Snowflake Challenge 9

"This challenge is fairy open, and is based on people looking back on the last year and thinking about their personal wins."

* I did a lot of writing last year, more than I realized. I really need to track things better. I did a big project at the start of the year to read books on writing and did a lot of writing exercises as part of working through them.

* I also wrote The Light Ahead, a Steddie fanfic that shows me that I can do the sort of writing projects I want to do and can write on a schedule if I need to. I wrote it entirely during the Stranger Things season 4 hiatus.

* I started a photo-a-day blog on tumblr of my own photography. So far I have over 250 posts made, the queue filled for a bit and one of my posts broke 5k reblogs.

* I also did a lot of photowalks.

Honestly, I realized at the turn of the year that I need to track what I do a let better, because I do more projects than I realize. Like I did some comics this year, and other art, etc. And my writing is finally really building toward where I want it to be, even if it's at a much later point in my life than I could have imaged when younger. (Now I just need to write more tonight and not stick my nose back into Scarlet Hollow)

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* Someone created a tool to help identify use of AI in writing

* Did some writing, and also got more into Scarlet Hollow. It's really good.

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* I need like... and overall explainer on this George Santos thing because I keep seeing followup articles assuming people saw part 1-6 of this drama and... what?

* So much for me talking a big game about having walked so much of this city. I *just* found out that a viral image I've seen for years is not only real, but it's from Portland. I'll get/post my own pic soon and explain then.

* Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion over use of copyrighted images. Getty, for those unaware, is a big deal. Want to know why google image search works how it does these days? Getty made Google sit down and behave, to the benefit of everyone who does photography. There are a lot of lawsuits right now, including instances of extremely close copies of people's art, but Getty are the people who have the big stick.

Trying not to talk about AI too much because it gives me a headache, but we do have more tools than we think against all of this. My main problem is that anyone who is pro-AI is either making an argument from nihilism (artists don't matter, teaching/learning art doesn't matter, community doesn't matter, people don't matter) or they are the same reddit-addled idiots who think all content posted online is free real estate and posting online meanings giving up all rights and people can do what they want.

With the Getty/Google thing I am talking about how you used to be able to gather images from images search at full resolution, no visiting the site, no giving the site SEO or allowing sites to made ad revenue. Getty said 'no' and now image search shows a downscaled and lower quality image, if you want the good version as an art reference you need to take the extreme action of *clutches pearls* actually fucking clicking on the site and letting the site's stats go up by 1.

* Also in related news I was doing some research recently and saw *MY* images in google image search. I was ready to lock and load some takedown notices... until I realized the images were from my website. For certain search terms, I am what comes up. Now, obviously they do tailored results these days and I am likely to use the same specific wording as on my website, but I didn't used to be able to find my own content that way because my ranking was so low. I need to get off my butt and do things to get me more site traffic, it's been a while since I have, but I do get enough traffic that I go get search engine traffic.... riiiight as search engines are no longer becoming the big deal they were but oh well. One of the reasons why people do want to use chat bot BS is because google search gets worse and worse each year, but that is a whole 'nother... actually it's a very related discussion but this post is long enough.