The Tick: Letters Get Carved On It, Visible From Earth LOCAL 58 TV: Implied To Be An Alien Colony? A

the darling Glaze “anti-ai” watermarking system is a grift that stole code/violated GPL license (that the creator admits to). It uses the same exact technology as Stable Diffusion. It’s not going to protect you from LORAs (smaller models that imitate a certain style, character, or concept)

An invisible watermark is never going to work. “De-glazing” training images is as easy as running it through a denoising upscaler. If someone really wanted to make a LORA of your art, Glaze and Nightshade are not going to stop them.

If you really want to protect your art from being used as positive training data, use a proper, obnoxious watermark, with your username/website, with “do not use” plastered everywhere. Then, at the very least, it’ll be used as a negative training image instead (telling the model “don’t imitate this”).

There is never a guarantee your art hasn’t been scraped and used to train a model. Training sets aren’t commonly public. Once you share your art online, you don’t know every person who has seen it, saved it, or drawn inspiration from it. Similarly, you can’t name every influence and inspiration that has affected your art.

I suggest that anti-AI art people get used to the fact that sharing art means letting go of the fear of being copied. Nothing is truly original. Artists have always copied each other, and now programmers copy artists.

Capitalists, meanwhile, are excited that they can pay less for “less labor”. Automation and technology is an excuse to undermine and cheapen human labor—if you work in the entertainment industry, it’s adapt AI, quicken your workflow, or lose your job because you’re less productive. This is not a new phenomenon.

You should be mad at management. You should unionize and demand that your labor is compensated fairly.

What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.

they must really have feared fyodor's power

Ever think - most of that last bit in Muersault didn't need to happen? Because if Chuuya is never a vampire and Dazai knows that, then once Chuuya's THERE, the rest is a pantomime. Chuuya had more than enough power to hail bullets into Fyodor the moment Gogol's 'game' began.

So why didn't they?

I think they had to be really afraid of Fyodor's power. All they know is that it works by touch, and it's lethal. Chuuya's power also requires him to touch things to exert control over them. They must've been afraid that the powers would cancel each other out if used directly that way, which would introduce too many unknowns to 'can we kill fyodor now'.

I think that's why they saved the finishing blow for "when we have control of the vampires". Because then, if it was an always-on kind of power like Dazai's, whatever it was would activate when the Random Vampire Mook attacked.

Of course, they couldn't KNOW they'd get control of the vampires, but really, if they didn't they were screwed anyway? So I guess they figured eh, in that event we leave Chuuya around as some kind of secret double agent and wait for the next clear shot. Or something.

Miron Białoszewski, Namuzowywanie -> Musing up

Oh Muse! Inspirouse

i just for you endinfying from unwritinging

do tell me ing o se

#But seriously I've seen more Jesus slash fanart in the past month than I have my entire life

honey it's been a week.

who lives who dies who tells your story

I wonder if Teruko stays in her younger form so often to avoid the intensity of her own emotions.

Her devotion to Fukuchi despite his faults -> A childish crush

Her intense pride + rage that she must endure horrors for the sake of national peace -> Constant tantrums that seem disproportionate to the situation

Her sadism going unfulfillled during an interrogation and the storm of emotion that arises from that -> Cluthing Jouno's hand and wailing like the child she is embodying

friendly reminder that the first nonary game took place in 2018 :)

this is happening, everyone. zero escape is real

wouldn't say this limits teambuilding, tho; 3rd option: ignore uptie 4 (just like i keep ignoring uptie 3 on EGO b/c it's just bigger numbers*), then once you clean out shop start with U4 on units you have figured out why they're bad, and U4 fixes exactly that. This gives longevity to fresh toys, gaining design insight is good, builds hype for to prevent burnout from grinding. Example: if mariachi sinclair doesn't get gloom on block and/or jubilo hedonista requirement 3 gloom res -> 2 gloom res i'm just. not uptying him.

So about them Uptie 4 costs:

Brain fried like egg trying to math this so late at night. Despite my knee-jerk reaction when I first saw these prices, it doesn't actually seem too horrid. As long as you're not also trying to spark every new thing that comes out in an effort to avoid the gacha in the gacha game or trying to be a completionist and uptie everything to max without grinding or spending.

(Before we get into the rest of it, this isn't going to cover the grind that leads up to Uptie 4. Everything in the game currently is beatable with Uptie 3 units and whatever you can scrounge up for EGO, so Uptie 4 is optional as of time of writing. This is just going to cover getting from 3 to 4.)

Not accounting for resources you get from the gacha (random amounts of Egoshards from dupes and an amount of Thread when your Ideality expires), an endgame F2P can get:

18 - 27 Thread per day from Luxcavation with bonuses (18 is more sustainable for module usage, so we'll say 126 Thread per week)

1 Egoshard crate from daily missions, making it 7 per week

2 Egoshard crates from weekly missions

22.5 Egoshard crates from MD2 Hard with full bonuses (13.5 crates if it's three boosted Normal runs instead, then another 3 crates per extra run afterwards)

A crate can be 1-3 shards, so it comes out to 31-93 Egoshards out of 31 crates weekly, averaging at around 62 Egoshards per week. Excess shards can be made into Thread, if needed.

Assuming you're not trying to spark any units (and, again, not accounting for stuff from the gacha), an endgame F2P player can get about one 3-star unit that was T3 up to T4 per week, with a chance to have resources left over to uptie an extra unit every other week without too much extra grind. Similar situation for TETH EGOs at ~1/week but less so for HEs, which will need another day or three unless you grind more. If you're short on Thread as a F2P, Luxcavation is better than MD2 in terms of module cost.

If you bought the pass, multiply the number of crates you get by 3. So about 93 crates per week (with an extra 3 every other week), ranging from 93-279 Egoshards and averaging at 186. A player with a paid battle pass can get at least one 3-star up to T4 from T3 in a week comfortably, with potential range to extend to two in one week without extra grind. The EGO situation doesn't change much though. A bit over one TETH a week, but only about one HE a week due to the extra costs. If you need more Thread and have the time, your modules are more efficient at MD2 than Luxcavation. If you don't have the time, Luxcavation is still good as long as you have the bonus.

The only issue I can see with the costs for Uptie 4 is that it makes it harder to experiment outside of a team you're used to, at least right now anyway. If you have meta units, you're less likely to want to grind materials to upgrade your non-meta units when it takes about a week to grind resources for your existing team and more units are still coming out that will need even more resources to get up from T1. Then again, you do still get some upgrade materials from excess items from the gacha, so your resources aren't coming exclusively from grinding unless you want them to be.

Overall, this feels like a "Project Moon saw people at the end waiting for more content and remembered they're making a gacha game" type of move. I wouldn't be shocked if they dropped the prices due to complaints, but they may be better off giving us a Luxcavation with better rewards.

In honor of the twins’ birthday, a redraw of one of my old Gravity Falls drawings 🤩

good enough to boost.