DeltaAro

14 hours ago, Lovebird said:

Idk who needs to hear this but calling people psychos/crazy/mentally ill for experiencing romantic attraction and saying romantic love is the equivalent to a mental illness or a curable disease is a spit in the face disabled, neurodivergant and mentally ill folk of all stripes, especially those who have been fighting for marriage & relationship equality.

Romantic love was traditionally compared to madness, so it's not something aros came up with.

This goes all back to Plato. He stated that four types of madness are divine gifts: prophecy, mysticism, poetry and love.

Plato praised love as admiration of the Form of Beauty, which our soul had "seen" in another life. It makes the soul remember and long for the realm beyond the heavens (the forms).

So the source of "love is madness" is actually exclusionary to aros.

And while I'd say romantic love in the acute phase can involve altered states of consciousness, this is temporary and something most people experience (and therefore accepted or even expected). Romantic love may involve negative feelings, but overall it's more positive or at least a mixed bag, which is not typically true for mental illnesses.

21 hours ago, 7sev said:

may i ask what essentialist means? i dont understand the definition google had given.

"Essence" means the underlying nature of a thing, a concealed quality which makes it what it is. Essentialist thinking is believing in essences and that there are natural categories which depend on them.

For example, the idea posted here, that the essence of art is the "creative expression of emotions", that AI generators lack. They don't express anything, don't have emotions, and instead just produce their images according to fixed logical rules and calculations.

You see, this supposed "essence of art" isn't directly observable. E.g. "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" was assumed to be human-made and even won a prize, but was unknowingly AI generated. "Muse in a Warzone" is the opposite story, wrongly suspected to be AI-generated.

21 hours ago, 7sev said:

either way ai generated images doesnt have what it takes to equate to manmade artworks; it should be used as a tool for artists instead of being profited off of and treated like a fellow human artist

If they can replace artists, they'll be used as such. 😐 It's even advertised that way.

I agree that it feels like artists are profited off. But it's a conundrum...

While overfitting may cause the AI model to partly reproduce images from the training set, that's the exception, not the norm. And without a concrete similarity, whose rights are infringed?

It would normally be impossible to prove that a particular image was used in the training set. So it needs a special law that makes the training sets explicitly opt-in.

On 3/6/2023 at 1:32 AM, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

The problem is that the AIs are being trained on art taken from real artists without their consent or permission, and then sold to people who are using this technology to avoid employing human artists. Those artists whose art the AIs are being told to replicate, or being taught how to draw from, deserve to be paid for their work and they deserve to have the work attributed to them. AI art, in the end, is just futuristic plagiarism.

Except for outsider art, human artists also learn art from other artists and are inspired by them. No permission is needed, because training on other people's art is neither stealing nor plagiarism.

AI image generators do something resembling learning and abstraction, and generate the image on multiple layers of detail. They don't just collage together existing works. The AI doesn't have the database of the original images anymore - the "only" thing left are the millions of parameters in the nodes of the ANN.

OTOH, the trainings sets needed are extremely large. No human artist has to look at 50,000 images to paint competently, so here the comparison falls apart.

On 3/6/2023 at 1:33 AM, 7sev said:

but literally searching up the dictionary definition of art can give u the answer. despite art being purely subjective; ai generated images would never fit the definition of art which is pretty darn objective and everyone had agreed on already; 'the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination'. ai is not a person; a human being.

This sounds very essentialist. Also, this:

On 3/6/2023 at 3:46 AM, hemogoblin said:

It is not soulful. It is not human expression. It is not expression at all. It is calculator equations.

100 % essentialism. So, we maybe rethink our attitude towards essentialism a bit? Personally, I never thought it was unequivocally bad.

9 hours ago, BasicallyEmoPotato said:

This is a very controversial topic, I see. 

Personally, I don't consider it real art.

If we discussed this in a universal basic income utopia, it would be much more relaxed.

🥱

yes ... *yaaawn* yes... very fascin... ZzzzZZzzzZZzzzzz

1 hour ago, whatistheromance said:

How is it disempowering people, if I may ask?

To put it in a bon mot: AI could automate menial work, so that people can engage more in uplifting pursuits like art. Instead, it automates art, so people can do more menial work.

Is capitalist greed behind this? Difficult question. It could also be the Moravec paradox in action.

Also, the bon mot above comes from a privileged perspective. If a person's job gets automated away, this is always bad for them in the short term. Even it was dull and unpleasant, it was their source of livelihood. Automation is an average plus for society, but without wealth distribution, it may leave some people much worse off.

PS: You certainly hit a nerve with this thread. 😀 Very interesting topic.

On 3/3/2023 at 2:39 PM, KoconutBounty said:

Oh no, that precious Demon Slayer volume!!

Yummm!!

Morning Couscous (with agave syrup)

On 3/2/2023 at 8:41 PM, ProbablyHuman said:

Until the age of 10, I believed Britain and the UK were two different places.

When I was five years old, my parents took me to Italy, and I expected that the Italians looked like Super Mario. I was very disappointed. Italians looked so... normal.

I also was very shocked to learn that Egypt is part of Africa.

On 2/21/2023 at 4:29 AM, MulticulturalFarmer said:

And in one of the countries that I'm in, teaching sucks big time, since you have to deal with kids that are horribly behaved and the pay honestly sucks. Not to mention becuase of certain geopolitical events the cost of living keeps rising and rising all the time.

Oh, yes...

For me, after I got a real adult job, I still live like I lived in my student years.

I'm a shareholder of a housing coop and the heating in my house is a central heating pump. So rent and heating is very cheap for me. I could even live from €500 a month, all included, though of course that would be very tight. 😬 But normally just for a 30 m² flat you'd pay €500 (without heating) in my city.

So I'm glad, that though many times I wanted to relocate to a nicer flat (with a vicinity that doesn't look like from a cyberpunk dystopia [though some people might like this]), in the end I did not. Now the living costs are through the roof, and it's nice to not have to restrict yourself much otherwise.

On 2/21/2023 at 9:15 PM, Nix said:

Yeah, the time that people got a job and only left after working there for 40+ years for a nice pension is a distant memory… my parents find it difficult to understand why I would choose to be a freelancer for both my teaching and my artist work and have asked me numerous times if I wouldn’t prefer a desk job at the teaching intitute I freelance for, or some other ‘steady’ job. But as I keep explaining to them, I spent years at those ‘steady’ jobs feeling horrible and then just getting fired anyway when the economy tripped over itself again. They too expressed worry over the fact that I don’t have a financial partner to rely on. But as I see with my partnered friends, as one or both of them get fired from their ‘steady’ jobs, that is also no longer a guarenteed way to live securely. So personally, I decided some two years ago that I was done wasting my energy in those boring as hell ‘secure’ jobs and that I’d rather do what i love (and studied to do) instead. 
So yes, I sometimes worry about the future. But since in this economy no job seems to be truly secure, I’m content with my choice.

I admire you.😄I'd like to be a freelancer, but I couldn't deal with the amount of self-promotion. My boss forgot all his coding skills, but he's good at networking, putting on a suit and finishing the deals. I'm so happy that I don't have to deal with this. 😉

14 hours ago, Atypique said:

If your tics get so heavy that you would need to diagnose them, wouldn't they be ocd instead of simple tics ?

I would NOT say you can control OCD while you can't control tics. Or that OCD is voluntary. 😀

The difference is that OCD has obsessions which compel goal-driven behavior, called compulsions. Tics just happen without any intention or goal.

And tic disorder and OCD can both be mild or severe.

I don't have any tics. I imagine simple tics to be like those hypnagogic jerks, but while being awake. But more complex tics I can't image how they feel like, and they indeed seem a bit like OCD from the outside.

On 2/24/2023 at 1:02 PM, mivoei said:

also again to ops question ill add that if an aro person dont think they belong in the lgbtq community then they dont have to identify as part of it; its ones choice to identify as queer or not. but they can never speak for the entire community on this matter

I wonder if you can belong to the LGBTQ community but not identify as queer. I've encountered one trans person who said she belonged to the LGBTQ community, but rejected the queer label and identified as straight because of heterosexual and heteroromantic attraction.

You have to remember that a religion isn't like a culture, where you very easily choose the elements you like and reject other parts.

Instead, religions contain numerous beliefs that swing together. And if you take only a few of them out, the whole system usually becomes much less plausible.

E. g. revealed religions are based on holy scriptures (in Islam obviously the Quran and usually the core hadiths - if you question all hadiths you're in a small minority), and while there is considerable leeway in the interpretation, if you differ too much from mainstream interpretation, the question arises why to believe the scriptures in the first place: Scripture is usually revered as a guide, and so it should not be something that so easily leads people astray.

Also be prepared that both mainstream members and ex-members might hate on you.

1 hour ago, MulticulturalFarmer said:

Well, first of all, I'm guessing you're American?

No, I'm not.

I also would rather live in Sweden than in the USA. Though that's not a good argument. A country can be a bad place to live in because of uncontrollable, external factors (wars, disasters, colonial exploitation, ..).

1 hour ago, MulticulturalFarmer said:

Yeah every country has its flaws for sure, I wasn't trying to imply that Sweden is perfect by any stretch of the imagination just because I critcized the United States, not to mention that the USA has a moral superiority complex too as well as naive trust in politicians (not so much institutions, but that's hardly better), rise of the far right, lack of privacy laws, and many western countries have that same issues too. Despite these issues, the laws and society don't make it that easy to get an AR-15 military style rifle and shoot a whole bunch of people you don't like that easily.

The Swedish "moral superpower" narrative also doesn't say that Sweden is perfect. But that Sweden as a state is more enlightened than other nations and obliged to "spread the message" to better humankind.

It's important to remind ourselves that all the supposedly enlightened Swedish positions (like the Covid strategy) weren't hotly debated domestically or are the ones that withstood all public scrutiny and criticism.

There is no such thing in this country. It's just what the technocrats and experts there decide (and admittedly they had a good track record as being relatively competent and integrous - until they weren't) and the population goes with it.

To get back to the topic... if we think of Swedes as individualistic, we make a big mistake.

So yeah, the US is positively insane in many ways, like the 2nd amendment. But if a policy in the US is universally agreed on nationally, I'd trust it way more than a Swedish policy.

On 2/23/2023 at 8:50 PM, MulticulturalFarmer said:

American culture is certainly individualistic, maybe a little less than Sweden perhaps. But it's especially individualistic in the areas where it's pretty inconvenient like healthcare and education. But also in general too. I think that just because people tend to talk a lot to strangers doesn't mean they are necessarily community oriented. 

"Individualistic" is multifaceted. Most societies are individualistic regarding certain aspects and collectivist in other aspects.

Sweden is very individualistic on a personal level (the lonely cottage at a remote fjord or lake). But when it comes to the state, it's consensus driven. Even for very important decisions like the Swedish COVID strategy or joining NATO the lack of debate is... surprising.

And the trust in institutions, oh dear... state surveillance in Sweden is unprecedented for a democracy. In 2020 a law was passed without opposition that allows law enforcement to hack into electronic devices to turn on cameras or microphones, on a mere suspicion and without a warrant.

To the US left it's a kind of a paradise. To be fair, Sweden has health insurance, welfare, consumer-friendly laws, etc.

Given the over-shelteredness (one word: Systembolaget) of the population and naive trust in institutions, it makes me wonder how stable the whole thing really is. There are certainly cracks showing in Swedish society (like the success of the Sweden Democrats).

Sorry, this devolved into a rant about Sweden. Normally, I wouldn't criticize foreign countries. I just don't like their 🇸🇪 "Moral Superpower" narrative. Just as I don't like US exceptionalism. If you claim to be better or more enlightened than everyone else, then please live up to it!

On 2/6/2023 at 9:49 PM, Themathlover said:

whole world agreeing on this and even providing "scientific evidences" to prove it mentally impacted me.

 There is this pipeline:

Scientific study (often questionable) about a statistical effect => delivered without context and over-simplified by science journalists => clueless overgeneralized interpretation by laymen

I mean, statistical difference between genders is one thing. It's just baffling how people then conclude "ALL women are like X".

It shouldn't take a genius to think "maybe it's like with height: it's not like all men are taller than all women".

I never understood the need to lay out one's romantic problems before a huge audience of strangers. And not even in a "pity me, I'm so miserable" way, but in this brazen "I deserve better" way.

There's an article ‘My husband used to be hot. If I met him now, would I still fancy him?’ in The Times (wasn't this a quality newspaper some time ago?).

It's behind a paywall sadly, but I read the full article since a friend sent it to me. If you think that this is just a clickbait title and the actual content is more self-aware... no, it's not.

On 2/13/2023 at 7:52 PM, KoconutBounty said:

I use Kleki on my Chromebook and IBIS Paint X for my tablet and phone. thorough these were done with Kleki.

So you can draw directly on the tablet?

I have a Wacom Intuos and that's non-display, so it's kind of difficult to get the hand eye-coordination compared to directly drawing on paper... (a display tablet of that size would be very expensive).

But I guess I would learn it if I put the same time into drawing as I put into gaming. 🥲 Let's say I do "naive art".

I use Krita and this does some good antialiasing. So doesn't Kleki have AA or did you disable it?

Of course, if you use the bucket tool and the like, you can get very funny results with AA. In such cases where precision is needed, I'd just work at twice the resolution and disable AA and then scale down to 50% with interpolation, which gets you nice AA.

Or I just use Inkscape.

In God of War: Ragnarök, I've now reached Alfheim, where there's a desert with a sled drawn by creatures called "Gulons":

When I saw those, I thought: "Cats vs. Dogs? Why choose when you can have both!"

But the color, yeah, no. They should be green!

On 2/5/2023 at 12:02 AM, Lovebird said:

The aro community is lowkey full of hypocrites, they claim to support everyone on the aro spectrem yet freak out and call anyone whose aplatonic or loveless psychos/mentally ill/crazy and other borderline ableist terms. One of the many reasons why I don't go on aro forums much anymore is due to trash like this. Stop trying to palatable for allos because it ain't going to work and in the end, every aphobe hates us equally.

Every community has/had those ... accusations? Problems? Let's say "issues". So the personal question is, does X do more harm than good? Stay and change X, or leave?

Aplatonic is a hot button issue, because contrary to romantic relationships, you have some non-optional relationships, like with your parents. So that's the logic behind it for those aros to fundamentally distinguish aromanticism from aplatonicism and regard the latter as a character defect.

Generally, we live in a time when everybody presents themselves as absolutely, firmly believing the right thing, without even a shred of doubt, and then frame their opinions in a language of victimhood. E. g. just browse J. K. Rowling's Twitter posts.

So there is really serious contradiction, but no accepted meta-theory to settle those disputes. You can use history as a guide. But that's obviously imperfect since we live in a globalized world, while the history of societies differs greatly.

TW: very flame war prone material

Also, some issues simply lack any historical precedent. Maybe we should just all be more reticent and less judgmental. OK, I start with this now... This is one of the post that I regret posting, though I have much more material. For a whole book... 😆

Yum yum!

Vegan* Çiğ köfte?

* as by law it is served in Turkey (though the original recipe isn't vegan)

Like this famous thread, but vegan! 🪴

Post Yum or Ewww depending on how you like the food in the post above, and then name another vegan food.

I'll start:

Onigiri with Peanuts & Avocado

8 hours ago, KoconutBounty said:

am I the only one who is a proud single pringle on valentines day, but still, kinda feels upset that they don't get chocolate or presents from a partner as all the "normal" people do? Like IK I can buy myself chocolate and gifts. but it isn't the same though. is that weird?

  Very relatable. It's normal to like attentive gifts. I dislike February 14th as a date, I always feel so excluded on this day.

Though I got chocolate and even a rose (which I declined, but took the chocolate 😄) today. But this was just promotional gifts. Which is not the same.

But if you find yourself really yearning for romance and pining at all happy romantic couples and being envious, we have an orientation for it: cupioromantic.

Lots of roses🌹today. Even guys in hoodies running around with roses. Very weird. Much more PDA. I even had the opportunity to get a rose for free, but declined.

In Central European Time it is now 22:39 and in 1 hour, 21 minutes February, 14th, is over.

21 hours ago, Tinkere said:

any ace attorney fans here?

Yes, many ... was mentioned multiple times here.

I never played it... is there also an Aro Attorney? 😉

Very cute drawings, I like the idea with the Triceratops.

You can find some other aro art by users here.