My semester has concluded, yet there remains so many things that, without the illusion of expectation and structure motivating me to put in the work, would probably go untouched (unread books, pdfs wasting away in the Downloads folder, hobbies neglected in favour of daydreaming…). Whether you feel the same, need a push to get through the last month of your own semester, or just feel up to the challenge, I invite you to tag along.

The idea is simple:

Compile your June goals into one post, then mark each item as desired upon completion. This is mine.

Tag all your posts #june days of productivity, that way we can find each other. Daily, weekly, and sporadic updates are all acceptable.

Starting 1st June, do one thing every day to bring you closer to achieving your goals, however minor it might be. Rest is productive! So is connecting with nature, one's friends, family and pets.

Enjoy the journey! You can't fail as long as you are having fun.

On 30th June, we can congratulate ourselves for our dedication.

Additionally, I encourage everyone who participates to reflect on their month as it progresses. Pay attention to your habits and choices, what works and what might not, whether you are pushing yourself farther than you ought to or can stand to push yourself more, and so forth.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Cara is the only art platform I have found that not only prohibits AI art from being uploaded on the site, but also offers their users to Glaze their art (which protects them from ai mimicry). They are also working on implementing Nightshade, which actively poisons ai training.

I have used Cara for a couple of months now, and I hope more people check it out. It's really nice. 💚

We need these kinds of places for artists, and it's also FREE (despite the staff paying out of their own pockets to keep it running).

i cannot help but think this is a direct result of liberal White Guilt and how people have interpreted "anti-racism" as form of cultural self-segregation - the kind of person who thinks trying to cook chicken curry is cultural appropriation, or sends white people anon hate for wearing a kimono (yes, this kind of discourse happened). like, "oh, no, i could never participate in this culture, i'd get my evil white hands all over it! it would be more Progressive if I only did White things."

if you're a poc you've seen this, i'm sure - this deer-in-the-headlights stare you can get from white people when you play music / show art / share a story / anything that is Racially Coded, this total refusal to actually engage with it out of fear that it is in some way Wrong for them to have any opinion on it. because they read somewhere that it's bad to use AAVE but the only lesson they actually learned from that is "gotcha, white people are not allowed to interact with other cultures as punishment for my White Crimes. this helps to fill up the gaping pit of my white guilt and makes me one of the Good People." this transforms their discomfort around non-white cultures (black culture, especially, i should add) into a kind of virtue

Brazil is going through one of the worst climatic crisis ever seen.

i live in the southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul. we have been suffering from extreme, nonstop rainstorms for a week now. the rivers are flooding, reaching 4-6 meters above their natural level. people are being rescued by helicopters, neighborhoods are being evacuated. entire cities are slowly but surely becoming submerged in water. 60 people missing and counting. 32 deaths and counting.

and this is not new. last november also had a flood like this one. 50 dead, many material losses. it happened again this january, with thousands being left without power or water for days.

three catastrophical disasters within less than a year. three disasters only a few months apart.

this is not natural.

unsustainable agricultural practices and politics led to this. a complete disregard for nature led to this. greed led to this. always greed.

when it comes to the climate crisis, i cannot stress this enough: we need to act now if we still want to live. disasters like this are going to happen more often and they're going to be much, much worse. this flood is being considered the worst climatic catastrophe in the history of my state. i don't know how long it will take for another bigger one to happen and take its place. i just know it will be sooner than it should.

links to donate (if you can't donate, sharing already helps a lot):

link for non-brazilians (paybox)

link for brazilians

pix assufrgs

LINK - fundraiser by @badincolono on instagram, accepts donations in dollar and euro. we have reached 14mi out of 25mi!

LINK - cozinhas solidárias, to feed the people affected by the floods. also accepts international donations through a paypal linked in the page.

please share and consider donating if you can. $5 is around R$25 for us and it already helps so much.

International donations:

Doações nacionais:

It's still raining in many parts of the state, but at the capital and metropolitan region it has stopped or now. That being said, the weather forecast predictions say it'll start raining again towards the middle of the week, which is not enough time for most of the water o go down. Plus the weather should get colder.

Here's the forecast for the capital city, Porto Alegre, towards the end of next week:

and Ishikawa Takuboku wrote "just for once i want a love that feels like plunging my flushed cheeks into deep soft snow.”

There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio