Can Y'all Send Some Asks That Are Like “thoughts On ______”

Lake Baikal is one of my top two nature tourism destinations, along with the Devil’s Throat in Yguasu /Iguazú/Iguaçu Falls.

Crystal clear ice of the frozen Baikal Lake

Traveling mushroom and his trusted cat

House Martins on a Ledge. Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935)

via

When a ceremonial monarch who largely didn't do anything died, tumblr cheered about it because she symbolised colonialism and imperialism. Not because of anything she personally did, but because of her *symbolism*.

When someone dies who personally presided over mass executions of political dissidents, oversaw as a political leader massive repression of women, religious minorities and ethnic minorities and helped organise genocide and civil war throughout the Middle East, only Iranian and Jewish tumblrs are saying anything.

Skewed priorities much?

The Early Therocene: 30 million years post-establishment

Tallest of All: The Girats

The great success of the boingos across the plains and grassland of the Early Therocene would spell bad news for the hamtelopes. While enjoying a brief success in the Middle Rodentocene, they would eventually be outcompeted by the boingos, with a more-efficient means of locomotion and more-specialized teeth for eating tough grasses. As such, the hamtelopes would be pressured into other niches as they were pushed out of the plains: many would become forest and jungle herbivores, others would remain as small hare-like grazers in the plains, and only on isolated environments do the hamtelopes get to dominate with the absence of competition.

But one family of hamtelopes stubbornly stuck to the plains, and despite the abundance of competing boingos grew to megafaunal sizes. However, they reached higher up, into the treetops where the boingos could not reach, and so were selected to grow taller still, and so this trend reaches its logical conclusion in the Early Therocene, with the tallest hamsters ever to walk the planet: the girats.

Towering high-browsers that feed on the sparse trees in the open plains, the girats reach tremendous heights of up to 16 feet, with their long legs and even longer necks. They evolved prehensile lips and long, flexible tongues to grasp and pluck branches and stems from trees, while their incisors served as pruning shears to clip off leaves to be swallowed. With virtually no competition for these high leaves the girats dominate and thrive, managing a coexistence with the other grazers that drove off most of their smaller relatives.

Girats are mostly solitary, though occasionally gather in groups to seek out mates during the breeding season. Male girats are easily distinguished from females by the presence of large, keratinous horns sported on their protruding cheekbones, which they use in headbutting contests with other males, swinging their heads at each other and trying to inflict bruising whacks onto their rivals with their blunt, hammer-like horns.

At least a dozen species of girat range all across Nodera and Easaterra, where they vary in color and the arrangement of their horns. The axehorn girat (Altocervimys securiceros) is the most common species in Nodera, while its relative the trihorn girat (Giraffacricetus triceros) lives further south in the savannah of Nodera. Meanwhile in the tropical forests of central Easaterra lives the splendid girat (Procerocricetus magnificens), one of several species in the genus Procerocricetus that adapted to denser jungles instead of the open plains. Unlike their cousin the axehorn girat, the trihorn and splendid species possess sharper horns, due to the need of extra defenses with the increased number of larger predators further south, and as such are less aggressive toward their own species than the axehorns: with more pointed weaponry, a headbutting contest between two rival males can easily result to death for them both, and such they rarely fight unless absolutely necessary.

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A Laboratory for Star Formation

Location: In the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy

Distance from Earth: About 20,000 light-years

Object type: Nebula and open star cluster

Discovered by: Sir John Herschel in 1834

Imaged here by the Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 3603 is a collection of thousands of large, hot stars, including some of the most massive stars known to us. Scientists categorize it as an “open cluster” because of its spread-out shape and low density of stars. Surrounding the bright star cluster are plumes of interstellar gas and dust, which comprise the nebula part of this cosmic object. New stars are formed from the gaseous material within these clouds! NGC 3603 holds stars at a variety of life stages, making it a laboratory for scientists to study star evolution and formation. Astronomers estimate that star formation in and around the cluster has been occurring for 10 to 20 million years.

Read more information about NGC 3603 here.

Right now, the Hubble Space Telescope is delving into its #StarrySights campaign! Find more star cluster content and breathtaking new images by following along on Hubble’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Haven’t been feeling like logging on for a few days. I’m still on twitter break so disabled my integration. Discord is really enough social interaction for me as is.

REBLOG IF IT IS OKAY TO COME INTO YOUR INBOX AND SAY THE RANDOMEST SHIT I CAN THINK OF BECAUSE I REALLY WANT TO INTERACT WITH YOU.

Considering making the predator birgs fellow sapients..

They live in smaller social units than birgs and are almost entirely carnivorous, subsisting mostly on their herds of semi-domesticated trunkhorses. They often bear pike-like tools for prodding and spearing animals.

Birgs maintain an uneasy coexistence with them, often striking trade deals or forming alliances against common foes. However, since the development of firearms, the Twowi have begun pushing the balance, slowly driving giant birgs from their ancestral ranges, and sparking increased conflict.

Many birg folklores designate them as cursed beings, transformed into ever-roaming ‘beastmen’ for consuming the flesh of trunkhorses (a taboo) or even another birg. To the giant birgs, their diminutive cousins are fearful, untrustworthy, and deceptively numerous.

All art is derivative. Yes, there should be protections of the rights of artists that their work can't be used in databases of AI art without consent. And yes AI does not consciously create art. In that sense, it is a tool for creating art. I don't see why these things make AI art inherently wrong or anyone using them wrong. By the way, I have only ever shared AI art with a small number of friends and only from programs I trust to be using public domain datasets You shouldn't paint everyone using AI for art with the same brush.

AI Art and Why It Can Go Die In A Fire

Why am I opposed to Stable Diffusion and AI Art in its current incarnation:

Some people seem to believe AI can “learn” art. Like it learns the concepts of perspective, value, anatomy, colour etc. through images and then recreates art based on this knowledge.

This is a misconception.

An AI doesn’t “know” things. It has no concept for artistic fundamentals. It just learns associations based on the data it’s given in a way that’s completely , vastly different to the way a human brain does. An AI can only recreate based on known image data. Those recreations can be blended in a very complex way, but they will ALWAYS be derived directly from image data it’s trained on.

A human can take a paint-bucket, and throw it at a canvas, and then mush paint around with their fingers. An AI can’t do that;  it can only blend image data that best fits “canvas with messy splashed paint”. It will pull from all the image data it’s categorized with “canvas”, “splash”, “paint”, etc. and then blend them by placing datapoints next to other datapoints that it has “learned” will most suitably go next to each other.

Human learning creates complex conceptual structures. Our concept of an “apple” may contain many elements such as the colour red, how heavy it is, its overall form, how you hold it, and what it tastes like. An AI’s concept of an “apple” is whatever images it associates with the word “apple” based on text cues in its training.

When you tell it to paint “a hand holding an apple”, it will recreate and blend many images of hands with many images of apples in a way that best fit each other depending on weights defined by the data its analyzed.

Any presumption that AI can “learn” art theory and then make art through its knowledge of this is incorrect, and would require a level of general AI intelligence we are nowhere near capable of building yet, and we won’t with our current models because they are not creating actual epistemology, merely datapoint-based imitation without actual integration or understanding.

But the bottom line? All AI art is derivative and, unless it was trained exclusively on works in the public domain, there is definitely a case to argue that the companies creating these algorithms are violating the copyright of the artists whose works they are using without there first being a contract, agreement, or royalties (which is the thing these companies are trying to weasel out of by creating these AIs in the first place.) There is a reason why Clip Studio Paint, the latest of money-chasers jumping aboard the Stable Diffusion pony, issued out a warning that states, verbatim, “we cannot guarantee that images generated by the current model will not infringe on the rights of others.“

They know. They just don’t care- and everyone who ‘creates’ AI art is a willing participant in the infringing of copyright of millions of artists who never gave consent to have their works used in this fashion.