Nemui

NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix

The planet Saturn makes noise. The planet emits signals through plasma waves, which can be converted into sound.

So, in 2017, after recovering the Cassini spacecraft that literally fell through Saturn, scientists recovered the recordings the spacecraft made of the planet.

And you know what it sounds like?

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Proko (Free)

Marc Brunet (Free but he does have other classes for a cheap price. Use to work for Blizzard)

Aaron Rutten (free)

BoroCG (free)

Jesse J. Jones (free, talks about animating)

Jesus Conde (free)

Mohammed Agbadi (free, he gives some advice in some videos and talks about art)

Ross Draws (free, he does have other classes for a good price)

SamDoesArts (free, gives good advice and critiques)

Drawfee Show (free, they do give some good advice and great inspiration)

The Art of Aaron Blaise ( useful tips for digital art and animation. Was an animator for Disney)

Bobby Chiu ( useful tips and interviews with artist who are in the industry or making a living as artist)

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

The "how to draw manga" series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.

"Creating characters with personality" by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.

"Albinus on anatomy" by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.

"Artistic Anatomy" by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.

"Directing the story" by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.

"Animal Anatomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.

"Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations" by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.

"Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand" by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.

"An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist" by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.

Etherington Brothers, they make books and have a free blog with art tips.

As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

Clip Studio paint ( you can choose to pay once or sub and get updates)

Procreate ( pay once for $9.99)

Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, ect Free)

PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)

Krita (Free)

mypaint (free)

FireAlpaca (free)

Libresprite (free, for pixel art)

Those are the ones I can recall.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

The Swedish torch is good for an efficient and contained fire, it’s controlled and good for cooking over and produces less light and heat than other fires. It can be difficult to keep going once you burn through the original log

The teepee is your traditional campfire. Good for heat and light not great for cooking, burns through fuel fairly quickly

The star fire is one of the slowest burning and not well protected but provides an even heat good for slow cooking and is excellent if you have limited fuel and need the protection a fire can provide

The lean to is a compact and efficient fire that evolves into a dense and hot bed of coals. The structure creates a good source of air flow which can help damp wood burn. A slightly better cooking fire that isn’t as bright. It also provides protection from wind on one side

The platform fire is incredibly hot and will create a very thick bed of coals but it doesn’t have a lot of air flow and is a little harder to get started.

The log cabin is big and bright and has lots of air flow which again is good for damp logs. You can also use this structure to start a smaller fire in the middle while drying out bigger logs. This fire will crumble into a messier bed of coals that don’t produce particularly even heat for cooking.

In the town I live in, there’s only one place to get the state-required voter ID. It’s way out beyond the end of the bus line, and its hours are inconvenient and unpredictable. Also, the IDs cost like $30; the people who passed the voter ID law obviously didn’t think that was a budget-breaker for anyone who MATTERED.

If you have difficulty getting a voter ID, here are some thoughts:

- Contact a church. (I wish I could say contact ANY church, but to be honest, if you look unconventional, and you don’t know which churches in your town are the progressive ones, look for a Unitarian church. I suspect most synagogues would be more helpful than most evangelical churches, but I don’t know that from personal experience.)

When I was a church secretary, if someone had called and said, “I want to register to vote, but I don’t have a car and I don’t have $30 for an ID,” I’m pretty sure our entire governing board would have been lining up to help you out.

In this part of the country, nuns are a good bet, too.

- Contact the local Democratic Party office.

- Contact a YMCA or a YWCA. Did you know that fighting racism is actually part of the Y’s charter? Pretty sure somebody in that office will be able to help you get the ID you need to register.

- Go to your town’s website and look for a pro-diversity organization – a Multicultural Awareness Center, something like that. Give them a call.

- Call your library reference desk and ask if they know of anyone who could help.

Yemen Food Crisis

Yemen's Houthis warn ships in red Sea to avoid Israel or face attack

Other places to give:

Save the Children Donation

Muslim Aid USA

Islamic Relief USA

Yamada & Akane 💕

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

Incredibly violent well-armed vagabond who kills people for money/political favors

member of the landed elite who does the same and also just to maintain/extend their personal fortune

Did something to get in the monarch's good books and got a big special pat on the head for it.

Knights were

a social class of feudal europe,

part of the noble class,

comprised of

well-equipped

mounted

warriors and warlords (i.e. professional "officer" soldiers, they fought themselves and also had men-at-arms under their command, "rank and file" soldiers),

who

owed their allegiance as warlords to a lord/baron/king/religious institution

and

owned land and exploited (in the marxist sense, it's not a value judgement, it just describes a social relation) the labour of those who tended that land (serfs or otherwise), often without being taxed (in lieu of paying taxes, they waged war on command)

AND/OR

were part of a christian military order, and waged holy war for a living.

"Allegiance" is the key word here. That's what separates knights from generic warriors and mercenaries. It's not an inherent trait of the class, it's part of an ideological superstructure which evolved gradually over time. And to a significant degree, it evolved precisely to separate knights from mercenaries, and to offer to mounted well-equipped warlords some tempting privileges (land, tax exemptions, social status, honours and glory) in exchange for becoming a reliable war asset. Which mercenaries were certainly not. Hence the enormous emphasis on loyalty and fealty and oath-keeping.

This is the purpose of chivalry. To take a horse-rider with a sword, who would be a wild card if left to his own devices, and turn him into a reliable war asset. A good little tool of death. The rest is pretty ribbons tied around the sword.

Now obviously, if the ideal was "the loyal knight", in practice knights were not necessarily loyal. It was a process to establish it, and an effort to maintain it, and then at times it broke completely, and the place got swarmed by robber knights. (Usually when the ruling class was no longer willing or able to give away lands, and found out that titles alone are not enough to control heavily armed warlords). So the war asset was not, in fact, always reliable, and the little tool of death was not always pointed at the desired direction.

But remember that the robber knights, who operated in their immediate vicinity instead of marching wherever their liege lord or order sent them, were in the exact same business with the loyal ones. They killed and plundered and enslaved. We often read complaints about their brutality, and how they forsake their vows and shit on chivalry, but you know what's the main complaint, the real one? "They're doing it to US! They should be doing it to other people far away!"

@illuminaidan

The chevauchée is a type of military tactic, kinda like scorched earth, where the cavalry raids madly through the country and summarily burns and pillages fields and villages, slaughtering everyone. It's pure destruction: it's not like, to secure this strategic position, nor is it about depriving the enemy's army of food and shelter, which is how scorched earth is often used, as defence vs an invasion. The only goal is demoralisation, and forcing the enemy to come meet you in battle. Because you just devastated a portion of their lands and eliminated a portion of their peasants, and you are gonna keep doing it until there's nothing and no one left. So they better show up.

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR EXAMS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR ESSAYS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR PRESENTATIONS!

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR FINAL PROJECTS!

GOOD LUCK!!! YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR!!

and a gentle reminder to take breaks, and get a snack and some water. Don’t forget to take a moment to breathe.

thank me later.

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YouTube with downloads (you can even download the audio by itself!)

YouTube with subscriptions and playlists without logging in

As an immunocompromised person, i'm begging you to consider doing one or three of these things. I've seen very few people talk about them because we want the pandemic to be over, so i'm trying to spread the word, especially as cases go up with winter+holidays.

#1 --- Nasal sprays/prophylactics.

There are several nasal sprays on the market that have been proven to reduce the risk of covid by up to 80%.

(That study was done on a nasal spray with Iota-carrageenan.)

The nasal spray Covixyl was proven to reduce covid infections in healthcare workers by 62%

Nasal sprays with xylitol in them also showed efficacy at lowering viral load, and also helping symtoms if you've contracted covid.

Xlear is one such brand. They were actually sued for saying they prevented covid, and then proved *in a federal court of law* that they were able to prevent covid and treat covid symptoms by 62% - (link here)

You can find similar nasal sprays with xylitol at your local pharmacy, which may be less effective (Studies may vary), but STILL helpful as a preventative.

These sprays last about four hours, and are used prior to engaging with people (and ideally while masking, but even sans mask these are very helpful!)

The sprays in the US range from about $12 to $35, and can be found on amazon and probably your local pharmacy or walmart. Seriously, just blow your nose, use a spray in each nostril, go about your day.

#2 - Mouthwashes with Cetylpyridinium chloride

The ingredient Cetylpyridinium chloride has been proven to lower viral load. Links: here, here, here

Mouthwashes with povidone-iodine, or chlorhexidine gluconate also proved effective but here's the thing: CPC is found in mouthwashes like Crest, Colgate, and Therabreath.

I can buy a mouthwash for $5 at my local grocery that helps reduce viral load just by rinsing my mouth out when I get home after an event.

Usually, the label will advertise active ingredients on the front or cap, so it's not hard to look for.

#3 -- nasal sanitizers.

These have been used in the hospital for a while - if you've had an "elective" procedure done since covid, you might have had your snoot cleaned out with an orange scented q-tip. This is to reduce nasal viral load. It's mostly for use with MRSA right now, but with how much people touch the nose area and how much covid is shed from the nasal passages before/after symptom onset, this can help with spread of covid. To be very clear, full double-blind studies have not been done yet, but it does show some promise.

Either iodine solutions or the brand NOZIN are good options.

These would be used when you got home/after spending time with people to cleanse your nose.

I bought my bottle on amazon for about $25, and it's still going strong ages later. (To be fair, I mostly use it for events where there's been little social distancing or ive felt exposed).

---

TL;DR - if you dont want to read all the studies, here's a good cheap prevention plan:

~Use XLEAR nasal spray before you leave or interact with people ($13.50 on cvs website)

~Come home and use a CPL mouthwash like Crest ($5 on amazon)

~Use a nasal sanitizer with iodine or like nazin - $18-25 after exposure

Combine this with your use of masks, social distancing, air filters, vaccines, and increasing air flow, and you can really reduce the spread of COVID.

While some of these studies are still ongoing, the risk of all of them is essentially nil. And honestly, I will pay $20 and do a few small things to reduce the risk of covid. Most of these are genuinely easier than masking - which I will still be doing. Additionally, they'll reduce risk of colds and flu!

Blue Eye Samurai by Mike McCain

always listen to music/audio at a reasonable volume. additionally, use over-ear headphones instead of earbuds whenever possible, preferably noise-cancelling ones as you won’t have to turn up the volume to drown out ambient sounds.

use earplugs when going to concerts/other loud places (cons, sport events, etc). if you’re worried about audio quality or not being able to hear people in a conversation, don’t be! many modern earplugs simply attenuate incoming sound without muffling it or otherwise deteriorating the sound (this is absolutely not an ad but Flare Audio’s Isolate is one example of earplugs that work like this). use of earplugs can in many cases result in an even better experience, as your ears will only perceive really loud audio as straight-up distortion anyway, a problem that earplugs fix quite effectively. 

it’s also important to note that if anyone gives you shit for wearing earplugs, they are not your friend and you should absolutely not listen to anything they have to say (if you’re the kind of person who does this then please drop your address in my DMs so i can personally come punch you in the face, thanks!)

if you work in or otherwise frequent a noisy environment, try to find the time to give your ears some rest. just sitting/meditating in a quiet space on a somewhat regular basis is enough, and also has the added benefit of decreasing stress and anxiety, two other factors that can potentially lead to/worsen tinnitus.

this is all important because once you have tinnitus, it will not go away. while there are treatments that can help mitigate the symptoms or help you cope with them, there is no cure for tinnitus, and there is no guarantee that there ever will be.

i feel like i don’t need to put into words how detrimental it is to your overall quality of life to have a constant tone/noise playing in your ears, never being able to hear pure silence ever again.

if you’re curious about what it’s like for me specifically, go to this website, set the waveform to “sine”, put in 6800 hertz, drag the volume slider almost all the way to the left, then click play. this is approximately what i hear in my left ear constantly, even when there’s other sounds in the background. any everyday sounds in the same frequency range that i happen to hear also amplify this tone, so simply drowning it out is not an option.