Couldn’t absence of any process be a process.

With some intention perhaps.

I guess, why would you even want art without creativity or meaning or intent? Is the goal of art to simply make something nice to look at? That seems to be the way most of the people touting AI art seem to view it.

I just don’t see AI making Fifty Days at Illiam: Shield of Achilles - which really, that kind of beauty in chaos is something that AI artists should be exploring (and was being explored by machine artists in the 70s and 80s.)

It doesn’t really feel like “art” in the making. When I’ve used AI to create an image, it doesn’t feel different from using search terms and tags on an imagebooru, or trying to find a piece of clip art for a presentation.

I think there might be fruit for exploration in digital collage, training ones on models in creative ways… I’m not really seeing anyone using these tools to really “do art” though. I’m seeing lots of anime girls, porn, ShrimpJesus Facebook slop, hamfisted political comics, and occasionally an “artist” crowing over like a generic image of a tiger. I’d like to see better, but I’m not.

Also - if you like making art, I don’t understand the appeal of taking out “process.” You type some keywords, you adjust them if you don’t like what you see.

This might be more personal preference, but something that I’ve come to enjoy working with paint is that you have to wait for it to dry. That it splatters and doesn’t always go where you want it. That the image you have in your head will not ultimately be the image you get on the canvas. That sometimes it’s a process of weeks of dialogue between you and the canvas.

A lot of AI art enthusiasts do seem fixated on product, not process. I don’t know if you are really an “artist” if there isn’t some element of “process” that you are involved with.

She’s was a woman though, they don’t get autism. Autism only looks like a nonverbal little (white) boy in an Autism Speaks commercial who can only eat chicken nuggets.

State institutions are still hellholes.

There needs to be a federal investigation in to Oklahoma’s congregate care homes. Kids still get shipped off to institutions, which are unsafe and unregulated.

Not that all stories need to have morals attached to them, but I think showing older teen protagonists who also struggle with PTSD (the threstrals serve almost as a direct “visual” metaphor) as treating the symptoms of someone who is experiencing some sort of severe psychological shock so callously. It’s the kind of thing Harry might think of doing, because what she tortured him with the pen, but you should have your good protagonist consider how that would make them worse than the bad guys, or maybe have Dumbledore or McGonagall give a speech. It’s not that Harry Potter has to be moralistic, but it does try at times?

Shouldn’t they mentally be flashing back to St Mungo’s - to see how fucked up Neville’s parents were - the way that Bellatrix jokes about it is considered fucked or I think Malfoy also does at a point.

Should Hermoine feel some form of subtle guilt, or, even just respect for a fallen foe? I guess the assumption is she’s not dead and magic medicine can make brains better.

The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.

I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)

It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)

She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.

It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.

Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.

She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)

The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”

Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)

Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.

The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.

The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.

That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.

And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)

She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.

Don’t forget love potions - a girl basically roofies Ron trying to get Harry. Voldemort is evil because his mom drugged his (muggle!) dad, and he left once she stopped drugging him.

Rowling is dealing with sexual trauma, as we know from her eagerness to weaponize it against trans people. But she also seems to have a morality system where anything the Good Guys do is Good, and anything the Bad Guys do is Bad. Whatever happened to Umbridge is something that was so traumatic even the sound can bring her back - and we are showing a character with signs of clear PTSD and with protagonists that think it’s funny to try to make them relive their trauma.

Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling … Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.

‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.

‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.

‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.

‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.

‘No … no …’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming …’

Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.

She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.

The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.

The implication is that she was sexually assaulted by the centaurs.

I am fairly confident (as are my therapists) that I am somewhere on some sort of spectrum. However, when I looked at the process of getting a formal diagnosis, it was several thousand dollars which would not be covered by insurance and would be a full year at least on a waiting list. (I believe they also want to talk to your family…)

The average age of diagnosis for AFAB folks is around 30. Clinicians are not trained in recognizing the way that ASD presents in girls, and are to this day often taught that it doesn’t really present in girls at all (a current gig is tutoring intro psych - this was in a students textbook!)

Self-diagnosis is problematic, but you also must acknowledge that accessing resources to even get evaluated are often completely out of reach.

CECOT in El Salvador, where they are sending people accused of being in “gangs” - for example, the man from Maryland that the Supreme Court has ordered the administration to return.

That is a Google earth view of the site, showing what is very likely a large blood stain, as CECOT does not release prisoners.

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Can’t diagnose borderline in teenagers. Personality is not set, hormones are wild, personality disorders aren’t really appropriate models. Hearing voices could be borderline, early schizophrenia (not common in teens, but drug use might play into this), lies for attention… We don’t have enough to suggest that with more evidence (which is always true when we’re weirdos on the internet).

It tends to be thrown around too freely (like how everyone has NPD now) and misdiagnosed in women too imho. I suspect it’s often actually PTSD (sexual trauma) or ASD.

I’m not a psych, but I’ll happily be called out by one.

I think the key is not to think of drawing as a like a skill you can cap out. It’s more that it’s an art form which if it’s really for you, you’ll spend time interrogating and exploring it and finding your own “level.”

Like, if it’s just because you want a medium for story telling because of the comic - if it’s a barrier - a lot of really good webcomics shine because they use other techniques. Or sometimes writers and artists work together.

Something that helped me go from stick figures to things recognizable as animals and my environment was a drawing course from the Smithsonian (online during Covid - I think they still have regular courses though). That kind of formal instruction helps you focus on what is is essential and gives you opportunities for specific feedback. Being encouraged to invest in things like charcoal, pencils, the right kind of paper - these things aren’t necessary but then sometimes part of learning to enjoy a hobby is spending $5 on a pencil.

We all got our verbal tics. Also an attempt to add some more complexity to our communication, since we’re missing things like facial expressions or body language or environmental cues.

Most of them voted with the GOP because they are upset about how the schools are presenting pronoun policy.

And most of it is complete bullshit. They lie - they say teachers are letting students identify as cats and shit. Or with the sports stuff - the current outrage over a woman who intentionally went to a fencing competition that allowed trans women, so she could cause a scene. Amateur fencing is typically coed anyway - when I took an intro fencing class they paired us with whoever. The same woman had faced a man a few weeks ago even IIRC!

Then she’s claiming that she was afraid for her life - as if the brutish strength of anyone with an XY chromosome is going to make fencing deadly.

Democrats don’t give a shit about trans people and haven’t. Fox News and OAN and Alex Jones have Republicans convinced that middle school teachers are doling out puberty blockers.

I’m sick of this “Democrats are failing because of pronoun politics” because they haven’t done Jack shit for us.

Insurance as a whole should be a sort of “public union” thing. No profit motive, everyone who participates in something like driving has to pay some fee for insurance, maybe along with things like registration. Ideally along with massive improvements to public transit.

The concept of private insurance under capitalism seems at odds with itself. You have to pay out a good chunk less then you take in to turn a profit, and the best way to do that is be useless and fuck over your customers. (With health - Cigna was supposed to cover my top surgery. Pay for it up front be reimbursed reimbursed later. Then, later, it turns out that my employer specifically included a rider that excluded it. I’ve talked elsewhere about how I’ve paid CareCredit back.)

I don’t know if we should nationalize auto insurance without doing health insurance first though. Would the government be negotiating deals with mechanics? I think hospitals have structures that are easier to unionize and generally smarter/kinder folks than the general population. Mechanics tend to skew the type that’d get upset over navigating fender bender payouts with Uncle Sam, probably going to be harder to get to understand that their labor rights are good things.

Yeah - the real freaks left because moot dated like Brianna Wu or something stupid and weird like that. 8chan was the place for a bit.

4chan is owned by an anime figma company at the moment - i think Nendroid?

I’m not even getting the 500 I’m paying for already!