God is my witness I initially read this as “TOPS ARE A PRIVILEGE! THEY MUST BE EARNED!” and I thought that was a tad presumptuous of an employer.
Hey hey this is *SUPER* illegal in the United States holy cow.
If you are in this country and took the job, which I hope you didn’t, now is definitely the time to look into a pro-bono labour rights lawyer. You’re definitely eligible for back pay of any tips withheld and probably more. If you’re in any progressive state there’s a good chance your rights go beyond this. Regardless, federal regulations:
You know, I’ve been thinking about the writer/actor strike in Hollywood, and like, I love it. I really do. They absolutely deserve better pay models and protection from AI. But do you know what would just be the cherry on top for me?
Hearing CGI artists are starting a union to demand better pay. That would just be *chefs kiss* to me.
they are called VFX workers and they HAVE been investigating the best way to do this for a while! they would be a part of IATSE, and you can follow their efforts here:
I was going to just leave this in the tags but no, I’ve seen too many people misunderstand this and it’s very simple and easy to explain so I don’t know why anyone who shares this fun fact doesn’t use this analogy.
so if you took a few leaves and threw them into a blender and pulverize them to as fine a paste that you could they would still be green. this is because chlorophyll has a green PIGMENT in it. now I can’t speak to the base color of blue jay feathers so we’re just going to talk about blue macaws for this example. If you went and put a Blue macaw feather in a blender and pulverized it to the finest powder that you could you would get black powder. this is because blue macaw feathers have black pigment in them, but they reflect blue light because of a microscopic bubble texture on the surface.
to explain it further, have you ever seen one of those little rainbow hologram things? like how they’ll put a holographic Crystal or sparkle pattern on like a Pokemon card?
yeah that motherfucker, if you tried to scrape the top layer of this card off to get the hologram “pigment”, you wouldn’t get bubkis. in fact if you scrape the top of this card very lightly, the yellow part would still stay yellow because it’s yellow because it is PIGMENTED, but the hologram where you scratch it will stop being holographic. now it will still have the pigment underneath it because that is pigmented but the rainbow effect comes from a TEXTURE on the top.
you could even put these kind of holograms on chocolate, are you following? it’s a texture!
it’s the same reason that bubbles are rainbow colored despite being too thin to see pigment in them.
IT’S A TEXTUREEEEEEE!!!
blue pigment will always be blue, you can crush up a Rose and use the Rose goop to color something else the color of that Rose! leaves, bones, clay, rocks!! that’s pigment! disturbing its structure will not change the color because its a PIGMENT!!!
but a blue macaw? a pigeon’s neck? a raven’s feathers? and a blue jay apparently? that’s a texture.
“yeah that’s how color works” NO!! bubbles are clear!!! they just happen to have a broad spectrum iridescent TEXTURE, and some bird feathers have a short spectrum of iridescence.
So I was scrolling and saw this image in an article about the European heat wave,
And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that’s a lot of red.
And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don’t know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it’s normal there?
“The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.
“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”
”The Sahel, for instance, has been heating at a faster pace than the global average despite being hot already. Burkina Faso and Mali, both in West Africa’s Sahel, are among countries that are set to become almost uninhabitable by 2080, if the world continues on its current trajectory, a UK university study found. Its people are especially vulnerable due to shrinking resources, such as water, and poor amenities, and a dearth of trees and parks means there are few options for places to cool off.“
In case you’re still reflexively on the fence when I proclaim that the conversation about AI has progressed to a truly batshit level of reactionary mythology, people on twitter are currently calling out the animators for Spiderverse for using a digital interpolator to assist with lining, because a documentary used the term “machine learning” to describe it.
Apparently using digital tools is taking work away from real artists. I am excited for 6 months time when the discourse has evolved into “all movies should be hand-inked on the inside of Palaeolithic caves to escape the corrupting labour-stealing influence of the pencil”.
(Yes this is currently a minority opinion in this instance, largely because people just really like Spiderverse. But the fact that these arguments are being seriously made shows how far off the deep end this conversation has gone. These types of arguments for blanket technology bans already made little to no sense due to the double standard applied, and this demonstrates that by removing the double standard and taking them closer to their logical conclusion - all labour saving tools are bad, especially if they involve a spooky computer algorithm).
y'all ever think about how the paint bucket tool on MS paint is stealing jobs because someone could have been filling in those pixels by hand
You love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Okay, as someone with their doctorate in plant health (specifically trees and landscape plants), I’m frothing at the mouth livid.
Pollarding is a type of pruning done where you remove the upper branches of a tree with the intent of forcing it to grow more branches. Historically, it was used to produce fodder for livestock and wood for fencing, crafting, etc. but now is more of an aesthetic choice - it creates dense shade and reduces the risk of heavy branches becoming safety concerns later.
However, that pruning is something that occurs in January - March, when the tree is dormant. Not in the peak of summer, when there’s a heat wave expected. By doing it during dormancy, the tree has already stored all of the nutrients and sugars the leaves held in the roots and trunk, ready for use in spring.
By pruning these trees now, they’ve severely damaged them, if not outright sentenced them to death. Leaves provide a tremendous amount of shade to the trunk, actively cool the area through respiration (pulling water through the tree and into the air around it), and provide sugars and nutrients necessary for growth through photosynthesis. These trees now have to work overtime to compensate and re-grow and entire canopy of leaves with reduced resources.
These trees are in what are sometimes affectionately known as “hell strips” - there’s a concrete sidewalk on one side, asphalt on the other, and they get hot. Not just upwardly hot, but they heat the soil underneath them as well. The root zone of these trees don’t get a lot of water to begin with (concrete and asphalt don’t let water in well) and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of soil around the tree to begin with.
Trees in hell strips already have the heat and restricted root zones working against them - you can’t have healthy trees if you don’t have room for roots. Now these have to compensate and draw resources to push out new growth.
In addition, all of those pruning cuts are open wounds - places where infections and insects can enter into the tree. Usually mature trees can manage minor infections or infestations with no issue. But these trees are now extra susceptible because their immune response is weakened - all the extra energy available is going to new growth, not fighting off infections.
So there’s a bunch of factors here that have put these trees at a disadvantage: the removal of most photosynthetic plant material, an increase in surrounding temperature, a restricted root zone, the potential for increased infection, and a heat wave expected in the next week. These trees are going to struggle the rest of their lives because of the decision to prune these trees like this now - all over a desire to break a strike so the studios don’t have to pay their actors and writers and editors fairly.
I hope they get the book thrown at them with tree law. And then some.
Are you the “I will eat the good food first and let the bad come last” neurodivergent or the “I will suffer through the bad food first so I can end with the good” neurodivergent?
The “I will start with bad food and intersperse it with pieces of good food because what if I died and didn’t get to the good stuff at the end? But I’ll keep most of the good stuff for the end” kind of paranoid.
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