Today’s deck is the Universal Monsters Tarot.
One detail I appreciate is that the minor arcana are not simply just an item repeated a set amount of times. Sure, the illustrations aren’t super complex but there’s illustrations.
Also, I didn’t notice until today that in that Support Card, Mayano is drinking lemon tea.
Not like I needed extra reasons to like her, but my own dependence on Lemon Tea makes it so relatable.
For today’s reading, claws are swords and crypts are cups. The crypt one feels weird until you consider monsters lay in crypts and cups are all about relationships.
The two of swords is rad because it has a woman with a blindfold dual wielding swords. It’s supposed to represent a tough choice ahead, one where you probably have very little information to begin with but are determined to see through. Reversed it can instead represent the logical result of such a situation and illustrate a lack of initiative or indecision.
The Reversed Ace of Swords can represent both action and rethinking things. The way I remember it is that if the hand with the sword is up it’s telling you to charge ahead, but downwards it’s like the person with the sword has it resting on the ground and going “hold on…”
Finally the Three of Cups means
So with all of this in mind, today’s reading is a reminder that if I’m ever in doubt, I can always stop and ask for help.
Today’s sketch page was cut a bit short because I’m sorting things for my trip tomorrow, but I tried two things before then. One was drawing the eraser I’ve been using which turned out good. Then I grabbed a random Beyblade and drew the whale on its top… but then when I tried to draw the Beyblade itself my brain kinda fried itself and stopped.
But that’s two days of practice, nothing to scoff at.
Like I said though, not much novelty today with the trip prep. And honestly even then it’s not so much the trip prep as it was sorting things around my place while doing the prep.
I’m trying to actually stick to my plan of piling everything up in containers so that I can clean up and sort the contents of the containers later. I swear to God something always comes up that distracts me from that.
Funnily enough, for as cluttered as my place is, I wouldn’t call it filthy. What I mean is that even if access to my TV is kinda blocked by me checking what winter clothing to throw away, when it comes to actual trash and food leftovers, I’m proud to say I’m shockingly on top of that one.
Then again, I hate cockroaches with the passion of a million suns so it makes sense I avoid giving them any leeway.
No, I don’t mean hate as in “ew”, I mean hate as in If I had three wishes one of them would be to make them extinct with my own two hands.
By the way, I mentioned it before but every so often I mess around with AI image generators. I’m not going to pretend like there’s not a part of me that finds it funny to put words in the machine and see what comes out, but there’s also a practical element of knowing your enemy. It’s one thing to say something looks like it was AI generated and it’s another one to KNOW what the computor generates and what its limits are.
Also, the more I try one out for kicks, the more I find jarring that anyone would think about using it for a serious project, honestly.
Like for example, the biggest way to know something ISN’T AI is if it uses any perspective other than slightly three quarters or front-facing. And this is because since the machine is averaging out everything it gets fed, it’s going to find that easier to process than any more complex perspective.
I also mentioned in the past, for example, how chatbots are designed not just to only be reactive but to bait you into continuing the conversation yourself. Or how they cannot be relied to create what truly goes inside the sicko brain.
Which brings me to why I’m bringing up the topic today.
Lately artists have been watermaking their work a lot and I don’t have anything against it, especially because I know how effective it can be in poisoning the well of those models.
In fact, I actually remember when I tried out one of those models (ain’t naming because fuck getting this blog indexed by THAT) a couple of years ago and because they fed it so many pics from pixiv and the like, it only knew to draw dicks that were censored.
So you know how some porn websites when they release pics or videos they add a watermark promoting the website? Think for example how BangBros’s logo on a pic was so iconic that it became a meme for a while to put it in random pics to change their context.
You’ll never fucking guess what the computer tries to generate as part of the image every so often. I swear to God they’re like… a weird nightmare version of a Chaturbate logo.
Sadly it’s mainly anecdotal since I don’t save those Gen AI things unless I have a point to make, but the point remains. You don’t even need to make the watermark intrusive to the subject of the drawing for it to poison that well.