the problem with all of these, “X creature is an antisemitic stereotype” is…
well, if they are, it’s a thoroughly recent invention
because, yanno
Christians didn’t need to come up with coded representations of the worst things they believed of Jews
they just presented it outright
we didn’t have “goblins hoard gold and control the banks”, we had “Jews hoard gold and control the banks and steal the Host and drink the blood of Christian babies and dig up our dead”
With the exception of impenetrable allegorical works that were just allllll about symbolism, from top to bottom… Notsrim didn’t need to invent some kind of fantastic monster to represent Jews
because to them, we’re already monsters
this isn’t to say you can’t talk about stuff in the context of specific recent creators
JKR’s goblins are grotesque little antisemitic caricatures, just as many editions of D&D made goblins into anti-Asian stereotypes
remember that there’s no One True Goblin Form. There’s no codified rule about dwarves being greedy treasure-hoarding foreigners, in spite of Tolkien. There’s no rule about how long or how pointy an elve’s ears are.
this stuff is all centuries if not millennia old. It’s gone through countless variations in how it has been told. Sometimes, to some people, “goblin”, “elf”, and “dwarf” were all names for the same thing. Sometimes one or the other was extremely specific. Sometimes they were each broad categories, more akin to something like the Japanese “youkai” or “bakemono”.
sometimes, people have sat down and decided to take these ideas and use them to conceal their hatred, to signal others who believe as they do or to try to make their bigotry seem less bigoted by making it about something nonhuman
but that’s recent
because back when people were worried about elves swapping a changeling for their baby, or an ogre in the forest
they were also convinced that “Jew” was itself a category of inhuman creature.
reblogging this again because i checked tumblr again after being behind the wheel for about three and a half hours last night and found another post claiming that goblins originated as antisemitic, which is… no. It’s just no.
and an addendum: Jewish tradition has several creatures of our own who can be identified as a goblins, including the lantukhs and kapelyushnikles of Yiddish folklore.
I’ve been thinking this for a long time bit it’s nice to see actual Jewish people talking about it. Basically all it took was one completely unsourced post claiming goblincore was inherantly antisemitic and hundreds of people uncritically reblogged as is the nature of this site.
I actually made a list a while back of different goblins in folklore with this issue in mind but I didn’t realize Jewish folklore also had goblins!
bearing in mind that a lot of my readings on this were texts that are not digitized (or not readily accessible online), and i don’t have copies of my own, but here’s some info on those:
lantukh(er) or lantekh: most likely derived from mistransliterations of the French lutin into Hebrew script (source; i’ve actually read this and i can see about digging up the relevant passages for this and the rest if anyone really needs access), a lantukh is a vaguely described creature most often seen hiding in shadows and darkness. The common attributes include a love of mischief ranging from harmless to violent depending on whether the lantukh has been slighted; Isaac Bashevis Singer (if i am remembering my sources correctly) gave the translation as “brownie” in reference to said fey’s reputation for switching from benevolent to malicious depending on its treatment, and some sources suggest lantukher often take up residences in human homes. Others put them solely in lonely places; a particularly unusual characteristic is their association with impossibly long tongues, either as an illusion they create or a genuine physical attribute, allowing them to reach across great distances (per stories repeated in first source). Whether they are smaller than humans is often implied or left ambiguous, but often not outright stated.
kapelyushnikle(ch/kh): translatable as “hat-wearers” or “hatters”, kapelyushniklech are very small people who… wear hats. Presumably nice, visually distinctive hats. They are attributed a mischievous character linked to human-owned cows and horses, stealing milk from the former (source) and harassing the latter (source). They seem to appear in groups of two or more, unlike the usually solitary lantukh, and stories seem to focus on their capture and bargaining for their freedom.
there’s been a bunch of replies to this that have twisted what i’m saying to act like every instance of people pointing out antisemitism in goblin designs is baseless. That’s bullshit. Goblins in and of themselves are not antisemitic, but there are plenty of instances of Christian artists and authors over the past century who used them as a vehicle for antisemitic caricatures, whether consciously or just as a general trend of associating us with evil. There are plenty of artists and authors who do the same with orcs and Black or Asian people.
This post is not and never was about disputing a specific example of goblins in fiction. It’s a rejection of the claims that the origin of goblins is in antisemitism. Jews have used goblins and goblin-like creatures in our folklore, plenty. We’ve used vampires too, and there’s a lot of links between antisemitism and vampires in the older folklore. I know plenty of Jews with hyena fursonas, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take into account the blood libels in North Africa that claim we turn into hyenas and dig up Christian graves to eat the corpses.
Some people, including a certain very famous TERF author, do make goblins antisemitic. I’m not denying that. The people who do so are usually going to be noticeably bigoted in other ways, treating everyone other than cisgender neurotypical heterosexual western European white Christians as if we were strange fantasy creatures in the first place.
Pay close attention to who is writing the stories and drawing the artwork. There are some Jews who perpetuate Jewish stereotypes, and there are some Goyim who do it without realizing, because both have internalized so much awful shit. Look at what characteristics are being presented as negative or bundled together with them. Be critical and analyze things.
And just as much as you shouldn’t assume all goblins are antisemitic, please stop giving people shit for pointing out examples that are.
(also please stop reblogging the version of this post where someone put badly translated German. Aside from the errors, I don’t want to keep seeing those photos every time I check a new comment on this post)
“What? Like, a disabled protagonist? How would that even work? How could someone with a disability be the hero in an action show?” local anime trash boy wonders while sitting next to his box sets of Full Metal Alchemist, showing no hint of irony or self awareness.
but is Ed really disabled? sure I get he lost his arm and leg
but he’s still able to move and do things perfectly
He has prosthetics. Having prosthetic limbs (that more than once break amd need repair) doesnt make him not disabled
It should also be noted that Ed:
-had to undergo very painful surgery to get automail
-had to relearn how to write because of his prosthesis (there’s a post going around showing he had to switch hands etc) and his handwriting is likely a lot worse due to that. This means automail isn’t super good for delicate work, unsurprising, considering what it’s made of.
-experiences phantom limb pain and therefore other associated stuff (this was only really shown in the manga)
-cannot go anywhere too cold without changing his automail or he’ll get really bad frost bite and it will stop working
-cannot go anywhere too hot, period, because the metal attached and under his skin will overheat and he will be badly burned
-Reattachment is painful, but needs to be done frequently if he breaks or outgrows his automail
– it’s HEAVY so much so that the strain has the potential to cause stress on his body, enough that it’s even theorized as possibly stunting his growth.
-it requires regular maintenance or it will break down, as shown when he forgets to do that and it…breaks down
-when it does need to be repaired, it takes time to do that, during which Ed uses regular prosthetics (that usually don’t quite fit him).
-costs a lot of money (not a problem for Ed due to high state alchemist salary/having mechanics as surrogate family, but explicitly noted to being the reason why most people in the fmaverse stick to regular prosthetics along with the painful surgery)
So Ed can’t actually do everything perfectly and experiences a lot of extra hassle, problems and pain people without automail don’t have to deal with! And any advantages he does have are more suited to fighting than day to day life (being able to incorporate weapons/fake out people who want to blow up his arm).
Arakawa did her research and thought it through. Automail is by no means a magic cure that solves all problems associated with losing a limb.
I’m kinda sad these two might not count.
Why wouldn’t they? Hiccup is missing a leg
But he doesn’t struggle.
Disability isn’t defined by” struggle” or suffering. Having a useful prosthetic doesn’t make them not disabled. Get the fuck out of here with that.
DISABILITY ISN’T DEFINED BY SUFFERING OR STRUGGLE
I will also point out (quietly, because that last point was SO important) that choosing not to show it on screen does not necessarily indicate a lack of either adaptation or difficulty. It might simply be none of our business.
Reblogging for that last comment…it’s really creepy how voyeuristic people act about it sometimes. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean they’re not struggling…and their apparent struggle or lack thereof isn’t what “grants” them disabled status. It’s the fact of having a disability.
Also that’s just… not true. Hiccup DOES struggle sometimes and there’s a couple instances of them showing it. The Christmas special Gift of the Night Fury (which I am not even kidding, is canon, they reference it in the third movie) shows him having trouble on ice (you know, metal leg) and the movies do occasionally show him having a little trouble getting around.
A struggle because of a disability doesn’t have to be the most extreme thing. It can be a little extra annoyance that just makes things a little harder, or makes someone not able to do things like others would. Like a movie not having captions so a Dead/HoH person can’t watch it.
“But they have functional prosthetics so are they really disabled?”
Do you know the definition of the word disabled. Have you ever looked up what a disability is.
What the fuck is even happening here.
Also, Toothless very much does count as a disabled character as well, since he legitimately cannot fly without a prosthetic fin on his tail.
Plus, in HTTYD 2, Valka proceeds to introduce her son to several dragons who became disabled as a result of injuries from traps: one with a torn wing, one with a missing foot, and another that’s entirely blind. Plus, there’s Gobber, who’s missing two whole limbs! He has a gangling walk from his peg leg, and has to deliberately switch “hands” with his other and cannot always be properly equipped. We need not get into Drago, but the point remains that Hiccup, Gobber, and these dragons very much are disabled characters.
One could easily call Sol Regem of The Dragon Prince disabled as well, since the burns on his face completely and utterly ruined his sight. He can go by smell and hearing only, which was the saving grace of two beings that he normally would’ve been able to kill within moments. Plus, there’s the ever lovely General Amaya…who is deaf and communicates predominantly by sign and lip reading.
Plus, there’s the ever famous Toph, who while she greatly improved her life when she mastered vibration sight, it’s still imperfect. She still would rely on her friends when she couldn’t properly see (read, during the airship fight during the finale, or when they were putting up Appa’s Lost posters). Plenty of other disabled characters were also shown there.
But nothing else I can say can better enunciate the point than: Disability isn’t defined by” struggle” or suffering.
Bless this post…
anyone who says a disabled person doesn’t struggle, doesn’t know the fucking meaning of struggling. We hide more from the world than you could ever imagine.
When I say “writers don’t want your unsolicited criticism” and “leaving unsolicited criticism on fanfiction hurts writers” THIS is what I mean.
This isn’t even all of them, this is just from a FEW posts on the subject. Read through these, and then look me in the eyes and say you’re ~helping writers~ by leaving that criticizing comment on someone’s fic when they didn’t ask you to.
You’re hurting or, at best, annoying us. You’re hurting fandom.
You’re not helping us.
Here is what good criticism looks like:
1) Start with something you loved!
You can even stop here, because positive feedback is still constructive criticism.
2) Ask questions that you wish the Author had asked themself
Was there anything that you wish had been explained or developed more? What direction do you wish the Author had taken? Let the author know if there were any places you got confused.
3) Ask the author if they had any specific concerns, then address them.
Maybe the Author stressed over a certain paragraph being too boring. Either offer suggestions, or put their fears to rest.
4) End with something else you liked!
If you are reviewing a hard copy of someone’s work, put lil hearts by the phrases that made you smile!
-Don’t correct spelling or grammar unless you are not able to understand a sentence/paragraph/the whole story because of it. Grammar and spelling will improve naturally as a reader/writer matures, and that is not your job. You are not the grammar police. Anyone who self-proclaims themselves as one needs to grow uo.
-Don’t say anything about who the author is as a person. Feedback should just be a product of the interaction between reader+work.
My life as a writer began when an English teacher decided to take my sappy teenage work seriously. Writing is a journey of constant improvement. The best feedback you can give is: “I’m proud of you.”
You’re obviously jumping into an argument with no idea of the history of it , but this is the exact behavior I’m talking about that’s damaging.
Fandom isn’t a writing class. We are not in English 101 with you. You’re not our teacher, and we’re not students that you need to correct by giving us unsolicited criticism. You’re not even my beta reader. You’re Joe Schmoe on the internet and we don’t want your unsolicited criticism on how to improve.
Listen, I know you mean well, but please take a moment and look at what you just did. You looked at a hundred comments from a hundred people saying “please stop doing this behavior, it’s hurting us” and said “okay, but here’s how to do this behavior anyway.”
No! The point is stop doing it. YOU are the one hurting us.
“My life as a writer began when an English teacher decided to take my sappy teenage work seriously. Writing is a journey of constant improvement.“
I mean, listen.
I started writing fanfiction at eleven–and you can imagine how terrible that was–which my dad found and read.
Despite the fact that it was terrible, thinly veiled Mary Sue self-insert, my dad took it seriously. He told me that it was amazing and imaginative and he never would’ve thought to do the thing I did in that one story, etc, etc.
It was terrible writing, but he only ever encouraged me to write more. He only ever gave me compliments.
You’re right, writing is a journey of constant improvement, but nowhere is it written that that journey must be made on a road where random passersby throw rotten fruit at you under the guise of helping you.
I am the writer I am today not because my dad criticized my work or because of snotty, holier-than-thou comments on the internet. I’m the writer I am today because I’ve been practicing for over fifteen years.
Year after year, fic after fic, fandom after fandom, I have gotten consistently better at crafting stories and it’s not because of so-called “constructive criticisms” on fanfiction that I’m already done writing.
It’s because I got encouragement when I needed it and silence when I needed that.
I’m not saying that everyone’s story is mine or that people even grow the way I do and I’m not saying that criticism is never warranted.
I’m saying that constructive criticism is a beta’s job and that it useless after the fact, which is when the author gets your comment–after the story is posted, after it is done being written–and that are there enough writers out there that DO learn and grow just by practicing that perhaps you should be mindful of what you comment on a fic.
That is literally the entire argument.
How many screenshots of messages and tags have to be posted before people get that they’re hurting writers instead of helping them?
“You’re ruining my fun thing by turning it into homework” is my favorite screenshot from this post.
@ao3commentoftheday I recall a huge discussion on your blog about this sort of thing, and thought might be a addition to offer the masses on the subject of unsolicited criticism and why fandom etiquette is not to give it.
but to be very blunt and very serious – it really is disturbing how you can look at fashion magazine spreads, teen magazine spreads and other media depicting teen girl trends/fashion and see how girls dressed in the 90′s, early – mid 2000′s compared to now.
i mean 1998 – 1999
2002
2003
jump ahead to 2008
vs depictions of teenagers in media / teen fashion and teen trends of the last few years (2015-2018)
and people always say “if you look at teenage girls and see sexualization, then you’re the pervert” but .. i just don’t get that line of reasoning. how can you be so naive to look at how media, modeling companies, clothing companies, etc are treating teenage girls ( some of which aren’t even teenagers – but as young as 10,11, 12 years old ) and say “nope, nothing to see here 🙂 but if you call out the problem then YOU’RE the creep” instead of acknowledging that aforementioned companies are blatantly and intentionally producing clothing that is more and more revealing, less and less age appropriate, portraying girls in more sexualized ways as years go on, peddling these themes through social media, televised media, advertising, etc. i mean, that’s the same line of reasoning of “if you look at this picture of barack and michelle obama depicted as monkeys as being racist -then you’re actually the racist one for thinking that black people are monkeys!” when the artist of the photo is the one who blatantly and obviously was being racist.
Lol have you seen Instagram?
15y/o
14 y/o
I’ve personally known girls (underage) who actually post what would considered child porn (partially or near fully nude/provocative poses) pictures of themselves while hoards of “feminists”, minor AND adult, cheered them on. I’ve watched the same girls continue to post sexually suggestive photos while their peers/fans encouraged them and adult men made sexually explicit comments under the pictures. I usually cant tell the difference between teen and adult women anymore, especially on Instagram. And it keeps getting worse. Attention, sex appeal, a huge following and validation is everything right now. That’s all that matters and if you dare call out what’s wrong with how teenage girls are being advertised as sex objects, you’re degrading and “slut shaming” them. I just want kids to be able to be kids and seeing my 13 year old cousin snap chatting her full face of makeup is disturbing enough
when i say pedophile culture this is exactly what im referring to, its sick and twisted. theyre children that look like adults and under no circumstance should that be okay. i have so much fear for this generation of girls and im scared sick of how its going to just keep getting worse.
What bothers me the most is young girls can no longer have an awkward phase. As soon as they become aware of fashion trends and the media, the immediately start copying these behaviors and become what they see. There isn’t a time to truly figure out who they are. Maybe it’s because of the internet culture, advertising, lack of patrental guidance or a combination of all three.
The fact is young girls (and boys to a certain extent) have a shorter childhood now.
The media, for years, has been conditioning minors to be more provocative and sexy, and at the same time conditioning society to believe this is okay. The only reason we haven’t noticed [until recently] is because the process was slow and subtle. When will we finally wake up and realize this? When pedophilia is legal, and it’s too late????
Thank goodness style is starting to have clothing that’s can be more conservative to chose. Its just gross that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between women and girl section in advertisement because they are using extremely thin women and very sexualized teens.
Media and advertising infantalize grown women and hypersexualize underage girls making it hard to tell the difference between the two, and that’s nothing but pedophile culture at work
in 2010, a camp counselor goon logged on to the somethingawful forums asking for help with the zipline he build from scratch, and with no engineering knowledge, that didn’t seem to be working right. when he tested it with a sandbag, it continued to gather speed during the entirety of the 143 foot drop (19 degree slope) until it slammed into the wooden platform at the bottom at a speed of 65mph, presumably creating a child paste that would have to be scraped off to be sent home. there were pictures.
groverhaus and the child-annihilating zipline are classics of post and we will never forget them
too bad the zipline isn’t as famous. the fucked-up bathroom has even gained more traction than the child-exploding summer camp zipline. there is no justice
i love this but DON’T denigrate the fucked up bathroom that’s a legend
I’m sorry, y’all are selling RIPline (The Machine to Kill Children) short, so I need to bring in YouTuber and generally amazing person Dan Olson in to sum this up for me
is it weird that as i got through the tweet my understanding of it lessens?
If you had a recent ancestor who went through starvation it actually altered their genetics and may have passed down genes to you that make you hold on to fat. So this tweet is more accurate than you’d think.
MY FUCKING GREAT GRANDFATHER LITERALLY FLED LEBANON DUE TO A FUCKING FAMINE AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND DAD AND I ARE ALL FAT AS FUCKING HELL.
FUCK ME RUNNING I DID NOT KNOW THIS.
…That’s going to apply also to anyone whose recent ancestors voluntarily dieted a lot, isn’t it. Diet culture long-term causes more obesity. Sure, it takes decades to show up, but anything you’d hear today about childhood obesity would reflect that. Exercising is still very good for most people, but trying to lose weight shouldn’t be the goal for most people, because a) it usually doesn’t work very well or it comes back and b) your kids or grandkids could end up with extra wonky metabolisms. (And while fat itself is actually not that much of a problem if you keep your fitness up, it can be hard on your joints. That’s actually the biggest health risk if you’re “small end of fat,” under 40, and active–joint problems.)
THAT MOTHERFUCKING ARTIFICIAL FAMINE THAT’S IT I’M GONNA FIGHT THE ENGLISH
Honestly, “I’m gonna fight the English” is a good reaction to a lot of things.
the ‘obesity epidemic’ in america is probably due to a combo of our grandparents living through the great depression and our parents being teens and young adults during the days of twiggy and heroin chic and the rise of diet culture.
combine that with the fact that gen x was the last generation allowed to play outside, pretty much, and the fact that everybody nowdays is working service jobs that exhaust them without working their muscles, and there is basically no way on earth you’re going to get a fit and healthy population without changing the basic structure of our society.
don’t fall for the hype. don’t focus on weight. it’s actually far more dangerous to be underweight than overweight. even with what is clinically defined as ‘morbid obesity’ it’s possible to be healthy as a horse, if your bone structure and metabolism are set up for it and you’ve got lots of muscle to support it.
on top of that, the charts for ideal weight are at least a generation out of date. they were compiled based on a population that didn’t regularly get enough dairy and fresh produce, at a time when girls didn’t do athletics in school. young women in the 1960′s were measurably smaller than young women today. their bones were thinner, they had less muscle mass, their shoulders were more sloped, they had a smaller lung capacity – society discouraged them from being physically active past the age of ten or twelve, and they finished their physical development in a sedentary setting.
boys were plenty active, but just like the girls, they were eating just about nothing but red meat and starch and some mushy greens with the vitamins boiled out. the thing where the poor get fat because sugar and fat are cheap wasn’t really happening yet, especially in rural areas; a farm kid’s diet was beef and wheat in the north, pork and corn in the south. “eat your vegetables” was such a hard sell because everything else was expensive and bland and overcooked. you’ve seen the godawful cookbook excerpts from that time. mushy green beans and fried spam on a bed of mashed potatoes, seasoned with nothing but a pinch of white pepper.
sorry, that was kind of a tangent. i guess my point is, even the people who ate well by the standards of the time were malnourished compared to the standard of today. your lunch of a matcha cucumber smoothie and a cobb salad with one ounce of ham, one ounce of turkey, and 15 kinds of fresh vegetable, would give them the explosive shits because they’ve never had that much fiber in one place before. there’s more vitamins and antioxidants in your black bean fajita dinner than they saw in a week.
so first of all, the idea of trying to be the same size and shape they were is absurd.
and second, if malnourishment in one generation primes the next two for protective fat retention, the combination of that and the incredible wealth of nutrition we have available to us today is obviously going to make us HYUGE.
instead of fighting it, we should embrace it. we could all be HUMAN BOULDERS OF MIGHT.
I know a number of gen z kids who are active, regularly exercise / do sports, and are mindful or careful about what they eat but who are considered overweight. They’re healthy kids. They’re strong and have energy. But they’re repeatedly criticized by parents and doctors alike for being “fat”. You wonder why so many kids have anxiety disorders? When you’re trying your best and are still told at every checkup that you need to stop eating junk food and sugar and lying on the couch watching tv because the doctor assumes that a kid living healthily couldn’t possibly be fat so that must be what you’re doing, it hurts. You feel like something is wrong with you. You internalize what you’re being told and it turns to feeling shameful, guilty, not good enough, messed up. I wish parents and doctors could wrap their brains around the fact that fat children can be healthy
I am 5’9", and for a solid portion of the last decade I was also 125lbs. It’s only in the last couple years that I’ve managed to put on a reasonable amount of weight. I’m between 180 and 190lbs right now, and very happy about it
When I was 125, not a single doctor was ever worried. I was constantly cold, stressed, and exhausted. I was literally always eating, and still could not gain anything. I was hungry all the time, but at the same time I would have given anything to just go to bed and sleep for days, because being chronically underweight does screwy things to your entire system
Now, a couple years into being an actual reasonable weight for my height, I’ve had a doctor, on our first visit, include ‘healthy eating and weight loss’ tips in my visit notes without even asking if I was happy at my weight. I am still mad about this. But also, I have so much more energy, I sleep better, I can actually regulate my own damn temperature, and I just over-all feel better
Eat the food, guys. The alternative isn’t worth it
Also, women who were pregnant in the 50′s and 60′s were ruthlessly exhorted to minimize weight gain during pregnancy, with doctors often demanding they gain only 15 pounds. In fact, if they were overweight before getting pregnant, their doctors might urge them to actually lose weight in early pregnancy. This led to a whole generation of babies who were undernourished during development, which studies have shown can lead to overweight in adults for two or three generations.
There’s a lot wrong with America but Jesus fucking Christ this is the royal cherry on the shitty sundae
Don’t see how “we’re genetically predisposed to being obese” means “we shouldn’t do anything about it”. Because the thing is, people see stuff like this and think that since there’s no point in trying to lose weight and keep it off, they don’t have to do that stuff. You have to do that stuff anyway. Being overweight (especially on a shitty diet) can cause long term issues. Yes, everyone should be aware of the complexities, but that doesn’t mean that we all shouldn’t strive for regular exercise and a healthy diet. You know, because there is such thing as consuming too much nutrients.
Plus like, as someone who comes from a family with a history of cholesterol and heart problems, and the fact that my grandpa died basically ultimately from obesity, I find this shit kinda difficult to process, lol.
Yes, you can be healthy and overweight, but that doesn’t mean that overweight is generally healthy.
It’s the neural net equivalent of shouting “enhance!” at a computer in a movie – the resulting photo is MUCH higher resolution than the original.
Could this be a privacy concern? Could someone use an algorithm like this to identify someone who’s been blurred out? Fortunately, no. The neural net can’t recover detail that doesn’t exist – all it can do is invent detail.
This becomes more obvious when you downscale a photo, give it to the neural net, and compare its upscaled version to the original.
As it turns out, there are lots of different faces that can be downscaled into that single low-res image, and the neural net’s goal is just to find one of them. Here it has found a match – why are you not satisfied?
And it’s very sensitive to the exact position of the face, as I found out in this horrifying moment below. I verified that yes, if you downscale the upscaled image on the right, you’ll get something that looks very much like the picture in the center. Stand way back from the screen and blur your eyes (basically, make your own eyes produce a lower-resolution image) and the three images below will look more and more alike. So technically the neural net did an accurate job at its task.
A tighter crop improves the image somewhat. Somewhat.
The neural net reconstructs what it’s been rewarded to see, and since it’s been trained to produce human faces, that’s what it will reconstruct. So if I were to feed it an image of a plush giraffe, for example…
Given a pixellated image of anything, it’ll invent a human face to go with it, like some kind of dystopian computer system that sees a suspect’s image everywhere. (Building an algorithm that upscales low-res images to match faces in a police database would be both a horrifying misuse of this technology and not out of character with how law enforcement currently manipulates photos to generate matches.)
However, speaking of what the neural net’s been rewarded to see – shortly after this particular neural net was released, twitter user chicken3gg posted this reconstruction:
Biased AIs are a well-documented phenomenon. When its task is to copy human behavior, AI will copy everything it sees, not knowing what parts it would be better not to copy. Or it can learn a skewed version of reality from its training data. Or its task might be set up in a way that rewards – or at the least doesn’t penalize – a biased outcome. Or the very existence of the task itself (like predicting “criminality”) might be the product of bias.
In this case, the AI might have been inadvertently rewarded for reconstructing white faces if its training data (Flickr-Faces-HQ) had a large enough skew toward white faces. Or, as the authors of the PULSE paper pointed out (in response to the conversation around bias), the standard benchmark that AI researchers use for comparing their accuracy at upscaling faces is based on the CelebA HQ dataset, which is 90% white. So even if an AI did a terrible job at upscaling other faces, but an excellent job at upscaling white faces, it could still technically qualify as state-of-the-art. This is definitely a problem.
A related problem is the huge lack of diversity in the field of artificial intelligence. Even an academic project with art as its main application should not have gone all the way to publication before someone noticed that it was hugely biased. Several factors are contributing to the lack of diversity in AI, including anti-Black bias. The repercussions of this striking example of bias, and of the conversations it has sparked, are still being strongly felt in a field that’s long overdue for a reckoning.
Bonus material this week: an ongoing experiment that’s making me question not only what madlibs are, but what even are sentences. Enter your email here for a preview.
When I worked at a fast food place, one of my coworkers(btw all of my coworkers were single moms, not ‘lazy teens’) got her foot run over.
I don’t remember how it happened but all the bones in her foot were broken in multiple places and her doctor told her that she needed to stay off her feet for 6 months.
The company gave her the bare minimum of paid leave which was only like two/three weeks.
And you cannot sit down working in food service. No matter what. She had a signed note by her doctor, and she had to pay completely out of pocket since neither of her two jobs provided health benefits. She asked our corporate for at least another few weeks off to heal.
They denied her. So, with a toddler to feed, she had to stand for 8 hours to work. The doctor gave her a boot so it wouldn’t be too bad for her but she said that her foot would never heal properly.
She will always have a limp. Forever. Because a multimillion dollar company wouldn’t give her adaquate medical leave.
“Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”
HOLLA!!!!
A lot of people don’t realize, but the Friends and Elves themes are actually LEGO trying to fix the massive mistake they made with gendered marketing in the ‘90s.
LEGO panicked in the ‘90s. They were losing money hand over fist as video games and movies occupied more of kids’ time. In response, like a lot of toy manufacturing at the time, they took a sharp right turn into highly gendered marketing. They made sure that all the new parents of the Reagan/Bush era knew that LEGO was safe and not challenging for their little boys’ masculinity. ALL of their advertising went to promoting LEGO as a “boys toy”, and they invested in “action” themes and cartoons for boys, like Clutch Powers and Bionicle. Even plain, non-themed bricks were advertised exclusively by and for boys. They even reduced the number of different colors and the vibrancy of those colors to make sure the bricks seemed masculine enough.
This came back to bite them, as naturally it should. They, along with the other toy companies in the ‘90s, pressed so hard with the gendered marketing, that there was literally no crossover market in most areas anymore. They had alienated half of their customer base. Those Reagan/Bush parents they were so worried about bought into the gendered marketing hook, line, and sinker. Many of these parents (especially the conservative ones with more money to spend on toys) wouldn’t even consider allowing their little girls to shop anywhere but the “pink aisle”. I know many women who grew up in the ‘90s have stories about that, of parents and other adults telling them they couldn’t shop anywhere else. There are parents all over, but especially in conservative markets like the Bible Belt, that will still not buy a toy for their girl unless the box is pink.
Because LEGO had remade itself as a “boy’s toy,” it had now been purged from the market of girls’ toys entirely. They tried to get back into the “pink aisle” with the Belville line, but Belville was shit, because they were made to appeal to the conservative parents rather than the kids. They were mostly about big, awkward dolls with almost DUPLO simplicity to the build aspect, most pieces were incompatible with regular LEGO system bricks, and they were just not fun.
Then, in the late ‘00s, someone at LEGO had the brilliant idea to actually ask little girls. They spent 5 years and millions of dollars doing hundreds of focus groups with girls with their parents not in the room to influence what they were saying. The resounding response? The girls wanted the exact same brick their male siblings had, but with more color variation, detail work, and also could we have people that look like people instead of blocks with arms?
LEGO Friends is the result of this feedback. Released in 2012, it has been the best way for LEGO to sneak past conservative parents and into little girls’ hands again. Friends is all LEGO brick, but as the little girls requested, it comes in more, brighter colors, has more small, storytelling-themed details, and features characters that look more like people. The sets were a bit tentative that first year, not a particular challenge to build, but have since gained complexity rapidly as the line took off. If you look closely and actually build the sets, you will notice that while the boxes are pink, the builds are usually another color. Still generally “cute”, but rarely exclusively pink. The pink is mostly the box to get it past the parents who see nothing but the box.
LEGO Friends is the third most popular LEGO theme of all time, after Star Wars at #1 and LEGO City at #2 (mostly because City has been there forever). Think about that. Five years, and it has beaten the sales numbers of most other LEGO lines in the last 80 years since the company was founded. Additionally, the LEGO Friends theme has entirely shifted LEGO’s statistics. In 2010, surveys indicated that the gender breakdown of end-users of LEGO products across all themes was 90% boys, 10% girls. In 2013, one year after Friends was released, it had shifted to 60% boys, 40% girls. That’s across all themes. Some quick market research discovered that little girls would get a Friends set or two, and then expand into other themes. Because obviously my town with a juice bar and a cupcake shop has to have a police station or a pirate fortress too, mom.
And LEGO added the Elves theme last year, specifically because older girls wanted to tell more complex and fantasy-themed stories with their LEGO builds. Elves is targeted at a slightly higher age group than Friends, and the complexity of the Elves constructions rivals any Star Wars set of similar size. Every single development with “girl” LEGO in the last 5 years has been at the express feedback of actual girls.
LEGO still has a long way to go to fix the mistakes of the ‘90s. There are still marketing people in the company who don’t fucking get it, and think that they’re just shilling “girl LEGO.” There are still a lot of old white men in very high positions in the company who don’t understand what’s going on, they’re mostly just coasting on what market research and focus groups are telling them. And some themes, like Ninjago, are still very clearly marketed for boys while Friends and Elves are marketed for girls. They have a long way to go to fix what they broke.
At the same time, if you’re unwilling to allow a pink building toy to be a gateway to other building toys just because it’s pink, the problem is not the pink building toy.
LEGO Friends I’m sorry for all that I said about you
Just wanted to say that the president of Poland Andrzej Duda just signed smthg called “Karta Rodziny”, which basically states that the only true family and marriage is that of heterosexual people, further doubling down on refusing marriage equality and adoption. It will “save children from alien and harmful LGBT ideology” by baning public institutions of mentioning the “LGBT ideology”.
The things happening over in america are horrendous, but also making way for changes for the better. They’re making the whole world have a discussion about racism still woven into our societies.
But please. It’s pride month. My country, my people need this to be on the lips of the world.
Spread the news
the current government of Poland is very fond of the expression “LGBT ideology”, which sets up queer people as a bogeyman to scare up support for far-right parties. Duda is up for reelection this year and he’s clearly following the playbook to the letter. the insidious thing about Karta Rodziny is that it contains some positive ideas, like state protections for single parents and higher penalties for domestic violence… as well as “a ban on promoting LGBT ideology by public institutions”[1]. so if you protest Karta Rodziny, the gov’t and state-controlled media will absolutely claim you ~just want single parents to die~ and ~love domestic abusers~.
[1]: no queer-inclusive sex education at schools, for one. there’s been a push for better sex ed and a counter-push by far-right, anti-choice groups for NO sex ed.
it was signed June 10, 2020. this isn’t news from the 1990s.
some donation links to help Polish LGBTQ+ community
Duda also says that LGBTQ is an ideology and NOT people. They dehumanize us in order to pass more laws to take away our rights.
His supporters just recently published a picture of a teenager at a pride event who had visible self-harm scars and descibed it as „what lgbt does to you”, they keep on spreading false information which goes all the way to saying that being a lesbian or a gay man is basically a death sentance, that by making a decision to be gay (which is ridiculous on it’s own) every queer person will end up in “pedophile clubs” and be raped with no chance to lead a normal life.
There’s a lot of places in Poland where the only source of information is what the priest says at a sunday mass and what they play on TVP, a tv channel run entirely by the government.
Do you know what this means for the non-cishet youth? If the laws suggested by Duda come to life, everyone who lives outside of the big cities is screwed. In his ideal world there’s no legal abortion, no legal transition, no sex education (it would be punished by 4 years in prison) to the point where they cannot say anything about rape until these children become legal adults. Hell not only for the LGBT community, but for women and for all people. And he’s close to fulfilling these “dreams” of his.
Please, sign these petitions. This could help save thousands of innocent lives. As a person living in Poland, even though I live near the capital, I don’t feel safe anymore and I can’t even imagine what happens in the villages.
ifesbob 
