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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • It is pretty formulaic for the most part (it does have some more nuanced and unusual dynamics later on )but I still enjoyed it. It’s like a Saturday morning cartoon you would watch while eating cereal as a kid. It’s just a cozy, chill sort of show you can watch when you feel like some nostalgic, cheesy, easy watching. It takes me back to a simpler time, if that simpler time was more also more culturally progressive, and that’s very comforting.


  • Both are frowned upon. But in proportion to a society’s lack of sex equality, the relationship from the older to the younger when the older is the more empowered sex will be rightfully seen as more suspect. Whichever sex, in a given society, typically wields more advantage, power, wealth, etc. is by those same tokens more likely to abuse their advantages. All relationships with large age gaps are seen suspiciously since it typically means either (1) the older person is taking advantage of a naive younger person, or (2) the younger person truly is mature beyond their years. But when the older person is also a member of some group which is more likely to have advantages, whether that is the group of “business owner”, the group of “famous people”, or in most still-patriarchal societies today, the group of “men”, the fact that they have more advantages reasonably draws additional suspicion to the already suspicious age gap. For instance, we suspect that the older person is only with the younger person for their looks, and is using their money to make it “worth it” for the younger person; or we suspect that the older person is using their wisdom to deceive the younger person into feeling truly loved when in fact they are objectified, etc. These tropes commonly show up in the case of the older woman with the younger man as well, but notice when - usually if the woman is very wealthy and the man is someone very attractive and not wealthy, and so on. It’s the unequal standing of the younger vs the older that draws additional suspicion to the older.

    So, this seemingly unequal treatment of men vs. women is not the result of some sort of bias or dislike for men (as some people may mistakenly interpret it) but in fact a rational response to the reality of the unequal standing of men and women in our society.










  • Hey there! My neocities is still under development, but I hope to publish it soon. I was thinking a lot as I worked on my site about this same exact thing. I really, like REALLY REALLY love the small web and especially the neocities subculture of it. But I did notice that it feels a lot more like a collection of people talking into their own respective voids rather than people talking to each other. For all social media’s failings, I do feel like I’m really interacting with people. There are guestbooks, and that’s cool, but those (and comment sections) are hard to set up, and ironically seem to get harder to set up the more technically skilled you are, because you’ll end up being picky about privacy, ethics, implementation details, and so on. (Obviously slathering Disqus all over neocities is completely counter to the ethos of the whole thing.)

    I also thought it would be nice to create some sort of SIMPLE social structure - just like you said. Something like webrings, elegantly simple, yet effective. RSS is maybe the best way, I dunno. Sometimes I see blog posts that I’d like to respond to, maybe it’s as simple as writing my own blog post and telling the person so by email. It’s funny because you could just have the exchange by email, but doing it in public anyways is part of what may make the small web feel more social (in a good way).

    That said, my site isn’t live…soo…


  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.detoMemes@lemmy.mlPoory
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    6 days ago

    My brother, I am someone who is pretty pro-AI art, for reasons too complex to get into, but which basically have to do with latent possibility spaces and the boundary between discovery or creation.

    I am typically pissed off and annoyed when people get their pitchforks out at any mention of AI art. I also consider myself a pretty decent amateur artist. I draw, I paint, I 3D model. I also like working with the more core technologies of AI. I have a horse in both races, so to speak.

    But this post, this post makes me feel like one of those pitchfork-wielders that typically annoy me. Why? Because you’ve depicted the artist as a rude snob who looks down on poor people, and is thereby getting their just deserts and having their smugness deflated now that they’re no longer needed. This is such a wildly inaccurate perception of artists. 9999/10000 artists make probably less than $40,000/yr in the U.S. Most of them could make more money doing something else, but they don’t, because they love art. They aren’t looking down on poor people, they are poor people.

    And no, $60 really isn’t enough. Nobody is getting paid enough these days. Do you have any skills or crafts that took you 4 years of work to become even barely good enough at that someone would even consider hiring you? And if so, how would you like it if someone asked you to work for days at a rate below minimum wage? Don’t people deserve to have not just subsistence lives, but nice happy lives in return for creating something nice and happy for you?

    No artist is sneering at your low commission offer on account of you being poor. The sneering is that, you can spend $60 on something that you don’t need whatsoever, whereas they likely need your $60 to buy something like food. These are people who live ENTIRELY off what people pay them for their work, no wage, no tip, etc. How could you ever look down on them for wanting to have a nice life, while at the same time wanting what they provide? It’s fine if you’re not willing to pay $260 for their work, but it’s not fine to look down on them for it, and it’s nonsense to characterize them as a judgemental snob. Unless you’re trying to commission Jeff Koons or something, any artist you talk to is struggling to get by just like everyone else. You aren’t “serving them right” or “teaching them a lesson” by going to AI instead. You’re just making it harder for them to make a living doing what they love, and regardless of whether AI does it better than them, or another artist is willing to live a shittier life for that and therefore charge a lower price, that’s nothing to be proud of.

    I don’t want to be mean or make you feel bad, though, I just want you to stop and think about what it must feel like to be a poor artist and see something like this. No doubt they’re suffering extra competition as a result of AI, but should we revel in that? If in my small town, I have a neighbor who makes a decent living by charging $20/ticket to his guitar concerts, and then one day another guy moves in, who plays way better my neighbor, and only charges $10/ticket…such that eventually my neighbor can’t afford to make a living playing his music any more and picks up a job he hates instead…That’s just a shitty situation. And I’m not going to go as far as many others do and say you’re bad for buying the $10 tickets from the new guy. I get it, you’re struggling too, we all are. You want some joy for the lowest price you can get it, and if it’s better, why not? But that doesn’t mean we need to turn our noses up at our neighbor and deem his shows “overpriced” - especially if he’s already living on less money than his patrons to begin with.








  • That’s not why anyone abstains from voting. People abstained from voting for Democratic candidates because they felt that they are controlled opposition, who only slow the rate of decline temporarily before the pendulum swings back to Republicans to do the dirty work. The only way to break that cycle is to force the Democrats to run better representatives of the people’s interests, and the only way to do that is to deprive them of power when they run shitty candidates like Kamala and want you to vote for them just because Trump is worse. This is the same thing that’s been happening since the 80s, and if people would have stopped falling for it back then, it wouldn’t have got as bad as it is now. If Kamala had won, we’d still be heading towards he same horrible destination, it would just be slowed down a bit. You could argue that slowing it down is still better than letting it go full speed ahead, and that’s true, but only in the short term. At some point we need to pay the price to turn the ship around.

    I don’t know if you find this line of reasoning convincing, but at least try to remember that the reason people abstain from voting is not them being picky or perfectionist. It’s them trying to look at things in a longer-term, greater-good sort of way. I have a 60 year old friend who spent her whole life voting for Democrats she didn’t really like. What did it get her? Bush, Obama, Trump’s first time, Biden. And the possibility of Kamala. And you do realize that if Kamala had won, we’d just be getting all this same Trump shit but a few years later, right? That was her reward for voting “blue no matter who”: the same fucked up situation we’re in now. So she’s tired of it, she doesn’t want to vote anymore for someone who won’t make things better. Her only hope is that starving the Democrats out will force them to eventually run someone who might actually change things in the same aggressive, effective way that the conservatives always manage to achieve.

    Again. It’s not about “I only vote for someone who perfectly agrees with me”, and in fact the people who abstain from voting are most likely people who have voted MANY times in the past for people they don’t even like at all, so it’s a really misguided accusation.