#not trying to gatekeep btw. or say that you have to have read the comics to like any of the characters from it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

trekkie-polls · 4 months

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About

Hello! This is a new blog. I’m still figuring out the details.

I’ve been a star trek fan my whole life - it started with getting in trouble in kindergarten for staying up to watch late night tos reruns, and I watched all of tos, ds9, and voy as they aired. I tried ent when it first aired and didn’t care for it. Later as part of a project to watch all episodes in in-world chronology, I did watch all of ent. Still didn’t care for it. But it is trek. I watch all new trek, and for the most part I love it (pauses to side-eye Picard season three), but don’t have the same knowledge base with it because I haven’t rewatched it as many times. I’ve seen all of the movies but I honestly just tend to forget them when I’m thinking about what’s happened in cannon. I think they live in a separate part of my brain? I haven’t read the books or comics yet but I do spend a lot of time on Memory Beta.

Right now I’m rewatching lower decks & tos and that’s what I have on my mind.

Anyway, this is all to say that I plan to be inclusive with all star trek media on this blog, but not everything will get equal attention. There are just some things I know more about or am more interested in.

In particular, there are a limited number of options in tumblr polls, and there is a lot of star trek media out there. I make sure to put “other in tags”, or combine titles in a choice, in cases where every item can’t have its own little box. Yes sometimes my personal opinions influence how I break that up, and that’s ok, because this is something I do in my free time for fun.

You are very welcome to submit polls & posts. If you do, and I repost them, I’ll credit you unless you prefer to stay anonymous. Btw - this is how you can get more content around your favorite series if you’re not seeing as much as you’d like.

Right now I don’t have any rules about submissions. It’s possible I won’t post something that’s clearly prejudiced, malicious etc… but I haven’t figured out exactly where I draw that line yet. I don’t plan to gatekeep what is and isn’t trek. I have personal opinions about what I enjoy and what I don’t enjoy, but star trek belongs to everyone and it’s illogical to try to draw lines around what is “legitimate” trek for everyone.

I haven’t really figured out what to say about trigger warnings, spoilers, and nsfw. I don’t plan for this to be especially nsfw, but I do plan to cuss and touch on adult concepts sometimes (I mean how can we not talk about the many forehead vaginas). I also plan to add content/ trigger warnings that are obvious to me but I’m far from an expert about what the most important ones to include are. And finally spoilers are hard because most star trek media has been around forever and the fandom is here to talk about what happened in it, but some is brand new and it can be hard to stay completely caught up, and even the oldest series are new to someone. So I’m making an effort to consider triggering content, spoilers, and nsfw but can’t responsibly make promises on any of them.

And last but not least, I’m happy to block people who call me names. I’m here on my free time for fun.

Tldr:

This blog will be a mixture of:

Polls I make

Other star trek posts I find interesting

Polls & posts you submit

If I see a star trek poll I find interesting I may write the author and ask for permission to reblog here

This blog will not:

Gatekeep what is & isn’t star trek

Be completely impartial to my interest

Be completely sfw or spoiler free, or include all important trigger & content warnings

P.S. I’m in this for the tags. I absolutely love reading through everyone’s theories, favorites, stories, etc…. So if you want to tip this blog please do it by adding your star trek thoughts :)

#trekkie polls

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blurb-brain · 1 year

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I have not yet tried this for myself but I WILL read about it further, do some more research, wait for a bit more review, and THEN try it out. What is promising is that it can be downloaded and used offline instead of online where the upload-download process is in danger of data mining.

Now, this is not a panacea. The AI arms race is FAST and constantly developing (mid journey can do hands properly now btw). The developers have also chosen not to make this open source in an effort to increase security. This means it can get outdated very quickly. However this is a good place to start and CONTINUE. If you have the skills and/or interest to join projects like these, perhaps this thread is a good place to start.

Some thoughts regarding AI:

I put Artificial Intelligence on an automation spectrum with Fully Handmade/Manually Done/Live Performance/etc on one end and artificial intelligence on the other. Between those lay many tools that reduce human effort, time, and cost. I would then add that as you lose more and more of that, you lose the soul because what is art if not an expression of human soul?

Take music for example. You have a song performed live by singer/s and one instrument or a band or an entire orchestra. Move down one step on that spectrum and suddenly you can fit all those instruments on a keyboard and perform with the singers. The keyboard still requires musicality, physical hand skill to play, and some advance programming of rifts for the different instruments (and some choral, wordless singing) to somehow come in but still. That's a whole lot of people who have suddenly become "unecessary". Then move a step again and all that that keyboard can do can be played on a midi pad. Requires musicality still and a lot more pre-programming but the physical skill set to play it is lesser but still has a live element like during DJ concerts. Step down again and all this can be done on a computer. It can do all the previous but live element is now gone. I thought singers were still safe but with the recent AI on copying a specific person's voice, lyric style, music style, and just overall song style, that's gone too. Congratulations you don't need anyone but one person with an idea. You save a lot of money and can make a lot more than what you invested.

Thanks, we all know that musicians and artists are the jobs that get paid so much that removing them from the equation is anti-gatekeeping (eye-roll & sarcasm).

That is ONE thing I will allow AI, that one person with a half heard melody, a sweeping symphony, an impossible world inside their soul and no idea, time, and money to realize it can have the tools to do so.

But what I find absolutely UNACCEPTABLE is the theft of style, of identity. In art school, realistic drawing is taught in first year. With enough time, anyone can do it. But what sets you apart? Why can a stick figure hyperbolic satire comic be more wildly successful than a painstakingly detailed, scarily accurate painting of an entire city? Why is it also absolutely hilarious for a character painted in the Rembrandt style to be in a pop color, cartoonish grocery? It's about life, the connection, the commiseration, the lenses in which we experience it and the joy in finding something that echoes it exactly. It's so hard to make it big in the arts. We're called starving artists for a reason people. It's not just about technical skill. There's that something more, something about that person specifically, their X-Factor (tm) as they say. To then take that away, filter it down to code, and mass produce it is... it's dehumanizing. It's theft. It's an erasure. And for what? To save money?

What I've seen is that it's the people who struggle to earn a living who's jobs are most easily taken over by automation. Save money, destroy lives I guess. If art is just a commodity for quick money then what is even the point.

This has also given me severe trust issues. Can't trust photos, can't trust videos, can't trust sound bites. Can't trust frikkin anything. I used to think that the Assassin's Creed motto of "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted" was such an edge Lord, emo phrase to go parading around but the older I get, the more true it becomes and I'm so upset about it.

#artists #protection against AI #protection against having your art used for machine learning to copy your style and render you obsolete WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT #not a panacea #but a good place to start and CONTINUE

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l-ii-zz · 3 years

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I've been a long time fan of yours & that pic made me feel really uncomfortable. I didn't know why till you posted that anon. Don't you think that even if Zim isn't autistic in your au hes still a mentally disabled adult being treated like a child? I'm super grossed out by how you handled this. Im unfollowing. I hope you take your next disability criticism better than this

My god, Karen. Can’t believe I have to explain the context of the comic.

But first of all, I think it’s important to say that it’s not okay to generalize a concept or idea about a fictional character and believe that everyone should treat them that way, and therefore, everyone have to post and make assumptions with such special treatment.

It’s understandable and makes sense for people to headcanon Zim as autistic, but to make assumptions and to state as fact that he's autistic coded or “mental disable” itself is gatekeeping. It is just a simple headcanon, not coded.

And No, Zim being defective is not a “proof that he is autistic or mentally disable”, it was never explained why irkens can be defective. Therefore, fans can freely make their own theories or headcanons about it. I have my own headcanons.

I personally don’t have the concept of Zim being autistic or “mentally disable”, so all the stuff that I post and draw are not supposed to be seen with such concept. If you got it the wrong way and got triggered for literally nothing, it’s your problem, not mine.

You can make your own assumptions and get triggered for an innocent comic. It’s not on my hands anyway. Goodbye, I hope you can take your next sjw criticism better than this.

Oh yeah, btw, the context:

Odi and Lu don’t see Zim as a baby, but they care very much for his well, maybe even too much. they owe him anyway, because more of a good friend, Zim is literally a hero for them (Remember that Zim ruined Impeding Doom I, which it caused the retreat of the Irken Armada, avoiding the Invasion of thousands of planets, including Eruka).

Therefore, the only way they can show their gratitude is giving their hospitality with healthy food, warm clothes and helping in anything that Zim and Dib could need. This is their way to spoil him, and not even them, all the Eruka citizens love to spoil Zim (and Dib) this way, but they are oblivious that it annoys Zim. Not to mention that Odi and Lu know what happened to Zim on Earth, so they always worry for him to have breakdowns and they try to always show him in their way how much he means to them. It may be kinda annoying to Zim, but deep down he is grateful for them for being so attentive.

I also like the concept of Zim secretly seeing Odi and Lu as the parental figures he never had when he was very young, and this is why he usually visits them. He loves the attention but he never admits it.

So yeah, as you can read, it has nothing to do with “Zim being mentally disable”.

#mean anon #replies

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cmyk-discourse-blog · 6 years

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Summary #2 Terhi 1.10.18

We met at Aina’s place and had a nice time chatting while Aina served us lovely blueberry pie and tea! It was nice and we had a cozy atmosphere for our chat.

You could say that this time the texts “spoke our language”, we felt more connected to them.

We pondered how some people seem to be “time travelers” -– how can someone come up with something that others discover decades later? Maybe no one listened, or then others are just better in marketing their ideas. Talking about Crane (in the 1900’s) and then Klee and other Bauhaus-people (in the 1920–30’s) and the design principles.

It’s interesting that the rules have always been there, but it took so long for anyone to write them down. Maybe because the language of design/graphics/visuals is so different from text and written language? Again, this division. But, I feel that the design principles have a lot to do how we people are “wired”, how we see beauty in symmetry and colour harmony for example, or feel more excited about ‘dynamic’ shapes and diagonal lines, all that. So behind it all is a universal language with rules, I guess. On top of that there are the values shared in a specific culture and the individual preferences.

We talked about the design rules for a while. Are the rules really needed? We came to the conclusion that you don’t always have to play by the rules, but… (the old cliché/meme) you have to know the rules to break the rules. If you are a trained professional, you can usually spot the works made by unprofessionals. Something’s not quite “right”. Maybe they broke the “wrong rules”? Maybe you can see that they are trying to mimic something cool they saw but didn’t really understand the essence of.

Again, this leads us to the gatekeepers. Do we have to really be so strict? Is only the art/design/craft made by the likes of us good art/design/craft? Does everyone have to have the same background for us to approve it?

But I hope that my education could be seen in the things that I do! Everyone can of course get the Adobe programs and start designing away, I’m not stopping them. People can educate them selves, do online courses, read books, train, sure. It’s just that few of the people who use Photoshop and call themselves graphic designers and make their uncle’s company’s visual identity for free or for a low pay (thus making it hard for the people who actually only work in this industry and don’t do it “as a hobby” to make a living and keep the prices (and the quality of work) reasonable……)

Utkarsh told us that back where he’s from people call graphic design “dtp”–data, typesetting, printing. So it’s considered as something quite practical, people see the designer’s as “photoshop monkeys” who just press the buttons, who execute the stuff without much thinking/effort. Very practical… and stuff just needs to be done, it doesn’t matter what the shop window looks like at long as there’s some information. I mean, I guess it’s the same in here also but maybe people in Finland have been more accustomed to the idea of branding/design as a tool to make their business bloom. If your website looks messy, people won’t trust you. (Of course you shouldn't automatically trust “good-looking”/designed websites either! But this is how we people roll…)

We talked some about infographics. How people in some cases trust more a picture than the text, and in some cases it’s the other way. For example people trust maps. Even though they are as well a human-made artefact as any illustration or (constructed?) photograph. So I was thinking that it would be fun to make a project where in the maps there were all sorts of things that weren’t “true”. “Here be monsters.”

Oona showed us a part of an interview with the movie director David Lynch. Lynch describes the problem with language quite well: At first he struggles how to take his ideas and make them into cinema, to moving images, sound, atmosphere, cuts, all that. Into the language of cinema. Then people ask him: “What does it mean?”, and then he is forced to again translate the movie into words, from the language of cinema to the language of spoken language. He refuses to do so, what it the point? He claims that everyone, somewhere inside of themselves, understood what was meant. They understand it without words. If they have to put it into words, it’s difficult. Then they might say that they didn’t know what it was about. But when someone else describes what they thought it meant – then you disagree, “No, it’s not like that! It’s something like this:…”. So, you did know how you felt about it!

Nice. “The more abstract things are––the more they are open to interpretation.”

Talking about how pictures were seen as inferior to text – not everyone could read, so the educated priests knew all the secrets and the “dum peasants” could only understand the pictures. Picture books are for children, somehow it devalues the words written if there is a picture next to them. In some cases. Like comics. But then again, newspapers? These days you basically have to have a picture related to your text if you want people to stop scrolling their feed and take notice. People also understand pictures with a quick glance quite well. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Maybe you need to study it for a while to get to know all the nuances, but anyway. So which one wins?

Do we have to fight?

Btw everyone of us (in the group) wanted to be a “good craftsman”. (I wanted to write “craftswoman”, but then the quotation marks would have been wrongly used maybe.) It would be interesting to hear the arguments against this. Of course real life hits you in the face, and also for this to be an utopia the craftswoman also needs free time, not to be working all the time. But anyway, yes!, we hate the way people are being used as parts of this money-making machine. There should be something more noble to achieve.

Memes! We all love memes. Some talk about internet-memes. Meme history was interesting. Also the idea of people as vessels for ideas that travel through time and space and mutate.

What’s the connector of these texts that we read this time? Maybe that we get used to stuff, we assume that if things have been some way, then that’s the natural order of things, the way it should be. Even if it’s not, it’s just how we’re USED TO it being. I think this is good and bad. It’s good to build on old knowledge, you don’t have to invent the wheel again. But you have to question things: is this the way things need to be? Is there a better way to do things? STAY ALERT!!!

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