237 posts
actually, growing up is feeling like i turned sixteen two days ago. i’ve been eighteen for years. fifteen year olds seem so young. wasn’t i fifteen just a few weeks ago? all my friends and i are still twelve. i’m closer to thirty then to being a baby. i never got to be a kid. i never grew past eight. i can’t talk to my mom. i want to sit in her lap forever. the week is going by so slow. an entire year has passed. i want to decide everything for myself. i need someone to tell me exactly what to do.
this website lets you listen to the sounds of all different forests around the world
spotify, play me every song ive ever loved in the order i need to achieve perfect emotional catharsis
no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder
This marvelous haunting mystical lighthearted world where rain smells good as it falls upon earth and you can rest against a pillow just to hear your own heartbeat and whales sing to each other across stretches of ocean and you can move mountains w the power of your mind and the same water you swim in is home to coral reef ecosystems and dreams bring people you love a little bit back to life and you can bite into big fat juicy navel oranges in November and see shooting stars while walking home
i’m obsessed with whatever these are
YOU WILL FIND A WAY!!!! YOU WILL FIND A WAY . You will find a WAY ….. you WILL find a way . You will find a way you will find a way……!! YOU WILL FIND A WAY YOU WILL FIND A WAY you will find a Way you will (find) a way you will find. a way you will find a way YOU WILL FIND A WAY!!!!!!!
- a haunted house with a picket fence
starecat.com(?)/ @firstfullmoon/ i know the end- phoebe bridgers/ james baldwin/ my tears ricochet/ @shhhitsfine/ 13 going on 30/ @mazzystarjpg/ @7pmsummer on instagram
create pixel art
Awesome photo editor and art program, all free…!
Totally free transparent textures
make a cute chibi
draw some cool generative art
be a graffiti creator
create a picassohead (you don’t need to be a picasso to do so)
paint online
another awsome site to create pixel art on
and another one
create your own mandala
or color one
create an avatar
or you can try creating your own superhero
here you can interact with organisms in different environments to see how to music changes
here’s a website that translates the time into hexidecimal colours,
Here is a website where you can travel along a 3D line into the infinite unkown
here is a website where you can listen to rain with or without music
Need a model in a certain pose for drawing? here
Want to build your own planet
here is a website where you can create your own galaxies
make your own pattern (very useful if you need a new background)
create next hit comic
make a city which looks like something from 90′s games
draw a mandala like design
jig saw puzzles
more jig saw puzzles to solve
create a stunning HTML5 animation - no coding!
make a movie
create and dress up dolls
play a piano
you can also play a guitar
create sounds
another sound creator
create a logo
design your dream home
sketch rooms
explore fashion trends and create your own sets
build a website
try this app for building a website
Or maybe start learning how to code!
design your own t-shirt or a beanie or sweatpants and order them
design your own phone case
pretend to be a graphic designer with this cool online tool
Make your own Glitch art
Here’s another glitch art maker
And another!
Holy hell, here’s a third!
make an image look like it was created by a commodore 64
freaking cool text generator!
Easy to use word processor
Make up really cool patterns or run your photos through it :)
Write an essay on anything with no hassle
Wanna see how something you write would look like if it was on JacksFilms YGS((Your Grammar Sucks videos on YouTube))?
Make pictures out of text
ASCII word generator
Need an idea for some fanart-here :D
mario
cubefield
sleep calculator essay typer
rice questions
maths
artsy-fartsy pretty thing
quotes
survive nature
rain
tumblr music
calming rain
themes
backgrounds [x]
loads of references
watch a documentary
learn to code
do something yourself
workout with the help of this great youtube channels
learn things
play pokemon or zelda or other awesome old school games
waste your time on miniclip
play games at additing games
or try games at agame
calm your thoughts
the quiet place
it will be okay
vent or listen to someone
pour out your soul
explore the sky
look at art from around the world
virtually visit museum of iraq
explore world with arounder
create a music playlist
list through rare books
scroll useful science website
create sand art
brain games
try out tastekid and discover new favorite band or movie or book
interactive 3D anatomy
random street view
post a secret
create a family tree
find our what’s the difference between x and y
help scientists and become volunteer researcher
create your own font
read a classic short story
In the mood to read, but not sure exactly what book to go for?
scribble on maps
listen to letters
play with acrobots
listen to podcasts
make a bucket list
Ever want to see the most truly useless websites in creation?
Prank a friend with this blue screen of death!
Zone out watching the colors drip down
Sprite generator!
Face Generator/Creator!
Maybe none of these peeked your interest-maybe you’ve been wanting to create an o.c, but never really knew how to start-or you just enjoy making O.C’s….Or maybe you have a Gemsona that you want to create, but don’t have the energy to draw!
This masterlist is to help you in making your own OCs….it can also apply to developing RP characters i suppose! (´ヮ`)!
Gemsona stuffs;
Just a straight up character gemsona creator
Here’s another
Not sure what gem to go with, or where?
OR maybe your unsure about more than just that?
How to Write Better OCs:
basic tips on how to make your oc even better
tragic backstory? learn how to write one/make yours great
writing specific characters
a wordier, great guide on how to develop your character
kick out those vague descriptions and make them AWESOME
Character Development:
how to actually make an OC
Q&A (to develop characters)
more Q&As
giving your character a backstory
how to write an attractive character
Need an Appearance idea?
Humanoid generator? check
Here’s another one
and maybe if you didn’t like those this’ll work
Need Monsterpeople?
Well, then here ya’ go
Maybe you need Cats?
Diversity
adding more racial diversity
avoiding tokenism, AKA, how to add diversity to your cast not just because you “need” it
writing sexuality and gender expression (doesnt include non binary, if you have a good ref to that, please add on!)
masterpost on writing more diversity into your story
cultures of the world
guides to drawing different ethnicities (not just a great art reference, but also really helpful in appearance descriptions!)
Mary Sue/Gary Stu
Test to see if your character is a Sue
Explains subdivisions of Sues/Stus
Powerful Characters Don’t Have to Be Sues
Villains
villain generator
need an evil sounding name for your evil character? bam
villain archetypes
what’s your villain’s motive for being a villain?
Relationships
character perceptions (What your character thinks of themselves and what others think of them)
how to write strong relationships between two characters
8 ways to write better characters and develop their relationships with others
OCxLove Interest Handbook
develop your couple with good ol’ Q&A!
how to write realistic relationships
how to write relatives for your characters (this is more OC related to a canon character, but will help in writing family members in general)
ARCHETYPES
12 common archetypes
8 archetypes for male/female characters
female archetypes (goes pretty indepth from two main categories)
a list of archetypes
NAMES
how to name your character
random name generator
most common surnames
surnames by ethnicity
APPEARANCE
tips for better design
basic appearance generator
pinterest board for character design (includes NSFW and images of skeletons/exposed muscle (?) so tread carefully!)
clothing ref masterpost
Clothing generator
Another clothing generator
More clothing generator
Aaaand even more
Steam punk clothing
Char Style preference
Dress Generator
DETAILS
give your character better powers
a list of professions
proactive vs reactive characters
positive and negative traits
interest generator
skills generator
motivation generator
123 ideas for character flaws
list of phobias
Oh shit someone died
Backgrounds and stuff? yep
Quirks
Personality. you need that shit
Need something fandom related?
City generator hell yeah
location? got ya
World-building?
make your own god damn laws
Landscape.
Need Item names?
Fantasy/sci-fi/etc. medicine names
Stuff to make things more interesting.Weapons, clothes, treasures… whatever your characters need.
Item & Artifact Generators
Other stuffs!
Genre, Plot, & Story Prompt Generators
How did your characters meet?
Fanfic plots. you bet your ass.
Other Other stuffs!
Wanna make a custom minecraft skin?
Well then these’ll work!
This one too~
WAIT!…if none of that worked, then maybe you want to make a southpark style character?
Here!
Well, this one’s nice too~
And another..
Aaaand another!
UNDERTALE STUFFS;
Undertale character speech box creator!
Want inspiration for an Undertale Oc?
OR a super Edgy Undertale Theory generator?
Maybe you just want to read some funny Sans Puns!
TMNT STUFFS;
How about a TMNT creator?
Or a TMNT meme generator..
the journey home is an endless one
may sarton “letters from maine” // james baldwin “giovanni’s room” // neil gaiman “the graveyard book” // @wordsnquotes-net // anne carson “men in the off hours” // miriam adeney // “no longer fits” // han kang “the vegetarian” // “garden state” dir. zach braff // richard blanco “mexican almuerzo in new england” // mitski “there’s nothing left here for you” // julian barnes “a history of the world in 10 1/2 hours”
you are not a wasteland you just need ibuprofen and a hot bath and a shower and a nutritious meal and some water and some fresh air and to do something productive and to do something creative and to do something that takes physical exertion and to do something social
why is it so difficult to not borrow grief from the future
Dreaming of childhood and summer and lemonade and grass with daisies in it and running through sprinklers and devouring books in an afternoon and trying to swing high enough to fly
yes girl I think it’s incredibly sexy how indecisive you are about every single decision in your life. I also love how you haven’t let anything go since you were 12. can we make out now
it’s like nobody wants to dry hump and make out on the couch in the living room anymore
There is supposed to be a place where no one can reach you. Traditionally, the home, but now we settle for the ocean, the airplane, the summit of a mountain, the middle of a lake, the shower, the womb, the grave
happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !
Paramore Syracuse, 2018
im terrible at sexting because people will be like “ive been a bad girl/boy” and ill be there like “morality is subjective anyway… and as immanuel kant said, im in awe of the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”
bringing a global labor perspective to the “ai is gonna steal our jobs!” discourse that usamerican creative workers don’t really like…
(based on this twitter thread)
Google’s AI Chatbot Is Trained by Humans Who Say They’re Overworked, Underpaid and Frustrated (12 July 2023)
“If you want to ask, what is the secret sauce of Bard and ChatGPT? It’s all of the internet. And it’s all of this labeled data that these labelers create,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University. “It’s worth remembering that these systems are not the work of magicians — they are the work of thousands of people and their low-paid labor.”
The Hidden Workforce That Helped Filter Violence and Abuse Out of ChatGPT (11 July 2023)
ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often for wages of just two to three dollars an hour, they helped make the viral chatbot safe. WSJ’s Karen Hao traveled to Kenya to meet those workers and hear about what the job cost them.
The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution: The global labor force of outsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI — and the most at risk (11 July 2023)
Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.
Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human (20 June 2023)
You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.
OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic (18 January 2023)
OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.
To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. … The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour…
The ‘Invisible’, Often Unhappy Workforce That’s Deciding the Future of AI (9 December 2023)
Among a range of conclusions, the Google study finds that the crowdworkers’ own biases are likely to become embedded into the AI systems whose ground truths will be based on their responses; that widespread unfair work practices (including in the US) on crowdworking platforms are likely to degrade the quality of responses; and that the ‘consensus’ system (effectively a ‘mini-election’ for some piece of ground truth that will influence downstream AI systems) which currently resolves disputes can actually throw away the best and/or most informed responses.
The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence: Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.” (13 October 2022)
So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.
A factory line of terrors: TikTok’s African content moderators complain they were treated like robots, reviewing videos of suicide and animal cruelty for less than $3 an hour (1 August 2022)
“The devil of this job is that you get sick slowly — without even noticing it,” said Wisam, a former content moderator who now trains others for Majorel. … While TikTok does use artificial intelligence to help review content, the technology is notoriously poor in non-English languages. For this reason, humans are still used to review most of the heinous videos on the platform.
Human Touch: Artificial intelligence may be making some jobs obsolete but it has given a new lease of life to one group of people who play an unglamorous but critical role in the machine learning pipeline: first generation women workers in Indian towns and villages (20 July 2022)
“Any major technology company in the last 10 years has been powered by a throng of people … At some level, there’s denial. Investors like to hear that technology sells itself once you write the code. But that’s not really true.” … “Data work has a racial and class dynamic. It is outsourced to developing countries while model work is done by engineers largely in developed nations … Without their labour, there would be no AI.”
Desperate Venezuelans are making money by training AI for self-driving cars (29 August 2022)
How the AI industry profits from catastrophe: As the demand for data labeling exploded, an economic catastrophe turned Venezuela into ground zero for a new model of labor exploitation (20 April 2022)
Most profit-maximizing algorithms, which underpin e-commerce sites, voice assistants, and self-driving cars, are based on deep learning, an AI technique that relies on scores of labeled examples to expand its capabilities. … The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labor to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work” … is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.
Over the last five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become a primary source of this labor. The country plunged into the worst peacetime economic catastrophe facing a country in nearly 50 years right as demand for data labeling was exploding. Droves of well-educated people who were connected to the internet began joining crowdworking platforms as a means of survival.
Facebook Faces New Lawsuit Alleging Human Trafficking and Union-Busting in Kenya (11 May 2022)
“We can’t have safe social media if the workers who protect us toil in a digital sweatshop… We’re hoping this case will send ripples across the continent—and the world. The Sama Nairobi office is Facebook’s moderation hub for much of East and South Africa. Reforming Facebook’s factory floor here won’t just affect these workers, but should improve the experience of Facebook users in Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, and other African countries.”
Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop (14 February 2022)
Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user. …
The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook… is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe
Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon: Big tech relies on the victims of economic collapse (22 September 2021)
Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance — just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programs follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus — primarily black — populations [in the United States] are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labor for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programs represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
(an excerpt from the book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Philip Jones)
AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem (11 December 2020)
A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans. (16 August 2019)
A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential. “This is an expanding world, hidden beneath the technology,” said Mary Gray, an anthropologist at Microsoft and the co-author of the book “Ghost Work,” which explores the data labeling market. “It is hard to take humans out of the loop.”
[book] Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts (June 2019)
Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day
[book] Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (May 2019)
Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. … services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.
[follow-up articles about the book here and here]
Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor (28 March 2019)
“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. … “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’… They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”
How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine: Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen (5 February 2014)
Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. … But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.
oh you watched a movie I recommended????? you listened to a song I told you about ?????? you read one of my favourite books ?????? do you know that I would literally kill for you ????? let's drink each others blood
unfortunately if you are an old friend of mine i will always care about you no matter what even if we haven't seen each other in forever because i still remember what you were like 7 years ago and i still remember how it felt to be young with you and i still have a lot of love for you in the back of my mind
they need to let me make movies
Sotce
Girlpool—Before the World Was Big // memorial bench quoting Toni Morrison's Sula // @inanotherunivrse // Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You // Zadie Smith, Swing Time // Fall Out Boy—The Kids Aren't Alright // Audrey Emmett // Mikko Harvey, "For M" // Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi) // Langston Hughes, "Poem"
actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it
Durga Chew-Bose