Your stairway lies on the whispering wind

Meta, the company controlled by babyfash Trump fan Mark Zuckerberg, the board of which thought it was reasonable to support Fascist politicians in the hope of avoiding regulation, and whose Facebook service has or had a “17-strike” policy for known sex trafficking accounts and not only doesn’t remove fraud posts but charges known fraud operations higher rates for their ads, puked this vile mixture of plagiarism, artist’s blood, and AI sludge posing as photography onto BART station walls in San Francisco:

And of course it’s shit. Of course it’s shit. Holy gods, it is such hot garbage, and I’m not even talking about the implied higher situational awareness of someone wearing an AI PHONE ON THEIR FACE over people looking down at their regular phones

tho’ that’s a pretty fuckin’ hot take for them to have right there too, I have to say

I’m talking about the raw clownery of this image. Holy hell. Let’s zoom in at one of the insults to imagery:

And I’m not even mentioning the ghost in the room, by which I mean the four ghosts in this one particular rendered room:

And I have to ask:

HOW CAN ALL THIS STILL BE THIS SHITTY AND PASS MUSTER FOR THEM? HOW?

Christ it’s so insultingly bad. It’s infuriatingly bad. As photography substitute, as AI generated Not Art. It’s… it’s like it’s Anti-art, an opposite of art that mocks the real, that imitates while degrading both itself and its opposite.

Anybody can make bad art. I’ve made plenty. Also some good art.

But it takes real work to make anti-art.

And that’s what makes me want to fucking scream.

We all know how monstrously wealthy Fuckerberg is. How much money he and his company have. How he could jerk off with thousand dollar bills, wipe himself clean, and burn the dirties the rest of his wretched life and not even notice the difference.

So when you see that they’d rather put out this slapdash, revolting, uncaring – no sneering insult of a render than pay a photographer and a few models a few bucks for an afternoon photo shoot, what’s that say?

It’s not the money. He has all the money. All of it. Well, him, and the other TESCREAL fascists.

I think… I think I have to think… that it’s a matter of principle for them. A sick principle, but a principle nonetheless. It has to be, because otherwise it makes no. goddamn. sense.

I literally have to conclude that they hate art, and even more, hate artists. They have to, to consider this better. It must be principle for them to not care about artistic creative work, to not pay artistic workers. It has to be principle to hold all that in contempt, to say, “see? We just steal everything you’ve ever done, throw it into our churn machine, and then rub out our own version in half an hour to show you’re not any better than us. And you can’t do shit about it.”

They’ve made it clear that they’d not only spew this kind of rancid splatter, this metaphorical scrawl of shit, urine, blood, and theft across the walls of a city than break that principle.

And they’ll enjoy it.

I used to think, once upon a time, that Syndrome from The Incredibles was a little too on the nose,a little too pointed, maybe – dare I say it – a little too cartoonish for even a cartoon.

I’m starting to think maybe he wasn’t on the nose enough.

But that’s flippant, and maybe a little too easy.

What I really feel is that… I’m finally starting to understand – really understand, at a gut level – what Hayao Miyazaki meant when he called AI “art” an insult to life itself.

Because, well, almost anything can be art. Art is an observation and an intent, as much as anything else, and handing that mantle to something which has no awareness, no observation, no actual knowledge of meaning, no ability to opine, no personhood at all, a chum machine with less actual awareness than a housefly maggot…

…how could that be anything less than an insult to life, itself?

It took me a while to understand, Hayao. But I think I’ve finally got there.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

I bought something for my second bike trailer build on Saturday.

The trailer’s basically been done for weeks already. I’m adding details and accessories now, like, I want to sew a cover, and I want to add reflectors. So I took it for another little shakedown ride, this time to a hardware store I found out had DOT-grade adhesive reflectors in stock for… more money than I’d like, but not unreasonable money.

Here’s what I’ve done with those stickers so far. I think it’s pretty good. The rear view is my biggest concern, given that my bike is well-lit, and this… frankly ugly flash photo… makes the reflectors pop well, showing how they’d reflect headlights. It’ll help:

But it occurred to me as I was doing all this that…

This is the first time I’ve bought something for this project.

The trailer frame was salvaged from a semi-wrecked kiddo hauler abandoned outdoors for over a year. The platform is made from a cargo pallet someone illegally dumped and I salvaged; the metal clamps holding it in place I shaped out of old building strapping. I literally found the warning flag pole on the street, and it inserts into a metal tube salvaged from a housemate’s broken laundry rack. I made a flag for it from scrap fabric. The cage is made from Buy Nothing-listed DIY cube shelving, the kind that never really works right, but there’s nothing wrong with the wire squares that a whole bunch of zip ties can’t fix. Other parts are 3D-printed, designed by me, printed by me, at home.

Everything else was just ordinary supplies I already had.

But when it came to the reflectors… I looked around a little, but then… I just went and bought something. And I have kind of mixed feelings about that!

I mean, it’s fine. Really. At some point, I’m going to want to replace these tyres, too, and that’s a purchase – they were also in the outdoors for at least a year and as a result are semi-rotted. They’re only still usable because I used a lot of silicone glue to make a reinforcement coat on the walls. (Hey, it’s not stupid if it works, and it works.) So sooner or later, money was going to be spent.

But even so, just buying something – even if it’s something you legitimately can’t make at home, like DOT-spec reflective material – feels like cheating. I kinda don’t like it.

Part of it is that I started making these cargo carriers around the time Anna got laid off, and even after she finally got a new job earlier this year, I kept the same approach. Sure, it helped that I already had basically everything I needed by that time, but also, we’re trying to make up for a lot of lost money and time, so I kept doing things the same way.

Until today, when I didn’t. I did it the normal way instead. It’s a very normal thing. You need an item, a part, whatever – you can just buy it.

And… maybe… maybe it’s just how extremely abnormal everything else is right now, in this endless emergency… but…

I just don’t know how I feel about that.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.