Link Roundup 3/10/2024

On Monday, I read this BBC article, “Trump supporters target black voters with faked AI images“, which points out that misinformation like this is now being generated by people in the U.S. instead of outside actors like Russia or China. Something that really jumped out at me, though, was how real the fakes looked:

There’s some giveaways that this is fake: the weird glossy focus, the kind of sameness to the guys’ faces, the software’s inability to generate recognizable logos or designs on the t-shirt and baseball cap. But it is rendering hands okay! It’s doing way better than what was being produced less than a year-and-a-half ago:

Definitely not real people, certainly not a hand. Made in January 2023.

If Trump wasn’t in that top picture and I saw it as part of an article, or posted on social media, I don’t think that I’d pause to consider whether it was real or not. That’s something I worry about a lot, because I think that we’re at a point where the casual observer might not be able identify AI-generated images without scrutiny. The potential to create fake outrage bait to fuel narratives and advance agendas is pretty frightening to me. “CAUGHT ON CAMERA: Antifa member kicks puppy! You won’t believe this shocking thing that a homeless person did right in front of us! Cop shoots unarmed black mom in back! [I’m both-sidesing it, here]” If this sort of thing starts to become commonplace, then you have to start questioning every image that you see. We’ve always had image manipulation and fakes (see below), but as this technology improves it’s going to be harder to tell apart. Also, the more commonplace this becomes, the harder it will be to accept weird images that are actually real (also see below).

Deepfake, 1937 version.
Deepfake, 1993 version.
Nixon and Elvis. A real photo. I have a vague memory in the 1990s of people thinking that this was fake, but I don’t know how widespread that opinion was.
George Bush Sr. shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. A real photo.

Seven years ago I used to work around a team of software engineers from India, who on their lunch breaks would spend a lot of time sharing clearly Photoshopped images with each other, like the one below of the blue monkey. They’d pass the image around and say stuff like, “So beautiful!” and “Nature is amazing!” I never asked them about it, but I couldn’t tell if they knew the images were fake and were just enjoying them for what they were, or if their media literacy was poor enough that they thought they were looking at real photos. I still think about them and wonder about it.

A blue monkey is a real type of monkey but it doesn’t look like this Photoshopped image.

Anyway, here’s some more links to stuff I read this week, all picked from the Internet by these human hands:

Israel war links. I put these all in one place so you can skip them easier if you want to. Also, content warning on that second link: the article and my notes on it relate to sexual violence.

  • London Review of Books: “The Shoah after Gaza“. This article is, in part, about Israeli’s right-wing made the Holocaust the central point of their culture, and use it as a sort of shield against criticism of any of their actions. It’s a pretty dense read, but worth it.
  • NPR: “A U.N. report finds ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ attacks in Israel included rapes“. When 10/7 was happening, a lot of people on social media (including me) celebrated the breach of the walls of Gaza before learning about the horrors that would happen next. I’m guessing that a lot of Israelis and Jewish people saw that and understandably misunderstood that as people supporting Hamas. Anyway, once it became clear that this was an attack and not a breakout, it was easy to see from videos and pictures that horrific violence was going on. I saw one video of a hostage that showed, to me, pretty clear evidence of sexual assault. Shortly afterward, I read a post from some left-wing group I’d never heard of arguing that there was no indication of any Palestinians sexually assaulting people and that to suggest it was racist. In it they referenced the same video that I saw, suggesting that what was pretty clearly blood was just dirt instead. It was such a gross, obviously-wrong thing for them to claim. The most generous interpretation of their post was that they were blinded by their politics. When I hear people talking about antisemitism on the left, that’s the post that comes to mind.
  • Washington Post: “U.S. floods arms into Israel despite mounting alarm over war’s conduct“. I am too dumb to understand why we are advocating for a ceasefire and trying to deliver aid to Gaza while we are still giving bombs to Israel.

Portland & Oregon links

“I love this kind of shit, like, you guys… I… when I… I do not believe that I should be here in fucking cuffs right now. And so I will use this – 100 percent – to fucking… it’s absurd… I WAS NOT doing anything wrong. I was over here – th – FUCKING sitting on that bench. Right there! Like I can’t….. you get it, right?”

Table-Top Role-Playing Game links

  • D&D Beyond: “How to Write a D&D Campaign“. Some good baseline advice for creating campaigns for any role-playing game.
  • Gnome Stew: “HOW TO MAKE A PUBLISHED RPG SETTING YOUR OWN“. I was looking forward to reading this article, having lightly adapted “Descent Into Avernus” and “The Wild Beyond the Witchlight” to fit into my campaign world, but I found the article too generic to be useful. No offense to the author, but I had to check to see whether it was written by AI.

I’ll end this week’s post with a recommendation: I don’t normally read online comics, but this week I started reading “3rd Voice” and I’ve been enjoying it so far.

Link Roundup 3/3/2024

Well I was going to write up some sort of intro to these links, but today I organized the paper minis that I use for my Dungeons & Dragons games and did not expect it to take almost six hours! Here’s some stuff I read this week:

Portland links:

Tabletop Role-playing games links:

  • Rascal: “Return To Perinthos Honors Jennell Jaquays’ Queer Activism And Her Dungeon-Breaking Legacy” [Paywalled article]. I only learned about game designer Jennell Jaquays after her death in January. She was highly regarded for her innovation of creating non-linear dungeons, and I wanted to know more. Rascal’s article was my jumping off point, but it’s paywalled so I ended up finding this series of posts I’m in the process of reading that deep dives into her concepts. Two posts in, I’m realizing that her ideas would have highly influenced the D&D mega-dungeon “Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage“, which I enjoyed quite a bit largely due to its use of the process. Here‘s her Wikipedia article for a quick introduction to who she was.
  • Core20: “The Sweet Spot“. I enjoy reading through the sourcebooks of non-D&D games, even when I don’t plan on playing the games (just because I’ve learned the rules for some new game doesn’t mean that I’d expect the people that I play games with to do the same). I’m kind of interested in learning more about the Core20 system, but I dislike their font that they use for their logo, also used for their headers in their sourcebooks, so much that I stopped reading through their beta-version player’s handbook.
  • Rascal: “Balancing Black Joy In Creating Black Horror” [Paywalled article.] I mostly just followed this link because the post I saw it in referenced Harlem Unbound, a sourcebook for the Call of Cthulu games. I’ve never been particularly interested in Call of Cthulu, but the idea of it being set in 1930s Harlem and having everyday racism be as big of a threat to the characters as otherworldly horror sounds pretty compelling. Here’s a review of it that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. I don’t think that the appeal of this sourcebook is enough to get me to learn Call of Cthulu, but who knows.

Here’s a cool old illustration of streetcar lines as a reward for making it to the bottom of this post!

This image from the TransitMaps account on Twitter captioned “Here’s a stunning (and surprisingly accurate) overview of the then-new Arlington Heights (left) and King’s Heights (right) streetcar lines in Portland, Oregon. Note the Pittock Mansion sitting high above everything! From the “Morning Oregonian”, October 5, 1913.” I completely forgot that there even was an Arlington Heights streetcar!

Link Roundup 2/25/2024

I don’t make much art or anything else very interesting these days, so when the hosting for this site expired a week or two ago, I thought to myself, “Do I really need a vanity website anymore?” The ready answer was “no”, although I did have a bit of sadness at the thought of discarding this site that I’ve maintained in some version for over 25 years. I made a note to myself to take a few days to think about it, and if I decided to keep it, come up with some valid justification for doing so.

Anyway, a few days ago came the news that the website Vice was being killed by the private equity raiders that bought it, and it made me think of all the other sites on the Internet that have been bought and gutted for parts or otherwise turned into garbage (Google search) for short-term profits. I know that’s not just happening online – it’s happening in a bunch of other industries (see my first link, below). The thought of maintaining my own private little patch of the Internet outside the influence of Mark Zuckerburg or Elon Musk or Blackstone Group or some other group of billionaire creeps suddenly became a lot more appealing.

I still don’t know what I’ll do with this site, but I’ll go ahead and keep it. I’m plenty busy with other projects, so it might be that I don’t touch it again for another three or four years.

For now, here’s some of the links I’ve been reading this week:

  • NPR: “After his wife died, he joined nurses to push for new staffing rules in hospitals“. A man’s wife died unexpectedly in an ICU unit and it was likely due a shortage of nurses. As the article explains, the hospital is run by a for-profit company and since they can’t bill patients directly for nurses’ labor, they instead try to cut costs and maintain a level of staffing that is actually life-threatening.
  • NPR: “Scientists scanning the seafloor discover a long-lost Stone Age ‘megastructure’“. “Megastructure” made this sound a lot more exciting than what it is: a half-mile, 1.5′ tall wall of rocks, probably used for hunting purposes. It’s still pretty interesting, just not, like, a caveman fort or anything like that.
  • Freaky Trigger: “Aard Labour 2: High Society“. This is the latest in the series of posts reviewing and evaluating the 6,000 page run of the comic Cerebus by weirdo/extreme-misogynist Dave Sims. When I was in my late teens I had a roommate that had the “High Society” and “Church and State” collections of the comics and I read some of them but ultimately found them to be not for me – there was something off-putting to them that I couldn’t put my finger on although they were fun in sections. The writer of these posts is doing a good job of breaking down the good and bad.
  • Washington Post: “Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation“. This isn’t stated in the article but it’s basically a story about the nexus of QAnon anti-vax conspiracies and right wing grifters.
  • Prospect: “The Neglected History of the State of Israel“. If you oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians (in the West Bank, too, not just Gaza), you’re going to get called anti-Semitic by some people who I think are either saying that naively or disingenuously. Not all Jews want to kill their Arabic neighbors, but there sure is a far-right extremist party that wants to do exactly that, and it’s not too hard to find evidence of their success. The linked article provides some historic context for that group, which includes Netanyahu. It’s linked in the article, but it references the Isaac Chotiner interview with settler Daniella Weiss, which is still such a shocking thing to read that I’ve linked it here.
  • Wikipedia: “List of unusual deaths“. A jumping off point in case you want to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Portland specific links:

Indefinite Shutdown, Infinite Shutdown

Last call.

With coronavirus cases growing exponentially, Oregon Governor Kate Brown has ordered the state back on shutdown for two weeks, with Multnomah and some other counties being shutdown for four weeks (at least). I’m not mad about it or disagree with it, but this is an absolute nightmare for owners and employees of restaurants and bars – especially bars.

The first lockdown was incredibly hard for lots of service industry people, but this one is going to be even worse because there’s no financial support coming from the federal government for everyone affected by this. Theoretically, there’s unemployment for people, but Oregon’s unemployment system has not exactly been weathering the pandemic very successfully. We’ve already seen a ton of restaurants and bars permanently close since the pandemic started and this is probably the death knell for a large number more.

If we had a competent federal government, maybe we wouldn’t be here, but I think that we also needed a competent response by the public. Last night, when the above picture was taken, my wife and I were at a bar with outside seating spaced reasonably apart, having a last beer before they closed indefinitely. A patron from a nearby table came over, mask-less, and bummed a smoke off of my wife. The dude then asked,”Mind if I sit with you while I smoke this?”

“Uh, no, you can’t. We’re pretty concerned about the virus.” I gestured to our masks.

“Huh. Okay. Fine. By the way, you don’t need to wear a mask.”

A Personal Blog? What is This, 2008?!

After Trump won the 2016 presidential election, there was this ridiculous suggestion made, if nothing else, at least it would inspire great works of art (here’s an article from January 2017 referencing some of those statements). The idea was dumb, offensive, and entitled in this sort of way that ignored the potential for harm from a Trump presidency. Anyway, I guess now we can all look back and see how that went. I went on sporadically making art, but I sure wasn’t inspired by the fact that a deeply racist, misogynist fascist was in charge of the nation. If anything, my creativity was limited due to the psychic weight of Donald Trump being the President of the United States. I mean, seriously: at least once a week, I would be shocked and dumbfounded as I stopped to think about how the tacky grifter from one of the dumbest reality game shows from the 2000s was somehow elected to be the leader of the country. By the way, wasn’t the early 2000s an embarrassing time culturally? Frosted tips, bedazzled ass-pockets on jeans, “Jon & Kate Plus 8”, Justin & Kelly from “American Idol”, reality shows in general, but especially “The Apprentice”. I couldn’t ever figure out why anyone would want to watch such a blatantly hateful phony demean and bully greedy dumdums.

Anyway, that asshole has lost re-election and when Biden/Harris’s win was called yesterday, I spent the day feeling like a huge weight was lifted off of my back. I mean, Trump is still in office for another two months and will likely continue to do irreparable harm for our democracy. But yesterday felt pretty good.

I’m mostly writing this post, though, just to post something on this blog. A couple weeks ago I’d realized that it had been nearly two years since I’d posted anything here, so I added “Make blog post. ha ha” to my weekly to-do list (I have daily and weekly to-do lists). Having a personal website when I’m not actively trying to make money off of it or showcase my art is the definition of a vanity project, but I pay $5 a month for the hosting, so I may as well do something with it. I’ll keep “Make a blog post. ha ha” on future to-do lists, and – who knows – maybe I’ll even make something that could be considered art.

Day 1: Donald Trump Has Been Elected President

I went to bed after several drinks last night, not surprised but not fully prepared for where the election was headed. Heather, my wife, came into bed later, crying and holding me and confirming what I feared. I felt numb, and comforted her as best as I could.

I woke up this morning with the same dumb numbness, but NPR came on to the alarm clock. The announcers were too upbeat for the reality, and Heather started crying again. I shut it off and lay in bed. I didn’t look at Facebook and I didn’t look at Twitter. I didn’t know what to do. When I thought about what to do, I thought about deleting both my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I had an idea, an idea that stills seems reasonable, that interacting on social media instead of in person was destroying us. I’d also attended a demonstration the previous day of software that efficiently scrapes all of your social media for immediate review and consumption. I was thinking about how President Donald Trump might use this technology. President Donald Trump. I checked a few permission settings on Facebook and walked in to work.

Nobody harassed me on my walk into work – it was no worse of a walk than usual. The day progressed as normal, with the exception that I greeted people with “Hello!” instead of “Good morning!”

There was a protest happening after work, just a block away from me over at Pioneer Courthouse Square, and I considered joining. I was starting to feel again, realizing that this is our new reality and that to be numb and turn away from it is the equivalent of apathy and death. I also wanted to go to the Library, where I do my research on Wednesdays. I decided to check out the protest, which filled Pioneer Courthouse Square. A thousand people, easy. There was also a contingent of sad men that supported Trump doing a counter-protest. I decided that the crowd was big enough that it didn’t need me, so I went to the Library.

The Library was closed. I’d later learn that the Library was closed due to the protest, but it felt really fitting that a library would be closed the day after Trump won the presidency. I decided to join the protest.

I couldn’t find the protest at first, which seemed silly considering the amount of news helicopters hovering above the city. I walked around for a while and finally found the protest as they were taking the Morrison Bridge. As a pedestrian and a guy who hates cars, I love a protest that shuts down traffic, but I have a lot of empathy for car drivers that are frustrated by sitting in that traffic. I want to help shut down traffic, but then I think about the person sitting in their car (idling, needlessly) who gets mad about the protest without thinking about what the protest is trying to accomplish. I decided not to join in, and kept walking around.

I walked through Waterfront Park, which was close enough for me to enjoy the protest, but not to be part of it. As I was walking, I heard the horrible crunch of metal hitting a smaller metal target. The sound came before my sight, but it happened in such a way that I turned my head towards the noise and saw a bicycle and a bicycle rider flying through the air. It took me a second to process, and while I was understanding what I saw, the driver who hit the bicyclist pulled off to the side of the road. The bicyclist pulled himself from the ground and immediately started staggering into the park. He saw me calling 911 and waved my concern off – it seemed pretty obvious that it was a stolen bike that he had left demolished behind him. I paused for a moment before pressing “dial” on the call before deciding not to dial. I feel a lot of concern about the health of the guy, but he didn’t want that call to be placed. I stopped the call. Whatever that guy’s scenario was, I hope he got the help he needed.

The driver stayed behind, and was clearly concerned about the cyclist. I didn’t see what led to the crash, but the abandoned bike was demolished. The driver behind the driver also stopped to get out. They were both concerned about the crash, albeit in different ways. The driver that hit the man on the bicyclist told me “he ran a red light!” I’d normally take issue with that – you should always travel at an appropriate speed to anticipate unknowns – but this injured dude just booked it. I advised both drivers that the guy did not want help, and left. I don’t feel very good about it. That driver was driving fast enough to send a person through the air. Confronted with a crash that sent a bike rider into the air, I left that driver to deal with his own conscience.

After the traffic crash, I never caught back up with the protest even when I followed the news helicopters. I was within blocks of it, but never got close to join. On the Esplanade, I enjoyed the calm of one direction of traffic being shutdown.

I got off of the Esplanade and climbed the stairs at the Burnside bridge. A pickup truck drove by me and a passenger yelled “WOOOO TRUMP PENCE!”. At the Burnside/MLK intersection, someone gunned their engine as they sped around the turn. I don’t think that’s related to the election, because it happens all the time, but I assume the perpetrator was a Trump supporter. That might be unfair! Who knows.

As I got closer to my house, I walked through the houseless encampments in my neighborhood. As a white male, I have the agency to do this – a lot of women, regardless of color, feel unsafe doing this. It’s understandable! A lot of houseless people in our neighborhood have taken to carrying improvised weapons with them – it’s a threatening scene.But like they need to arm themselves. They’ve been attacked a lot, politically and physically. I saw a lot of houseless people emerge after the Great Recession of 2008, and I’m seeing more of them appearing now.

I walked by a couple of houseless youths, one armed with a crowbar and the other armed with an axe. The guy with the crowbar got in my face and yelled “Fuck Trump!” I responded by saying “I agree!” He was a little startled.

I don’t feel numb anymore. Here’s our first day. We can’t run, we must be present. We have to acknowledge our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, our biases, and we have to fight. We have to fight.