Creativity comes with the work

 
Liked The growing backlash against AI by tante (tante.cc)
Famous film critic Roger Ebert once said “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.” and the booing is people coming back to realizing this simple fact. You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work. In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.

Tracy Durnell

18 Mar 2024 at 23:39

Our lives, commodified

 
Quoted In Cringe Video, OpenAI CTO Says She Doesn’t Know Where Sora’s Training Data Came From by Maggie Harrison Dupré (Futurism)
Historically, when someone told you to be careful of what you post online, the reasoning was something akin to "you might regret that later" — and not "a multibillion-dollar AI company might turn a profit by vacuuming that Facebook video of you and your family, or a goofy YouTube video you made with your friends, into a generative AI model."

Ok so I don’t get how this works:

A judge in California has largely dismissed copyright claims brought by three artists against AI image generators Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DeviantArt… The three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — immediately ran into problems as two of them — McKernan and Ortiz — did not register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office.

When the copyright office FAQs assure you:

Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

And given Midjourney specifically called out the names of other artists they wanted to be able to reproduce… does this not show intention to compete, which is what the recent Andy Warhol lawsuit lost over? Is this one of those you-have-to-be-a-lawyer for it to make sense things?

Tracy Durnell

18 Mar 2024 at 23:31

Exposure to vacuum

 
Bookmarked Human Exposure to Vacuum by Geoffrey A. Landis (geoffreylandis.com)
A frequently asked question is: how realistic is the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where astronaut Bowman makes a space-walk without a helmet? How long could a human survive if exposed to vacuum? Would you explode? Would you survive? How long would you remain conscious? The quick answers to these questions are: Clarke got it about right in 2001. You would survive about a ninety seconds, you wouldn't explode, you would remain conscious for about ten seconds.

Tracy Durnell

17 Mar 2024 at 21:37

Not your strongman

 
Quoted The Strongman Fantasy by Timothy Snyder (Thinking about...)
Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be *your* strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.

Tracy Durnell

17 Mar 2024 at 20:32

Tradwives are comforting propaganda

 
Bookmarked Tradwives are levelling up by Günseli Yalcinkaya (Dazed Digital)
From Nara Smith to Gwen The Milkmaid, tradwives make up some of the biggest influencers on social media – but why are we so invested in their lives?

“But the home and the family and the body of the woman herself has never really been a place to escape from capitalism,” says Rachel O’Dwyer, a lecturer in Digital Cultures at Dublin’s NCAD who spoke on the topic at this year’s transmediale festival in Berlin. “It was always ground zero, the place where the good feelings for the good life and capitalism were shored up and set afloat.”

See also:

What is considered “political”?

Cultural coercion and the question of choice

Culture war: meat and masculinity

The Politics of Kitchen Design

As the viewer, there’s an obvious allure to this lobotomised vision of domesticity for the same reason that we obsess over the interior lives of the rich and famous. We know it’s unrealistic but it’s also a soothing way to tap out of our own less-than-satisfactory lives for the same reason you might tune into an ASMR video or watch an ambient show on Netflix.

Can it be online rubbernecking if it’s intentionally performative? 🤔 I watched the bagel making video the article linked and found myself repelled by the POV even though it shouldn’t be weird to make your partner a nice anniversary meal. I think I was dumbfounded at the idea she’d drag herself out of bed early, heavily pregnant, and make bagels *and* cream cheese from scratch. I can even get the bagels if they don’t have a bakery nearby — grocery store bagels suck — but the cream cheese??? Let yourself sleep in, girl. He’ll love the bagels just as much at 11am as 9am.

I think it lands with me because I have made cream cheese from scratch — but because I wanted to, not because my husband expected me to. And, I have since recognized that I was trying way too hard on the handmade foods, and I could save my energy. In fact, my husband has encouraged me to prioritize my interests and free time over spending a ton of time cooking. When I cook something complicated, it’s my choice.

Eleanor Janega lays out the underlying misunderstanding (and misinformation) of tradwife thinking:

The tradwife movement is particularly tragic not only because it lends credence to those who want to define womanhood as a biological state that necessitates childbearing, but because of the idea that women working outside the home is modern and bourgeois. Most women until the 19th century held jobs such as farm workers or specialist artisans, though they were generally expected to see to the children and home when they returned from work. The idea that women had no business outside the home not only erases working-class women but was also a short-lived one that peaked in the later Victorian and early Edwardian eras.

Calls for a ‘return’ to a non-existent past are seductive precisely because it did not exist.

 

See also:

Women’s voices, women’s choices

How momfluencers affect the value society puts on care work

The Burden of Dinner and Learning to Say No

History and fascist speak

Trojan tweets

Tracy Durnell

17 Mar 2024 at 04:55

Exploitative arbitrage

 
Replied to The Dystopian "Young Indian Method" by Jason KoeblerJason Koebler (404 Media)
“Do not be scared to get rid of any indians slacking, wasting time, or offering poor quality within the team. Remember, these guys are easily replaceable. They are exactly like soldiers,” it says. 

Tim Ferris was telling people to do this fifteen years ago. It was icky in The Four Hour Workweek, and it’s icky now. (Can people stop idolizing him please?) This sounds blatantly racist though which I don’t remember 4HWW being.

Tracy Durnell

16 Mar 2024 at 03:21

Weeknotes: March 9-15, 2024

 Win of the week: finished everything I needed to get done!

Looking forward to: veging out this weekend — had a little too much to do this week for my energy levels!

Stuff I did:

  • Researched and emailed and connected with possible subconsultants for a new project
  • Developed a draft scope of work for the project
  • Downloaded all my tax documents and filled out the organizer for my new accountant (now that I have freelance income, taxes are way more complicated)
  • Sat in on a college class to watch students’ final presentations
  • Baked Smitten Kitchen’s blueberry pancake cobbler (after a previous day disaster of rancid pancake mix 😿)
  • Researched rug options for a new space and ordered a relatively cheap one (on sale!) from Target
  • Virtual appointment with my nutritionist to talk about how to eat differently without a gallbladder
  • Took my first walk around the block (half a mile) since surgery
  • Finished my sister’s birthday playlist — only a few weeks late 😅
  • Got two (!?) emails from people who found me on nownownow.com (this has never happened before)
  • Replied to an email interview
  • Reviewed a friend’s essay
  • Went to Homebrew Website Club

Dinners:

  • Impossible chicken burger
  • White bean and mushroom stew 👍 (added carrots)
  • Sushi takeout – veggie tempura roll and unagi roll
  • Baked pasta with vegetables
  • Shake Shack — veggie burger
  • Indian takeout — salmon tikka + naan
  • Leftover baked pasta + fried egg + romaine lettuce with sesame ginger dressing

Reading:

  • Read Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words 👍👍 by Eddie Robson
  • Ordered New Feast by Greg and Lucy Malouf and The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
  • Bought ebook of Rose/House by Arkady Martine
  • DNF’d The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
  • Sent my library a request for personalized book recommendations for spec fic novellas and they said they’d get back to me within 21 days 😂 Actually it took them five; I’d already read two of their nine recommendations, but there were at least two books that sounded intriguing in their suggestions 🤞(Once More Upon a Time by Roshani Chokshi and Linghun by Ai Jiang)

Pretty stuff I saw:

New music I listened to:

Website changes:

Nature notes:

  • Heard the frogs chorusing in the pond across the street (they may have been at it longer but I haven’t been in my office in the evenings lately)
  • Saw two robins using the birdbath, haven’t seen anyone in it in months — a junco was kinda loitering, waiting its turn, but as soon as the first robin left the second one jumped in and the junco noped out
Tracy Durnell

16 Mar 2024 at 02:51

Resources for divesting your retirement

 I’m generally an index fund investor, with one (poorly performing) green energy fund, but I do feel wary about the impacts of climate change on the marketplace. I see a reckoning (“market adjustment”) happening in the next 5-10 years — from climate, from the housing crisis, from workers getting laid off and deskilled and gigified, from corporations stripping their brand and products for ca$h — but I don’t know what to do about it finance-wise. These might be a place for me to start researching…

Fossil Free Funds

Invest your values

AmplifyETFs

Tracy Durnell

13 Mar 2024 at 03:49

Prioritizing locals

 
Watched

Wow, clearly whatever they’ve changed to protect the vicunas is working! I suspect keeping the community connected and carefully monitoring the commons so that all may benefit is a big factor.

I appreciate this highlights a valid question: should local craftspeople be granted higher access to valuable local materials than export markets? The shawl-maker they feature could earn more through her skilled craftsmanship, but she’s denied access to enough materials. Who’s decided that an Italian vicuna wool coat is more important to supply than a local artisan?

A common thread between these videos: local farmers and producers are taking only a bare portion of the profits because they don’t have local facilities suitable for processing the raw materials into more valuable forms. Instead, they’re exported and other countries reap the profits from processing.

I recently learned that a WPA project in my city was a community cannery; in exchange for 30% of their crop, people could have their produce canned at the facility, and the collected food went to families in need. We have lost some of this collectivist, community-rooted thinking. It seems many communities could be served by cooperatives.

Tracy Durnell

12 Mar 2024 at 22:02

Anything can be treated as a craft

 
Watched These melons can sell for as much as $22,500 each in Japan from Insider
Melons are grown up and down Japan and they're serious business. In May 2019, two melons from Hokkaido sold at auction for just over $45,000.

I thought this video would be silly but I was blown away by the farmer’s ethos of nurturing one perfect melon from each plant. This is a culture that values care and process. I’ve read about how this impacts Japanese garden design but hadn’t considered how the same philosophy might extend to food crops.

Tracy Durnell

12 Mar 2024 at 21:20



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