oddletters @oddletters@everything.happens.horse

alex and i went over my full image result packs and in addition to the sick burn of "cosmic"+"male"="do not let this close magician near your drink at DNA Lounge (2008)", they also noted that lensa is very fixated on giving me blue eyes (my eyes are green), and including guns in lots of categories like "sci fi" and "anime" and "adventure". also "other" and "male" are allowed to be fat/round, but "female" are really really not.

having given myself both a headache and an accute attack of _the genders_ doing this analysis, i am going to put my phone down now. maybe i will write more about this later if folks are interested?

and just for fun here are what i suspect are the "uniques" for each gender category: "cyber scientist" (other), "rock star" (male), "fairy princess" (female):

here is a comparison of "mystical" for "other" and "male", and then "cosmic" for "male" and "female":

here is a comparison of "light" (which is the painterly genre) between "other" and "female" (it didnt show up for "male"):

here's a comparison of "stylish" across the gender settings: other, male, female

i dont think this gender essentializing is particularly surprisng to anyone. as mentioned by @kattiidenberg , the female setting is quite aggressive about adding large breasts and also earrings to images. it's silly and disappionting in an undergraduate 101 feminist theory seminar kind of way that in the year of our lord 2022 we have image platforms that apparently have been set to provide images of "fairy princesses" to girls and "rock stars" to boys.

i got "superhero" and "cyborg" for both my "other" and "male" avatar packs, but "fairy princess" only showed up in my "female" pack. "rock star" only showed up in the "male" pack, along with "astronaut." my "other" pack got "cyber scientist".

there were some persistent differences between the styles that were shared between categories. "Cosmic" for "female" looks very gaia-mystical-geometry-astro-goddess, while "cosmic" for "male" looks like Dr. Who.

i ran a small experiment using the three different gender markers (male, female, and "other") on Lensa and the results were...interesting. the "female" setting had the most aggressive "photoshopping" or airbrushing or what i'm just going to call "weird interferance with the geometry of the face". it also was the only setting that removed my glasses from the final image for some styles ("fairy princesses" dont wear glasses i guess???).

new stickers are here, including this year's redesign for my research lab's logo (STRATLab)

how are people doing locked alts here? is that even a thing mastodon is set up to do?

real big "to die would be a great adventure" vibe on the birdsite right now

if you'll be at #shot2022 or SIGCIS later this week and want to hang out, send me a ping! let's have beignets!!

update on the pen fair: it was Fine (TM) but was mostly modern US and Euro brands, which i dont really care about. but in two weeks the shop is hosting a vintage guy who really cares about the one vintage brand i care about the most (Wearever) so i might have to go back.

also the dimsum we got in rockville was phenomenal so overall good times

anyway today alex and i are going to a pen show out in Farthest Rockville, wil report back

i dont know if mastodon has the same tolerance of shitposting as twitter and i...like? weird shitposting? i like making dumb jokes and everything seems very earnest over here. that isnt bad, but the vibe is definitely different

can i subscribe to a different instance than the one i'm on?

tonight i'm hosting a screening of HACKERS for my undergraduate class bc the children have to learn!!!!

well, i put the mastodon app on my phone, which is more than i ever did for twitter