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Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.

(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)

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How long before someone gets framed and winds up on death row because of ai-generated “evidence?”

it is so insanely insidious to me that we are at a point now where A.I. can be completely passible to people that don't know what to keep an eye out for & it sucks ass that this content is infiltrating tumblr. its sooooo cool and fun having to study pics extra hard to figure out if im being spoon-fed a lie in image form

#seriously we need regulation NOW #even just watermarks indicating that it’s AI would go a hell of a long way

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I’ve rolled a 1 on cracking an egg. I was aiming so carefully, cracked it over the bowl… and it somehow wound up on the floor. I’m still not sure how that even happened.

the d20 1/20 crit system is so funny

imagine if one in twenty times you cracked an egg it cracked perfectly down the middle and landed in your pan in a perfect circle, and one in twenty times it just exploded across the kitchen

#dnd #ttrpg #goddam wormhole must’ve opened up

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Well, if their silly butts stopped digging out dungeons instead of finding a nice cave, maybe they wouldn’t have this problem.

dungeons and dragons? no no no. a dungeon is not a healthy environment for a dragon. they need a nice healthy cave at minimum, with an opening to the sky for them to stretch their wings, and no adventurers coming in to slay them

what? dragons are an endangered species!

#dungeons and dragons #dnd

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I gotta go with Mending. Fuck your planned obsolescence, I’ll find software workarounds and keep my shit working FOREVER

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How people think TTRPGs are going to go, especially when a DM gets to play: very serious, characters constantly doing badass stuff.

How I actually play more character: funny lil’ skeleton guy who likes to fix stuff, likes to tinker with machines, and also has 2 gallons of mayonnaise on him pretty much at all times even though he doesn’t eat.

#ttrpg #d&d 5e

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I think the last game I fired up was Pokémon: Arceus. So, it’ll be very pretty, but I’m gonna die to some pissed off electric rat.

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Oh, I’ve already done that. Sort of. Just in the TTRPG. We’re playing Canada, so we’ve got Mounties as a faction, we’ve got new Raider gangs (including one that’s based on hockey fan riots), we’ve got a cult that worships Mr. Banff, we’ve got Indigenous factions (because why wouldn’t Indigenous nations rebuild themselves after settlers go and nuke themselves back into the Stone Age).

you guys should tell me what you'd add if you were making a new fallout game

like factions, enemies, weapons anything at all I'd just like to know how other people's brains work :)

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Remember kids: 1 week in air, 2 weeks in water, 8 weeks in ground!

it's not until you get yelled at by your boss for looking up rates of body decomposition for the ttrpg you run on your work computer that you realise your hobbies are kinda weird

#ttrpg #yeah I’ve looked it up too

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This! Demanding that the whole world cater to your comfort is unreasonable. You need to seek out and create safe spaces for yourself, absolutely. But part of living is learning how to cope when you feel uncomfortable and yes, even triggered in the clinical sense.

Stuff kids on tumblr better relearn

1. You are responsible for your own media experience. 

2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you - but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.

3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.

4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves - you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine - but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.

5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.

#note that there’s a huge difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling unsafe #hate speech is different obviously #that shit leads to genuinely dangerous conditions for the oppressed if it’s not nipped in the bud

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“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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one of the nice things about heterosexuals i never see talked about on here is that they haven’t already heard all your gay jokes yet. i just really appreciate having a new audience sometimes for my completely automatic responses to phrases like ‘i’ll be straight with you’. so, shoutout to all the innocent hets out there who have a genuine giggle over lame quips that a fellow queer would groan and hit me for. ilu guys. 

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People getting caught up in the canon of D&D is really funny to me. You just lean in and say “I play homebrew” and whatever gatekeeper-y BS argument they had automatically goes up in smoke.

Was wearing a DND shirt in a records shop which is a critical mistake on my part, and a random guy came up to me and was grilling me about DND editions and I was like I don't know the deep lore and he was like well you're wearing a shirt from whatever edition and I was like my mom got me a DND shirt bc she knows I play DND, and it looks cool, that is the extent of my knowledge, and the look on his face was comical.

I do not have encyclopedic knowledge of DND editions, I just play DND with my buddies!

I am a fake ass fan. Don't @ me.

I would've been more hostile, but truthfully I had to get out of there before I was forced to admit I don't have a record player at gun point.

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Just a relatively quick ink drawing I did at my Calgary Horror Con 2023 table!

Brains, yes! Baseball bats, no! Somebody might get their goddam block knocked off!

#art #illustration #drawing #monster #bones #ghoul #skeleton #zombie #return of the living dead #tarman

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hot skeletons in your area

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Okay, so these guys are very specific to my campaign’s setting, but: meet the Cult of Mr. Banff! They worship a (Fiji) mermaid, have more chems than you can shake a stick at, and enough explosives to level a town. They’re also holed up in the Fairmont Banff Hotel, which has since been converted into an actually functional castle.

My players have met one… who was convinced one of them is “ghoul wizard” who’d turn him into a newt if he didn’t take them back to the cult’s HQ. I’m looking forward to more shenanigans involving these explodey weirdos who fear sobriety more than they fear death itself

#art #illustration #fallout #fallout rpg #drawing #cultists #ghoul #ALL HAIL MR BANFF

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Is that a promise? 

"the writer's strike could stop the MCU from making new movies for months!" fuck dont dirtytalk me like that. it's only 9:34 am

#does it apply to Star Wars too? #disney seriously needs to chill #let the people still watching have a lil’ break #they need to see the sun again