materials for sails as well as bedding and clothing.
My Brain, for no goddamn reason: You know what would be funny? Me, up too early to drop my car off for maintainence: what? Brain: What if Wookiees and Kaminoans shared a recent common ancestor? Me: ... Me: *rapid mental theoretical xenobiology montage* Me: LOL. LMAO.
Some of us biologists would like an artist’s interpretation please.
How fortunate :)
My degree is in Scientific Illustration :)
Now I'm currently high off my tits on allergy medicine and Star Wars has only a passing relationship with Scientific Rigor, but let's have a little fun with HIGHLY SPECULATIVE EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE!!
Anyway, for those of you that aren't neck deep into the world's most deranged Space Opera, these are Wookiees and Kaminoans:
Wookiees are about 6-7 ft tall on average, Kaminoans about 7-9 ft.
Wookiees are from the Planet Kashyyk, which, in the style of single-biome planets in Star Wars, a temperate rain forest, not unlike the north pacific coast of the US and Canada, (and are also the ancestors of Ewoks according to this article I just read). Kaminoans are from an entirely flooded ocean-world called Kamino, and have been genetically modifying themselves for ages. I genuinely cannot remember if it's one of SW's 20-odd canons or a really good fic I read, but IIRC: 1. Kamino used to have solid land before the Bougies flooded it for ethnic genocide reasons. 2. Wookiees are not native to Kashyyk either- their ancestors crash-landed or were abandoned on the planet over a million years ago.
So, perhaps neither species is Native to their respective homeworld, what would the theoretical ancestor look like? Let's start with some features of the descendant species! Some notable features I'm deriving from half-remembered canon and a GREAT exhibit on costuming I saw:
- Wookiees have tons of hair, but no undercoat. I'm basing this off the fact that Chewbacca's original costume was made from wigs, not animal fur, but it makes a sort of sense- Long hair would act as an insulator by keeping air close to the skin, and is oily enough to keep them from getting soaked in the rain, or waterlogged when they need to take to occasional swim to get from one tree-city to another.
- The designers took some significant inspiration from Baikil Seals when it came to the eyes, nose and texture of Kaminoans- they're officially bald, but the velvety texture suggests they might have fine fur like humans do. This makes a sort of sense if the Kaminoans modified themselves to fit their watery new world.
- Kaminoan males have a crest on the tops of their heads- while they may have added something later, but bauplan genes, esp hair patterns are hard to fuck with, so the genetic potential for a crest was probably present in the Wookiee-Kaminoan Common Ancestor (or WKCA). Similarly, the Wookiee costumes I saw had notably longer fur along the neck and spine than the rest of the body. This suggests that the WKCA had a mane like a horse or zebra.
- Dark Sclera and lighter-colored Irises, and Vision in the UV and infrared spectra. Apparently, the stark-white walls of Tipoca city on Kamino are covered in UV-spectrum murals!
- A much broader ranger of hearing than humans. The uulating sound of a wookiee is well-known, and in one of the books, Kaminoan native language is described as high-pitched humming and trilling, which sounds like pitched-up Shryywook to me!
- Both species walk at a very long, smooth lope, despite being from Arboreal and Aquatic worlds respectively. Both Species are very capable of sprinting at great speed and have quite the jump, when needed.
- Both Species are Hypercarnivorous Apex predators that have a NASTY bite- Both species still retain prominent canine teeth.
So, the WKCA likely had:
- A lightly furred body with no undercoat
- A spinal mane, which is not a defensive feature, but a Heat-Dispersing one.
- Dark-pigmented eyes with light-colored irises and a broad range of vision- features commonly seen in animals that deal with highly variable levels of light, like something that hunts at dawn and dusk between bright sunlight and extreme darkness.
- Excellent hearing and a musical language that can be heard across great distances.
- Legs meant to walk very long distances and put on the occasional turn of speed, but not stalk.
- Was likely a social carnivore with BIG-ASS TEETH.
All these taken together suggest one thing: The Common Ancestor of Wookiees and Kaminoans evolved in a DESERT.
It's specifically a social sprinting predator- humans terminator-pursuit our prey down, leopards ambush, but the exceptionally long legs and short ankles (Those are short ankles on the Kaminoan compared to many terrestrial mammals) suggest a hybrid strategy more like that of African wild dogs- this is an animal that runs it's prey down with a lot of power, but it doesn't like to run for long, so it brought friends to corner the prey. We are looking at a very tall Mad Max Extra with the galaxy's Most Magnificent Mowhawk here.
LOL. LMAO.
You may note some Bonus features on the above Sketch- the larger ears and heavier legs- Wookiee ears and necks would have shrunk fairly fast to conserve body heat in such a wet environment, and the overall size decreased in order to be light enough to actually manage their new arboreal lifestyle. The Kaminoans were selecting for culturally desirable traits over all else, hence the lack of ears, dubious structural integrity in the neck and total absence of Ass. The WKCA is have been caked the fuck up on account of walking across huge amounts of desert, needs those big ears for thermal regulation and hearing each other and prey, and being purely terrestrial, probably outweighs both descendant species by a good amount.
I also gave it a Nubbin tail, because it's cute, and there's no evidence that Wookiees and Kaminoans DON'T have them.
Now I know I've been discussing carnivory, but mammals wander all over that spectrum of Omnivory all the time. Pandas are bears that are Vegan, Rodents love chicken.
So please consider, because it makes me laugh: The Common Ancestor is an Ungulate.
There have been Carnivorous ungulates before! Andrewsarchus comes to mind. I think they were social herbivores that developed a taste for meat as their planet dried out and these very large animals needed to get creative about calories and moisture in the encroaching desert ...Like if giraffes decided to start eating tourists.
Anyway, after doing some Lineart, giving her a BF (the Kaminoans made the crest a sex-indicative characteristic, which is HILARIOUS to the WKCA), omitting any gender-presenting nipples or sex organs to avoid the banhammer, Giving them toe-hooves like Eohippus and making them soft and velvety like a proper Desert Creachur:
Behold! The Common Ancestor of Wookiees and Kaminoans (and technically Ewoks too!). Truly, Speculative Evolutionary History is a fascinating subject...
...Except. It's a Big Galaxy. Much of it Unexplored.
The Common Ancestor might still be out there. Lurking. :)
At Jewerly Shop Only one more month to the Across the Spider-verse…!!😍
Charizard being cute in Detecitve Pikachu
And now it’s time for one last bow Like all your other selves
#i don’t know what these things are #but i want 20
Comics Month: Alpha Flight
[ID: A zooming-out image of the Alpha Flight team with the Alpha Flight logo appearing in the center and sliding to the bottom right of the banner. On the top left, the Fanlore icon appears. /End ID]
In honor of Comics Month we're focusing on Alpha Flight, Marvel's oft-forgotten Canadian superhero team.
The team was a group of super-powered mutants similar to the X-Men. The two lasting legacies of the team may be its connection to Wolverine's origin story, and that it featured Northstar, Marvel's first openly gay character.
The 90s was when the fandom reached its height, with fans sharing information and fanworks on forums and message boards. Fans often turned to each other for accurate information about life in Canada, and tried to add more Canadian content to their fanworks, something that was often missing from canon.
There are still a few dedicated fans of this team. Are you one of them? Help us expand their Fanlore page!
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We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!
Poll Tuesday
I feel like I’m exposing myself a little bit with this bc my introduction to fic is soo random I think, but whatever your answer please tell me the story! I wanna know haha
pre-Google, a Star Trek recap and discussion site had a link to a couple of fanfic sites
4 days left to get 20% off all my pieces at @gallerynucleus and help me scorch cancer! 🔥
Use code 'MONA4ART' until May 31st. Proceeds go towards supporting my radiotherapy! (Thanks Gallery Nucleus!) 👇🏼
