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I'm not on TwiXter myself but sometimes my lines of inquiry run through it, or into it.

Yes, TwiXter is still useful. I didn't mean to condemn the whole thing because of one part of it. Sorry if I gave that impression.

I generally break my longer posts up into chunks under 3,500 words, if memory serves. I think that's always been about the limit, but I haven't posted anything super long for ages.

Darn it - now I have to do it again   

Basically, I see what Jim sees. But why are we seeing this? Is it just mismanagement of the platform? Do Nazis have some form of generic anti-censorship software? Is TwiXter a Nazi entity? Just what is going on here?

You wanna know what I think? [YES - GO TO 01] [NO - EXIT]

01: TwiXter is currently allowing a lot of questionable content, from the Nazi content Jim mentions to truly disgusting comments from government sanctioned Israeli TweeXters glorifying, inviting, justifying, mocking and even denying the Gaza genocide. 

What is more interesting is the content being suppressed or outright banned. No matter what one thinks, where is the logic in allowing fascism while simultaneously shadow-banning anti-zionist content? Why allow Eylon Levy to TweeX zionist propaganda and not allow Ryan Christian to TweeX links to factual official sources? Why are all the bad things that are properly bad promoted and the bad things that are narratively bad suppressed?

It's almost as if TwiXter was a mechanism for herding public opinion. But why herd the public mind towards inherently repulsive ideologies? Here's a thought - regulation. Where there's regulation, there's money (taxes, licenses, permits, fines, etc.), and where there's regulation, there's perceived legitimacy, cementation into the state (which provides legal and physical protection as well as tax deals and subsidies). A regulated industry is the Gold Standard of business (petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, banking, etc.).

So TwiXter allows all this vile content for ordinary people to get upset about whilst simultaneously shadow-banning content it doesn't want people to get upset about. Next come the regulators with all their restrictions for us and rewards for TwiXter to defeat this evil menace and make the web safe for us all - but will purposely throw out the baby with the bathwater. Censorship in the name of freedom of speech.

That's what I think TwiXter either is or is becoming.

To bastardise Martin Niemöller;

First they came for the Search Engines, and I did not speak out because I wasn't an academic.
Then they came for the videos, and I did not speak out because I didn't have a Youtube channel.
Then they came for the tweets, and I did not speak out because I wasn't on Twitter.
Then they came for the podcasts, and I did not speak out because I don't have a podcast.
Then they came for my emails, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

EXIT

Ahoy, matey, tech-heads!

It's currently impossible to make any profile changes. When you click the "Change Profile" button you get dumped onto a 403 Forbidden page.

Please fix this so our resident Shark can change his profile picture each day, as is his wont.

Thanks, Funt, seriously.

I didn't want to make a fuss about this as I know my constant avatar changing irks some people and complaining might be churlish so I thought it best to just roll with it.

I commit my mortal soul to vote for Jim.

I just wrote out a long post about TwiXter and what it seems to be doing but the internet ate it and I can't be bothered typing it all out again.

Lucky you.

Since the last site glitch, I can't change anything on my profile. I suspect Deep State shenanigans... But if nobody else can change theirs either then it probably isn't that. 

Furthermore, the Spoiler and Move tags stopped working ages ago, the Active Topics page is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere and we still haven't got a Like button - one could almost say that this Stupid Bally Badly Fix-ed Website Is Atrocious...


(It's not really atrocious - I just can't find my rhyming dictionary.)

For Rogue's diarrhoea he needs von Trapp's patented "Trooper Belly (Fragile) Colic Toxic G.I. Potions."


I'll get me wimple.

[Rome]

I'm 19 years late to the party but I just finished Rome. Blimey, it's a bit good innit?

Psychic projection of youthfulness. Indicator of vanity, possible pressure point. (SJS Assessment Bulletin)

[Mersey Beat]

Mersey Beat. Dredd hits the Scallydome.

Well, it is a spectrum. At the far end is hyperphantasia, when people can't distinguish real from imagined images - which must be terrifying.

I'm just glad I didn't name him Warren...

I understand your concerns, JBC. Because I've spent a significant portion of my working life as a professional driver I view a.i. self-driving vehicles in a similar way. Fortunately, in my case that doesn't matter much as I don't do that job any more (though it's a skill I have in reserve) but if I was just starting out again I'd be worried too.

Furthermore, the a.i. glitch causing figures with too many limbs or distorted faces in art might lead to rather more significant mistakes on a motorway or high street. Driving, just like painting, is at least as much about the human factor as the technology. There is art in everything we do; and a.i. will not be able to simulate that for a long time yet. But it is coming. Indeed, the hundred-years-hence version of you might own a couple of second hand art robots, each one programmed with the unique owner's style, which do jobs for him all over the place while he reserves his own work for customers willing to pay a premium for the human touch. Similarly, that future version of me might own a couple of a.i. vehicles and reserve his own skills for similar higher-paying clients.

For the present, I find this technology to be a great boon to my creativity. Take the image above as an example and compare it to its predecessors. It's still not very good but it's far better than the originals and closer to my initial intent. The a.i. technology helped me to do this in three major ways; firstly as a mood board, secondly for throwing up ideas, and lastly to generate elements.

As I've droned on about before, I have aphantasia. This means that I can't conjure up images in my head. My mind's eye is blind. Now, I obviously don't know how you do it, JBC, but I have gleaned that some artists see the images they want to create in their heads and "copy" those mental images onto paper. In my head, there's nothing to copy - only a concept; in this case, the wreck of a massive war machine rotting away in the noxious atmosphere of Nu-Earth. The first image I see is the first image I draw. The a.i. I use allows me to generate loads of images of futuristic battlefields, for example, allowing me to explore the mood and composition of the piece. It's a time-consuming and enthralling process because few of the generated images are worth saving for reference.

The above process also throws up bits and pieces of interesting ideas - things that would fit into the concept or suggest elements I'd missed or not thought of. It's also good for fleshing out more abstract ideas. Even in the first image I had some vague notion about how the light from the wormhole in the sky would work, scribbling it out with red ink. In the second, I made the light around the wormhole fiercer and experimented with sunbeams. In the third image, I used a.i. to explore different kinds of wormhole and waded through all sorts of generic and mundane sci-fi t.v. clones before hitting on the idea of a rainbow corona. This is when the concept of Nu-Earth lighting crystallised somewhat in my mind; if the wormhole gave off rainbow light, then the surface of Nu-Earth must glisten with rainbows. I haven't been able to properly express that in the above but I think it's close enough to give the gist and I like it, though it's something I could never have envisioned in my own mind.

Finally, I used the a.i. to generate the major elements for my masterpiece; machinery, wormhole, figures, buildings, wreckage, textures, etc., and used them as I would photographs in previous digital work, cutting and pasting and stitching them all together.

Lastly I started painting and smudging over the elements, just as I would with photographs, and drawing it all together with layers and filters and all the Gimpy tricks I've learned over the years. I am fairly pleased with the result.

So, for me a.i. art is like a prosthetic mind's eye - it still can't do everything yours can but for me it opens up a door to worlds of invention - if not for producing pictures of Nu-Earth for my own entertainment then at least as a tool for exploring visual ideas for my writing projects, where the a.i. images are entirely behind the scenes like the rest of the research.