cohost
wholesale magnesium oxide at low low rates
hello hello. i’m magnesium oxide, moth / mineral / transfem / communist. i write prose and poetry, and i make a lot of little creativity tools.
i write a web serial called triple helix pitching forward, and my mentor rose quarter-drifting (@tattletale) & i have some poetry collections out:
intellectual property is the devil & i love art theft.
(tags: #welcome to cohost)
i’ve put up a new tool. ligaturist uses mathematical beauty to turn nice, readable text into illegible grids of letters.
enjoy!
(tags: #tools, #moth tools)
there’s a lot of weird ideas about creativity and authorship when it comes to ai. i’ve seen a couple people say that ai output can’t be art because there’s no intentionality. even granting the premise that intentionality is necessary in art, curation is a deliberate act. if someone generates ten images and shows you one, what does that decision mean? why’d they choose that image specifically? why did they prompt the ai the way they did?
if the generated image has been post-processed or is part of a larger work, there’s even more space for deliberate artistic choices made by humans. there isn’t really much difference between using random midjourney images & using stock photos in this regard. (the argument could even be made that prompting an ai gives you more artistic control than using stock photos…)
i think any argument that goes “ai isn’t a valid artistic tool because there’s no intentionality, even if you post-process / incorporate into a larger whole / etc” catches a lot of interesting artistic methods (cut-up technique, chance composition, etc) in the crossfire. and that’s really sad.
(tags: #ai, #ai art)
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2024/03/03/cdl-publishers-against-books/
this is an absolutely infuriating read. jesus christ, culture is in the grip of some of the worst people alive. i don’t endorse everything here (the lionization of private ownership & “good copyright” sits funny with me) but it’s still well worth a read.
(tags: #internet archive, #fuck ip)
doctor who empire of death spoilers (click to reveal)
i am so mad about that ending. the thematically resonant ending was right there! ruby giving up on finding her “real” mom in order to stop sutekh makes so much more sense & dovetails thematically with all the stuff previously.
like, between sutekh having been imprisoned by his brother & susan triad saying “you thought i was family, doctor?” & ruby breaking the screen, you could’ve had a really compelling throughline about the false allure of blood family. but instead ruby calls someone she just met her “real mom.” and they even find her birth father! thanks to the fascist DNA database.
sucks so bad. abolish the family.
(tags: #doctor who)
just laid a new clutch of whiz-bang 1950s scientists. once they hatch i’m gonna get them to figure out how to invoke the specters of the sociopath, narcissist, and sexual degenerate without being a frothing reactionary. once they’ve got that through peer review i’ll set them to work on the most progressive way to hate women.
(tags: #ableism)
i’m branching out into a new genre of tool. tone trace generates dubious chord progressions by tracing paths on a grid. please enjoy.
(tags: #moth tools, #tools)
i’ve put up a new seasonally appropriate poem. it’s called capitol. please enjoy.
(tags: #poetry, #moth poems)
deeply satisfying when i finish adding whatever new feature to my website and i can close all the hugo & html &c. reference tabs i’ve opened… it’s like sweeping scraps of paper off your desk when a collage is done, or taking off dress shoes.
i see a lot of “vote for biden because he’s better than trump.” that doesn’t address one of my main objections to voting for biden: if the democrats know they can get our votes by running an awful-but-less-awful candidate, they have no incentive to run anyone better. if they’ve got your votes anyway they’re never going to make any concessions to the left, and they’re never going to stop promoting far-right republicans.
genuinely curious what the counterargument to this is, so if you disagree, i’d appreciate if you said why.
(tags: #uspol)
REKOMBINAT MANIFESTO
a statement of artistic concerns drenched in eye-searing industrial runoff. by my mentor @tattletale and myself. read here.
ableism (click to reveal)
one of the quickest ways to get on my shitlist is using the word “narcissist” pejoratively.
i’ve seen people argue they’re not referring to narcissistic personality disorder when they say it. given how much ink has been spilled on the Great Narcissist Versus Empath Mind War, though, you’re reinforcing those narratives whether you like it or not. you can’t “it means a bundle of sticks” your way out of ableism.
ableism (click to reveal)
the worst instance of this i’ve seen was someone saying “narcissistic (and i don’t refer to so-called ‘narcissistic personality disorder’)”
just acknowledging the criticism and going “nuh-uh.” vile shit.
ableism (click to reveal)
in the end, you should be able to make your point without going “this person has Ontologically Evil Disorder. they have the diseased kind of brain that makes them incapable of anything other than abuse and exploitation.”
if you can’t, why should i ever listen to what you have to say?
it’s unfortunate that some of the most interesting interactive narrative stuff out there comes from live service-type games with real-time energy systems. on a personal level, i don’t have the attention span for that kind of thing. on an ideological level, i find the “play every day” incentivizing bad.
it’s not exactly the kind of game i’m referring to, but i stopped playing mtg arena when i realized the only reason i wanted to play it over cockatrice was “but i don’t want to miss out on my daily quests :(”
real-time energy systems aren’t quite on the same level of lootboxes, but in my ideal world they’d be similarly regulated.
(tags: #game design)
i’ve put up another tool. omission & percolation removes letters from input text at random. please enjoy.
(tags: #moth tools)
a good deal of the discourse around ai is very silly, but the silliest version of it i’ve seen is “don’t use character chatbots, they steal from fanfic authors!”
- intellectual property is the devil
- fanfic authors pearl-clutching about derivative works is really funny
- it’s one of the few use cases that LLMs actually make sense for
- it’s so frivolous that adding it to your anti-ai activism just makes you look silly
just a perfect storm. love/hate to see it.
(tags: #ai, #ai art)
i finished reading soviet democracy by pat sloan and it left me wanting similar accounts of life, governance, etc. in other socialist states. does anyone have any recommendations?
(tags: #communism, #socialism, #marxism)
i keep wanting to write more elaborately about the new cohost ai art policy1, but then i remember i’ve got a serious longform piece on the subject burning a hole in my dropbox. suffice to say i think complaining cohost allows ai art at all is unserious.
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the missing stair policy is encouraging & much more important, to be clear. ↩︎
what are the best anti-generative ai arguments? where are they best articulated. looking for articles, blog posts, etc. i’ve been writing an essay on my thoughts on the topic & i want to develop / refine them further.
(tags: #ai discourse, #ai discussion)
i keep daydreaming about being an author under socialism… working in a big room with a bunch of writing desks… asking my comrade next to me for their opinion on a particular phrasing or plot beat… group editing session… maybe if a book i write is particularly well-liked i get a medal or certificate or something.
i don’t want to be the Indie Breakout Hit. i don’t want to be a Self-Publishing Success Story. i just want to write and live. i’m not even opposed to writing being a side thing when i’m not working at the People’s Widget Factory. reading Soviet Democracy really made it click that a better world is possible. i sympathize to an extent with intellectual property protectionist arguments but we are in a ditch and petty-bourgeois aspirations won’t save you. take my hand…
racism, us politics (click to reveal)
ads i’ve noticed so far in this doctor’s office:
- career fair at the local child prison
- attack ad against kamala harris for being too lenient against “illegals”
- pro-harris ad saying she’s tough on the border and will hire more border guards
deeply, deeply evil country.
(tags: #uspol)
the tim walz dreamcast thing is kinda funny, but it also serves to paint him as a relatable everyguy, and i’m not gonna do the democrats’ marketing for them.
(tags: #uspol)
“tim walz was addicted to crazi taxi” “kamala harris has wine aunt energy” we are doing the Cool Uncle Biden Onion bit again. will we never fucking learn.
(tags: #uspol)
if you really want the democrats to win, pushing them leftward on Palestine is going to be far more effective than any number of “vote blue if you don’t want trump” posts. they’re not going to change if they think you’ll vote for them anyway.
of course, if the harris campaign won’t listen to their own delegates, maybe perpetuating genocide is more important to them than winning.
(tags: #uspol)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/abandon-kamala-harris-biden-target-support-israel
(tags: #uspol, #palestine)
“single issue voter” is a very interesting way to describe people whose priority is the currently ongoing genocide. i would argue it is the correct issue to be prioritizing!
(tags: #uspol)
people who read a lot: how do you do it? there are so many interesting works of theory & history, and i am only one insect
i still cannot get over someone responding to a description of the abandon harris movement’s goals with “oh so vote for trump then and he’ll genocide even more people. brilliant plan.” ghoulish, ghoulish, ghoulish.
(tags: #uspol, #moralists do not have beliefs)
when your preferred candidate loudly refuses to do the obvious moral thing, the correct response if you want them to win is to force their hand! shaming the critics is vile and — more to the point — it’s not going to work. if you want her to win, push her to enact an arms embargo.
perhaps threatening to withhold your vote would be effective?
(tags: #uspol)
i put up a new tool recently called coherent space. it simulates gravity to produce abstract smears of color like these.
please enjoy.
(tags: #tools, #moth tools)
kamala harris is, to me, a really effective illustration of the limits of a politics centered around empathy. she is a more empathetic voice, i guess, decrying the suffering of Palestinians. however, she also vocally opposes an end to US military aid to Israel! what has her empathy done for anybody if she’s not going to make any material changes?
(tags: #uspol)
BRAINBLOW CITY
a new poem, available below the cut or on my website.
someone stop my hands from shaking work’s too big for just one person SEE IT IONIZING GIANT IN OUR WRECKAGE vultures picking children from their beaks
robocop came screaming down the hallway trailing traitor tongues like bridal veilings SEE THAT SMIRKING BASTARD BOUGHT AND PAID FOR pupils shaped like headstones down the line
i will burn your every bloodied standard red and white and blue that endless devil SEE OUR AGELESS ARMIES DEEP IN SLUMBER howling at the moon is all that’s left.
(tags: #poetry, #moth poems)
i’ve never done nanowrimo, but isn’t it a self-guided activity? even if using ai is “cheating”… is anyone harmed? it seems so harmless from the outside. is there something i’m missing?
even if it’s a “theft of intellectual property”
- your ip ending up in someone’s nanowrimo novel is such a nothing problem
- intellectual property should be abolished
in general i don’t find “this is bad for a specific kind of skilled artisans” to be an immediately persuasive argument. the photograph was bad for portrait painters, and we got a lot of invective about how that was the death of art, too. for a more recent example: the internet archive acting as a library is bad for authors, in the sense that each person who checks out a book is (most likely) someone who won’t buy it.
(tags: #generative ai, #drafts jubilee)
something missing in a lot of ai discourse imo is an understanding that attribution is oftentimes a liability. if, for example, you’re using an uncleared sample in your song, your best hope is to hope it skates by. citing sources just puts a target on your back.
(tags: #drafts jubilee)
really illustrative of me as a person / my approach to cohost that my only two drafts were ai discourse…
i was kind of surprised by how upset i was to hear cohost’s shutting down. i don’t think i had the Cohost Experience. it didn’t cure me of clout chasing, it didn’t cure me of bad social media habits, etc. i disagree with a lot of the common opinions around here, and there was a possibly unhealthy joy to being a representative for unpopular beliefs.
still, it was nice, making my little posts. maybe getting reshared or liked.
all i can hope now is that this place is a lesson for whatever comes next.
i saw someone say that another person was a ghoul for their cohost post-mortem thread, and… does that not feel hyperbolic to anyone else? it’s a public website, and its shuttering is pretty noteworthy. people are going to comment on it.
if anything, reasonable critiques are a good thing. i would rather people use cohost as an example now if it means the next thing does better.
personal thoughts: the cohost so white post & associated exodus is too recent for me to have an unalloyed rosy recollection, but i am going to miss it here. i think there are some financial / logistical / etc critiques to make, but more interesting than that to me is the culture. culture & moderation.
i had a footnote but it vanished in the edit. i’ve seen the criticism that cohost shouldn’t have hosted images, which is probably reasonable. images are way bigger than text.
this was commentary on someone else’s post.
i never read the original statement, so apologies if this is inaccurate, but my understanding was that nanowrimo was allowing / promoting / suggesting human-guided LLM writing (i.e., asking it for editing advice, scene descriptions, etc.) where the process is still largely manual prompting, compositing, and editing.
this seems like a very different beast from nanogenmo. i haven’t looked at all the entries from every year, but my understanding is that they’re programs you can run multiple times with different seeds / inputs / etc. and get different results. even though annals of the parrigues has a hand-written ending, you could theoretically generate as many additional counties and towns as you wanted. i don’t think using chatgpt to edit your nanowrimo entry is automated in the same way, and it makes sense people wouldn’t want to submit an at the very least human directed work to the generative novel competition.
(tags: #nanowrimo, #nanogenmo)
my only point of reference for that kind of workflow is this piece from the verge about amazon authors using ai. to be clear, i don’t think any of these authors are really making high art. (which is due to their economic incentives, not because they’re using ai.)
when i read the article, i don’t think the authors are really engaging with generative art. it’s a writing exercise, not a design one. that — to me — makes which event it belongs in clear.
(tags: #nanowrimo, #nanogenmo)
i’m going to keep posting here until the site shuts off just because i’ve already committed to putting an archive of my posts on my website and i don’t want it looking all sad and sparse
every so often i reread this piece in the verge about ai writing tools. imo it’s a really good illustration of the economic incentives involved here.
paranormal romance novels on amazon are products measured by weight. with their release schedule, how could they be anything else? the problem isn’t ai, it’s the incentives, it’s the system. it’s capital.
(tags: #generative ai, #LLMs)
if you’re a believer in leftist worker co-ops, in small teams building a new internet, in a return to a prelapsarian geocities world, i think cohost’s closing is something to reckon with. personally, i think the-world-that-was ended for a reason. can’t go back! gotta move forward. the future of the internet won’t lie in isolated hobbyists tinkering with html1. cohost did well in some ways and poorly in others. what comes next? can we do any better under capitalism2? very real questions to answer!
added my email to my private contact info, btw, if anyone wants to get / stay in touch.
intellectual property leads to raised prices for lifesaving medicine & the inaccessibility of vaccines in the global south, but it also means small business artists can feel warm and fuzzy about owning something, so it’s impossible to tell if it’s good or bad,
(tags: #sarcasm)
it’s not unsupported, but “omelas is about how we don’t believe in utopia” really does nothing for me as a reading. “what do you do when your life is powered by exploitation” is just so much more actionable & applicable as a takeaway than “we need to manifest & picture utopia 😌”
(tags: #omelas)
initial conditions: this post about making blogging easy, even if it takes a lot of work
elaborations:
- my website is on neocities & generated via static site generator (hugo specifically)
- i don’t have a markdown editor on my phone
- i don’t have a way to run the publish script from my phone
synthesis:
- email server running a script to take any email i send it & put it on my website
cons:
- no idea where to start
- i don’t have a computer running 24/7
- i could literally just start using my tumblr again
pros:
- kinda funny
Kramer bursts in.
Kramer itches.
Kramer looks at Kramer lustily.
Kramer fucks Marge.
Kramer bursts in.
Kramer bursts in.
Kramer itches.
Kramer itches.
Kramer turns into a bug.
Kramer looks at Marge lustily.
Kramer looks at Ned lustily.
Homer moans.
Centipede #1 falls asleep.
Ned becomes a bug.
Ned picks up the magic wand.
Marge itches.
Homer moans.
Marge becomes a bug.
Homer picks up Kramer's skull.
Ned fucks Marge.
Homer weeps.
Homer weeps.
Marge looks at Centipede #2 lustily.
Ned picks up the brass lantern.
Homer weeps.
Homer weeps.
Homer itches.
thinking about the world and its scale is dizzying. there is so much to be done. there is so much to be done. jesus christ. it’s horrifying, the scale of the challenge. the work ahead of us. unimaginable. it must be done, and it will be done. but goddamn.
(tags: #communism)
oh, cool, boeing workers are on strike for better pay! let me just take a big sip of water and look up what boeing makes…
i haven’t done any reading on syndicalism & welcome any recommendations from folks, but this seems like an obvious failure state, a union concerned only with its own wellbeing and not with the impacts of their work. a bunch of well-paid engineers making machines for empire. we need to do better.
(tags: #communism)
brandon sanderson is such a mystery to me. i haven’t read his books but seeing people talk about his work without mentioning “by the way he’s an active tithing mormon” is more than a little frustrating. even if i was after what he’s selling, that would just hang over the whole work.
maybe i’ll read one of his books someday and it’ll change my life, but… fantasy novels grow on trees nowadays. frankly, i find promoting his work as a progressive leftist whatever to be a little unprincipled. like, there’s problematic media and there’s “the author is giving 10% of their income to a hate group.”
individual consumption habits aren’t going to change anything, of course, and an organized brandon sanderson boycott isn’t going to do much for the dire political landscape in the us. however: i was raised mormon, so i get to be a bitch about this.
the phrase “voteblue socialist” has been stuck in my head. i think it’s a very effective descriptor / pejorative. i release it into the world in the hope it hits its mark.
nevermind, i just imagined someone self describing this way and my soul died. post over. goodnight everybody.
discussing gen ai online is a bit of a quagmire. everybody seems to be directing their ire at “techbros” and such, responding to inane marketing hype… but my experience is seeing disabled artists who use gen ai getting harassed, full-throated support for copyright1…
i think it’s important to oppose things for the right reasons. even if you don’t like ai — even if you think it’s boring or samey — you need to have a better counterargument than “it’s theft” (so’s collage), “it’s lazy” (who cares), or “just pick up a pencil / learn to draw / paint with your mouth” (just straightforwardly ableist).
(tags: #ai discourse)
i think i’ve realized what the concern actually is when it comes to art theft. “don’t trace or reference my art”, lawsuits over chord progressions and orchestration, the inane fucking palworld lawsuit… it’s economic. it’s defending an asset. any song sampled by a bedroom producer, any painting traced by a teenager, any sprite comic or itch.io fangame… it’s all infringing upon the sacred copyright, and if you want to be the next vivziepop, that’s the one thing you can’t tolerate.
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as someone who cares a lot about music, seeing the current sampling IP regime lauded as a positive example boils my blood. sampling is clearly transformative and — more to the point — it’s a fascinating artistic technique. if you stand in its way, you’re an enemy of art. ↩︎
where to find me
- neocities is the main one. there you can find:
- tumblr is where i’m probably going for social media purposes.
i may show up on dreamwidth or on various forums & sundry.
it was nice being here while it lasted. i hope the next thing does better.
i’ll see everybody on the other side.
i don’t know how you look at the world and go “as a progressive / leftist / socialist / anarchist / communist i am going to advocate that people vote for kamala harris.” i don’t know how you look back on that decision without horrible, violent shame. it’s downright chauvinist. “yes, she’s complicit in genocide, and shows no signs of reversing course, but if the other guy wins it’ll be worse for me!” vile, shameful, maddening.
(tags: #uspol)
small businesses and worker co-ops will not save the world. the revolution is not buying local. remember this.