#Cultural critique

[adrianfridge]

Something something the rise of AI art

I know it's not the worst thing about capitalism. But I do think there's something really *bad* about the fact that between lack of leisure time, lack of disposable income, and "hustle culture" mindset that for many, many, many people the primary/only way they are able to express their creativity and artistic aesthetics is through consumer culture. Buying stuff and displaying that stuff.

When like...making stuff. Drawing, painting, weaving, crafting, sketching is like, baked deep deep into our bones as humans.

But I know so many adults who haven't like...drawn a picture since they were children.

[italianpawg]

wow almost seems like this whole romanticization of "girlhood" thing kind of revolves entirely around consumerisim. "little treats". 10 step skincare regimens. "girl math" as an excuse to be financially illiterate. be a good girl, don't think, just spend inordinate amts of money to conform to the latest tiktok microtrend bc that's all it means to be a girl <3

[thoughtportal]

[kryptonbabe]

A personal argument in favor of transgression in fandom spaces

Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), would he write Wincest, Reylo and Zadr fanfiction with obsessive yandere mafia boss tropes if he was alive today?

It's so weird for me to come to fandom at my current age (30) and with my background, I was not a very online teenager, I had an art tumblr growing up, but that was very far from the whole Superwholock bubble and discourse. My first interests reading were classic literature and stuff from school and Harry Potter for little bit, then Tolkien for a long time, then science-fiction and transgressive literature, starting with A Clockwork Orange, then Piano Teacher, Bret Easton Ellis, Yukio Mishima, Dennis Cooper etc. I'm a sensitive traumatized person (for reasons I won't explain) and I've been depressed and anxious most of my life, experiencing disturbing intrusive thoughts, so the themes in fiction that interested me were always the things I was most afraid and uncomfortable with in real life, traumatic events close to me that I had no other way to explore and no one else to talk to about. In a way transgressive art was always there for me, showing me how evil thoughts and experiences are not an exclusive thing, not a burden I must carry alone, those artists and writers also cared and thought about those things in meaningful ways, that was a relief. Slowly and with therapy I learned to organize my intrusive thought as creative thoughts, ideas I could use to paint or write, and this really really helped me.

The thing is I started to get interested in comic books too, this by the age of 20, reading them by myself and sharing my ideas with some close friends who didn't care about comics, but would listen to me. I started being active in fandom spaces recently, almost ten years after I started reading comics and, oh boy, is this a different environment. Where the morally ambiguous, weird and transgressive are very close to forbidden, people are divided among anti and proshippers, and exploring heavy themes and disturbing scenarios is frowned upon. I recently read about an Invader Zim artist who was bullied and had to abandon their blog due to attacks to their weird art. As if Comte de Lautréamont, Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille and I don't know, the fucked up passages of the Bible never existed, to free us from the closed-mindness. It's all so backwards, restrictive and conservative. Not the fact that some people do not want to engage with these themes, you have the right to do so, but we accomplish nothing by judging and hating on people who want to talk about these subjects, who understand the human nature as a complex experience not imune to evil, malice, bizarre impulses and desires.

Talking about these things is different from supporting and agreeing with them, but they are a part of our existence and sometimes expressing awful experiences through art is the only escape someone have. To ignore the worst in us is a conservative attitude that idealizes a perfect conduct and ideal way of being, an hygienist perception of what it means to be human, with a lack of nuance and complexity that is just boring on top of being a form of censorship.

[adrianfridge]

I’m annoyed beyond belief that the majority of information is now in videos that waste my precious time instead of articles that let me skim through text. Most of the videos don’t even answer my question. Garbage information age

[mediamatinees]

"American Fiction" Makes the Perfect Argument For Why Drake Is "Not Like Us"

Who know one day I'd be using my English degree to one day formally discuss rap beef? Dreams do come true. Check out my essay on "American Fiction" and "Not Like Us"!

“No, you not a colleague,  You a f****** colonizer”  Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us” (2024)  Content Warning: American Fiction touches on difficult topics, including racism and cultural appropriation, false identities, as well as Blackness as a monolith. Additionally, I won’t be discussing the pedophilia allegations in this post (that would be an entire post all on its own). This conversation is…

[piecesbythestars]

“frankenstein,” a poem about women’s suffering

normalized in medicine, glorified in pornography, justified in religion. since we birth people, does this mean we birthed the society that causes and trivializes our agony?

[mai-333]

“Buy less. Choose well.”

-Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood Fall 1995 Ready-to-Wear Look 35 Modelled by Kate Moss

We are living through a global collapse as our oceans are killed by plastic, and our land melted by global warming. The big companies that run our world have decided that money is more important than the planet we all live on, and the fashion industry is not innocent. 10% of the worlds carbon emissions are from the fashion industry alone. Just last year, 235million items of clothing were sent to landfills. In this culture of fast fashion, and micro trends, clothing has become one of the biggest pollutants.

Fashion has always been a major part of society, going as far back to the old ages where it was a sign of social status, to today where it is our main form of self expression. Yet this has been exploited. The pay for labour to make clothing is decreasing, the quality of the clothing is decreasing, and yet the cost is still increasing. Even cheap companies such as Shein are racking in an impressive profit just down to their abysmal production costs. The fashion cycle goes faster, churning out new designs and trends (often stolen from independent designers) so fast that within a month they are old. Even if you aren’t one to be bothered by wearing out of style clothing, don’t worry because the clothes will be unwearably damaged in no time.

Ethical and quality clothing may be more expensive, but in the long run it will cost just the same as the countless cheap versions that have to be bought. Second hand shops, reselling and repurposing, are all great alternatives for shopping ethically. Even sewing, or knitting new clothes will make such a difference. It may be harder to follow all these rapid trends, but by buying less and better quality clothing you will be able to achieve a stable wardrobe that doesn’t need replaced monthly.

[livingbythewords]

The good, the bad and the boring

Today's discussion with a friend about the way heroes and generally positive and morally good characters are portrayed in mainstream media made me think a lot. It was, on the most superficial level, about Marvel movies, but the issue itself actually goes way deeper than that, and is something that I've been pondering about for ages, on and outside of Tumblr. Here's a nod in the direction of my friend @princeescaluswords, who I know shares a lot of my sentiments in this matter.

It is, of course, about how morally good and positive characters are usually considered "boring".

Now. My friend claimed that being boring is not bad in itself, which might be the case. Here, however, I need to view it as such, because it's when real life and the world of fiction tend to differ a lot. In fiction, a character being boring is in fact one of the greatest, if not the greatest sin a writer can commit. To be boring in literature, cinema, movies means death for a character. The audience won't care about it, won't identify with it, won't be curious about its motivations, which means no more movies, no more stories. So if good people are considered to be boring, that means fewer stories with good people. That means more stories with assholes.

There is nothing wrong with a shady or, using an euphemism, "morally complicated" person as a main character. There is even nothing wrong with straight up evil person as a main character. I love Walter White as a character, precisely because he is not complicated at all - his downfall is the inevitable result of his pride, selfishness and yearning for power for the sake of power, and the writers of the show couldn't make it more obvious. We are not supposed to root for Walter, we are supposed to hate him. Watching him destroying everything that once mattered is fascinating. But there is nothing interesting about him in terms of why he is who he is. His motivations are pretty clear. In that way, he is boring.

(Now, Mike Ehrmantraut and Saul Goodman are a completely different story. But that's a matter for another post.)

There is place for both kinds of stories. However I am not the only one worried that recently the odds became really uneven in favor of one side at the cost of the other. Is that it? Are we really supposed to root only for selfish and reprehensible characters now, because all the heroes are "boring" or their character arcs became completely butchered if not straight-up villainous?

It was David Foster Wallace who noticed almost two decades ago that literature became so lazy and self-conscious it's hard to stand. What a cool, sharp, sarcastic commentary on the modern materialistic society you wrote, bro! Now go write something honest and optimistc and true, I dare you. Everybody knows that today's society is materialistic, individualistic and self-obsessed to the core. We have been saying that for ages. Nobody cares about that. What is really interesting is what makes people altruistic and caring when there is no obvious gain from it, monetary or other. Why some people who have been through hell still choose to be good, despite the odds being all against them. Why we risk everything, knowing that there is a possibility we could never get back to what once was.

This is where the realms of reality and fiction overlap in a high degree. Fictional characters, both on the micro and macro scale, are a reflection of us. It was never "just fiction". The medium might be considered deep and serious (literary fiction) or shallow (superhero movies), but issue at the core remains the same. Being a good person is the furthest thing from boring. Doing the right thing despite all odds being against you requires bravery and effort and the spine of steel no matter of you are a suburban single mom, a gay guy trying to navigate the corporate world, ex-KGB agent trying to atone, or Captain America. In fiction it's just dramatized for the sake of the story, but the core principle remains.

My favorite quote about writing fiction, one that I think about a lot, comes from True Detective writer, Nic Pizzolatto. He once said that the audience has been abused by writers for twenty years through constant irony, sarcasm, plot twists used merely for shock value, and other techniques with no other end goal than reinforcing the sense of superiority in some viewers and shocking the others, who will forget about it in a week anyway. There is no place for sincerity and authenticity in writing anymore. Happy endings are for sissies. Fiction being "realistic" means that every character is an asshole. Grimdark is the gold standard now. It's all very depressing, when you think about that.

We need heroes now more than ever. We need good people, both in real life and fiction, more than ever. I'm tired of Tony Starks of this world. Give me someone who can just tell the truth without being a sarcastic asshole. Someone who finds hope and light in the darkest of times. That requires unbelievable strength and resourcefulness, and it's the furthest thing from boring.

It is seems that way, it's because the writers are bad.

[chariotofgod]

the phenomenon of an individual needing to "condone" or "condemn" everything really interests me when hits a critical point like this. maybe it results from a misunderstanding of what 4chan was/is. as if you can condemn 4chan as a homogenous culture and not at least as heterogeneous as tumblr is.

there are fascists, terfs, and libertarians who are here or were popular on here who participate in a lot of the same linguistic and cultural rituals as the progressive part of the site. some of these individuals even being critical in its cultural development. does it make any sense to "condemn" Tumblr as an entity because of this?

like obviously we can point to 4chan as the root of a lot of misogynistic and racist subcultures that now permeate the American and European Right. but then like. the origins of SCP, creepypasta, the growth of furry culture, the inception of the MLP fandom (as filled with paranoid homophobia as it was, which is obviously hilarious in retrospect), and even the standard formats for how shitpost punchlines are delivered all come from there.

they don't have their fingers in so many pies "for some reason???" it's because 4chan was a diverse and complex culture group that defined the early internet.

the continued treatment of it as "fringe" or "a place that's so scawy to visit :(", i think, creates a sense that whatever cultural products we decided to keep from 4chan were deviations from rather than products of its culture.

there are obviously a lot of problems with this. one being that it creates a lack of critical evaluation of 4chan's cultural exports (not that i'm rushing to categorize them as morally good or bad, just that it's important to consider).

another being a lack of perspective on why and how marginalized groups tended to thrive within the space in spite of its hostility towards.. everything (a kind of countercultural edgy nihilism which was not *inherently* reactionary, but definitely a response to 2001-2008 American and European neoliberal positivism).

anyways. you spend two seconds on a board that's not /pol/ and you quickly find an overarching paranoia around "redditors" who invaded after 2016 when r/The_Donald was shut down. there's a marked difference in the website's culture post-Trump, when the fascists on /pol/ (who i don't think you could call a majority) forged an alliance with Trump-aligned redditors.

pretty much any "oldfag" on the website is extremely resentful of this change. you could not take pity on them in a "where did you think such edgy nihilism would lead?" sense, but it also makes it quite clear that the website's earlier dissonance between anti-social behaviors and pro-social politics was not an accident. and while i would not want to adopt early 4chan's philosophy full sale, i do think there are things to learn from it.

whatever. post over. kisses, mwah, xoxo. 💋💋💋

[disneycritical]

disney's "adorkable" problem 🤪| ModernGurlz

A good look at the current trend of Disney heroines.

[scumgristle]

Hey bb... wanna see some hot action?

Search Google for “Midnight Climax”

have a piece titled |}|_€^|&lt; ^^[=@+ in Kenji Siratori’s HYPER-ANNOTATION #001

and a piece titled "Synodic Ganglia" in this one, also from Kenji Siratori.

written / art pieces at COPROLALIAC

LUSTWORK #1

supplied video / voice for this short film by Zak Ferguson

available NOW from SWEAT DRENCHED PRESS.

A****n link

FREE EXCERPTS

meanwhile:

CRINGE MYTHOS TONE REELS

and the piece FLOATING STAIN appears in issue 0 of AGON Journal, available for FREE in PDF form.

you’ll see i’m listed as part of the “Male Choir” (N. Casio Poe).

i’m the one that does the big “yeaaaaaaaagh” part.

other music i’ve done (just vocals/lyrics)

here

here too

LIVING ROOM - Corrugated Asshole - got some vocals on this one.

close as you’ll get to a “biography” of my time in music, which i guess is over, but who knows.

same podcast as above, except we all being chucklefucks about trash horror

MUBI page

Goodreads profile

youtube playlists

[aeaeaexxzd]

Djinn_kazama (@/devildjinn) via instagram

[thoughtportal]

the garden of time and the met gala

[kryptonbabe]

It's baffling to me how some people really believe that someone's taste in fiction is an accurate portrayal of their personalities... "I don't trust people who like X", "I'm suspicious of people who ship Y", like our lives truly revolved around this specific topic, like we are all reduced to a handful of comic books, movies, fanfics, blog posts, headcanons. It's surprising to witness people being judged by what I perceive as such a small aspect of their inner lives. I get we sometimes get so attached to these characters and their fictions that we might think they are defining parts of who we are, but they're really not, we are complex and ever changing, made of experiences as well as our interpretations of the world. Fiction is merely our playground, our laboratory, a safe space to explore concepts, experiences, sensations; a place to express feelings and learn about how others feel, and the human experience is diverse, as such the art and fiction created based on it won't always be pleasant or appeal the same way to everyone. You can enjoy multiple things for multiple reasons and this won't say anything about your actions necessarily, bad people can enjoy wholesome media, good people can enjoy transgressive and what is perceived as toxic and problematic and bad and bizarre media. We are not products to be so easily classified and comprehended, the study of human psychology would be way more simple and brief if we were

[adrianfridge]

Waiting for purity culture to reach the point where two people or characters are sharing the same surname and the purists freak out about it being incest except even after learning it’s from a marriage they’ll insist becoming part of the same family is always inherently incestuous