cetaceanhandiwork

[cetaceanhandiwork]

so for a certain period of my childhood I was really into the Netrunner card game that they made as a spinoff of the "Cyberpunk 2020" tabletop RPG

and as a kid one of the enjoyable things about a TCG is reading the flavor text and imagining who these characters might be that keep getting quoted there

as... well, a weirdo who took a certain amount of pride in being a weirdo, I was particularly enamored by Rache Bartmoss, a famous hacker (both in the modern sense of "data thief" and in the classical sense of "exploratory spirit who enjoys stretching the capabilities of the systems they master"). he was a character who projected that same melange of unhinged genius that also made me such a fan of, e.g., Willy Wonka

now, with Cyperpunk 2077 having re-ignited general interest in this particular setting's take on the genre, I find myself looking back into those old 90s materials again, and I gotta say, given the canonical evidence we have vis the origins of Rache's name & why he went by that online?

I would bet you 200€ to a burrito that dude was a trans man

[cetaceanhandiwork]

On this topic: as of this writing, Lent is about 2½ weeks away.

Yes, Lent is a religious thing, for a religion which most folks on here don't have any particular reason to respect. But I'd argue that "having a time of year when you deliberately, temporarily give up a creature comfort" is a useful cultural practice to adopt, even if you're not religious, for anyone who has strongly held moral or ethical "hard lines" they plan to refuse to cross under duress.

Because... sometimes you need to give up something for abstract moral or ethical reasons – like a boycott, or to hide private information from people who would use it as a weapon, or etc – and where are you going to get practice at making that kind of decision in the heat of the moment until that moment arrives? How do you exercise your "just say no" muscle in a low-stakes environment before you need it to carry a load in a high-stakes one?

"Giving up something for Lent" – or for another, more meaningful-to-you time of year – is the answer to that. If you can make the connection in your brain that you're saying no because it's the right thing to do, even if the reasoning that justifies that is sort of abstract, then the automatic part of your mind – the part of you that makes impulse decisions before you have the chance to sit down and think about them – will learn to hook up those decisions with your sense of right and wrong. You'll get experience in dealing with temporary inconvenience and feeling proud about having done it. It'll get easier in practice, like everything does.

And when you're faced with the Real Thing, you'll already have the kind of heart that's ready to do what it needs to do. Or to not do, as the case may be.

Hey, look at me. Look at me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.

Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?

Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.

I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.

Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.

[cetaceanhandiwork]

Hm. "Introducing people to new ideas" may be one of the benefits of the arts to society, but IMO that doesn't mean it has to be part of an artist's artistic agenda. Rather, I feel like it's a benefit which arises as a natural consequence of the most compelling reason that artists make art in any era:

"I have something inside me that I need to articulate or else I'll explode".

Because... if it was something easy to articulate? If it was something that you could find words for and summarize in a 30 second soundbyte? You could just tweet it out (chirp? toot? I don't know what the generic term is for "posts on a Twitter-like website" these days). We need art because sometimes the thing we have to express isn't so easy to put into words.

And so, by definition, they'll be complex ideas more often than not… and sometimes, utterly unique ones, the kinds of ideas that could only come from inside a particular artist's heart, the kinds that you'd never have thought of until you encountered someone's art expressing it. I feel like that's as much a component of point #3 (the value of art that only one artist could've made) as any more craft-centric notion of "artistic style".

If part of the purpose of art is to introduce people to new ideas (a premise i agree with), then I think there'd be frequent conflict between the the drive to introduce a new idea or explore a new thing, and the constraints of a long term serial narrative that requires overall consistency. An artist cannot experience the novelty that their audience does, as they are by definition more familiar with the creation than their audience. And in that divide of familiarity, details can get lost or warped- something a creator assumes is not novel actually is, and vice versa.

How intentional do you prefer your novelty to be? Is it enough that a human with a unique perspective made their take on the (familiar) subject, or must the subject itself be unique? To be fair, the subject matter part of the question steers into "do you prefer genre fiction" territory, and my assumption is that most people want both. Enough familiarity to be understandable and enough novelty in setting and elsewhere to be new.

And also how can we find the executives that keep greenlighting generic and safe media properties and have no spine or courage in their hearts and shoot them into space?

breaking this up to respond to it (on mobile so its a little complicated):

1. the artistic conflict described in the first paragraph is very real and something that bothers me constantly while in the process of trying to make comics. by the time a page releases, a joke lands, or the plot progresses, im mostly just thinking about how bored and sick of it people must be because I'M bored and sick of it after thinking about it for multiple days/months/years

2. the intentionality is not that important to me. i dont know enough about how other people make their sausage to determine how intentional their creative process is. sometimes i run on pure id and sometimes i stare at a blank canvas for hours trying to manifest a sequence in my brain in full before continuing.

3. asking for unique subjects every time is unrealistic imo. but i am looking for that "only you could have made this" factor in a person's work.

4. i dont think we can stop executives from doing that. i would argue one of the biggest problems in mainstream art creation today is that the people funding these projects have no taste or vision to cultivate, or any interest in art beyond its ability to generate revenue.

[cetaceanhandiwork]

we can only sext if we roleplay as key figures from the cold war 

[cetaceanhandiwork]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

story checks out tbh. blue fairy is obsessed with Conventionally Correct Behavior, and the green fairy's absinthe was a symbol of Bohemia in the hippie countercultural (rather than geographical) sense; if we work backwards from that and suppose that the red fairy is about a counter-establishment and counter-hippie ethic, then the desire to respond to the world's wrongness by going cathartically Ape Shitt is a strong contender

the blue fairy that turned pinnochio into a real boy and the green fairy that gives us absinthe imply the existence of an equally iconic but hereto unidentified red fairy

[cetaceanhandiwork]

"the way" by fastball is like. my #1 go-to song for a character finally giving in and doing some esoteric shit that makes them debatably ascend to a higher plane but also undebatably cease to exist from a mundane point of view

which is one of those "two nickels" situations in terms of stories I have enjoyed

[cetaceanhandiwork]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

the blue fairy that turned pinnochio into a real boy and the green fairy that gives us absinthe imply the existence of an equally iconic but hereto unidentified red fairy

[cetaceanhandiwork]

This is actually such a powerful image

[cetaceanhandiwork]

YOU KNOW WHAT DAY IT IS

[cetaceanhandiwork]

My contribution to the latest Neath to Reach zine. The original idea involved an autopsy conducted via mirror, but this is much nicer (and much less work)

[cetaceanhandiwork]

Earth To Albatross 🌎📡🪽(a short about making art.)

(youtube)

[cetaceanhandiwork]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

well, let's see...

some candles come from beeswax: the fruits of collective labor

other candles come from rendered fats: a trophy of death

hope that helps!

commit blasphemies for power. unethical jewels. hoard them. dragon blasphemies—do them. lair furnishings. accoutrements. candles (both kinds). claws, elongated, growing, like spikes of rusted iron. eyes, numerous. like a cathedral if it was alive, reptilian. see time. never die. get more unethical jewels. you can eat them, hold them on your tongue, keep them tucked away inside old wounds. unethical jewels: they've got your back! that's why it's so important that you hoard them. so important that you build a place to keep them safe. can be small, can be big. faintly luminous blood, pale neon watermelon, looks great when spilled on unethical jewels

[cetaceanhandiwork]

fl oc ask game based on fun crayola crayon names

english vermillion: if you could give them a custom lodgings, what would it be?

permanent geranium lake: are they artistic? if so, how would they describe their art?

banana mania: what thing from the surface would they give an arm and leg for (hopefully not literally)?

outer space: could they survive in a sci-fi setting? thrive, even?

celestial blue: are they in other games besides fallen london?

tumbleweed: what stats would they provide as an in-game companion? how would you acquire them?

atomic tangerine: if you had to choose a neathbow color to associate them with, which would it be and why?

neon carrot: if you could give them any npc as a spouse, who would it be and why?

unmellow yellow: how much time do they spend in parabola?

screamin’ green: if you could give them a custom profession, what would it be? what unique tools of the trade item would be associated with this profession, if any?

lilac luster: is there something they wish they could forget? something they wish they could remember?

earthworm: if they could, would they go back to the surface? why or why not? if yes, where would they go?

bittersweet shimmer: who do they miss the most?

acid wash jeans: what would an exceptional story featuring them be about?

mango purée: what’s something modern they would love, and what’s something modern they would hate?