Everyone do yourselves a favor and click on this link to have a transformative media-based experience
I don’t need to. The Detroit Lions will still suck and I’ll continue betting on them because I’m stupid.
No you…. really need to click the link
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK
This does deserve to go around again
Spoilers? Spoilers.
Y’all just to be clear it’s a ?? multimedia novella with video and animations that tells the story of an immortal humanity through the eyes of satellites we’ve launched into the stars that have awakened as artificial intelligences.
It is brilliant and beautiful and moving and not about sports in the way that you’d think and I’d strongly recommend giving it a look, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in this decade.
The title says it all really. So if nothing else, please share and reblog this post to raise awareness for those that might be caught out – both artists and followers.
For a TL:DR, please look at the bottom of the post
What is happening?
Right now, there is at least one person actively impersonating multiple artists across tumblr in an effort to scam their followers into paying for fake ‘cheap commissions’.
The scammer will clone a tumblr, usually using a slight change to the url/account name to look like the real deal. They will then message people directly through Tumblr with messages along the lines of “Hey, i’m doing cheap commissions right now. DM me to get one”. Naturally, this is ends up just being a way to take their money without giving anything back in return.
Who does this affect?
Everyone. Simple as that. As long as the scammer in question works unopposed, they are free to spread their influence and continue to scam more people. Even if you haven’t been targeted yet, it does not mean you are safe or immune.
Several artists have already fallen victim to this scammer, and I encourage any artists that have to reblog this post with the details of their affected account(s) and the ones the scammer has set up.
How can we stop this?
Tumblr, like many other social media platforms, seems to care very little about ‘minor’ occurences like this one, and despite reaching out directly to them over a week ago through multiple avenues of contact – they have refused to comment on the situation, provide a recommended response for users, or take action on behalf of those already affected.
Despite this, there are still tools at our disposal that we can use to make this scam more difficult, and to increase its visibility to those within Tumblr staff that are required by policy to take action.
Tumblr has the following to say on the topic of impersonation:
Confusion or Impersonation. Don’t do things that would cause confusion between you or your blog and a person or company, like registering a deliberately confusing URL. Don’t impersonate anyone. While you’re free to ridicule, parody, or marvel at the alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch, you can’t pretend to actually be Benedict Cumberbatch.
They then provide a link to this online form that you can fill out if you suspect someone’s identity is being confused. Unfortunately, this can only be filled out if you are the victim of impersonation. In other words, only the artists can fill this out legitimately.
So, what about the followers and users of tumblr whom aren’t being impersonated?
Our most valuable tool in this online platform is the platform itself. It enables us to spread our word near-virally across all the many sub-communities on Tumblr with remarkable efficiency for a user-driven system. We can take advantage of that effect to increase awareness of the situation. Even if you – the one reading this right now – aren’t an artist or don’t know an artist, the act of reblogging this post or sharing it directly with friends improves it’s ‘ranking’ in popularity increasing its chances to be seen by more people.
We don’t need everyone on Tumblr to see the post for it to be effective, just like we don’t need the entirety of the human population of the world to be immune to a disease for that disease to be rendered ineffective or eradicated. If enough people are aware, the likelihood of pulling off a successful scam increases dramatically reducing efficiency to a point that it no longer becomes profitable to continue.
Why should I care?
It disheartens me to say this, but of the many artists I contacted directly over the past week to warn about this issue many of them refused to listen or dodged the responsibility with lines like;
“I’m not being impersonated, so it doesn’t affect me”
“I’m just one person. I can’t make an impact”
“I need to take care of my community. Other people can look after theirs”
This is honestly disappointing that so many artists or art-rebloggers care so little as to intentionally wave the responsibility of keeping their followers and fellow artists safe from this, that they cannot spare 10 seconds of their time to share an informative post.
I’m not here to bash artists, but it is time that everyone takes responsibility for their own communities, and of those around them.
Artists: You have a responsibility to ensure that your followers and fans aren’t being abused by someone who may impersonate you. If they succeed, your reputation will be damaged, and your followers will resent you. Your followers are also almost guaranteed to be following other artists meaning your efforts can spread beyond your own circle of influence, so don’t be naive when you think you have little effect.
Followers: You have just as much responsibility to be aware of those that might try to scam you or your fellow followers. Don’t just sit in silence when you see something wrong: Ignoring the issue only makes it more resilient to our efforts to stop it. You are the vocal majority if you just use your voices to be heard!
TL:DR
A scammer is impersonating artists and scamming money from their followers under the guise of ‘cheap commissions’. If we ignore the issue, it will get worse.
Every single person that reads this can afford to spend just 10 seconds to reblog and share this post. Those 10 seconds can save others from being scammed for hundreds of dollars.
Reblog & Share
I think my followers already know my commission style, as in how I market them and how I run my business. But just in case:
I NEVER outright DM someone to get a cheap commission from me.
I NEVER discuss the terms and conditions of the commission through DM, just through email. I only discuss drawing progresses through DM. Initial contract for commissions will ALWAYS be done through email.
I ALWAYS post my signature “Saera’s Commission” or “#Saera’s Comms” post on my blog to signify I’m currently taking commissions. NEVER through DMs.
Lastly, please please please be aware of the URLs, check the authenticity of the post and always think logically.
Be safe guys! 🙂
All of the above my friends.
As a note: I’m currently in the middle of con prep and won’t be taking commissions for a while nor will I ever DM you directly. Be wary of “artists” sending messages directly guys and be safe.
Reblogging this in case anyone somehow tries to impersonate me (lol): my commissions are currently closed as I work on projects for TCAF and Anime North. I always have my status here on my commissions page: http://om-nom-berries.tumblr.com/commissions
I also will never cold-message people for commissions. I advertise and people message me/email me. That’s how I always have done stuff, because I don’t have time to do it the other way around lol
Same here, folks. I don’t offer “cheap” commissions, nor do I go around trying to sell them individually. I merely announce them and give a heads up to those who expressed interest in being personally told about the next reopening. Also, my commissions are currently closed.
So if this random assface impersonates me, by any chance, don’t believe them!
As other artists above have already said;
I’ll NEVER send you DM’s trying to make you buy a cheap commission. I don’t contact people asking them to commission me, I ALWAYS wait for the client to message me first!
Adding to the above, I NEVER have nor NEVER will send an unsolicited DM about “cheap” commissions.
I DON’T dm the customer first, I don’t DM to fish for people to get commissions and ever since I remade my commission info, I don’t DM details either, it’s all in the Google form, I also don’t do ‘cheap’ lmao
If “i” DM you, ask for the form first and get my PayPal email from it and IF YOU DON’T ITS NOT ME
If you do somehow and it was not me, I will know and I will send you your $$$ back
Save the artists!
my ONLY art accounts are @/cryo-tea on tumblr and @/cryo.tea on instagram, and my commissions are closed atm
Personally, I got scam once with one of the scammer and it’s not fun and I lost lot of money because of it. Be wary about this. Tell everyone and artist who has commission open.
• interrupt a line of thought with a sudden new one
• say ‘uh’ between words when unsure
• accidentally blend multiple words together, and may start the sentence over again
• repeat filler words such as ‘like’ ‘literally’ ‘really’ ‘anyways’ and ‘i think’
• begin and/or end sentences with phrases such as ‘eh’ and ‘you know’, and may make those phrases into question form to get another’s input
• repeat words/phrases when in an excited state
• words fizzle out upon realizing no one is listening
• repeat themselves when others don’t understand what they’re saying, as well as to get their point across
• reply nonverbally such as hand gestures, facial expressions, random noises, movement, and even silence
Excellent sticky note for dialogue writing in fiction.
All of this. I get a lot of compliments on my dialogue and this list pretty much covers what I do (but some of it, I didn’t even realize I did, lol). I highly recommend reading your dialogue aloud (or imagining it in realtime like a movie scene) to see if it feels natural, which is what I do when editing.
hey if anyone tells you art goal is something serious remember i learned how to draw like actual western comics art style just to shove batman into high heels and titty window
Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.
In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.
Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.
Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:
1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.
2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:
Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.
Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.
Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.
As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.
This is actually pretty neat. I don’t think I’d want to use it for all my games, but it could be a lot of fun to work with
the hunger games was genuinely one of the most powerful and compelling commentaries on mass media, the glorification of violence, war culture, imperialism, and capitalism that western culture has ever produced and i will never forgive hollywood for turning it into exactly what the Games were supposed to represent in the first place
after the official disney princesses i started to draw my favorite girls
from my favorite movies :3 some are disney, some are not 🙂 if you
think your fav is missing please don’t yell at me “you forgot xy!!!” as i
did not, just these are the ones i like 🙂 but i do take commissions if
you would like to see her in this style, feel free to write me a pm 🙂
This is a video about how people used to walk in the middle ages, and how it changed around the 1500s when people started wearing a different kind of shoes.
This reminds me of something interesting I read in Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork:
“Much of the science of modern orthodontics is devoted to creating – through rubber bands, wires, and braces – the perfect “overbite.” An overbite refers to the way our top layer of incisors hang over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box. This is the ideal human occlusion. The opposite of an overbite is an “edge-to-edge” bite seen in primates such as chimpanzees, where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.
What the orthodontists don’t tell you is that the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives. Based on surviving skeletons, this has only been a “normal” alignment of the human jaw for 200 to 250 years in the Western world. Before that, most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, comparable to apes. The overbite is not a product of evolution – the time frame is far too short. Rather, it seems likely to be a response to the way we cut our food during our formative years. The person who worked this out is Professor Charles Loring Brace (born 1930), a remarkable American anthropologist whose main intellectual passion was Neanderthal man. Over decades, Brace built up the world’s largest database on the evolution of hominid teeth. He possibly held more ancient human jaws in his hand than anyone else in the twentieth century.
As early as the 1960s, Brace had been aware that the overbite needed explaining. Initially, he assumed that it went back to the “adoption of agriculture six or seven thousand years ago.” … But as his tooth database grew, Brace found that the edge-to-edge bite persisted much longer than anyone had previously assumed. In Western Europe, Brace found, the change to the overbite occurred only in the late eighteenth century, starting with “high status individuals.”
Why? There was no drastic alteration to the nutritional components of a high-status diet at this time. … What changed most substantially by the late eighteenth century was not what was eaten but how it was eaten. This marked the time when it became normal in upper- and middle-class circles to eat with a table knife and fork, cutting food into little pieces before it was eaten….
In premodern times, Brace surmises that the main method of eating would have been something he christened “stuff-and-cut.” As the name suggests, it is not the most elegant way to dine. It goes something like this. First, grasp the food in one of your hands. Then clamp the end of it forcefully between your teeth. Finally, separate the main hunk of food from the piece in your mouth, either with a decisive tug of your hand or by using a cutting implement if you have one at hand, in which case you must be careful not to slice your own lips. This was how our ancestors, armed only with a sharpened flint, or, later, a knife, dealt with chewy food, especially meat. The “stuff-and-cut” school of etiquette continued long after ancient times. Knives changed – from iron to steel, from wood-handled to porcelain-handled – but the method remained.
The growing adoption of knife-and-fork eating in the late eighteenth century marked the demise of “stuff-and-cut” in the West. … From medieval to modern times, the fork went from being a weird thing, a pretentious object of ridicule, to being an indispensable part of civilized dining. Instead of stuffing and cutting, people now ate food by pinning it down with the fork and sawing off little pieces with the table knife, popping pieces into the mouth so small that they hardly needed chewing. As knives became blunter, so the morsels generally needed to be softer, reducing the need to chew still further.
Brace’s data suggest that this revolution in table manners had an immediate impact on teeth. He has argued that the incisors – from the Latin incidere, “to cut” – are misnamed. Their real purpose is not to cut but to clamp food in the mouth – as in the “stuff-and-cut” method of eating. “It is my suspicion,” he wrote, “that if the incisors are used in such a manner several times a day from the time that they first begin to erupt, they will become positioned so that they normally occlude edge to edge.” Once people start cutting their food up very small using a knife and fork, and popping the morsels into their mouths, the clamping function of the incisors ceases, and the incisors continue to erupt until the top layer no longer meets the bottom layer: creating an overbite.
We generally think that our bodies are fundamental and unchanging, whereas such things as table manners are superficial: we might change our manners from time to time, but we can’t be changed by them. Brace turned this on its head. Our supposedly normal and natural overbite – this seemingly basic aspect of modern human anatomy – is actually a product of how we behave at the table.
How can we be sure, as Brace is, that it was the cutlery that brought about this change in our teeth? The short answer is that we can’t. Brace’s discovery raises as many questions as it answers. Modes of eating were far more varied than his theory makes room for. Stuff-and-cut was not the only way people ate in preindustrial Europe, and not all food required the incisor’s clamp; people also supped on soups and potages, nibbled on crumbly pies, spooned up porridge and polenta. Why did these soft foods not change our bite much sooner? Brace’s love of Neanderthals may have blinded him to the extent to which table manners, even before the knife and fork, frowned upon gluttonous stuffing. Posidonius, a Greek historian (born c. 135 BC) complained that the Celts were so rude, they “clutch whole joints and bite,” suggesting that polite Greeks did not. Moreover, just because the overbite occurs at the same time as the knife and fork does not mean that one was caused by the other. Correlation is not cause.
Yet Brace’s hypothesis does seem the best fit with the available data. When he wrote his original 1977 article on the overbite, Brace himself was forced to admit that the evidence he had so far marshaled was “unsystematic and anecdotal.” He would spend the next three decades hunting out more samples to improve the evidence base.
For years, Brace was tantalized by the thought that if his thesis was correct, Americans should have retained the edge-to-edge bite for longer than Europeans, because it took several decades longer for knife-and-fork eating to become accepted in America. After years of fruitless searching for dental samples, Brace managed to excavate an unmarked nineteenth-century cemetery in Rochester, New York, housing bodies from the insane asylum, workhouse, and prison. To Brace’s great satisfaction, he found that out of fifteen bodies whose teeth and jaws were intact, ten – two-thirds of the sample – had an edge-to-edge bite.
What about China? “Stuff-and-cut” is entirely alien to the Chinese way of eating… The highly chopped style of Chinese food and the corresponding use of chopsticks had become commonplace around nine hundred years before the fork and knife were in normal use in Europe, by the time of the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), starting with the aristocracy and gradually spreading to the rest of the population. If Brace was correct, then the combination of tou and chopsticks should have left its mark on Chinese teeth much earlier than the European table knife.
The supporting evidence took a while to show up. On his eternal quest for more samples of teeth, Brace found himself in the Shanghai Natural History Museum. There, he saw the pickled remains a graduate student from the Song dynasty era, exactly the time when chopsticks became the normal method of transporting food from plate to mouth.
The fellow was an aristocratic young man, an official, who died, as the label explained, around the time he would have sat for the imperial examinations. Well, there he was, in a vat floating in a pickling fluid with his mouth wide open and looking positively revolting. But there it was: the deep overbite of the modern Chinese!
Over subsequent years, Brace has analyzed many Chinese teeth and found that – with the exception of peasants, who retain an edge-to-edge bite well into the twentieth century – the overbite does indeed emerge 800-1000 years sooner in China than in Europe. The differing attitude to knives in East and West had a graphic impact on the alignment of our jaws.”
It’s a rather interesting book. It’s got other interesting stuff in it, e.g. about knife culture in Medieval Europe:
“In medieval and Renaissance Europe, you carried your own knife everywhere with you and brought it out at mealtimes when you needed to. Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt. The knife at a man’s girdle could equally well be used for chopping food or defending himself against enemies. Your knife was as much a garment – like a wristwatch now – as a tool. A knife was a universal possession, often your most treasured one. Like a wizard’s wand in Harry Potter, the knife was tailored to its owner. Knife handles were made of brass, ivory, rock crystal, glass, and shell; of amber, agate, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. They might be carved or engraved with images of babies, apostles, flowers, peasants, feathers, or doves. You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush. You wore your knife so habitually that – as with a watch – you might start to regard it as a part of yourself and forget it was there. A sixth-century text (St. Benedict’s Rule) reminded monks to detach knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didn’t cut themselves in the night.
There was a serious danger of this because knives then, with their daggerlike shape, really were sharp. They needed to be, because they might be called upon to tackle everything from rubbery cheese to a crusty loaf. Aside from clothes, a knife was the one possession every adult needed. It has been often assumed, wrongly, that knives, as violent objects, were exclusively masculine. But women wore them too. A painting from 1640 by H.H. Kluber depicts a rich Swiss family preparing to eat a meal of meat, bread, and apples. The daughters of the family have flowers in their hair, and dangling from their red dresses are silvery knives, attached to silken ropes tied around their waists. With a knife close to your body at all times, you would have been very familiar with its construction.
…
The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.”
Also, having special knives made for silver for fish was originally a practical thing, because before stainless steel lemon would react with steel knives and make the fish taste bad.
JahLoveAngel 