#I don't like my job

[masgwi]

:(

[bacchanalianhamlet]

teaching is like trying to understand what the student is talking about when they don't even know what they're talking about

[beebfreeb]

[siyaazu]

True pacifist ending.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[lazylittledragon]

'i'll just do a couple of doodles of mombin™/platonic stobin parents' nevermind, borderline graphic novel

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

going through my old journals as part of therapy homework and i'm reading a section written in the emotional wreckage of a full-on breakdown when i get hit with this line:

There is never a satisfying answer to ‘Why didn’t they love me?’

like wow babe. good fucking point

[arttsuka]

I made @wolfythewitch 's fox Bill design out of polymer clay

It's pretty thin (so thin I'm afraid it'll snap in half anytime I lift it)

Front and back side:

[chalkrub]

KOFI

commissions: here!

membership: here!

more in-depth explanation above lol but yes, opening up my kofi for the above stuff! i'll still be posting art to my socials as usual, but there'll be more consistent/exclusive/early-access art and wip posts for members on kofi, along with all the benefits above

thank you very much for any support as always! muah

[muzsmocsing]

Xie Lian can roast him to the moon and back about his unforgivable crime of not being pop idol level blindingly handsome but there is not a mf in this series as classy, mature, and level-headed as Yin Yu.

[arnaerr]

Rellana, Twin Moon Knight & Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon

prints ✦ full process on patreon

[masgwi]

Every day when it comes close to go time for work my palms get sweaty and I am filled with dread.

[sheerakk]

[bacchuschucklefuck]

while teen while goblin while aroace while injured while doing your best

[egophiliac]

heeey guess what, I'm obsessed with this idiot flamingo now

[inkskinned]

so i wrote a book that comes out soon and having that be real feels like falling down stairs because i wanted this since i was 7 years old so now what do i want after it.

so tell me why today all i care about is the word trundle, that the word trundle exists. of course i have things to do and emails to send and a world of suffering to protect but today my brain won't let me look away from the sheer linguistic improbability of trundle.

i saw a truck doing it. i imagine animals did it first. or people maybe. to trundle comes direct from old english. cows do it on occasion, but more often sheep (in my experience). someone had to name lope and someone had to name slog. the verbs to run and to leap make sense; they are singular and important distinguishers.

but we can bask rather than relax. we can scuttle rather than crawl. sometimes when i move in dance class it is to undulate rather than roll. someone had to name things like sonder and whimsy. of course we had words for tangible things like tree and grass and root. i love those words, i'm eating them.

i don't know the word for this thing. where it's real-now. sometimes i feel it when i am dating someone i actually like-and-love and i realize that is real, i am dating them and it's real that i like-and-love them. sometimes i have this feeling when i have been planning a vacation or an event for weeks-and-months and it finally happens - the feeling this is happening, it's happening right now.

it happens randomly sometimes too. i will be at the carnival or at an ice cream stand or with the last light of summer in my hair and i will feel it again, that sense - i have waited my whole life for this, and im finally experiencing it, and i need to pay attention to it.

but it's real! how amazing! how horribly tragic! it's real. it exists. the moment is here.

i have no idea what to do with it.