art

- get blank dvds (Both +R or -R work, I think +R is slightly cheaper, the difference is rewritability), these are not very expensive for the amount you can get in bulk (if you are in the US 100 of them is about 30$ at walmart)

- an external DVD drive that plugs in via usb is also around 20-40$ (it tends to be closer to 20)

- download DVDFlick (free)

- if you don’t already have the mp4/mpeg of whatever media you want to burn, you can download movies/shows off of sites like gomovies.sx and soap2day

gomovies.sx will have a download button that looks like this

below the video you can choose one of these

if you click streamlare for example and then the download button it will take you here where the mp4 is

(if you’re on an iphone/ipad, clicking download will save it to your files app)

- if you cant find the download button on soap2day you can also install a video downloader extension which will find the movie for you

- at this point you can drag and drop it into a google drive or keep it on your computer but if you still want it on dvd ->

- open dvd flick, drag and drop the video

- click “project settings”

- give it whatever title you want, you can change encoder to “normal” (default is below normal if you are doing other things on the computer). you dont need to change target size or thread count (unless you want to)

- insert a blank dvd into your drive, make sure you click “burn project to disc”

- click accept then click “create dvd” next to menu and project settings. it will create a destination folder and this dialogue box will pop up when you click “create” on more dvds, just click “yes” and then “okay” on the box that appears after it

-> -> ->

-> -> -> -> -> -> ->

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

Using both Glaze and Nightshade would corrupt the generation of pictures mimicking artist AND mess with the AI's recognition of what everything is. Like it would generate a dog when you ask for a cat.

My MIL is not an awful person. She’s a loving mother who carries emotional scars from having been in an abusive relationship with her minister husband for a long time, which has left her with a disabling preoccupation with “What might the neighbours say” in her life, and that often means she makes poor choices without realising it. She loves my husband no less; she didn’t withdraw love and affection from him, didn’t cut him off.

But she chose to pretend it wasn’t happening, and that sent him into a hefty shame spiral we had to work through. A few months later, a stand up routine he did about being bisexual was doing the rounds on Facebook, and despite normally sharing every single routine of his, she rang him to tell him she wouldn’t be sharing that one because “Your brother’s wedding is coming up, and I don’t want it overshadowed by people talking about you and your news.”

And again, this is not because she rejects him. That’s an easy narrative, and certainly the one you’d assume from the outside. But that, in her own way, was her attempt to protect both her children from negative scrutiny - she truly thought that people would care, and would care enough to make a scene at the wedding, and that would hurt the two of them.

Everyone already knew. He’s a celebrity in his culture. No one cared. But, that was my MIL’s fear.

And the message it sent, intentionally or not, was “This is something shameful.”

I could write a whole essay, a whole book about this experience in my family, but I won’t. It feels ungrateful to criticize the actions of people who still say they love you, and have never hurt you and will never hurt you in the big dramatic ways we see in the media. But in my case, and I think in many, it isn’t a clean, decisive cut.