Oh no

THAT IS NOT NORMAL OR HEALTHY

It turns out your period should actually make you feel just vaguely sick and sore, with mild cramping when you pass a clot. MILD. As in “easily beaten by 2 ibuprofen and a large coffee.”

You should feel tired or gross, sure, but not in agony. If the cramps are worse significantly worse than a headache, you have a problem

The agonies are NOT HEALTHY.

Please contact a doctor, ideally a gyno you trust, and tell them about this cramping. Be clear that you are dealing with a level of pain you normally associate with grievous injury. 8+ on the pain scale.

“Oh it’s not that bad” YOU ARE ROLEPLAYING A DYING MAN TO COPE YES IT IS THAT BAD

And I’m willing to bet that you’re passing more than a typical amount of blood, too. Did you know that you shouldn’t EVER fill a menstrual cup to capacity in the course of a normal 8 hour work day? That if you have tampon or pad leakage in under 4 hours, you’re “flooding” (passing blood too quickly to be absorbed).

These, too, are not healthy. But most people don’t know what a “normal” period even is. Especially since these symptoms often start around age 12, when adults are busy obsessively telling you to grow up and that it’s “not that bad” so that most of us with problems internalize that we are weak, not that we need help.

There is help.

There are treatments.

In my case, it was a simple matter of changing a single medication. It turns out, menstruation is supposed to suck because you’re vaguely lightheaded and your hormones are wacked out.

It’s NOT supposed to make you enter psychotic episodes or torture you like an open wound.

Begging people to stop reblogging this AI trash from “The Phantom Painter” on Instagram (instagram.com/phantom.painting). I’ve been seeing it on my dash more and more often from people who are otherwise anti-AI and either can’t tell it’s AI or don’t care because it looks cool.

This is the kind of shit that is VERY CLEARLY trained on the works of existing talented artists’ with distinct styles and this asshole is selling prints and making a profit off of stealing other people’s hard work.

Don’t give people like this money or attention and they will go away.

@thegnat That’s the problem, it’s getting really hard to tell what’s AI and what isn’t. This phantom painter person at least says on each post on Instagram that it was created with AI, but when people re-post it on tumblr, it isn’t specified, and people end up reblogging it.

There is no one single unifying giveaway beyond a strange sense of uncanny that you will eventually begin to recognize the better you attune yourself, and certain models have their own unique “styles” you can begin to recognize (midjourney and stablediffusion produce very different looks, for example). There are however a few things on which one can tend to focus.

Edges: AI, as of this post, still struggles with distinct edges of objects and figures and has a tendency to blend details together. Look for hair, ribbons, and other flowy details if present. Do they fade into other details? Look at how the hair fuses with the smoke:

Edges 2: Sometimes they will also have the edges completely avoid each other, with a foreground figure slightly warping along the edges in a way that matches the background edges, like repelling magnets:

Patterns: AI, as of this post, still struggles with patterns. Filigrees, mandalas, brickwork, scales, anything that involves a high level of intricate detail tends to get blurred together. This can be a tricky one, because a lot of artists will also fudge pattern details in looser renders, but usually in a way that makes sense as an impression and not…. this:

Architecture: Are there buildings present in the image? AI has a tendency to make Escher-esque nonsense structures, with pillars in places they don’t belong, arches that go nowhere, bricks that don’t align, and support beams that start on one plane and connect to another. It also struggles with perspective, but, so do many humans so I would not consider it evidence alone. Check out the placement of this pillar, and also the detail on the… window? Candle cage?? Thing?

Resolution and quality: AI cannot make high-resolution images. It just cannot. While most artists aren’t posting their full resolutions, generative images can’t be enhanced, and the “artist” will not be able to provide proof of work. You should be able to zoom into work by an artist and admire their strokes, relate to their errors, and appreciate their process at every skill level– zooming into generative images somehow makes them even less clear, a mess of pixels that are somehow both blurry and also look like they have been run through a sharpen filter:

Text and signatures: AI struggles with legible characters in any language, and the result is a simlish-looking approximation of characters at worst, and hilariously misspelled words at best. Since these models are trained off real artists, they will also often have artifacts of a signature that oopsed its way into the image. These signatures are always illegible or, if “legible”, are not actually the names of real accounts.

witchsona commission for @grandmazzter ;

There is nowhere left to go.

The lowest cost is $5,000 USD to flee to Egypt. There has been people paying over $10,000 USD.

That is the only option

Pay or die.

Rafah was the only place in Palestine promised not to be bombed. That promise is broken.

1.5 million people have nowhere to go!