gattsuru
6d ago
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, there's seems a pretty weird mix of 'awkward substitutions that probably should just wait for an Amazon delivery instead' (worchestershire sauce), 'not exactly traditional but workable' (fresh chili, green onions, arguably ginger), 'could work as a stir fry, but stretching the limit from americanizing to just bastardizing' (ketchup, that much sugar) and 'what the actual fuck' (breaking the noodles, olive oil, boiling them before pan cooking).
To be fair, he doesn't seem to promoting it as a traditional pad thai and a few other recipes include pretty bastardized versions, too (cacio e pepe e boullion?).
gattsuru
13d ago
Yeah, the original there were a handful of unlock events for most of the status and health level gambits. They could have used a bit more granularity and evenness (why is ally: lowest hp or foe: lowest hp a mid-game thing?), but it did help a bit. And the ones you could get from chests in the original also avoided the whole 'giant list of shit to buy' problem Zodiac Age had.
In exchange, Zodiac Age hide a lot of spells that were previously buyable by putting them in chests. Which, imo, feels a lot worse. Though at least it did fix the damage limit that made a lot of those higher-end spells useless.
Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until (arguably) the back half of the last book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.
While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like is a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city (though that happens a lot too). The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.
gattsuru
4d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
In theory, the term's pretty clearly picked to mimic federal obscenity-to-minors jurisprudence from Ginsburg, which... is a clusterfuck, but supposedly trades socially redeeming values against what extent the material is 'patently offensive to prevailing standards of what is appropriate'. In practice, I'd expect the Texas AG's going to act more based on what he thinks he can get away with and who makes particularly good news headlines.
I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners.
There's some good arguments for this policy (and some against: do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?). There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended). You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.
I dunno. I was a late bloomer. I don't think I have a good model for a lot of what'd be best, here, or even what a lot of potential harms would be. There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.
But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.
I'd expect it's even less good than that: the end result's just going to make the stuff operated by American businesses less profitable and crush smaller actors, and scare straight websites that intermix adult and non-adult content.
As far as I can understand it, the timeline is:
-
In 1983, T.B. was involuntarily committed in Ancora. There's some skepticism over exactly what degree of behavior this involved (ie, TB says he was violent pre-admission and then some time later was released after questioning, Ancora wrote that he was violent after admission), but T.B. does not claim that the commitment was illegitimate or trolling.
-
In 2022, T.B. went to LifeStream for outpatient treatment claiming interest in treatment for anxiety (and depression?), but really wanting to get a 'I'm not crazy-crazy' note. Neither anxiety nor depression would be disqualifying for firearms purchase even if he did have them (probably. NJ's a little arbitrary here).
T.B. was not trying to undo the LifeStream visit, but to remove the records about the Ancora commitment. The court held that the standard was not just that " their illness has either "substantially improved" or is in "substantial remission" since their discharge from a mental health facility" -- which it clearly had -- but that T.B. had to actively prove that the expungement of his Ancora record was in the public interest, and as a result it was not sufficient to demonstrate he was not actively dangerous. They had evidence that the man's mental health had improved, and none that it had not, and decided that this left the question unanswered and unanswerable. They had evidence that the man was not dangerous (literally "speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety"); the judge ducked it because the judge determined on his own that TB might forget a safety maybe.
It's possible (even more-likely-than-not) that the courts would have been able to withhold expungement under a more serious standard focusing on dangerousness or on continuing mental illness. But the issue is that they didn't have to actually interact with that more serious standard or any standard at all, and Rov_Scam's jumping in to inform us that it's tots reasonable anyway.
EDIT: you are correct that there was no 2A analysis involved.
gattsuru
9d ago
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I'd argue Ellison a few other bits going on (eg, themes of self-sacrifice, some of the hate including legitimate criticisms, a not-IFLS-style scienticism), but I've got of tolerance for well-aimed hate, and I can understand his public persona as a lot deeper a disappointment than Moore-style stuff.
gattsuru
10d ago
Trying to work my way through NoStarchPress's Computer Graphics from Scratch (caveat: got it deeply discounted during a Humble Bundle, definitely wouldn't pay full price). It's a little obnoxious because I've dabble enough in newer technologies that a lot of the early tutorials are annoyingly useless, but I'm also finding all the places I've missed conventions or misunderstood processes before.
Blanchard draws from wayyyy too little experience. I can give you furry examples of autoandrophiles in the gay male, cis woman, and trans man spheres, and even point some pretty clear distinctions between the autoandrophilic (cw: ftm in shibari and y-fronts, artist is nonbinary and I have no clue birth gender) and not-auto-androphilic (cw: ftm in panties, artist is straight male) treatments.
And that's been around for a while. The first Drayk 'intersex' commission I can find was pre-2010, and trying to find a good word that covers what people want in the fantasy (since some people want themselves, but transitioned, and other people want a character that never had to transition) was both getting a lot of controversy and eventually got an awkward compromise on e621 in early 2016.
gattsuru
11d ago
Yeah, a lot of the gameboy- or ds-form factor devices seem like they're extruded from a press somewhere. Miyoo and TrimUI seem like they're at least aimed at enthusiasts, but most of what actually get advertised seem like glorified ewaste aimed more to be good gifts than good things you'd want to buy for yourself.
That project sounds like it'd be a blast, albeit also a pretty sizable challenge. The MiSTer is pretty impressive tech, if probably more dedicated to fidelity than I could recognize. I've heard far more mixed things about the Retrons, although I do appreciate having something more legitimate than 'tots-ripped-yourself' rom-dedicated machines.
gattsuru
13d ago
I'm pretty explicitly spelling out why the alternative wouldn't be judged much better, given the background and details available.
gattsuru
19d ago
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Not in the US, in good weather, at daytime. Expect 10-15% over to be acceptable. Rain, snow, or true nighttime off an interstate, speed limits are more strict to their posted number. Other countries can be more aggressive; Australia going 1 kph over too often can cost you your license (though in turn, their norms for road trains are near-suicidal by US standards).
- On the interstate and state roads, yes. Residential roads, I'd consider it rude to get into the left lane for a left turn more than a couple miles ahead of time, but it'd still not be a norm violation and in heavier traffic might be a good idea.
- At lower speeds, it's just impolite. Higher speeds (50+ mph), I'd consider it a norm violation unless they've been really stupid (eg matching speed, ignoring or not seeing turn signal for several hundred meters).
- No.
- a. How long after sunrise or before complete sunset do you need to turn on headlights, and what amount of rain should you? b. What sort of load, if any, in an open truck bed, before you need at least one ratchet strap?
gattsuru
20d ago
With AI image generation, there are so many levels of randomness and frustrated choice that it's hard to imagine how a user could work for years to achieve progressively greater mastery. Don't most commercial models actively work to disrupt direct user control, e.g. by adding a system prompt you can't see and running even the words of your prompt through intermediate hidden LLM revisions before they even get to the image generator?
Commercial models are usually pretty limited in your control, but local models can be surprisingly deep in terms of technical skill.
There aren't many people working in the space yet, but there's a lot you can do. Inpainting allows controlled redrawing of selected areas, LoRAs (and, previously, Dreambooth) can be used to encode characters or things or styles or perspectives, Image Segmentation can control layout, ControlNet can be used to manipulate pose or composition, so on. Currently, first-frame-last-frame-packing video generation are pretty focused on something very akin to putting together a 'storyboard', and the most plausibly consistent that storyboard is drastically changes how consistent the output image can be. Local AIgen workflows can look very different from talking to a midjourney bot.
Some of these technical skills even have a little overlap: knowing things like the names of different paint or painting techniques, or how camera lenses work, or what poses people can actually do, or why composition matters, feed back into even prompting and heavily feeds into these more technical uses.
The big difference is that (with the arguable exception of storyboarding) these are technical skills; they'll show you how well you achieve what you're trying to do, without necessarily changing whether what you want to do looks good. Conventional artists always had a little bit of that -- drawing a circle or line to improve hand coordination doesn't inherently teach where to use those primitives -- but AIgen does not really have a good way to develop the skill of taste beyond personal preference.
Technically, my first car I owned was a "fancy German car", and even a Mercedes Benz... that was older than I was when I bought it, less than a month's wages as a part-time dishwasher, and about as unreliable as that combination sounds. Probably more a fault on the previous owner than the German Engineering, but even after a full fuel line purge and a new fuel filter, had to clean out the carburetor on a biweekly basis.
Since then it's been the typical Camry-or-nearest-neighbor that I'll buy heavily used, and then drive until the engine grenades itself (thank you Saturn timing chains) or the next oil change isn't economical.
I'm not a car person. It's nice to have something where the muffler isn't falling off, and I don't mind doing the elbow work for maintenance, but if the car's in decent shape I'll take a salvage title Hyundai or a Lesbian-Brand Hatchback as happily as a Tesla or a Big Fuckoff Truck.
gattsuru
21d ago
I'll caveat that tumblr has picked a 'third way' -- if you can't depend on finding the flaws in the machines or smashing the machines, you can start looking at and promoting artists with their art. Yes, an AIgenner could theoretically 'put their steps in', having a long history of progressing art skills and process work for a given piece, maybe not even fraudulent at that, but it's not really what almost any will.
((With the advances we're seeing, I'd expect this to go the way of Amish furniture -- great technical skill and often unusual approaches to a work and usually better when available, but not always able to do those things.))
... though I'm not sure that will matter. People want to make principled stands over copyright or intellectual property, even if they're sometimes a little Janus-faced. But the Luddites cared about their work, and their pay, and not without reason; modern AIgen concerns much more heavily revolve around these matters than tracing II: trace harder. A thousand galleries and retweets and reblogs do not cash make; as an artist, Attention Is <Not> All You Need. A lot of mainstream artists historically depended, both for cash and for opportunity to develop their skills, on make-day work that is completely separate from other reputation and reliability trends pointed to direct sales to their audiences. You can't break the machines for this, you aren't involved in deciding to buy or not, and you can't judge the artist because they might never be named.
Tumblr and a lot of fandom spaces have moved to merch or patreon funding, and that's kinda worked on the edges for the most successful or the most second-job strivery. But I don't think it scales.
Most furry spaces have largely gotten pretty strict rules about aigen, sometimes aligned to the points you've highlighted and sometimes not, and the end result is pretty goofy.
E621, for example, prohibits AI excepting use for "backgrounds (treated like using a photo as a background, quality rules apply); for artwork that references, but does not directly use, AI generated content; and for audio in video posts such as WebM." The moderators will explain, when pinged, exactly how a particular piece falls, and from my understanding are pretty clear and direct about things. I don't know of any sfw examples, but leeto's 4930019 (cw:M/M and M/F) is an example where AI had been used to create pose references, but the final file had never been touched by any AIgen program, and moderators said it was at the very border but still acceptable (though this scared the artist off enough to move to conventional digital pose generators). The rules are workable!
But they end up in a situation where half of the pixels in a particular artpiece are AIgen and it's okay, including a lot of stuff that's setting the stage, and then another piece where AIgen was only used to add some shadow or shading and that's unacceptable. More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting. Rick Griffin got a piece banned from FurAffinity (and, presumably, would not be allowed on e621) for some tree renders and shading that I don't think anyone would have noticed had he not spelled it out. Obvious errors in logic or consistency can sometimes point to AIgen when an artist doesn't disclose it (or show other faults that trigger other quality rules), and there's a certain look to some of the most common AIgen, but you can and I have put out hundreds of pieces in an hour with wildly different styles and pretty good image quality consistency.
((And, on the flip side, a bad actor can actively use AI for what AI proponents would still consider stealing. Img2img with someone else's art can have far less actual effort than direct reference or even hand-tracing on a lightbox, but can be different enough to bypass a lot of conventional phash checks or even eyeball tests for 'novelty' and 'uniqueness'. If a small-name account starts doing it, it's hard to catch and harder still to persuasively demonstrate.))
But you can also just kinda have counterintuitive and inconsistent results, and just that's how things are. I'm not even sure some arbitrary rules would be bad -- an art gallery that allowed some limited number of upload per account per day (and restricted alts) using AIgen could avoid a lot of the spam and quality control problems that places which haven't banned the stuff often run into. The rules and points being made up is pretty common.
I've mostly been focused on image generators. Between improvements to LoRA development processes along with Wan's image-to-video and first-frame-last-frame-to-video, there's been some pretty massive advances in the last six months or so. It's still hard to get consistency in animation, along with long generation times the reasons why why all those animation shots floating around tend to just be a couple seconds long, but that we're at the point where 'make this arbitrary subject into a turntable motion effect' is getting complaints about background consistency is not what I imagined just a couple years ago. They don't always work, but we're not talking 'success' in the sense 'that it can do it at all' anymore.
I keep hoping that this'll end up being a useful tool for artists -- someone with a real eye for the medium and a good sketching hand should be able to use this to crank out in days what would otherwise take weeks or even months of dedicated work, in the same way that two years ago plain StableDiffusion could save artists a ton of time with crosshatching or rosettes or shading -- but there's not enough people really messing in the field to say for sure. Even for those few working in this there's not a lot publicly visible with how many conventional galleries ban the stuff, and a lot who might be some of the most adept at it already have workflows that fill in many of these gaps for comic- or even animation-level work.
AI voicework has a lot of potential. I've toyed with it a little, though getting decent emotion through is still a bit beyond me. The workflows are still a little too finicky to use real-time, but eventually getting an Emet Selch together would be fun for the memes.
I've been trying to get a full workflow for image-to-3d-print and image-to-CNC together. 2D works are easy, if not especially entertaining, but it should be well within the existing tech to do a lot of creative stuff, here. Almost have Meshroom to a point where it'll work, but not there yet.
Haven't been able to get any of the offline ones to write reasonable fiction, and I don't particularly trust the online ones for anything more complicated. For conventional fiction, it takes a frustrating amount of prompting to get a work that's surprising enough to be interesting without swerving into M. Night Shamalayan territory; trying to get exofiction or a counterfactual story or anything complex with viewpoint tends to go batshit (and for smut, the line between interesting and disgusting is very thin and hard-to-encode just for my own use). But I haven't messed with it too much.
gattsuru
24d ago
Fair, and maybe a decade or two ago a different focus on the side of trans advocates would have avoided some controversial landmines had they made that decision then. But path dependence is a nightmare; at this point, even assuming that committed (left-?) civil-left-libertarians exist in enough numbers to be a meaningful political force, I don't think this battle of terminology makes the top-ten list, and maybe even not the top-twenty list, of most alienating things.
gattsuru
5hr ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
gattsuru
5d ago
I am not a lawyer, nevermind a class action lawsuit lawyer. The federal government's lawyer said that there were questions of typicality and gave a few groups, primarily based on the distinction between whether parents were temporarily permitted into the United States at the time of the birth. If he got his way, this would point to a couple different class actions...
But class action plaintiffs can prove they are typical members of a class by bringing more members into the plaintiff side of the bench; if you have plaintiffs on record as belonging to each of these groups, you defeat a typicality challenge.
This could be an issue for other universal injunctions, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on this one.
gattsuru
7d ago
He didn't really break out until mid-March of this year. He was getting some local coverage before that, and it's very interesting how much of that is puff pieces with little actual 'when what where why' behind them, but even the actually newsworthy stuff wasn't NYC-wide newsworthy.
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
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