IS ANY ART MY OWN?

 This was a question I pondered after reading people discussing plagiarism vs. original art, and I started wondering where the line between original art vs. plagiarism actually lies.

Here are 10 of my pictures, that I’ve given a percentage score on, starting with 100% original and working down to 50% or less. I’d call anything over 50% my own original art, but this is subjective and totally arbitrary. And that is the nature of art!

All these pictures taken from my old Frot blog have been through a similar process of digital editing, including being cropped to a 1×1 ratio, and finishing off with a black frame and my www.frot.co.nz URL. I’d be happy to post any of these pictures anywhere online, but I’m not a commercial artist, and I imagine some of them would cross an imaginary line in the sand for commercial use. But I have no idea where that line would be. I’d say anything above 50% is fully legit, but below that may not be.

1. FREAK DOG TOMATO THING – 100%

For my first picture I’ll go totally safe – this is originally a painting I did with acrylics on canvas. It’s all from the deranged contents of my subconscious, so I’ll call this 100% original.
 

2. STRANGE SCENE IN THE STREET WITH DOG PISSING – 100%

Most of my art is based on drawings I randomly do using pen on paper and then add colours. This is the sort of bizarre stuff I seem to keep drawing, it’s all mine but don’t ask me to explain it’s deeper meanings!

3. GROOVING OUT AT THE SUPERMARKET – 80%

This is not a photo from a nightclub, it’s actually taken in a supermarket. The guy in the photo just happened to be standing in line in front of me. The original photo looks fairly different, and although the subject might be totally oblivious to the fact that he was being photographed, I’d use this image anywhere and would give it an 80% score.

4.BIG BIRD IS LURKING IN THE BUSHES 80%

This is a photo I took of an ornament in a garden. It is just a mass produced garden ornament so I’m not likely to be sued for copyright! I’d say this is pretty safe ground and score it 80%. Not my original sculpture but the photo is all mine, and I’d happily use this image anywhere.

5. GET THAT FUCKING CAMERA OUT OF MY FACE – 70%

Strangers in the street are one of my favourite photo subjects. I regard anything in the public domain as mine to record, but some people disagree. Would all the people I photograph like me using their photos online? Hell no! – in fact the ones that look pissed off are often my favourites. This lady did not look impressed that I was taking her photo. I like this photo but would be a bit careful about where I posted it. So 70% on this one I guess.

6. A COUPLE OF ABORIGINAL GUYS – 60%

This a drawing I did based on part of a photo of two Australian aboriginal guys. But it’s not my photo and I no longer even have a copy of the original. My drawing is a bit different to the photo but probably fairly recognizable. I’d call this my own art but wouldn’t use it for an advertising campaign!. I’ll score this as 60% original because although I’ve changed it a lot, I’d be on shaky ground if anyone asked about the original photo.

7. SNAKE PSYCHEDELIC PARTY – 50%

This drawing was originally done by a friend – I just coloured it in and did some edits – but she was happy for me to do that and liked how my version looked. I’d call it a collaboration, and would ask permission to use it commercially for any purpose. And if it made a bunch of money I’d give her half, so I’ll call it 50%.

8. AN INSECT AT THE WETA WORKSHOP. 50%

I take photos of all sorts of things, and with things like cars and motorbikes I don’t hesitate to call it my own work. But 3D art is trickier. This is a photo of a sculpture I took at the display at the Weta Workshop here in Wellington.   

https://wetaworkshop.com

My edit does look a bit different to the original, but the original was very cool and I make no claim to there being much of my original art here. So it’s my photo but not really my art. And this is based on a photo of a model from a very commercial source. Where is the line?

9. SKULLS GETTING MARRIED ON A WALL – 50%

Street art is another thing I like to take photos of – It’s not my art though, and I have no idea who originally painted it. So although it's based on my photo, taken in the public domain, it is very recognizable and not my original work. I like to edit photos of street art but have no idea if that is considered OK. 

10. WONDER WOMAN GOES QUAD – ?%

I like to do edits of random pictures from the internet, and from my own image collection. Pictures of Wonder Woman are all over the place, and I have no idea where this original photo came from to start with (but I do have a copy of it). Here I have edited it into four different coloured copies, but Andy Warhol used to do that sort of thing a lot. Is this above or below the 50% line? I have no idea… 

COMPUTER ADDICTION

After spending years trying to get my possibly right brain dominant mind to work in the unnatural (to me) world of computers, I can see that while I may now be more computer literate than many people, I'm certainly not a natural. The darn things drive me batty, but I'm addicted to using them anyway.

The main thing I have going for me with computers, is that sometimes being totally out of my depth leads me to simplify things & sometimes even explain them in a way a borderline autistic geek generally won't.

As a Generation X old fart I think most of Generation Z and many of Generation Y are somewhere on the autism spectrum. And I think that is primarily because most of them are jabbed to the gills with the deadly concoctions of poisons we have been programmed to believe are "vaccinations".

If I could start over I'm not sure what if I would do things much differently with computers. When I first got a PC and an internet connection in 1998, things were very different to now. I think that some of the information I later learned online very probably saved my life, so if I went back in time I wouldn't "just say no" to using computers.

On the other hand I do think cell phones are horrible devices, and with the benefit of hindsight I'd do exactly the same thing that I did back in 2002. I would again say no to using cell phones all together, that was a really good decision.

If there was no time travel device available, and I was starting out with computers again here in 2025, I'd do some things differently with the hindsight and 20/20 vision of having watched the past 1/4 century unfold. For example I'd use Linux rather than Windows, I'd totally ignore all social media, and I'd only do software updates when hell froze over.

The most important thing I'd be aiming for, is to be more disciplined about what I allow to come pouring into my mind. Doing things like writing notes, or blog posts, or doing digital art, or researching and learning about new topics of interest, are all great use of computers. They can be amazing tools.

But getting sucked into looking at all the endless bullshit online, or constantly farting about with technical issues because the software is utter shit, that is not good. Computers can easily become time wasting mind programming devices of evil, and I think they are deliberately becoming more so day by day.

Like almost everyone, I'm constantly being bombarded with complete bullshit. The fudporn and deep state mind programming constantly gets more invasive. Since the covidhoax, using the internet feels like wading around in giant sewage pond. It's not that all the good information has been deleted, rather it's been buried deep in layers of shit and we are being relentlessly directed to look at that shit.

I have mostly stopped using social media, but nevertheless I'm still addicted to regularly checking Facebook, looking at videos on YouTube and other video platforms, and surfing about looking for all sorts of things online.

About once a week I get to the point of thinking "This is filling my mind with negativity, but can I stop?" - Could I give up all use of the internet? I have tried setting time limits, like one hour maximum internet use per day, but every time I've failed to stick to that limit after about two days.

Not using phones is easy because although I do have one, I hate the annoying thing and am only too happy to never use it. There is no deep seated desire to use a phone that I have to resist. On the rare occasions that I decide to take it somewhere the battery is usually flat so I don't.

So what am I going to do about this ongoing struggle between using tech and avoiding it? As I always seem to do, I have come to the conclusion my main problem is that my mind is being poisoned by the internet. I need to use it with total self control. One hour a day could actually be enough to do what I need to do, if I made a point of downloading all the things I wanted to read or look at, rather than always looking at things online. But that is a fiddly pain in the arse.

I even bought myself a bright yellow stopwatch to try to control my internet addiction. If I used that to ration out my internet use I could potentially have the best of both worlds. But I've previously found it's not as easy as it sounds. This time I plan to differentiate between "good" and "bad" use of my internet time. Looking at random crap online definitely comes into the "bad" category. I'm going to get my yellow stopwatch out again for August. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"

AI FREE ZONE

Much as I like to declare myself a cell phone free zone, the less dogmatic truth is that I actually have continually owned cell phones since 1998. But I seldom use them, and I really did decide to leave the stupid things turned off at all times back in 2002.

 My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 that I bought second hand in 2019. I take it out of the house about once a week, usually keep it in a different room to the one I'm in, nearly always leave it turned off, and pretty much only use it to receive login confirmations a couple of times a week. 

It's my sixth cell phone and despite being seven years old, it's in mint condition. When it eventually stops working I'll probably replace it with a newer refurbished phone that I won't use either.

Which brings me to AI. Right now I'm looking at AI a bit like I was looking at cell phones in 2002. Yes AI is going to be the next big thing, but I think it sucks, and I want as little to do with it as possible. So I'm saying right now, as far as possible, I refuse to use or interact with AI. 

It's now estimated that around 50% of all internet activity is AI. The worst social media platform for AI is said to be Twitter ("X"), with around 75% of all content and activity being AI. I never look at Twatter myself because it's all utter crap, but I do look at Youtube (which is mostly utter crap as well). On YouTube it's glaringly obvious that the majority of the content, comments, and hits are AI. I suspect that it's actually more than 75% AI now, and climbing rapidly.

 

On Facebook which is the only social media platform I still use, the AI is rampant as well. But I don't think I'm interacting with it much, I mainly just get friend requests from women with huge boobs, no posts, and only about five friends. So really obvious fakes. I suspect a few of my "friends" are scammers, but I think those are dodgy real people rather than AI.

This may well turn out to be delusional and I could be getting conned by dozens of AI accounts, happily up-voting their fake content, or cheerfully commenting that they are lame and gay without realising I'm talking to a cell phone bot in some giant bot farm warehouse.

 Delusional or not, I'm keeping an eye out for anything that has signs of being AI. And if it looks like it might be,  I'm out of there. I suspect that there may come a time when I sound like a Luddite, but that is probably a good thing!

 

BACK ON FACEBOOK

 It's the 1st of June today so my month of no blogging, and not posting on Facebook is up!

I must admit, to feed my social media addictions, I did have a quick scroll through my Facebook feed from time to time in May, but didn't do any posts myself.

And I also had a quick look at my other old haunts, but the blockchain platforms Steemit, Hive, Bastyon, and Blurt all show no signs of recovery, and are actually even more deserted and lame than when I previously checked them last year. Blockchains looked like the future of social media around 2017, but they have all proven to be complete failures.

 In fact they now look far worse than the mainstream platforms they were going to replace. Blurt for example looks utterly tragic...

Several friends have been recommending Instagram, so I had another go at using it. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so they could easily make it work more like FB, but it has three big problems that FB doesn't have. None of them are difficult to fix, so I'm sure they have their own devious reasons for leaving it as is.

Firstly it can't be set to show a chronological feed, so you only see what their algorithms want you to see. That pretty much kills any platform for me. 

Secondly, you can't repost other people’s content, and that combined with the lack of active users, makes it a slow moving ghost-town with a boring feed. Yes I realise I'm following over 20x as many people on FB as on Instagram, but I had a look around and was struggling to find interesting content.

Which brings me to the third big problem - a total lack of engagement, most people on Instagram seldom seem to post or comment. They mostly don't even hit like on anything. So it's all as dead as dodo.

I did 52 quick posts, and managed to build up an massive audience of 13 disinterested followers, but no, it really is a pretty hopeless platform, so I wasn't inspired to continue using it.

And then there is X/Twitter. I've never had a good relationship with Twatter, in fact they deleted my original account back in 2015. But because I wanted to see some specific content in 2019 I set up a new account, and by a lucky a fluke called my account "X". But I still didn't like the platform then and have never really used it since. This year I was again wanting to see some specific content so ended up trying it again.

Twitter, like Instagram, also has three big problems, at least it does for me. It too has no chronological feed. Yes it can be set to chronological in the app, but not when viewed in a browser, which is what I want to do. And in the app it's wall to wall advertising. Unless you pay them!

Talking about paying them, they not only want $ to verify your account (lots of $ and they keep going on about it, because Elon Musk is really short of cash) they even want $ just to let you edit your posts.

And the third biggie is that in my opinion the entire platform is a badly designed confusing mess. I can't easily see what I want to see, and I find it totally frustrating to use. It's a complete chaos zone.

So even if some of the people I subscribe to on YouTube say "follow me on X for all my latest posts", I can't be bothered looking at that mess, so when push comes to shove I will just give it all a miss.

FACEBOOK IS THE ONLY ONE FOR ME

All the mainstream social media platforms are deep state mind programming psyops, so if I'm going to be sucked into the enemies mindfuck it had better be a damn good platform.

Which essentially leaves only Facebook, the exact same conclusion I came to last year. At times, particularly NZ 6pm to 9pm, when it's a relatively high portion of real people posting, rather than mostly AI generated crap, my feed is actually pretty entertaining to scroll through.

VIDEOS SUCK

All social media, as well as being designed to program everyone's minds, is also designed to waste as much time as possible. And a key tactic for doing that is to constantly distract everyone with videos. Occasionally one of them is interesting, but the vast majority are just more time wasting distractions.

So from now on, as I'm scrolling down my FB timeline, I'm going to completely ignore all the video posts. I already mostly do that anyway, but I want to consciously make it a habit, to not only not click on them, but to not even look at the posts at all. If it's a video, I’ll simply be scrolling past it as fast as I can.

I'm on FB to see a bunch of good content as rapidly as possible. Videos don't work in with that aim, because they are eating up valuable minutes out of a 15 min FB session, so I'll totally cut them all out.

FACEBOOK CENSORSHIP

Since "President" Trump was selected, FB have backed off their censorship to some extent. Many things that were getting my accounts restricted or suspended in 2024 are now not a problem.

But the censorship is very unpredictable, and from time to time I still get account restrictions, which are generally one month of being unable to use groups. I'm an admin for a couple of groups, and also an active member of several others, so having to switch over to a back up account to use groups for a month is a total pain in the arse.

The sort of content that FB is censoring is not obscenity (that is mostly fine) or even exposing "vaccines" or the Covidhoax (that is no longer a problem, and the AI now doesn't give a toss if you say viruses don't exist or that all vaccines are death jabs), but just try discussing BLACKC0CK, or LARRY PINK, or anything to do with ISRAHELL or the JUICE, and you are playing with fire.

As a work around, from June 1st my Greg Anderson account is going to be fairly well behaved. If in doubt I'll ask Tom Anderson to post any potentially "offensive" content, because Tom doesn't give a toss if he has account restrictions.

AFTER A MONTH OFF

Having a month off, whether it's from social media, or blogging, or both, always seems to help me to get things in perspective. It's not like I've come up with any revolutionary insights, in fact I just came to the exact same conclusions that I usually do, but sometimes a reminder is helpful.

THINK SMALL

Back when I was posting on my old www.frot.co.nz WordPress blog, and getting up to 2000 hits a day at it's peak in 2017-2018, it seemed worthwhile to do copy and paste posts, sharing other people's content that I really thought deserved to be viewed far and wide.

But these days with this www.sift.co.nz blog only getting about 300 hits a day, any contribution I might make to the dispersal of good content is a bit of a drop in the ocean. So this blog is primarily just about getting my thoughts in order and keeping my hand in. 

 

If my primary audience is not 2000 rabid conspiracy freaks, but only little old me and a bunch of AI bots, there is not much point behaving like some kind of arbiter of good taste and dispenser of "truth". Rather, as I keep trying to remind myself, I might as well just post whatever I feel like and have a good time.

 IT'S TOO LATE TO WORRY NOW

At the start of the Covidhoax back in early 2020, I was going hard out trying to tell everyone it was all bullshit. It was, but we live in a different world now, in some ways more aware, but in other ways even more fake than ever. I'm tempted to replace outing the Covidhoax with exposing the Climatehoax for example, but I think these globalist psyops all sort of have to play out now, because the current systems are collapsing, for better or for worse.

If there was one thing I have learned over the past five years it's that normies are clueless retards, and they will believe whatever bullshit they are told by the deep state controlled media, rather than research any contrarian opinions. So if I still keep posting that sort of stuff myself, it's really more about getting things off my chest, than because I genuinely believe this vast train wreck can be prevented now.

For better or for worse, the shit has already hit the fan, and I don't really think that can be reversed now. The final outcome may not be what the globalists think it will be, but their evil plan is already in motion.

LIGHTEN UP

If worrying is futile, fear never helps anything, and mind programmed normies are incapable of learning, we are probably better off to have a few LOLS...