So... since clearly Jack never makes continuity errors, tell me your theory on what happened to Reepicheep between PC and VDT.
.
Wasn't an adult in PC; finally hit his growth spurt
Lucy's cordial couldn't fix his tail, but it did make him grow eight inches
It's a Lamarck's giraffes situation: he did a lot of stretching between books
He stopped slouching
He started wearing platform shoes
Lewis and Tolkien got their manuscripts swapped & Reepicheep drank ent draught
Friends, what are your favorite books that are considered classics? Anything 20th century and before
BTW I'm p sure that the court didn't officially rule that AI works can't be copyrighted, (unless anyone knows of a separate case), what they ruled was that AI works can't be copyrighted in the name of the machine
One of the questions I plan to address in my public comment about generative AI (which will probably turn into a veritable doctoral thesis paper) is the issue of the opt-out model.
The opt out model is antithetical to copyright law as it currently stands because under US copyright law, people have copyrights by default, and do not have to register anything to automatically get exclusive rights to their intellectual property, whereas in the opt-out model, people have to assert these rights to get them.
More broadly, it's antithetical to the US constitution in general, which assumes people have their rights by default and those rights should be respected unless they've been actively waived.
Furthermore, any discussion of a universal opt-out model creates undue burden on the copyright holder, since not all venues of art are major social media platforms. Any opt-out scheme has to take into account people who host their own domains, and ask are we going to demand this person has the technical knowhow to create opt-out flags before they have the right to protect their art? As well as art collections already posted.
In the extreme end of this, opt-out schemes have to account for fringe scenarios like if a representative of OpenAi walked past your painting exhibition and started taking photos with the intent to train ai on them. You can quickly see then that the concept of opt-out and red flag signals are extraneous to the discussion of what rights the copyright holder has.
Alright US mutuals, if you are interested in, morbidly fascinated by, or anxiously doomscrolling through AI news, including Stable Diffusion, Llama, ChatGPT or Dalle, you need to be aware of this.
The US Copyright Office has submitted a request for comment from the general public. Guidelines can be found on their site, but the gist of it is that they are taking citizen statements on what your views on AI are, and how the Copyright Office should address the admittedly thorny issues in rulings.
Be polite, be succinct, and be honest. They have a list of questions or suggestions, but in truth are looking to get as much data from the general public as possible. If you have links to papers or studies examining the economic impacts of AI, they want them. If you have anecdotal stories of losing commissions, they want them. If you have legal opinions, experience using these tools, or even a layman's perspective of how much human input is required for a piece of work to gain copyright, they want it.
The deadline is Oct 18th and can be submitted via the link in the article. While the regulatory apparatus of the US is largely under sway by corporate interests, this is still the actual, official time for you to directly tell the government what you think and what they should do. Comments can be submitted by individuals or on behalf of organizations. So if you are a small business, say a print shop, you can comment on behalf of the print shop as well.
Do a illustrator a favour and do this.
redemption arcs that double as tragedies!! you're a better person than you've ever been and you have nothing left to your name!!you have to rebuild yourself and your life from the ground up and you're smiling in the ashes!! you were devastated your life is ruined!!! nothing is ever going to be the same ever again you are never going to regain what you had you are never going to be free of the guilt you are never going to be able to go home there is nothing left for you!!! you are free you are more yourself than you've ever been!! fires help forests grow!!
One of the big things I've had to train myself out of when writing medieval historical fiction?
The stiff upper lip.
This used to really bewilder my editor, who for some time attempted to nudge me away from having my grown men weep and wail and blubber, but for me it's an essential part of the setting. Whether in grief or fear, medieval people did not hold things back.
Here are some of my favourite quotes to explain.
First, a couple from two great 20th century medievalists:
CS Lewis in his Letters put it this way:
“By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?”
Dorothy Sayers, in her fabulous Introduction to her translation of THE SONG OF ROLAND, speaking of Charlemagne discovering Roland's body on the battlefield:
Here too, I think we must not reckon it weakness in him that he is overcome by grief for Roland’s death, that he faints upon the body and has to be raised up by the barons and supported by them while he utters his lament. There are fashions in sensibility as in everything else. The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin. By the standards of feudal epic, Charlemagne’s behaviour is perfectly correct. Fainting, weeping, and lamenting is what the situation calls for. The assembled knights and barons all decorously follow his example. They punctuate his lament with appropriate responses:
By hundred thousand the French for sorrow sigh;
There’s none of them but utters grievous cries.
At the end of the next laisse:
He tears his beard that is so white of hue,
Tears from his head his white hair by the roots;
And of the French an hundred thousand swoon.
We may take this response as being ritual and poetic; grief, like everything else in the Epic, is displayed on the heroic scale. Though men of the eleventh century did, in fact, display their emotions much more openly than we do, there is no reason to suppose that they made a practice of fainting away in chorus. But the gesture had their approval; that was how they liked to think of people behaving. In every age, art holds up to us the standard pattern of exemplary conduct, and real life does its best to conform. From Charlemagne’s weeping and fainting we can draw no conclusions about his character except that the poet has represented him as a perfect model of the “man of feeling” in the taste of the period.
OK, now let's dig into some quotes that I found just in Christopher Tyerman's Chronicles of the First Crusade and Joinville's Life of St Louis:
Truly you would have grieved and sobbed in pity when the Turks killed any of our men....
As for the knights, they stood about in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable, not knowing what to do with themselves and their armour, and offering to sell their shields, valuable breastplates and helmets for threepence or fivepence or any price they could get....
When Guy, who was a very honourable knight, had heard these lies, he and all the others began to weep and to make loud lamentation....
They stayed in the houses cowering, some some for hunger and some for fear of the Turks....
Now at vigils, the time of trust in God’s compassion, many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall-tops; and in the city soldiers, returning from the encounter, circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store. To add weight to the terror, they too fled…
In the course of that day’s battle there had been many people, and of fine appearance too, who had come very shamefully flying over the little bridge you know of and had fled away so panic-stricken that all our attempts to make them stay with us had been in vain. I could tell you some of their names, but shall refrain from doing so, because they are now dead.
I could go on looking for quotes in all the other medieval literature I've read, but that would be beyond the scope of this Tumblr post.
In the meantime, this leads me to make some comments on how trauma was perceived.
In Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, the author discusses the mental breakdowns suffered by the first crusaders during the second siege of Antioch, which caused many of them to flee at the moment of direst need:
In these stressful circumstances it is not surprising that the crusaders were often very frightened. At times, indeed, they seem to have been almost paralysed by a terror that they themselves could hardly comprehend. … When the crusade was bottled up in Antioch by Kerbogha's relief force it was gripped by such blind panic that there was the prospect of a mass break-out and on the night of 10 or 11 Juney 1098 Bohemond and Adhemar had the gates of the city closed. It is worth noting that many of those whom later chroniclers, writing after the events in comparative comfort in Europe, vilified for cowardice and desertion seem to have been treated more charitably by their fellow-crusaders, who must have understood what pressures they had been under.
--
In conclusion: the way we feel about things today in the English-speaking isn't necessarily the way people felt about things in the past (and this goes for other cultures, real or imagined, too). I'm continually catching myself writing people with stiff upper lips and emotional reservations, and having to remind myself that the culture was different back them. If a grown man wanted to weep, he could. That's a good thing.
(Oh, and my medieval historical fantasy? Check out the Watchers of Outremer series on Amazon or wherever books are sold!)
the-writers-wrench asked:
Tuk wearing those underwater fairy wings lives rent free in my head, but I can't find video of it :'(
the-tiny-dragons-tea-room answered:
aww! It’s okay; you might be thinking of Kiri!
I’m sure Tuk wore them, too, but I can’t remember it… 😅
I GOTCHU FAM
yes Tuk wears them too!!
The Live Action Disney remakes do NOT demonstrate any level of understanding of the original content.
- Belle likes to read because she likes the idea of adventure in the great wide somewhere, not because she’s a feminist who believes in overturning the patriarchy by learning to read. Then she learns that giving up your life for someone else and looking past the surface of people is the best adventure she can get.
- Cruella is—and I cannot stress this enough—a crazy puppy-skinning self-obsessed maniac with no discernible care for anybody but herself. She is not a tragic young woman looking to find herself.
- Simba doesn’t think poorly of himself: he thinks about himself too much. When he’s a cub he thinks about how he’ll grow up and get to do everything his own way, and when he’s an adult he thinks he should get to stay in the jungle without anybody telling him how to live his life. He’s always hiding from responsibility. His reasons for doing it just go from childish entitlement to crippling guilt until Rafiki and Mufasa’s ghost knock some sense into him. But until then, he’s always thinking about how he shouldn’t have to take any responsibility. That’s how he runs from who he is—not because he’s ashamed of who he is, but because who he is requires responsibility.
- Genie wants to be free more than all the wonders and all the riches in all the world. He would never tell Prince Ali “I don’t care anything about that wish.” If he had said anything like that in the original movie, half the weight of his actually being set free in the finale would be gone. Meaningless.
- Mulan is a klutz who had to learn discipline; she was absolutely not born with a convenient superpower for fighting.
- Jasmine does not want to be Sultan. She wants to be free. She wants to be normal. She wants to be known. She’s caring enough toward normal peasants to hand them an apple when she notices they’re hungry; she’s naive and sheltered enough to forget that everything has to be paid for, even apples.
- Mulan is a homebody who loves her family enough to risk her life for them; she does not dream of leaving them to have her own adventures and thrills, not even as a child.
- Lady doesn’t teach Tramp how to have self-worth by helping her owners to adopt him after his original owner abandoned him. Actually, the original Lady teaches Tramp, who was never abandoned but instead takes advantage of several human families and lady-dogs alike, the value of commitment and loyalty.
- Maleficent lives alone in a crumbling tower with nobody but a pet raven. Flora, Fauna, and Merrywhether work together and love each other and stay with one another. Maleficent is petty, holding centuries-long grudges and never forgetting an offense. Flora, Fauna and Merrywhether are selfless, giving up their whole lives and all their magic to raise a child that isn’t even theirs in a poor cottage. Maleficent is cruel enough to kill all her own minions and doom an innocent child and chain a lovelorn prince to a wall while she tells him all about his doomed love. Flora, Fauna, and Merrywhether are compassionate enough to bake a cake and make a dress with no magic and endless trouble for Briar Rose’s birthday, even while they wipe away tears at the thought of giving her back to her parents. Maleficent shouldn’t get to be the villainess and heroine and the lover and the mother and the guardian of nature, while Flora, Fauna and Merrywhether get reduced to annoying stabs at comic relief. Flora, Fauna, and Merrywhether protect and nurture nature, while Maleficent kills flowers and children. That’s the story. You lose all the compare-contrast when you make Maleficent the only character.
- The Beast doesn’t just allow Belle to trick her father into letting her take her father’s place. He realizes Belle could break the curse, not because she’s a girl who found his castle, but because she’s a girl who is selfless and loving enough to say something like “take me instead.” He makes her promise to stay forever; he would never say that her love for her father makes her a fool, because that type of love is what he’s banking on to break his own curse.
- Aladdin would never say “‘I basically am a Prince.” His whole problem is that he knows, all too well, who he truly is, and it’s not the kind of guy who can be Sultan. He won’t set the Genie free because he can’t make himself pretend otherwise and thinks he needs help.
- Alice starts the movie by saying she wishes she could literally have a world where everything is done her way, then ends it by running out of that world for her life from a mad Queen…who ALSO wants everything done her way. It is just not a story about a young lady remembering who she really is (muchness) and embracing her inner crazy. It’s the opposite of that.
- Belle would never plan to escape when she gave her word that she would take her father’s place. Belle would never prioritize her own freedom over the Beast’s happiness.
Disney producers keep trying to adapt their old stories to “‘updated” values, and it will never work. The values that made characters like Belle and Mulan so enduring are totally incompatible with the bilge that gets printed on sassy t-shirts and Facebook statuses today.
There are two ways A’den uses the phrase, “That’s my wife!”
A good husband should always be down for two things: expressing his love and devotion to his wife, and defending her honor from reprobates.
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
ALTArt thieves already hate it:
Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.
The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222
As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:
&
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash
