dustyphantom

[dustyphantom]

they call it "protecting the children".

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Is there a word that’s a mix between angry and sad

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"I would kill for you. I would die for you" would you take a break for me? Would you sit down and rest? For a day, a week, a year? Would you let others take care of your needs for me? Would you let yourself be held for me? By me?

[dustyphantom]

why yes I AM making boop gifs from screen recording

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[dustyphantom]

What is this doing here now?

Tumblr Code.

[dustyphantom]

Text generators get all the attention as 'that thing that's going to destroy academia' (and they might) but I want to focus on AI 'assistants' for a second. Bots that scan a bunch of text and condense it. Those have been around a little longer but have only recently been added to a whole host of different platforms. Windows 11 now has one. fucking Adobe Acrobat has one.

And I can get it through my students' skulls that they shouldn't use ChatGPT to write their essays. But I can't convince them that they shouldn't use these summarizers.

I think there's a reason for it. We don't, as a society, put a lot of value on reading as a skill. We think that people learn to read at about age 6, get up to full can-read-a-book comprehension at about age 10, and then they're done. They know how to read.

And that's not true.

You continue to learn how to read through your whole life. The things that make you a better reader develop slowly - not just the mechanical things, like vocabulary, but the higher-level critical thinking skills necessary to parse more complex arguments. You learn these skills as you encounter more and more complex reading material. Like all skills, the only way to learn is by playing, and the only way to win is by learning.

In order to do high-level work in the academic humanities, you need to be able to read at a level above that of high school. That will include text written in unfamiliar styles, using unfamiliar vocabulary. You will need to parse the intent of people who are as dissimilar to you as it is possible to be while still being human. Readings for undergraduate level courses are long and difficult. They will take you a long time to do. They will require you to stretch your reading muscles, and you might not enjoy the sensation of that stretch. It's just not going to go down as easily as your favourite YA novel, or the ultra-predictable tropes of fanfiction. That's not a slight against those forms of writing, just an acknowledgement that the skills necessary to read them are not sufficient to read Kant.

I've started to get students in my classes who turn to machine summaries of their assigned readings in order to accellerate the process of doing homework. This is a problem. The summaries are often wrong, for starters (in philosophy it's extremely common to present your oponent's position before arguing against it - the machine can't pick this out very well because noticing when this is happening is one of those higher-level reading skills). But wrong facts aren't the problem. The problem is that by using these cheats, students don't learn one of the central skills of the class.

You're paying so much for this education. An amount of money that makes my eyes water. The least you can do is get your money's worth.

[dustyphantom]

[dustyphantom]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

[dustyphantom]

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

[dustyphantom]

[dustyphantom]

Does this count as finding a walrus at your door?

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"I cant draw" then do it bad who gives a fuck.....

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I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

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Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.

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it made too much sense in my head, I had to