Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility!
We're everywhere and we're cool.

Here's the trans pride flag 🏳️‍⚧️ on a mid-90s Pentium running DOS.

One of the stranger bits of misogyny I've seen in recent months is women who play guitar being accused of being AI by men, cause the assumption is that any woman who can shred in a pair of booty shorts and a tube top couldn't possibly be real.

There's a whole rabbithole of mentality goin on there, and it's really an extension of the already extant prejudices within music (o my goooooood, I could go on about that for a long time) which has, as in everything, a range of intersections.

For the record, I couldn't give a damn what somebody wears, if you can shred like a fiend, I'm a lot more interested in that, and how you choose to present that is your business and nobody else's. You wanna rock out with whatever you want out, have at it, music should be liberating.

O pls, like men ain't been takin to the stage goin "check out my pecs woo" for years. Or RHCP with 4 socks between em.

Tangential example:

Last week, I found myself going "Huh, that Hole song sounds a lot like a JCM 800, what amp does Courtney Love use anyway?"

Well, after an hour, I found out what she wears, who she's dated, what she eats, and a host of other stuff BUT NOT THE FUCKIN AMPS SHE USES.

Sorry. Whatever you think of that person, she's also a guitarist and singer. And if she was a man, that'd be front and centre "uses [insert guitar here] thru a [insert amp here] "and possibly a history of the variations.

Jerry Cantrell? I never even needed to look for the info. It'd be first thing in an interview. G&L or Les Paul mostly thru Bogners and Friedmans. No mention of who he's dating, what sorta shirt he has on etc.

How many women do they do this with?

So automatically the focus is on anything *other* than musicianship.

This is gonna come as zero surprise to any women in the music industry.

Or in general, really.

Anyway, I never entirely found out apart from squinting at live performances "uh, yeah, there's a Marshall stack there, is it that hers, or Erlandson's? Who knows"

But back to the point at hand.

There's been a rise in this thing called 'AI Guitar Girls" (and the use of the term 'girl' to describe women is a giveaway to begin with)

I get to hear about this stuff from watchin nerdy guitar videos that are usually about gear shit, but this seems to be coming up.

Some uncanny valley shit too. The worst part is they're using the heads of real ppl in some of this stuff.

And a buncha men all "I love u fake robot stolen valour lady"

(depressed sigh) dude, you can even tell the guitar is fake, what the fuck.

Anyway,

The part that really grabbed me was women doin their videos where they shred like absolute fiends and these guys are all

"No, that's fake, she's AI"

To actual people who've been doing this shit for years.

The whole AI aspect of this is hugely problematic.

But what it also does is amplify the already extant prejudices.

And now actual humans are being told they're not human. Cause of aesthetic.

It's not going well

so uh
we rescued a set of 4K movie film scanners

does anyone need a set of 4K movie film scanners

if you have a need for a cinema film scanner (or can give it a good home!), and can arrange to have it transported from the Seattle area, message me on fedi or e-mail me at [email protected]

I was just in a meeting where someone used a thing called Fathom to get an 'AI' summary of the meeting. Aside from some understandable typos arising from not understanding terms of art and replacing them with common English words, one of the key points that it concluded was that A was faster than B. It reached this conclusion because it missed one of the digits in the time for A. This completely inverted the key takeaway from one important section of the meeting.

Do not use plausible-nonsense generators for anything important.