Sorry, But Kanye Shouldn’t Have To Verbally Confirm To Everyone That “yes, I Literally Am A For-real

Various retail shops by AZB, a Japanese architecture firm headed by Etto Francisco Ohashi & Takamaro Kouji Ohashi (1999-2000)

“Austere, cool and futuristic, α-compiler looks like a spaceship that’s just landed on the pages of a Japanese sci-fi manga. Clad in easy-maintenance FRP (fibre-reinforced plastic), the off-white building steals the show in downtown Akita. AZB wanted to create an ultra-simple form with no superfluous details and, using the traditional culture of Japan as a point of departure, to sketch an image of the future. Automatic sliding entrance doors that slant backwards are, according to the designers, the first of their kind in Japan. Most display units on the first floor are made of stainless steel, including the honeycomb shelves. Certain units are incorporated into the surface of the floor, while others resembling large illuminated refrigerators line the walls. Everything is rounded and soft.”

Includes images of these works: α-compiler, α-assembler, and azb2000 (Akita & Kanazawa, Japan)

Hey, do y’all remember how Tencent said they were developing faceID AI to identify people in riots, and then they suddenly created an AI art generator to turn your selfies into anime?

Do y’all remember that time that someone discovered facial recognition cameras couldn't see through Juggalo makeup, then Facebook had a fun “see what you'd look like with Juggalo makeup” thing, and then facial recognition cameras could suddenly see through Juggalo makeup?

Do y’all remember how, on Twitter, Elon started a tirade against artists who ask for credit when their art is reposted, and he suddenly he created one of the first big art AI programs?

Do y’all remember how AI destroyed the field of translation, despite the inferiority of the machine translations, because people didn’t care about the quality of the translations? They just wanted it done for free?

Do you know how companies will see a lot of money going into a New Tech Thing (like, say, AI art apps) and will jump to try and implement that New Tech Thing into their tech? For example, how it felt like every big company and celebrity had an NFT to sell?

Just wondering.

( x )

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

The first official step towards banning any and all LGBTQ+ art and literature has been taken.

This is what hypersexualizing queer topics was always leading towards. Expect this to be the signal flare that gets some state legislature barreling forward to enact this exact measure, solely so the bill can be struck down, challenged legally, then taken all the way to SCOTUS.

...

Repeating what I said on Twitter: This is a good time to remind people that just being LGBTQ in this moment in time can be considered an outright radical act, so anything less than going all-in on the life you want to lead is fucking pointless.

Put another way, if you're putting actual time and energy into respectability shit right now, do everyone *and* yourself a huge favor, and stop wasting your time.

You can't fucking negotiate with Christian Terrorists.

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST

i swear to god if polyamorous people become the new “cringe identity” i am killing someone. we need to stop doing this… there is absolutely nothing to be gained by labeling an entire group of people “annoying” based on their attraction to others. it’s genuinely so pathetic and it really just seems like some gay people want to live out their fantasy of being high school bullies, so they go after people they deem lesser than them (this was once bisexuals, and then it was nonbinary people, and then asexual, and now it’s going to be polyamorous people)

why is finding trans healthcare so complicated can’t someone just hit me up with boy juice and amputitty me already

Hello i'm a normal person here's some stuff i drew to illustrate different traits different "person getting controlled" tropes can have

i hope everyone knows that the last wga strike was ~100 days and it's a pretty common phenomenon for strike support to tank after a month or two when it feels like it's dragging on and some writers and talk show hosts are crossing picket lines and trying to "return" to "normal" because of people's livelihoods etc when they're really just scabs. sure hope that we keep that in mind and are prepared for the long haul and aren't just in it while it's convenient for us <3