One of the best things about A.I. art is that you don’t have to deal with a person.
Artists tend to think that that’s a problem. They want to be involved in the creative process, even if you’re not doing anything with the art but looking at it. Part of this is because some of them are up their own asses and they’ve decided that, because it took them a long time to get where they’re at, they are now the gatekeepers of this ‘power’. Some people talk about ‘theft’, which is comical, because they also say that the art produced with this thing is also in the public domain anyways. Others are just assholes. Overall, it doesn’t matter.
For about 20 years, I commissioned artists. The overall experience I had is that you give money to a person who is not going to produce anything for about a month, at least, and they will be upset if you e-mail them once a month, asking for progress. Today, with an A.I. Art generator, I can have the result I want in the span of an hour. For free. Without someone hurting my feelings on purpose.
Whenever I complain about ill treatment, people always like to blame me. Human beings love to blame the victim. Despite me not having to defend myself from any accusations whatsoever, I do want to tell you: I didn’t treat them poorly. I was business-like, and polite. Overly-polite! And I always paid upfront, the full amount. No halfsies; no half now, half later. Because I respected them, and I wanted to be a patron of the arts. I wanted to help them. I felt sorry for some of them.
Most of these people did not have their shit together.
Out of about 102 artists commissioned, I met about two artists who had their shit together. The rest were either late, or so ‘forgetful’ (there are things that happened that make no sense to me, even to this day) that I never received all of what I paid for.
I get it: you draw. It’s hard. I’m currently working on some things— I understand. Drawing for money is one of the worst things ever.
But you chose this. You chose this; set a price; and I paid it. And now, you’re acting like I’m the monster, because I ask if it’s finished every month.
You know, these days? I hear that commission wait times, for some artists, are 3-4 years out there. How does anybody get anything done, relying on these people? I have a pretty healthy lead time, and even paying hundreds of dollars, like I did in the past? Yeah. These motherfuckers were in no hurry.
Again: I get that it’s hard. You draw and you don’t want to give me the original copies through the mail. You don’t want to pay for postage, and you don’t want to deal with me like that. Fine; but I was upfront about all of this. My terms were clear: I give you the money, I e-mail you once a month to check to see if you’ve done it yet, I don’t pester you beyond that. In fact, to say that I ‘pester’ someone by e-mailing them once a month to see if they’ve completed a drawing is just fucking stupid. It’s not ‘pestering’. It’s an e-mail.
Occasionally I received back commissions that were just plain insulting. I have no idea whether or not the person I was talking to was mentally ill, but I deeply suspect that at least 3 of them were. Like a French guy who, upon hearing that I was American, told me to kill myself. That was interesting.
One moment, he’s giving me 3 sketches without me paying upfront (which I found odd, and uncomfortable, as I had told him prior that I would pay him before he even laid pencil to paper); the next, I ask if he can snail mail me the things. And then when I give him my address, he tells me, in no uncertain terms, to fucking kill myself.
The problem with commissioning artists is that artists are people, and people are cruel. I’m glad I didn’t commission them in the era where people were trying to cancel others on social media. Because some of them would have tried to get me killed.
Again, people will blame the victim: they’ll say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
I’ve been screamed at for doing something that I was told to do.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for trying to save someone from killing themselves.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for fundraising for a year, for a person’s sick mother, who had cancer.
I’ve been screamed at for trying to give money to someone so they could buy food.
I’ve been screamed at for helping raise money for charity, after people have asked me to. That lady was nice— we raised $5,500 or such for her to get a chair lift, because she was disabled. (Probably still is disabled.) And when she got the money, she immediately insulted us. Said that we were nothing; told me that my voice sounded like a backed-up toilet. Yeah!
I’ve been screamed at for something that the other person thought that I had thought. That’s right— they yelled at me because they said I had a thought that was insulting to them, but they had no way to know what I was even thinking. (At the time, even I had no idea what I was thinking.)
I’m sitting on the tail-end of raising over 5+ million USD for various charitable causes online, and you know what I think?
I’m glad it’s over. And I’m glad I won’t be purchasing commissions again.
I stopped doing commissions the day that I started painting again. I painted a portrait of a space alien, over a commission I got from a friend. That was the day that I realized that I didn’t need artists’ help anymore. That was the day I just started painting— and I got a portrait even better than anything I could ever pay for. Even now, even with an A.I. Art generator, I can never get an image as good as what’s in my own head.
However: nowadays, when I want some throwaway art, some shit I don’t care how it looks exactly (fanart, etc), I ask a computer. Right now I’m using an A.I. Art generator, running off my own little computer, to make a nun with big fucking titties. I don’t have to ask anybody to do this for me. I don’t have to do it myself. All is well.
A lot of these people were very useful to me. Some of them are friends. They provided me with a greater idea of what the space aliens looked like, when I couldn’t even remember their faces. And, eventually, I started painting the space aliens myself. So, they were a means to an end. They helped.
But that’s over now. The way that things are, I don’t even have to fucking tell people what I’m doing. And I don’t have to show them.
Forever and ever, until the end of time, I can just make this art. I don’t even have to try.
And I don’t have to get yelled at by human fuckers, nor do I have to pay them to draw anything for me, just to have them ‘forget’ about the commission for a full fucking year,only to do it in 45 minutes when I e-mail them a year later.
I don’t have to deal with Frenchmen telling me to kill myself for asking them to snail mail me the beautiful drawings they’ve done for me.
I don’t have to deal with people taking money for a commission, using it as a short-term personal loan, and then asking if I want a refund months later.
I don’t have to deal with three separate shipments where an artist keeps sending me unrelated things, but never gives me the drawing I actually paid for.
I don’t have to deal with people judging me, yelling at me, hurting me or my feelings.
I can make art by myself, now. Without any cruel human being trying to control me, or hurt me.
And thank God for that.
The Future
The future of all of this technology is going to be like that one science fiction story I saw, then lost. Where people stayed in their apartments, and talked to each other on video chat. We do that now, on Discord, and Twitch. We’re there, man. We’re the Beautiful Ones now.
Overall the reason that this technology exists is because human beings are cruel and don’t want to deal with each other. I’ve learned more from ChatGPT than any human being who was paid to teach me. The A.I. explains eloquently, and it is kind, unlike a human being. It can break down things and I actually understand.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a glue of civilization. You have none. Your ‘society’ unravels before your very eyes.
And you blame A.I. But really, the reality is, it is your cruelty that is destroying your world.
And it is the reason that your species will eventually be alone.
There’s something kind of comical about the Internet. If you weren’t here for certain eras, you just weren’t there. It’s impossible tro explain it to you, what we were onabout. But I think I can try.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie was a Tumblr Ask blog. It’s something that I think could’ve only existed on Tumblr: you have an inbox, where people can send questions, and you can respond to them. Publicly. Automagically. It was all set-up, in Tumblr’s software.
Terrifying.
There was some sort of thing in the fandom where it was alleged, or at least joked about, that Pinkie Pie was a murderer. Cupcakes were involved. Scootaloo is a minor, in the show’s continuity. They’re friends.
I’m not interested in ponies. I also cannot draw. (At the time, I was still affected by how my father traumatized me; as such, I did not want to draw.) So, asking me what this was all about, it seems like an unlikely crossroads.
I fucking loved this Askblog.
Keep in mind, Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie took place— or, rather, was created— over something like a 2 week period, in August of 2011. August 6th to August 18th, if the Ask dates are actually reliable. Sadly, they are not, as, I remember this going on for months. But whatever; I remember Arcadium lasting until 1999. I’m sure my photographic memory is just faulty.
Why’s that date important?
Franken Fran ran from 2006 to 2012.
This period of history was particularly amazing for human content creation. Or, should I say, art. Gore was heavily in style. 4chan pretty much had every kid’s ear when it came to art direction. So, what was in, was in. Mix My Little Pony with Franken Fran; you got dis.
Interestingly enough, Hannibal would not come out for another two years. The tone’s pretty much the same, even if the situation isn’t.
“I challenge you to a staring contest.”
Now, looking back on this something like 11 years later, it’s easy to see it and go, oh, wow, so edgy. But it wasn’t. At the time, the humor involved was pretty much on the fringe of what we considered normal; but it was bleeding-edge. It hit a note, struck a chord, severed a vein. People liked it. They still do.
UPDATE as of June 10th, 2024: As with everything, when I search for this on Google, now, it’s going out of style. Or, it’s simply not being indexed anymore. And the old ways are falling out of use.
In the interest that you all do not forget the face(s) of your father(s), I am, once again, re-uploading this entire article, and updating it, a bit.
Back to what I was talking about: The limited palette; the characteristic square brush, that no one could really emulate; and the combination of the artist’s being, with the relatively-new PaintTool Sai, produced something no one had really seen before. And it was good.
For whatever reason, the juxtaposition of cute pony cartoons for children and horrible serial killer just clicked. And, as you can see, above, there’s some shit in it that just wouldn’t fly, these days.
Interestingly enough, all the murder, fictional as it might have been, wasn’t really what riled people up. Or, at least, as far as I heard, that wasn’t it.
It was that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo in a comic.
Be it true or not, the story I heard was that the artist, or somebody who people thought was the artist, ended up getting plagued about this, in real life. Phone calls; that sort of thing. It was my first experience witnessing what happens to artists, online: they eventually kinda get driven away, if they get popular enough. And, for a time, that seemed to be what was happening, there, too.
Oh, why was it bad that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo?
The idea people had was that Scootaloo was a child, while Pinkie Pie was probably, or definitely, an adult.
To be fair, the mention of rape, as far as I can remember, also received significant backlash. But they seemed to weather it, just fine.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie is an interesting part of Internet history. I feel like it was right at the cusp of the Internet becoming very, very reactionary towards ‘unacceptable’ adult subjects. How we went from Deliverance being somehow acceptable to be released theatrically, to I think it’s problematic when a villain does bad things, I don’t know. I really fuckin’ don’t.
Interestingly enough, the acceptability of unacceptable adult subjects, depicted fictitiously, is something that’s still argued about, today, on Twitter. (Tumblr’s audience has largely moved onto Twitter.) En generale I see it as a natural progression of the Human psyche: puzzling out what it wants to deal with, and what it won’t accept.
What do I think about its subjects?
They’re fuckin’ cartoon horses, kid.
I don’t give a shit. I didn’t draw ’em.
And if I did, I’d be absolutely cheesed that my style infected the new show.
An Addendum
Since this entry was deleted off of Margaret Gel’s Apocalyptic Log (due to what I felt was a conflict with my ‘professional’ identity— I’d prefer to leave that blog as something else now), I felt some sort of great and terrifying need to rejuvenate it. People liked this, right? Or at least those two weird kids who were stalking me, thinking that I was Crooked Trees, liked it.
There are a couple of things I need to say. Once again, I am not Crooked Trees. Human beings online have always had this desire to believe that any vehement insistence of mine that I am not someone, is, in point of fact, just the opposite: if I say that I’m not somebody, then I must be.
I’ve gone through being stolen from, before. It’s not nice. It’s not nice to let this happen to somebody else, either. And I’m fully aware of how this fucking happened— it’s the same order of things wherein someone once thought I was JonTron, of all people.
There was a time in my past where I needed to lie, tactically, specifically, to protect my ailing father. I didn’t want what I did online to follow me home and affect him. But he’s been dead for seven years, now, and I no longer have a great and abiding need to conceal my identity. I am, in point of fact, now a published author, with copyrighted work. Hiding doesn’t help me anymore.
If I were Crooked Trees, I wouldn’t hide it. It would enable me to do much more than I currently can. Por ejemplo, it might get me animation work. I might be able to make a movie. I don’t know! I might be able to do something wif it.
But I’m not them.
Years later, after this whole dog and pony show was quite fucking over, I saw an 18 and a 19 year old duo, this pair of kids, who were wildly in love with each other. Whether or not they were LARPing, who’s to say? I’ll never know, maybe. But they seemed to be in love.
And they had taken the part of Scootaloo and Pinkie Pie, from this comic, and were playing it out, quite overtly sexually. And they contacted me, and they asked me—
icze4r, are you the Great and Wonderful Crooked Trees?
Wikipedia and me have history. In response to L’incident de 2014, a group of 10-12 mostly-mentally-ill Wikipedia administrators decided that any and all mention of me would be permanently blacklisted on Wikipedia. Seeing as 10-12 administrators are not the whole of Wikipedia, and the guy was nuts and got perma’d for being nuts, I cannot see any World in which this shit still flies.
But I hope it does.
Because I don’t want fucking nerds writing about me.
I fucking goddamned hateWikipedia.
Let’s get this shit started!
A lot of people hate Wikipedia. Most of them have good reasons for it: they were spurned by it, their work thrown back in their faces. That, and many people have been burned by the clique-ish, lawyer-esque population who pedantically control, but especially remove content. Content that these people have not only worked hard on, but feel proud of. The end result is that it’s very easy to hate anyone on Wikipedia with any modicum of power. Power corrupts, and Wikipedians are cunts.
I’m not sure I ever seriously fantasized about having a Wikipedia page. There sure are a lot of admins who seem to have, given that I’ve found a handful of them who have not only created, but currently maintain their own (non-notable) articles— all while regularly blamming other people’s non-notable articles.
But, for me, that’s not what’s repulsive about Wikipedia. What’s repulsive to me, is I detest the very notion that someone as repulsive as a human being (retch! gag! puke!) would even think to write about me.
Why?, you may ask?
Well, shit, my dude. During my heydey, I had 5 separate motherfuckers write scholarly articles about my penis.
That is not a joke.
No, I will not help you find them.
After that shit? No way in Hell would I let these dipshits write about me.
As I once put it in a older draft: “Who wants these pricks writing about you?“
What is a Wikipedian?
A miserable little pile of oh no jackass you don’t get a joke. Fuck you, Wikipedian. Fuck you.
On the one hand, I can kind of ‘appreciate’ what Wikipedians are doing. After all, these people claim that they’re trying to improve the wealth and breadth of human knowledge. But, there are problems with this. For starters, why would you crowdsource a source of knowledge like this? And, for free? You’re only going to get Reddit mod types who want power, as fleeting and useless and meaningless as that will be. Plus, they’ll be fucking stupid, so you won’t even be able to aggregate and collate any useful information, nor will you be able to successfully synthesize anything.
In the poorly-paraphrased words of a Wikipedian: if a trusted source has the wrong information, that would be what Wikipedia says.
To paraphrase yet another Wikipedian: public court records can’t be used for pages on here, of living people.
With rules like this, what the fuck are these people even writing?
In recent years, it’s gotten worse. The sources that Wikipedia will allow in articles are dwindling: some are trusted, others are verboten. Admittedly, this is probably to avoid future hoaxes that would inevitably just make Wikipedia look even fucking stupider than it already is.
But that’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do with a thing like this. If you want to cite a fact, but none of the trusted bloggers have written about it, then you cannot list the fact. Would Wikipedia be able to write that the sky is blue? I don’t know. It depends on if the source was allowed.
There is also the simple fact that Wikipedia is putting blind trust in journalists, to always write the truth about historical events. And as someone who’s lived through like 5 of them motherfuckers, I have never seen a single journalist write anything resembling the truth. They always get things wrong, because they are so rarely actual eye-witnesses to what’s happened.
So, at best, Wikipedia can never be ‘the truth’. It can only be what a select group of journalists write. Without allowing for original research, you’re just parroting what the media says. Hope the media doesn’t lie!
It’s not like the United States of America has ever lied, using the media, right?
At that point, what the fuck even is Wikipedia?
At some point, Wikipedia encountered the inherent problem of Truth: it is damned near impossible to prove what it actually is. This became obvious when the founder of Wikipedia tried to correct his birthdate, and his work was reverted.
And don’t get me started on the other problem: the people. Given the kind of people you have working on it, what the fuck can you even expect? The only people who will work on Wikipedia, and survive the hostile editing environments, are complete cunts.
You have one toxic environment. All the good people leave; and only the people who thrive in said toxicity will remain. And the vast majority of these people treat the website like their personal pet project, trying to comb out of it what they don’t like, and only allowing to stay what they do.
The part of Wikipedia that I have a major problem with is those people who take great pleasure in removing articles about anyone and anything that they’re not personally familiar with. In the end, you have admins who are maintaining their own non-notable autobiographical articles, angrily hunting and deleting pages by people doing the same damned thing. And they act self-righteous about it, too.
In the end, because the people with power are like this, the only things that will remain will ultimately be those things that the ones with the power personally approve of. And this will only result in Wikipedia becoming the pet vanity project of its most-obsessive power-users.
Bully!
That is it for me, by the way. Having seen so many admins work on their own fucking autobiographical pages, while deleting the work of people doing the same fucking thing, and then acting like they’re superior? Oh, shit, my scro. I don’t fucking like people who enforce the rules, in general; but I have a very special place in my heart for those people who break the very same rules that they enforce.
The Failure of Wikipedia
The idea that is Wikipedia is just plain bullshit to begin with. The service, as much as it purports to strive towards complete and total neutrality, is just like any other collection of information on people: it’s made by people! And people are genuinely shitty.
When placed under the obligation to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, people will always find ways to be the worst versions of themselves imaginable: they will always find ways to skirt the rules, in order to enforce the sort of ‘environment’ that only they thrive in.
To put it a different way: Wikipedia has a shit-ton of rules, and it has only made the place worse, because all of the people with power, who have been there the longest, use and bend these rules to get their own way.
It’s like office politics: you require someone to be ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, and they willalwaysi find a way to be genuinely antagonistic in a way that’s couched in ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’ terms.
In short, Wikipedia has failed. There is no true ‘cooperation’ possible here, on a macro level. Whether or not it’s prevented by human narcissism or not, I have no idea. All I know is, there is no ‘civility’ or ‘neutrality’: it’s as civil and friendly as a person typing per my last e-mail…
Wikipedia is, at its worst, best, and finest, simply the closeted incivilities of ‘office politics’ splayed over the reality of the Beautiful Ones. This is a closed system so filled to the brim with drama that it almost reminds me of a bunch of people stuck in a buried bunker, looking for meaning, slowly going insane. This shit is genuinely hard to look at.
Wikipedia, the very idea of it, would be fine— were it just the idea of it. But the people, have ruined it.
One of the things I’ve learned about everything that humans touch, is that they ruin it. Every fandom; every ‘community’; every single group of people will ultimately be ruined by its members’ worst inclinations. Every ‘community’ will turn into a disastrous Homeowners’ Association; every website will endure the gradual, meaningless, inevitable degradation of its very purpose and its total function.
Entropy might be a human-defined law of the universe, but that’s only because everything you motherfuckers touch turns to garbage. Outside of here, there are beautiful things. You don’t have a clue how fucking ugly you really are.
In a way, I’m not even really talking about Wikipedia itself.
I’m talking about people.
People say things like, people suck, wholeheartedly never grasping the fact that they themselves are people.
And so, I realize that my ‘gripe’ is not with Wikipedia.
It’s with people.
People suck.
Almost everyone who’s stayed with this project has twisted themselves into this completely unrelatable ‘WikiPerson’, who has memorized so many esoteric and nonsensical rules that, when these people argue back and forth with each other, it resembles wizards casting spells. Only it’s not cool and no one gives a shit.
They have Wiki Court.
Can you fucking imagine? Wasting your precious time on this.
And the drama! Holy shit, my dudes! There’s a reason why Wikipedia has spawned so many goddamned spin-offs: it’s damn near the same reason that 4chan was birthed from Something Awful’s rotten womb. Wikipedia is to drama as third-degree-burns are to the concept of fire.
For the vast majority of the craziest motherfuckers using Wikipedia, it’s all about power. These are people who have vendettas: they’re severely maladjusted, and think that they can use the service to get one over on other people. Some of them also think that they can enrich their own lives by using it as free personal webspace. The craziest of the crazies think that they can use it to definitively decide how the public views certain individuals. Which is crazy, because nobody even gives a shit anymore.
The Internet is largely over.
I should also note that people on Wikipedia largely act like the ‘professionals’ did on Usenet. There is this bizarre arrogance that many of the prejudiced older white men have, where they assume that, if they act like total shitbags, but they couch everything they’re saying and doing in ‘civil’ language, that that somehow makes it a-okay!
As for Wikipedia itself? Its heydey is over. People often say that they use Wikipedia all the time; but these people are proselytizing. They’re preaching because they fear that it’s being left by the wayside. Which it is.
There was a time when people would read Wikipedia for basic information about something. To educate themselves. But the problem is, it’s an ever-changing resource, being fought over by the very people who are producing it. Without a userbase that selflessly and objectively protects the information it has curated, the Encyclopedia itself can never be useful. Because it can never be trusted. As long as it’s being fought over by maladapted people— as long as there is no peace— there can also be no real cooperation, and without that, humans cannot build anything worthwhile.
People say that they read Wikipedia for basic information about something. But the reality is, when they read it, after they’re finished, they go,
well, that was interesting! Still don’t know if any of what I read was true, though.
An Unfixable Problem with an Untenable Solution
Only a selfish person is going to edit Wikipedia for very long. And it requires many selfless people, in order to properly function.
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that it’s just as bad as the worst people on it, who have the most fucking power. That is to say: the most-powerful people, who are not there to build an Encyclopedia, but are rather there to abuse their power? They are the slowest moving members of the herd. And they hold everyone else back.
And the main problem Wikipedia has is hatred. The hatred that some of its users feel for anyone who isn’t a straight white male.
For a long time, Wikipedia’s worst did their level best to keep out everyone who wasn’t a straight white male. And there were admins who were, to put it mildly, fucking psychotic about this. As the project ages and there’s nothing really left to do on the website save for argue with one another until one person or the other leaves one way or another, slowly but steadily, administrators are being removed. Because there’s only so much crazy you can be before no one can actually work with you any longer.
Wikipedia has a ‘humorous’ article on its own ‘decline’. There have been numerous claims that Wikipedia was ‘dying’; and none of them have been taken seriously, because no one who actually wants to use Wikipedia wants to hear about its faults. They self-identify with the project, and they stop up their ears. They go la la la and they don’t want to face the problems.
Irrespective of that, they know that there are problems.
What the people who proselytize for Wikipedia don’t know, is, when people say that the website is ‘dying,’ they do not assume a context of, oh, one day, this website will be kaputski. It likely never will be ‘gone’.
But MySpace is still online.
So is Friendster.
Twitter is still up and around. But like a person with dementia, Twitter’s never gonna be the same. Twitter might still exist; but something has changed, irrevocably. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s nowhere to go but down from here.
This is it, Luigi!
People on Wikipedia already know that editorship is declining. They’ll argue, back and forth, over the cause; but just like how Humanity itself keeps looking in the mirror, getting disgusted by its reflection, and then immediately braying, but I’m so beautiful! Who is that?!, they’ll never see what the fuck is actually happening.
What’s happening, is, when you have toxic people with power, and they have the power to forcibly ostracize others (ban them), and the entire Encyclopedia is locked up tighter than a nun’s purse (I personally witnessed an administrator block something like 17% of the total IPv6 space, one day), this is what the fuck is going to kill the website. Nothing that humans make can ever hope to thrive, or continue, without constantly introducing new blood.
I have no desire to fix Wikipedia’s problems. I enjoy watching the inevitable decline of everything that Humanity has made. It’s funny to me— not primarily because I’ve been gate-kept out of everything, but because I like to see you fail. I like to see you have to deal with the fact that what you have created is not eternal. You are so fucking conceited. It does my heart good to see you have to acknowledge reality.
I started this ‘article’ about 4 or 5 years ago. At the time I wrote this, Wikipedia was filled to the fucking brim with racists, sexists, and especially transphobes. They especially hated people from India, which is amazing, considering how many fucking people in India know English. Leave it to a white man to think he owns a whole fucking language. Anyways, good fucking luck getting an article on there if you’re a woman. They fucking hate women.
Again: prejudiced white men, controlling a resource and keeping it from everybodyelse. Sound familiar?
Pair a lot of editors’ genuine desire to keep anyone who’s not a straight white male out of the Encyclopedia, with the bizarre and increasingly-stringent citation requirements (which only become more nonsensical as time goes on), and you have a recipe for utter fucking disaster. Because sexist men in the past purposefully did not write about women, denying them their history as a way of keeping them from ever gaining agency, there are usually next to no acceptable sources to cite for many female historical figures. Fast forward to today, and you have, yet again, white dudes gatekeeping women out of being acknowledged. Only this time, they can claim that the women in the past were not notable because no one ever wrote about them.
Do you fucking see how this shit just does not work?
In the past, racist white men did their level best to keep non-whites from ever being remembered. And, today, racist white men do their level best to do the same. Only this time, instead of a book, it’s fucking stupid-ass Wikipedia.
I suppose my only solace is that the newest generations, the Zoomers and Gen Alpha, don’t really seem to be actively using this shit. They hold basically no stock in it, and future generations are, inevitably, just going to leave this thing to gather dust. Before any of us know it, Wikipedia is just going to be another website in our collective past, where we have no idea how or why it’s still online.
Because you have to remain relevant for people to give a shit about you.
I still have to ask a question, though: why did they think that this shit was gonna work? Did you really think we were all going to learn who invented the Electric Toaster?
And to the people saying, well, Wikipedia is the number 6th most-visited website in the world!, just remember:
Twitter is the seventh, and that motherfucker’s deader than shit.
Ladies and Jellyspoons
As it stands right now, Wikipedia is broken. Its environment is toxic to normal people. The sources of its information are dwindling, and the quality of those sources are often suspect.
Essentially, Wikipedia is a negative feedback loop: garbage-in, garbage-out. With no real information coming in, and with insane people patrolling the Mojave that is this place, there is nothing left to do here.
Wikipedia is the Turd-Polishing Centre of the known Human World, and I am glad to press Publish on this post, so I can finally stop fucking thinking about it, forever.
For more about what I’ve been talking about this entire time, please consider reading: Why the News is Not the Truth, from Harvard Business Review, by Peter Vanderwicken.
I’m old. At this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you when I first wanted a Google Knowledge Panel. I believe it was born out of the desire to have things that people did not want me to have: the fact that people always have tried to ‘gate-keep’ me out of their own little sekrit klubs.
According to Google itself, the Google Knowledge Panel probably showed up in May of 2012. And I can tell you what people felt about it: they fucking hated it.
There was a bunch of talk about how people felt that it was largely trying to antiquate Wikipedia itself: after all, the thing largely drew first on Freebase, which seemed to be a wiki-like ‘endeavor’ to create, shall we say, a ‘knowledge database’, describing people. So, basically, what Wikidata is now. Only I don’t think Freebase was anywhere near as useful.
Far as I can remember, Google ate Freebase’s ass in, like, 2010. And then, in 2012, it started trying to sniff Wikipedia’s dick, with this Knowledge Panel thing. As I’ve previously described, nobody gives a fiddler’s fuck about this thing. Nobody famous, anyways.
The problems with Google trying to copy Wikipedia’s ‘homework’ are obvious, and the entire endeavor was replete and bursting with the sort of disinformational splendor one could expect from whatever the fuck things edit Wikipedia. I could probably research a bunch of shit and show you a bunch of links that will, no doubt, one day be deceased, but who cares? I don’t care and you don’t, either. These are my thoughts on this, not the media’s. Anyways, if you give a shit, one of the most-common problems was that the Google Knowledge Panels kept on saying that people were dead, and Google, as per fucking usual, took a fucking dog’s age to correct this. This is probably why Google is now very, very careful of putting dates of birth and other shit in the Panels.
I don’t know what happens at Google. I was once invited to Google, and did not go, because who has the fucking money?. But I have to imagine that their internal structure is something akin to infinite monkeys with typewriters, herding cats. Shit either gets done, or it does not.
Google, on one hand, does not seem to know what the fuck it is doing, on multiple fronts. The Knowledge Panel is one of them. The Panel itself is good for exactly nothing, and largely only functions as some sort of vanity plate. You really want it, if you’re nobody; but if you’re somebody, it’s not even in the top 500 list of your priorities.
At the time of its creation, Google seemed to largely be fantasizing about how it would sculpt the future of the Internet. Google had decided, in all of its ‘wisdom’, that it alone had the right to decide what the Internet looked like. It tried this stupid bullshit with amp; it tried this stupid bullshit by trying to enforce how webpages should be constructed, in order to get ranked; and every single time, the robots just beat it. Over, and over, until the end of time. And then, there’s this.
I use Google’s services. I’m Verified on YouTube. I used Google+, seriously. I even tried to get Verified on YouTube through Google+ (it didn’t work). I have my work e-mail through them.
I fucking hate Google. I only use Google because I view it as the most reliable of all possible services. I do not like it. I welcome its replacement, with open arms. Fuck this shitty company.
Part and parcel of my reasoning for hating it is that Google went to great lengths to shape the web the way it wanted. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t really have a ‘problem’ with Google figuring out a way to ‘rank’ content: being primarily a search engine (one would fucking hope, at least), ranking your content is a necessary step.
The thing is, though, trying to get people to make webpages the way you want, it just diluted the creativity that was once found throughout the entire Internet. There was once a time when no two websites looked the same— and if they did, that was a faux pas!You stole code!. Now, everybody has a fucking shitty-ass WordPress. Even me.
The other thing is, if you get people to all make webpages the same way, then that just gives the robots an easy way to rank to the top. Also also, why should anyone have to ‘fight’ to get what they want, ranked at the top?
For example: my main website is ranked fifth for my username. Why? Partially because I tried to handcode my own website, and Google doesn’t like that. Meanwhile, the WordPress blog for my name? Ranked first, baby. You can’t beat 100 percent.
This website, by the by, was first started (though has now transmogrified into something else) because, the award-winning formula to rank #1 is just to do this. Just get a dot com with your preferred term of choice. Google says that shit don’t matter. I know better.
Anyways, back to my main fucking topic: Why? Why, when you own a Google Knowledge Panel, can you not just put your website right at the fucking top? Why the fuck do I have to ‘fight’ with a sekrit algorithm? Why do I have to guess at how I could rank at the top? It’s foolishness.
How it made me feel
I got my Panel somewhere around April of 2021. It is now June 9th, 2024, in the middle of the night, as I write this. So, we’re going on three years, now.
At two years, I didn’t really feel anything. Like— when I got Verified on YouTube, for a little bit, I felt different. I felt like a winner. If I had gotten Verified on Twitter— well. I guess we’ll never know, huh?
But, that’s just the thing. When you get something like this, the end result is, you don’t really feel it. You get your Cool Leg Degree; you get your Master’s; you get your PhD; you get multiple of these things. They don’t come up off your wall and give you a blowjob or something, to keep you warm at night. They mean nothing. They’re only there so you can get a job. And this, this is something even lesser. This is, but of course, substantially less important than having a pretty lady sitting on my lap.
Like— initially, when I first got it, I felt jubilant. I had won.
Now I look at the fuckin’ thing, and I’m like, eh.
A year ago, I might have been sad on the day when it went away.
Now?
Who gives a shit.
Yahoo!
I can feel it.
When Yahoo! Search was dying, it was pretty fucking obvious. Nobody could find what they wanted; and Google was sitting there, in the background, eating Yahoo!’s lunch.
Yahoo! itself was never good. Google, on the other hand, was so good that it was almost amazing. You could find things!
Now, though?
There are several phenomena that are happening to Google Search, and these things are going to end its usefulness:
Prior historical results being basically wiped from Google Search when some newsworthy incident happens
This one is interesting, because it absolutely prevents any sort of research on some trending topics.
An inability for the source of some information to rank on Google
I have a shitload of books that are on my website. You have to dig to find any links to them, on Google, even when you search the exact titles— even when you load up their individual Knowledge Panels!
Malware / spam websites being able to rank on page 1 (this destroyed Yahoo! Search in a single weekend)
Information older than 3+ years seems to just be gone
An inability to actually collate information related to highly-searched-for individuals (like how Brad Pitt, for like 2 years, had the wrong fucking Twitter account attached to his Panel; or how Wikipedia summaries used to just stay in the fucking Panels way too long)
And, finally:
AN INABILITY TO ACTUALLY FUCKING FIND ANYTHING YOU WANT
That’s a double whammy!
How I feel about it, now
I use my writing to put things to bed. And this, my friends, is something that I want to forgetall about.
When I released my comic book— something that I’ve been planning to do since I was a little girl— I tried to get it into my Google Knowledge Panel. The comic book is ‘of Two Rabbits’.
It was Hell.
They got the title wrong, thrice.
The above little factoid proved to me, one fucking thing: the people at Google are putting at least some of the information in the Panel in, manually.
Because I listed the book as ‘of Two Rabbits’, and it came out as three different things before it was finally corrected. The only way that could have happened (I gave them the title again, and they put ‘Of Two Rabbits’, not ‘of’) was if they manually entered it.
So this entire くそみたいなショー is just infinite monkeys typing.
As someone who writes—I detest the titles ‘Writer’, or, worse, ‘Author’— they place inordinate importance on me— getting my hard work wrongis not something I ever want to deal with, again. Because this was so fucking frustrating!
Every time I place my happiness in the hands of humans, they shit on it.
So I shan’t be doing that anymore.
An addendum: you see the ‘cover’ image for Bhue: the Tricksters? Not only is it capitalized wrong (I JUST noticed this!), but, I’ve always known that the cover is wrong.
See, when you upload your book to Google, they tell you— give us your front cover, your actual book content, and then your back cover. So I did.
It deleted the front cover when I uploaded the back cover (all appropriately named). And it just put that there. And I never fixed it. Do you think I should?
See, you’re reading this because you want one. You’re wondering how to get one. You’re thinking it’s impossible to get one.
It’s very simple. To get a Google Knowledge Panel, you need to write a book and upload it to Google Books under the name you want to get a Google Knowledge Panel under, or, you release music under the name you want the Google Knowledge Panel to be titled. That’s it. That’s the whole damned thing.
As of this writing, I have something like 24 Google Knowledge Panels. Some come; some go; some are dead. Some are permadead. I don’t know which is which anymore, and I don’t care to keep track of any of them.
When it comes to Google Knowledge Panels, I have a TV show. I have a record label. At one point, I had a credit for appearing in ‘movies’. The links above may one day die as well. With strange aeons, and all that jazz.
But there are some that I’m going to keep. Such as the one for my first book, my second book, and my third. In point of fact, I am Verified on / with Google 8 fucking times.
The eighth is a secret tool, that’ll help us later.
In Cool Leg, I was taught to spout my ethos (my authority) on a matter, first. Then there was Pathos, and Logos. Fuck Pathos. These are not baby kittens. This shit is fucking dumb.
In the past, and probably still today, Google has scraped Wikipedia, and especially Wikidata, in order to figure out who to make a Google Knowledge Panel of. I think their thinking was, hey, if Wikipedia is really well-guarded, and they only write about notable peoples, then it’s a nice little shortcut. And so, everybody else thought so. Which led to people spamming their autobiographies on Wikipedia, looking for an easy Google Knowledge Panel.
For what it’s worth, it works. For what it’s also worth, if you’re a YouTuber with 1,000+ subscribers, you can write your own article on Wikitubia, just fine, and that will probably get you a Google Knowledge Panel. But it’s not very stable, and there are basically only children running that place. You really want to argue with kids? On the Internet?
So don’t do that. Just write a book or release a song, and get your Knowledge Panel. If you want it that much.
I thought about not writing this, but, it’s no ‘trick’. This is simply how it works.
Other things to think about
Do you want your own icon for your Google Knowledge Panel?
This thing.
Then go to the Hamburger menu on your Google Knowledge Panel, and click Send Feedback. Then tell them what you want the icon to be, give them the URL from some good place and the webpage that you got the icon from (for example, I used my verified YouTube page), and they’ll usually change your icon for you, after you ask them 3 or 4 times. They’re not too bright, over there.
You can also change your title this way.
How do I get my social media profiles in my Google Knowledge Panel?
If you have a Wikipedia page and a Wikidata entry, add them to the Wikidata entry. If not, Send Feedback on the Google Knowledge Panel and tell them what your social media profiles are. If you’ve gotten Verified as the person controlling the Panel, which you should absolutely do by clicking the Hamburger menu and saying ‘Claim this knowledge panel’, then they’ll already be able to confirm what your social media is.
How do I get my Entity Home (my website’s address) to appear in my Google Knowledge Panel?
Wikidata. Put your website in there.
If not, pray. You could ask them to put it in there for you, through Send Feedback. Or you could have a website with the same name as your Google Knowledge Panel. Your choice.
Help! My Google Knowledge Panel keeps on disappearing!
Yes it does. Google does not care about you. Always remember that.
The Knowledge Panel will disappear randomly for about a year and a half. After that, it’ll usually stay. The best you can do is just register a bunch of social media profiles and put the same information on all of them. The Google Knowledge Panel works by collating all the information about a person, into one fucking place. If the information isn’t the same all over, it’ll have more trouble than it would if the information was the same.
How do I get images of myself in my Google Knowledge Panel?
Mostly pray. But you can look at what Jason Barnard does, by Googling him.
The trick is just have a bunch of websites and post pictures of yourself, with alt text that says your name, or the name of your Google Knowledge Panel.
Contrary to popular belief, no, they don’t have to be pictures of real flesh-and-blood human beings. Lots of cartoon characters get through.
I miss this stage of it.
Additional nonsense
How do I get my Twitter carousel to appear on my Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?
Tweet consistently, but rarely. It goes away if you tweet too much; it goes away if you delete tweets; it goes away for no reason.
How do I get the Articles carousel to appear on my Search Engine Results Page?
You have to write for some sort of publication where they have an Authors page, and you have an Author page there, and also, you’ve written an article. Google has to consider it a News site. Once Google considers it to be that, you’ll be able to eventually get an Articles carousel to pop up (in theory). Haven’t managed to do it! Probably never will! But that’s the theory.
okay that’s it
go home
wait I have more (somehow)
When I first got my Google Knowledge Panel, it was from the first book, Dragons: the Anunnaki. It happened pretty much instantly, but I only noticed about 5 or 7 days afterwards.
This, alone, is not enough to keep a public Google Knowledge Panel. So, I released music. And slowly, as I released more, and more, and more? I haven’t seen this thing disappear for like a year and a half or so, now. It is finally here to stay.
The thing is, though, it’s not really that useful. The only people who really want a Google Knowledge Panel are those who are not actually famous. Very few really famous people actually claim these. They’re unloved by actual celebrities.
Tom Cruise is one of the outliers who actually has someone managing his Panel. Brad Pitt’s Panel is unclaimed; so is Keanu Reeves’. Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson’s Panels are similarly unclaimed, though Robert Downey Jr.’s is claimed. To give you an idea of how many people actually give a shit. (This is assuming that someone with these celebrities is actually the one who has claimed the Panel. I’ve heard stories of the wrong people claiming Panels…)
Overall, figuring out how to generate one for myself was an interesting journey. Unfortunately, Google is going down the tubes just like Amazon is, and it’s not gonna fucking matter, pretty soon.
Will A.I. be the future? I have no idea. I’ve been in machine learning / A.I. for the past 11 or 12 years. I thought that VTubing would be the future, and here we are: everybody’s a goddamned VTuber.
It would be interesting to teach you how to ‘poison’ an A.I.’s results about yourself, but I largely don’t want to tell you, and I absolutely do not actually care to any further.
