Thomas Rosen

Characters co-owned w @_magic.stardust_ on IG 😌✨ (a couple more comics abt this on my account already)

I'm not a very positive person, i have a LOT of doomer tendencies. I feel everything like it's cranked up to the max, and as you can imagine it doesn't feel great. Every day throws more atrocious things in my face, and i can't ignore it 🥲

I see other people feeling the same way. We dissociate and numb ourselves by watching, playing, buying stuff. Hateful movements are gaining traction and climate change has its foot in the door

And it's all happening either way, to some degree. I feel like shit, and i'm sick of that. I might as well have a little bit of hope, otherwise i'll go bonkers 😭 Do we continue doomering our way through life or ignoring things altogether, or do we choose to hope a little?

That's why i'm looking into Solarpunk and am thinking of taking any readers (and myself) on a little journey through a better world, and how it might work, through a series of mini-comics I'm posting here. I don't have all the answers (no one person ever does), and i don't hold any pretenses that this kind of world is going to be our future. But i often hear "You love critiquing the status quo, but what do you propose instead?" I'd like to find out too. Here's to something we can hope for, no matter how slim the chances are! Because as I said, i might just lose my mind otherwise ☠️

P.S for new peeps: this is an AU with me and my friend's OCs, so all characters are genderless and go by they/them. It's not identical to our world in that regard, but other than this fact we try to keep it more or less realistic 🤙

BBC News reports:

Elliot Page has won praise for posing bare-chested for the first time since coming out as trans in December.

An Instagram post shared by the actor showed him smiling while posing in a pool in swimming shorts alongside the words #transjoy and #transisbeautiful.

Page, 34, previously described his top surgery - where breast tissue is removed - as “life-saving”.

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey last month he said it made him “feel comfortable” in his body “for probably the first time”.

The Umbrella Academy star tearfully explained why his chest had brought him the “most joy” in transitioning.

“It’s getting out of the shower and the towel’s around your waist and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you’re just like, ‘There I am’. And I’m not having the moment where I’m panicked,” he said during the Apple TV interview.

More here.

OH NO

I figured out how to get ESRGAN (and SFTGAN) running on Windows. Unfortunately, it’s not as user friendly as waifu2x, but it’s fairly easy as far as Python deep learning programs go.

The most up to date info is at Reddit’s /r/gameupscale. https://www.reddit.com/r/GameUpscale/ You can also check out the Game Upscale Discord here: https://discord.gg/jkFHzGD 

I’m leaving this guide up because it still gets quite a bit of traffic.

You will need:

Windows 7 or up, 64-bit only

An Nvidia GPU is recommended. the newer and the more memory, the better. My 6GB 1060 could upscale 1024x600 images to 4096x2400. You’ll need to run it in CPU mode otherwise - see step 3.5.

Python 3 64-bit (x86-64) : https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-366/

Step 1: Install CUDA 9.2 or 10.0, plus the patch if there is one. I believe you only need the CUDA and driver components: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive

Step 2: Go to the PyTorch installation site. Use “pip” as the package, “stable” for the build, and everything else should match your software versions. Open up the Windows command prompt (search “cmd” in the start menu) and paste in the commands. https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/

If it tells you “x is not a supported wheel on this platform”, make absolutely sure your options match and that your Python installation is 64-bit, or try different versions of Python or CUDA.

While you’re there, paste in this (pip3, not pip): pip3 install numpy opencv-python

Step 3: Download https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN along with the two pretrained models.

Step 3.5 (READ IF YOU HAVE AN AMD/INTEL GPU): Go into test.py and change “device = torch.device(‘cuda’)“ to “ device = torch.device(‘cpu’)”.

Step 4: Follow the instructions in ESRGAN’s “Quick Test” section. I highly recommend running the network interpolation command, because the default, full monty SRGAN model can make images a bit noisy whereas PSNR is too blurry. I usually use 0.8.

Ignore any “nn.Upsampling is deprecated” errors, they have no effect on the results. Do not use PNGs with alpha channels or you will get an “index out of range” error.k

Make sure to include the model path, or else you will get an “IndexError: list index out of range“ error. Either navigate to the ESRGAN directory via the command prompt, or save the commands you want as a .bat file in the ESRGAN directory.

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Optional Step 5, for SFTGAN: Download SFTGAN here and follow the PyTorch instructions under “Test Models”. Make sure to download the pretrained models: https://github.com/xinntao/SFTGAN

SFTGAN is similar to ESRGAN. It tries to make more intelligent guesses about what kind of details it’s trying to retrieve, and it looks better in some cases (outdoor photographs, textures) and worse in others. The requirements are the same as ESRGAN.

Just Cause 2 texture comparison: https://imgur.com/a/JDsvVei

Place the images for  SFTGAN in data/samples. Unlike ESRGAN, you need to scale up the images by 4x before you run it. SFTGAN will downscale the image, then upscale it again, leaving the resolution unchanged. I use nearest neighbor scaling, but cubic scaling could be worth a try if dithering’s a problem.

Additional Info: I’ve been seeing this tutorial on other sites now and there’s a couple of things I need to clear up:

1. ESRGAN’s default networks were trained on a very specific type of image. That is, high resolution photographs downscaled with bicubic sampling. So it struggles with pics that went through color reduction or heavy dithering (like you see with old prerendered sprites), pictures that are blurry (I’d recommend downscaling them by 50%, as you’ll still get a 2x resolution boost), and pixel art. It may be possible to “tune” it by training it on specific categories of images. I’ve had some success adding small amounts of noise to the images to help it out, or blurring out color banding or sharp edges.

Other tips here:  https://boards.fireden.net/v/thread/443447437/#443455703

2. ESRGAN and SFTGAN are not the only super-resolution programs out there. The former is a modification of the existing SRGAN program from 2 years ago, and there’s new ones coming out every week. Not all of them exist as open source programs and not all of them run on Windows (Ubuntu 16.04 seems to be the “standard” OS for neural network programs), but I recommend you give them a try too, since there’s no one best way of upscaling photos. You could even shell out cash for Let’s Enhance or AI Gigapixel if you have more money than time.

3. Waifu2x is (as far as I know) the state of the art for illustrations and it’s what I’d recommend for HD anime reaction images.

I’ve just been kind-of thinking about this for awhile. It’s not that big a deal, I guess, maybe charts are just the least important thing, but I’ve seen quite a few attempts at finding ways to graphically communicate gender. and I’ve never once seen one that got it “quite right.”

I mean, there’s the obvious no-nos,

which could be vastly improved by adding another option or two, or just a “write it in” box. if you’re collecting gender demographics on a survey, I’d say that the best all-round option for your statistical convenience and to not erase anyone is quite simply

(other, please specify: ______ )

I mean, obviously, if it’s a general-population survey, or a survey that does not specifically focus on gender (esp. on trans, genderqueer, nonbinary etc people), the instances of non-binary respondents is probably going to be low enough that, for statistical purposes, this would suit your needs.

but for purposes other than collecting general-population demographics, sometimes it’s nice to chart things out, to show as many options as possible, to see how things interact. 

so then, the next step up the rung from the ‘pick one’ with only two options,

It’s an improvement, but it’s still binarist (really, 'androgynous’ here is just meaning 'halfway between male and female’ and isn’t exactly outside the binary) and has limited options.

I thought a long time about (and think I have seen) a representation like this:

(NB= nonbinary, N= neutral/ neutrois/ none/ etc)

Again it’s an improvement… a dot can be placed anywhere within the triangle, or floating out in space with the N-camp (and androgynous here is now between three gender groups). It would still not work for everyone, though, and honestly, there’s still something missing. It’s not very nuanced. 

My next thought was anything similar but with more sides - a square, for instance - but it gets too complicated deciding where to label different groups. Perhaps a three-dimensional shape would allow a bit more room for more options - but still, with the place-a-dot setup, it’s… limiting. (Multiple dots for genderfluid people is a huge advantage, but still, what if I can’t get my dot the perfect distance between all the right axes? What if a label I’m looking for is just not there?)

Recently I realized that the biggest issue here is that… dots and sliders and checkboxes are really limiting, in general.

You know what isn’t so limiting?

bar graphs.

I’ve looked around a bit and so far as I can tell… nobody else has done this? I don’t see why. 

of course, there’s plenty of room to add more gender designations along the X axis.

but my favourite part about this is that it allows one to express negative/ anti/ lack of identity. which… might not seem like it’s such a big thing to some people, to a lot of people. I’m sure the majority of people out there would just fill up the M+ or F+ column really high and leave it at that (mostly cis people) ; I have a feeling a lot of trans people would have some positives and some negatives (e.g. maybe a binary trans man would fill in lots of the +M and -F column).

a genderfluid person could do something like

(which, in this case, would be a genderfluid person who never identifies as masculine, and usually identifies as nonbinary, or something?)

my personal chart is something like

Which just… I mean, I really think this visual is a much better description of how I feel, gender-wise, than any one word ever could be, unless I invented a personal word just for myself… that I would have to define to everyone I met anyways, if I wanted it to make any sense. I call myself “agender” because I don’t really see myself as having any gender; as the chart can show, I don’t really have any “positive” gender feelings… but how negative they are is actually pretty important to me.