agoodcartoon:

fenrislorsrai:

ct4cd:

agoodcartoon:

i can think of another f word for you pal.

The right cares about literally nothing but their ability to call people slurs without consequences, AGC

I scrolled down too far so just the donkey’s white nose was visible, but the nose itself is a face and now I can’t unsee it.

and now neither can you.

I have no idea if it was intentional but Nose Face is way more ominous looking.

Highlander reboot but it’s about canceling each other

I just encountered a mirror with stick-on mirror appliqués to cover up scratch graffiti

Quarterworld

Hawthorne Blvd.

Portland, OR

there’s a 3-over-1 (3 stories stick-built residential units over a 1-story concrete retail podium, the new urban mid rise idiom) going up nearby that for a while looked like 2 different buildings, separate foundations with separate fences and separate contractor placards, and only clearly one now that it’s being finished and clad

That’s probably to do with being on uneven ground, but I wonder how much that served to tamp down local resistance to the full-block monolithicness

I just told Siri “cancel that, Alexa” out of blankmindedness and she cancelled that

Siri being the spirit of my iPhone

which is (1) weird because I’ve never owned an Amazon device or before said or heard the “Alexa” words aloud in person so I’ve somehow absorbed that as the way to address the computer help even as a hermit

BUT also from a primal UX angle it bugs me that Siri didn’t slap me down hard for calling her Alexa?

pileofknives:

using a laptop for the first time in almost exactly 2 years and it’s startling how much things have been optimized for phones/tablets and how bad they look on “computers” in the interim

Lowkey the last decade proved that libertarians’ concern with age of consent laws was because they levied more importance on obedience to the rule of law than other types of conservative

There’s a My Nationalist Pony dead-tree book now

earlploddington:

pileofknives:

earlploddington:

pileofknives:

I want out of touch crackers to explain every terrible thing to go down in MENA in the next few years through terribly misused AAVE

why would you want this

I’ve been poisoned by irony and sarcasm, and only ridiculous shit like some talking head on CNN calling the prime minister of Lebanon a thot will bring me joy

understandable

From a thread on active shooter training for teachers. And it struck me, I’ve seen this pattern before

1. Unarmed people fight an armed attacker with at-hand materials

2. Specialists study this, identify best practices, teach others

3. That’s it, that’s how you invent a martial art

Developing a martial art for use against long guns is so ‘Merican my heart swells with unironic pride

Apatow Inspired Me to Confront My Fear of the Mob | Penthouse Magazine

So Penthouse Magazine is relaunching with an antiwoke editorial line, opening with a package going after Judd Apatow for, basically, betraying (his own) comedy to perform wokeness in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the mob

Penthouse Australia I hear has been running a while as a lad mag with an alt-lite tone, I don’t know whether there’s a relationship, Penthouse has been bought and sold and licensed out a few ways in the last decades

This represents the second publication (after Quillette) I can recall to specifically launch as antiwoke (since Trump’s election there has been a subtler shift in tone from The Atlantic and Harper’s and NY Mag, and indeed the linked author’s has a column at NY Mag’s women’s vertical), meanwhile you may have noticed woke brands shedding writers as they slim or close

Again, I don’t know the relationship to other institutional manifestations of “Penthouse”, but when you think of publications capable of keeping their funding and distribution channels open even in the face of moralizing activist pressure, you do kinda think of Penthouse, so I suppose there’s a synergy there.

I’m struggling to think what the angle on encouraging a single person to play slots is. Casinos targeting whales individually? Aggravating an addiction so as to improve your positioning in a custody dispute?

lewisandquark:

A new paper from NVIDIA recently made waves with its photorealistic human portraits. Called StyleGAN, the algorithm had a new training dataset pulled from Flickr, with a wider range of ages and skin tones than in other portrait datasets. (If your pictures are on Flickr with the right license, your picture might have been used to train StyleGAN). Thanks to that big dataset, a new method of generating images, and a staggering amount of computer power, its human faces are indeed impressive. But, to prove that their method doesn’t just work for human faces, they also generated bedrooms, and cars… and cats.

The cats are so much fun.

In many ways, generating cats is more of a challenge than generating human faces, since cats can be in so many different poses. It has an easier time generating texture than figuring out where all the legs and tails go.

I’ve noticed that for some reason, whenever it generates kittens, one is normal and the rest are haunted. There must be something difficult about pictures containing multiple subjects.

Its humans are even worse, proving that the difference between it and the version that was impressively good at generating human faces was all in the training data.

Speaking of training data, StyleGAN’s training data was something called LSUN Cat. Evidently, LSUN Cat’s images were sourced from the internet, because when it generated some cats, it added meme text to them, assuming that white blocky lettering is just part of what “cat” is.

It also attempted to generate cats with the Shutterstock watermark, although actually spelling “Shutterstock” proved tricky for it.

Another delightful thing about its internet-derived dataset: quite a lot of the cats look an awful lot like Grumpy Cat. She’s only one cat, but she had a profound impact on what StyleGAN thinks cats look like.

There are far more amazing cats than would fit in this blog post. In this bonus material, I’ve collected a few more of my favorites, including several with meme text, perfect for your internet communication needs. You can get them by entering your email here.

You can look through 100,000 example cats, and generate your own, here.

taxxxon:

darth–nickels:

‘gaslighting’ is going to go the way of ‘triggered’ into that hallowed mausoleum of “words that are actually vitally important but were worked to death through misuse”

This is true, but also I recently heard a middle schooler use “triggered” as a euphemism for being on her period, which probably just goes to show something but I sure don’t know what

one of my fonder subplots is how lesbian tourists are increasingly showing up on the island of Lesbos expecting like Ibiza-as-the-Dinah and the locals are like “…yeah, we’re as eager to make coin off heritage tourism as any Greek and we’ll show you some ruins, but this is straight-up farm country”

Just went out gardening on Feb 6, there’s patches of snow on the grass and all my trees and bushes are budding already

kontextmaschine:

I’d respect the hell out of anti-vaxxers if they were in it to defend and restore the natural habitat of endangered viruses

I posted this on Facebook and the language (“respect… defend and restore the natural habitat”) tripped the algorithm so it kept thinking I was trying to run a fundraiser