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❤️💙💛GRACEFUL💛💙❤️

Who are you?

Dion Drache? Bahamut? Jun Van? Cian Galvus?

She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.

Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest.  Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear.  I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”

The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.

So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

This is… not reassuring.

And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.

There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.

Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.

I got this reply on one of my sketches recently.

First off, thank you @beefcakebambi for… what I’m guessing overall is a compliment(?) Genuinely, thanks if it is.

But then it got me thinking and I realised that I have a specific fear of the rise of ai infiltrating online art. And that fear is to do with being a Traditional Artist online in the ai hyperaware spheres of the internet.

As of right now (but will probably change in future) ai is easy to spot; although with every new updates ai seems to over correct itself from the previous signs, we’ve still had at least one easy tell between actual art and ai ‘art’. But I’ve noticed a trend with the types of tells of ai art. Things like ‘wonky straight lines’, ‘illegible writing on out of focus writings’, ‘lighting doesn’t make sense’ ‘a mix of art mediums that doesn’t make sense for the style of the art’ etc. And these tells worry me because… well, these are usually tells of genuine mistakes in genuine traditional art pieces.

I have a few wonky straight lines because my hand has a slight shake; and once I draw an ink line, I can’t undo it like digital art, I have to deal with it. Some signage I draw in backgrounds have random squiggles instead of writing because… I can’t draw that small and can’t soften the lines with a background blur like digital artists do (and most times I just can’t be bothered writing anything on signs that insignificant to the piece). Some of my lighting is off because I have to deal with the chaotic nature of paints running, smudging, mixing into other colours unintentionally. And most of my traditional pieces are technically mixed medium, because most textures like dusty light sources or rough textured shadows I do in pencil - which, yes, stands out a bit more than the rest of the mainly marker piece does.

Basically, the majority of art ai is trained on is online art (obviously), and mainly digital art. And all of the natural mistakes of a traditional artist now make me paranoid to make any at all mistakes. Every straight line that goes a bit askew I now sweat at the incoming rise of intense scrutiny of my pieces being ai at all. Which feels like the biggest insult a traditional artist can get at this point. And I shouldn’t have to be that way at all!!

I’m a traditional artist with limited options to correct mistakes. I draw wonky lines, I have to take the literal chemical reactions of paints, inks and pigments into consideration, and sometimes I can’t be bothered to do every little bloody detail of my own pieces. It is genuinely human to make mistakes, and I’m sad that making mistakes is also the habit of ai.