Do women get more sympathy then men? — Recently, Twitter got into debating a 23-year-old girl who talked about not having been kissed or in a relationship yet. She clearly displayed feeling shame, low self-esteem and asked what was wrong with her. The responses were to me rather predictable. There was a fair amount of sympathy, as there…

Remembering the Utøya terror attacks on 22 July 2011 — The Utøya terror attacks that happened 12 years ago on this day (22 July) affected me in a lot of ways for several reasons: I am a Norwegian living in Oslo, who also lived there when it Breivik blew up the government building downtown. I am a social democrat and…

Has society become too feminized and favoring women too much? Are men big losers? — The rise of people like Andrew Tate and more reasonable variants like Jordan Peterson is built on the narrative that men have become losers and society has become centered around the values and needs of women. We are told that masculinity no longer has any value and only feminine values…

The case against free speech absolutism — A lot of ignorance about free speech and its history has developed. The free speech absolutism promoted by Elon Musk is a symptom of this. In most ways, it will undermine rather than enhance freedom of expression. Of course, Elon Musk didn’t invent this concept, but it is rather become…

The complex mental gymnastics involved in retaining a racist worldview — I recently had an argument with racists online, which gave me food for thought. What I find interesting is that racist ideas are quite widespread, but almost no racist I have ever debated will actually admit to being a racist. They will admit to holding all the ideas which according…

ChatGPT and AI art are emergent phenomena — As I read about more of the details around ChatGPT and AI art creation tools such as Stable Diffusion, I am left with the impression that these systems were not really planned. Rather, something quite amazing arose from attempting to solve much smaller, more narrowly defined problems. Problems which at…

Comparing the processing of cooking food with making digital images using AI — Unless you live under a rock, you must have picked up on the fact that we currently live at the beginning of an artificial intelligence revolution. In many ways, this is like the beginning of the internet revolution. It swept across the world in the mid-90s and later accelerated with…

Why you need to grasp RGB, CMYK and HSL colors — With AI Art, you write what you want and there is no need to know traditional artist stuff like color models, right? Wrong, if you really want to get good at AI Art, you need to actually learn the usual stuff that any artist has to master. In this regard…

In Affinity Photo, we can change skin tones using blend modes and blending ranges — When working with AI Art, I often need to make changes to skin tones, so I watched various videos on the topic. These videos are great, and I advise you to have a look. However, occasionally, we just want to have something to read as a quick reference, reminder, or…