For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech

  • 2 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don’t fuck up my state to do it.

    You’ve done ok in CA when you’ve kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown’s footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you’re an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

    California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren’t even your constituents yet.


  • I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There’s plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

    While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what’s led folks to react negatively to your statement.

    On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

    Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub’s subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.






  • "I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
    Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.”








  • I’ve found that the quality of your Fediverse experience relies on your participation to a much larger extent than other social media. Lemmy instances tend to be tech focused and I’ve found it’s difficult to discover new content via accounts there - you don’t have the capacity to follow new users, only subscribe to communities.

    On the other hand, Kbin, because it reads both Lemmy style and Mastodon style instances, has proven to be exceptionally vibrant when it comes to discovering new content, as it allows you to both subscribe to communities and to users. I’ve found that once I subscribed to about 100 communities and followed a like number of users, my content feed far exceeds what I get on Reddit - because as the users I follow post to new communities, they appear as posts on my feed.

    I think when it comes to non-tech communities, a lot of them suffer from the fragmentation effect of having multiple communities of the same type across instances - because most Fediverse participants are in tech, tech is the theme that unifies the audience. To really match the quantity of content on /r/music, for instance, you’ll want to be subscribed to at least 10 communities in the Fediverse. It’s also harder to run a community in the Fediverse (although vastly more rewarding), and most mods often end up being the primary posters due to a lack of audience participation.

    All that being said, shameless plug for @13thFloor if you’re looking for a non-tech community. It’s a pirate clearing house of sci-fi, music, fantasy, literature, movies, articles, and all other sorts of weird ass shit designed to engage your imagination.




  • It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

    The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

    You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

    The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

    In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

    This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.