Nicolaas Stulting is creating Moon Maiden Mission, which is a digital story set in an alternate universe. He is an artist, musician, photographer, 3D modeler, and writer who is learning about modern technologies and new skills these days.
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It is also nice to not have every key stroke of yours copied by a company to train their proprietary AI on your workflows, as that is of little benefit to the user. Blender does not seem to want to copy your workflows for AI training, which is a serious feature in this current technology landscape.
Freedom and functionality definitely come into play when using such programs, so it is important to consider how with a program like Blender you do not have to update the software every time a company does that, so you are not in danger of losing all functionality with such a software update.
Some people do not see why Blender is amazing to use for a creative person, but for those who do not see why Blender is such a good choice, I would suggest reading the End User License Agreements of alternatives much more carefully. Free and Open Source has many advantages for a creative project.
These issues become more front of mind for me these days, as there is no longer net neutrality, so one must decide which platforms to use and what to use them for. Some platforms appear to benefit the user of the platform, whereas some platforms appear to only benefit billionaires and corporations.
I become more and more in favor of Ecosia these days, because it does appear to plant trees, which is cool, but also because for whatever reason it finds content that I put up on the internet much better than some other search engines. Ecosia finds websites I made and images that I posted very well.
It is worth knowing which one plays video back better for things like sharing video on websites, because quality matters. Certainly, each platform has benefits of their own, but if one judges based upon quality alone, then Bluesky seems to do a better job of displaying video, in my opinion.
Recently, I posted a video to Bluesky and the same one to YouTube. I notice that the quality of playback from the video on Bluesky is way better, which is definitely worth keeping in mind in the future. It may be about color compression, or something under the hood, but Bluesky did a better job.
This makes me smile to read. Making things yourself, and with people you care about, has a value beyond measure. I am sure that your family will cherish that tree house you all worked on together for many years to come. It sounds great!
Republicans are trying to redraw congressional district lines to keep their grip on Congress in the midterms and beyond. Voters should pick their politicians, not the other way around. Get involved with the @democraticredistricting.com as they fight back: bit.ly/3HJ1ayW
Since each one of these search engines has a different AI to chat with, then each one will produce different results, and that does suggest how these AI search tools will be used to shift public perceptions, inform and misinform people, and decide what thrives in the future and what does not.
When net neutrality disappeared, that certainly made it a lot harder to get real usage out of SEO for independent creative people with certain search engines, but this new AI shift for search engines really adds a layer of opacity to the process that does seem much more challenging.
Having spent a lot of time learning about SEO for posting independent creative content on the internet over the years, it is an interesting new challenge to see search engines now use AI instead of search results. The mileage on different AI tools like this definitely varies considerably right now.
To see some of the stuff I have been working on, you can go here if you are interested in the creative projects that tend to keep me on the computer so much these days. bsky.app/profile/moon...
Will the President's new plan to deal with the Coronavirus, by keeping people from being allowed to get a vaccine if they want one, go better than his initial plan to stop the Coronavirus back in 2020 when he thought ignoring it and letting it spread across the country might not kill lots of people?
Frey: And don't just say, this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.
Never before in our history has one man exercised such unbridled discretion affecting the lives of so many of us, while simultaneously preventing others — Congress, the courts, the American people — from having a say or even knowing what he’s going to do next. This is what dictatorship looks like.
It is a terrible idea to deploy American soldiers to fight crime in American cities. It will certainly cause very real and serious problems for American soldiers, American police officers, and American citizens. Soldiers are not police officers. Hopefully nobody gets killed with this stupid plan.
I guess that is something that I would recommend, to any young person, find things that you enjoy doing and do not cheat yourself out of that enjoyment for any reason, because that enjoyment is the quality of your life. Quality of life is more important than anything else, in my humble opinion.
For the moment though, I am entirely content to make my own things by learning skills and practicing and finding solutions to problems in my own ways. It is not that I doubt what AI can do, as I know from testing it that it makes great things quickly. I simply enjoy the process of doing it myself.
That being currently true, I do suspect that when I am much older I will take all of my art and music and photos and videos and writing and feed it into an AI tool and ask it to make all of the many works that I might have created if I had lived forever, just to experience all of that in my old age.
Due to that feeling being absent from the process and result, I am less interested in using AI tools to make my own things, unless I actually have to use them for some reason, because for my own creative work that sense of personal accomplishment is an important part of why I create things at all.
Having tried AI tools that produce decent art and music and been pleased with the results, I had to admit that I enjoyed the result but felt no real connection to the result, because I knew the machine had made it and I had only asked it to. So, the process lacked a sense of personal accomplishment.
I do think it is likely that young people will express themselves more easily with these tools, so there is a trade off, but the satisfaction from learning and practicing may not be there, so I wonder about how that will feel, to simply ask a machine to express things for you with immediate results.
It makes me sad, to comprehend that so many joys that I experienced in my life, through learning how to create art and music and stories and photographs and video, may be missing from the experience of most creative people in the future, because they will use AI to do so many things to save time.
If I was young now, and I could use AI tools to express myself, would I practice an instrument for years, learn about songwriting, and learn how to record my own music myself like I did do? Would I practice drawing simply for my own amusement? Would I learn how cameras work? I do not know.
It is a serious question that I cannot answer, in that I do realize that if AI tools were readily available when I was young, I would have explored them quite thoroughly and used them to express myself in every way possible. So, I do not know that I would have learned about how to create things.
As I get older, I think a lot about quality of life, so this AI revolution does make me wonder if young people using AI to write for them, create artwork and music and video for them, will they experience the same joys in their lives that I did while learning to draw and play guitar. I do not know.
Personally, I am certainly not opposed to using technology. I spend most of my time these last few years learning about 3D modeling and animation on the computer, but I did spend years learning to draw, and years playing the guitar, and years learning to write stories, all of which I enjoyed a lot.
In my opinion, it is essentially an existential crisis, for human beings, if humanity has produced technology trained from all of human achievement and all human knowledge for the purpose of streamlining the humans out of all workflows to save time and money. It is a strange world we now live in.
That is the part that I wonder about the most, even more than the point of creating job stealing tools to enrich billionaires. I wonder about how future people might not see the point in learning skills, perfecting crafts, or mastering subjects if they simply always ask AI to do everything for them.
I enjoy creating my own projects without AI, just as I prefer writing with my own words, but I realize that I am witnessing a change in humanity towards a time when humans will no longer value the experiences that I enjoy quite like I do because most people will do everything by asking AI to do it.
Now, as public perceptions normalize AI usage to this degree, I do wonder, as I did back then, what is the end of the process. The user interface is easy. The results are high quality. The tools are becoming very commonplace. So, where does that all lead to? Is it a benefit, and if so, for whom?
That was a few years ago, and back then most people doubted my opinions. I just assumed that if AI tools could produce good new variations on Mozart, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo's works that they could probably replicate workflows involving facts and math much more easily. It seemed obvious to me.
Back when I researched and tested AI art tools, to see what an artistic person could actually do with them using their own workflows and their own data and their own creativity, I was convinced that one day soon all jobs would be in real danger of AI replacement in all fields. That appears true now.
It seems really funny, because the user interfaces for these AI tools are getting so easy to use that it seems like using them is not actually a skill set that requires any training, but simply something anyone could use with absolutely no knowledge or skill sets of any kind. How might that end up?
The way that every other article on the internet now is about how some billionaire CEO thinks that young people should use AI tools to succeed in the future workplace almost makes you think that billionaires are making money from selling AI to everyone and making profits from replacing old workers.
I like testing AI with something I know about, because I can verify the truth of what the AI is telling me. It is a big hurdle for these AI tools to overcome, to try to earn everyone's trust while the tools themselves replace many human workflows and create significant and spreading unemployment.
There was an explanation about that, in terms of how the AI still makes mistakes, and personalizes responses for very vague reasons, but truthfully if the AI mode cannot find the enormous website hosting millions of videos that is owned by its own company, then one wonders what it is actually doing.
I tested a few this way, since the search features of search engines are leaning towards AI mode over search results more and more now. Oddly enough, one of the most popular AI tools seemed to produce the most inconsistent result, which certainly made me lose even more trust for that company.
To see if you can trust an AI tool, try typing your own name into it on your own device, then try typing your own name into it on somebody else's device. The results can be very different for different users, depending on the AI tool, which is definitely worth seeing with such a simple test.
As we mark the anniversary of the 19th Amendment we recognize the generations of women who fought tirelessly to be counted and the ongoing fight today to protect these rights. We must keep bending that arc toward justice—especially as our communities face new assaults on their rights & freedoms.
The weather here has been very good lately, so good that it was hard not to agree with Victoria when she suggested taking a break from working so hard on the computer and following her outside to enjoy a great day. It is surprisingly important to take little breaks and go outside in the fresh air.
The things I have been trying to focus on are all things that I thought I basically understood, but recently I realized I wanted to make a few things that I did not know how to, so I had to learn how. Challenges can make life more interesting, and in the process, the entire project improves.
It is funny, how one can approach creative projects from new angles at different points, applying new accumulations of life experience as well as simple ponderings, and come upon tried-and-true methods only to realize how much better those workflows can be if one only learns a few new things.
I have not been on Bluesky so much lately, as I have been consumed with trying to work on projects related to Moon Maiden Mission, which is a digital story that I create in Blender. I have also been pushing myself to learn various skills that are new to me, which should ultimately help quite a bit.
A flyby of Earth from the International Space Station. -Credits: NASA
I definitely do not want a dictator, and I think it is disgusting that the President does not represent the people of this country properly by simply following the many years of historical patterns and norms for our successful democracy. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
In the coming weeks, we're asking for feedback on our Community Guidelines. Your input will help ensure our Guidelines serve our users and are ready to support Bluesky's future. To learn how to contribute, check out our blog post: bsky.social/about/blog/0...
When Altman speaks of Mumbai, it is important to comprehend where this was always going. Decreasing costs for companies, by utilizing AI tools, will gradually shift all remaining jobs to the cheapest possible available options. This is not likely to pay the kid in Mumbai very much, on purpose.
One wonders if we are not moments away from one of these billionaires honestly telling us about how "awesome" it is that any young person with a phone anywhere in the world can use AI tools to replace virtually any workflow and how great it is since that remote phone worker can be hired for pennies.
Billionaires who make billions from creating job stealing technologies love telling us all how great it is that they make job stealing technologies. fortune.com/2025/08/15/a...
It is a weird choice for many Republicans to embrace a complete lack of morality, but if that is where their hearts and minds are at now, it is best to simply appreciate how their hearts and minds have shifted over time, since it certainly is a radical shift from what their party used to represent.
Only a quarter of Republicans said it would actually change their vote, so it is really safe to assume that three out of four Republicans are not ever going to be swayed by any type of moral compass that some might assume that all decent people use in decision making. It is worth understanding.
"In short, the claim was true: A survey conducted in late July 2025 found that 47% of Republican voters said Trump being implicated in Epstein's criminal activities would not affect their vote." It is simply who they are. www.snopes.com/fact-check/r...
To say that this administration is punishing poor people is really understating the seriousness of the economic cruelty of the plans that these billionaires who control the Republican Party have. It is entirely intentional to raise prices through tariffs and gut funding for food and healthcare.
Of course, the poor do pay for these tax breaks for billionaires in other ways too, which is why billionaires in the administration got Republicans in Congress to strip food and healthcare away from millions of Americans while DOGE fired thousands of government workers, to help pay for the scheme.
Commerce Secretary Lutnick suggests that our country will now generate 50 billion dollars a month from tariffs, by collecting money from Americans when they buy many imported goods. It is quite a scheme these billionaires have, to fund the rich with tax breaks and create inflation to pay for that.
So, if you are interested in taking any precautions to avoid getting sick again, or to avoid getting a high viral load from crowded indoor situations, then now is an excellent time to wear an N95 mask indoors and skip crowds when you can.
PMC Dashboard, Aug 4, 2025 (U.S.) COVlD transmission is higher today than during the majority of the ongoing pandemic. The CDC warns transmission is high/very high in 10 states/territories. PMC estimates 1 in 95 people are actively infectious.
It’s #BlackWomensEqualPayDay! Did you know that across the U.S. Black women earn only 64 cents on the dollar. This pay gap isn't just a number—it’s about fairness, dignity and security for millions of women. We’re fighting for policies for equal pay to close the racial wealth gap once & for all!
Her character is in some question? Wow, does this guy realize that his character is in some question, as is every high-ranking Republican including the President, considering how this situation has been handled by Republicans who seem to want to cover up the President's friendship with this woman.
Massie is correct. The pressure will build for the next three and a half years if the President continues to openly appear as though he is covering up for his criminal friends at Mar a Lago and protecting himself from further embarrassment. It is probably impossible for the President to avoid this.
Although the President is obsessed with windmills and continues to profit from his Presidency through his businesses, considering the grotesque and disgraceful scandal he just created all by himself it would be best for him to resign and face the public disgust about his past as a private citizen.
I would prefer that the President resign rather than have a President that most Americans think is currently covering up a ton of horrible crimes committed by the President's personal friends. I am not a fan of Vance, but at least he does not have these ties to criminals. Resignation would be best.
Looking at Republicans trying to protect the President from this disgraceful and grotesque scandal the President created through his many years of close friendship with criminals, it does seem like it makes more sense if the President resigns so he can attempt to clear his name as a private citizen.
Speaker Johnson should try to get a new serious Congressional investigation into Epstein's friends and associates from Mar a Lago, to get more usable evidence for real prosecutions, regardless of whether the President wants to protect his own circle of friends due to the President's preferences.
We do need a special prosecutor to handle the Epstein crisis that the President created and keeps making worse. The President was close friends with Epstein and all of the criminal people from Mar a Lago, so he cannot run a proper investigation into Epstein's friends and associates from Mar a Lago.
If there are hundreds of victims, and such serious crimes, there should be new investigations into the friends of Epstein, his associates from Mar a Lago, and everyone who went on his plane, to his island, and especially anyone who wants to cover up their friendship with him that now looks very bad.
Since there are hundreds of victims that deserve protection and justice, there should be new investigations that produce actual prosecutions and actual convictions of Epstein's friends and the people in Mar a Lago who participated in these horrible crimes, to get real justice for those victims now.
If there are thousands of victims and the President's previous administration failed to prosecute any of the friends of Epstein or people from Mar a Lago who participated in these horrible crimes, then there should be new serious investigations into all of Epstein's friends from Mar a Lago now.
If the previous administration of this President failed to produce convictions of Epstein's friends from Mar a Lago and people the President knows, it seems like a new series of investigations into Epstein's friends from Mar a Lago is entirely necessary to get actual justice for the actual victims.
Locally the air quality is unhealthy due to the climate crisis, and a new heatwave starts tomorrow due to the climate crisis, so it is still worth asking Republican voters why their party wants to increase the climate crisis in every way possible while the country discusses their hero's morality.
Owning all branches of government does mean that the Republican Party owns all of the consequences, so no matter who they try to blame, every American actually knows that this administration and the Republican Party are fully responsible for all of this stuff that most Americans truly hate.
It seems that the far-right extremists who control the Republican Party have gone too far in their hubris, having miscalculated how the American people might react to pure chaos, inflation caused by tariffs, human rights violations against immigrants, and protecting child predators from prosecution.
It really feels like the hundreds of victims of these crimes have already suffered greatly in part due to the President being uncomfortable or embarrassed due to his own personal involvement with the notorious criminals, but this can be made better by simply getting real justice for the victims now.
Opening up new serious investigations into Epstein's friends and all of his associates at Mar a Lago who participated in the crimes might be uncomfortable for the President, but nonetheless, it is the right thing to do, if his previous administration failed to prosecute all of these very bad people.
It does seem like instead of offering a possible pardon to his personal friend for what sounds like hundreds of grotesque and disgusting crimes against children, that the President could try to actually use the Department of Justice to get real justice for the victims of this terrible child abuse.
It does appear that blackmail was an important part of the grotesque and disgusting abuse of children, and one does wonder if that evidence does still exist, is anyone still being blackmailed by whoever possesses the evidence? New serious investigations should occur.
It is a fair question, as is the question of why everyone is concerned with the client blackmail list when really it is the actual evidence and proof that matters. The person who has possession of evidence of criminality would be capable of blackmailing people, both in the past and the present.
Trump got impeached the first time after trying to get Ukrainian prosecutors to smear his Democratic rival. Now he’s using a U.S. prosecutor to try and get Ghislaine Maxwell to smear a bunch of Democrats. Same corrupt criminal, same playbook.
“If we are not committed to saving this earth we will be buying designer air filters and gas masks with little Nike swishes on them.” — Assata Shakur
More people need to learn way more about Peter Thiel and Palantir, as he has somehow gotten so much lately with so very little press coverage.
Seriously, it does make one wonder. No matter how disgraceful and disgusting the man is, his supporters just love him like he is their god. What could possibly be in those files that he wants concealed, considering how many grotesque and disgusting details about him are already public knowledge?
It is strange honestly, for a guy with so much immunity from possible prosecution, and such a loyal base of supporters who love him unconditionally no matter what crimes he may or may not have committed, to be so interested in covering up this mess he made long ago very publicly with many witnesses.
Now that most Americans wonder why the administration is hiding the files related to the President's criminal friend to protect the President from embarrassment and consequences for whatever it is he did back when he was partying with criminals, will most Republican voters still worship their hero?
Reports of starvation in Gaza raise the questions: Why the hesitation in labeling it a famine? And who are the authorities with the power to make that call?
It is more like a lightning rod, than a distraction, in that if you elect a well-known scumbag, and then just let him create scandal after scandal, there will be no room in the national conversation to discuss whether these new policies are terrible, immoral, or human rights violations, or whatever.
It is not a distraction per se, as there is a strategy to electing a person with a sordid past and terrible interpersonal skills so that he takes up all of the headlines day after day by creating scandals in perpetuity while the greedy people quietly accomplish their greedy plans without hinderance.
Although the President has stolen the spotlight in relation to his sordid past and his friendship with criminals over the years, it is important to remember that this administration is still doing all of the bad things it was doing already, but now with much less publicity, thanks to the President.
As a species, all human beings should want to feed all starving human beings to keep them alive and healthy. There is no political excuse for starving any humans to death, as that is wrong and immoral in all circumstances.
Normalizing this type of corruption is how countries end up as completely failed states run by organized crime. We should not let the President avoid personal scandals by permitting him to send his former personal lawyer to get any testimony from the President's incarcerated friends. That is crazy.
In normal circumstances, the President's former personal lawyer striking a plea deal with the President's friend in prison looks bad, but if the goal now is to get her to supposedly exonerate the President from his current scandal, then that is wrong, no matter what the President's friend says now.
Sending the guy from DOJ, who was the President's personal lawyer during his sordid trial in New York which was about paying hush money to women he slept with, to talk with an incarcerated friend of the President who is hoping to strike a deal to get out of prison earlier seems like a very bad idea.
Building sensible houses for the homeless would be a better usage of resources for everyone.
Rep. Robert Garcia: "We should not be scared of what's in those files. We don't care who you are, how powerful you are, if you're in politics, what party you are, the amount of money you have — if you've committed these horrific crimes, it should be out to the American public."
I don't give a shit who's in it. Expose them all.
I want to know if the President of the United States is a pedophile. And I know the American people do too. I'm shocked that Republicans would rather shut down Congress than stand up to a dead pedophile. So why not release the files?
With yesterday's Presidential proclamation about attempting to never regulate AI, it seems likely that American billionaires will produce more job loss around the world and in our own country than any foreign billionaires will. So, if you are rooting for those billionaires, that is a win, I guess.
Since he has lied so much about so many things publicly, it would be a stretch for anyone to believe him now, even if he was hooked up to a polygraph machine. It is really a serious downside to behaving so poorly and without any integrity for so long, that nobody believes the President at all now.
It simply does not seem likely that this President could ever regain the public trust now, because it would be impossible to change the trajectory of a problem he created himself with years of dishonesty and years of bad behavior that is all well known by everyone. Resignation is the best option.