#also things are just BLEAK in the industry right now

[edwardratcliffegarthrussellevans]

Not sure if this is just a momentary lapse of faith but I'm starting to feel like maybe entertainment design and illustration really isn't for me in the long run compared to museum and archival studies

[dresshistorynerd]

The Real Cost of the Fashion Industry

Atacama Desert, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile. (source)

The textile industry is destroying the world. The industry is wasting massive amounts of energy and materials, and polluting the air, the ground and the water supplies. It overwhelmingly exploits it's labour and extracts wealth from colonized countries, especially in Asia. I assume we all broadly understand this, but I think it's useful to have it all laid out in front of you to see the big picture, the core issues causing this destruction and find ways how to effectively move forward.

The concerning trend behind this ever-increasing devastation are shortening of trend cycles, lowering clothing prices and massive amount of wasted products. Still in year 2000 it was common for fashion brands to have two collections per year, while now e.g. Zara produces 24 collections and H&M produces 12-16 collections per year. Clothing prices have fallen (at leas in EU) 30% from 1996 to 2018 when adjusted to inflation, which has contributed to the 40% increase in clothing consumption per person between 1996 and 2012 (in EU). (source) As the revenue made by the clothing industry keep rising - from 2017 to 2021 they doubled (source) - falling prices can only be achieved with increasing worker exploitation and decreasing quality. I think the 36% degrees times clothing are used in average during the last 15 years (source) is a clear indication on the continuing drop in quality of clothing. Clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2015, while 30% of the clothes produced per year are never sold and are often burned instead (source), presumably to prevent the returns from falling due to oversupply.

These all factors are driving people to overconsume. While people in EU keep buying more clothes, they haven't used up to 50% of the clothes in their wardrobe for over a year (source). This overconsumption is only made much worse by the new type of hyper fast fashion companies like SHEIN and Temu, which are using addictive psychological tactics developed by social media companies (source 1, source 2). They are cranking up all those concerning trends I mentioned above.

Under the cut I will go through the statistics of the most significant effects of the industry on environment and people. I will warn you it will be bleak. This is not just a fast fashion problem, basically the whole industry is engaging in destructive practices leading to this damage. Clothing is one of those things that would be actually relatively easy to make without massive environmental and human cost, so while that makes the current state of the industry even more heinous, it also means there's hope and it's possible to fix things. In the end, I will be giving some suggestions for actions we could be doing right now to unfuck this mess.

Carbon emissions

The textile industry is responsible for roughly 10% of the global CO2 emissions, more than aviation and shipping industry combined. This is due to the massive supply chains and energy intensive production methods of fabrics. Most of it can be contributed to the fashion sector since around 60% of all the textile production is clothing. Polyester, a synthetic fiber made from oil which accounts for more than half of the fibers used in the textile industry, produces double the amount of carbon emissions than cotton, accounting for very large proportions of all the emissions by the industry. (source 1, source 2)

Worker exploitation

Majority of the textiles are produced in Asia. Some of the worst working conditions are in Bangladesh, one of the most important garment producers, and Pakistan. Here's an excerpt from EU Parliament's briefing document from 2014 after the catastrophic Rana Plaza disaster:

The customers of garment producers are most often global brands looking for low prices and tight production timeframes. They also make changes to product design, product volume, and production timeframes, and place last-minute orders without accepting increased costs or adjustments to delivery dates. The stresses of such policies usually fall on factory workers.

The wage exploitation is bleak. According to the 2015 documentary The True Cost less than 2% of all garment factory workers earned a living wage (source). Hourly wages are so low and the daily quotas so high, garment workers are often forced through conditions or threats and demand to work extra hours, which regularly leads to 10-12 hour work days (source) and at worst 16 hour workdays (source), often without days off. Sometimes factories won't compensate for extra hours, breaching regulations (source).

Long working hours, repetitive work, lack of breaks and high pressure leads to increased risks of injuries and accidents. Small and even major injuries are extremely common in the industry. A study in three factories in India found that 70% of the workers suffered from musculosceletal symptoms (source). Another qualitative study of female garment workers and factory doctors in Dhaka found that long hours led to eye strain, headaches, fatigue and weight loss in addition to muscular and back pains. According to the doctors interviewed, weight loss was common because the workers work such long hours without breaks, they didn't have enough time to eat properly. (source) Another study in 8 factories in India found that minor injuries were extremely common and caused by unergonomic work stations, poor organization in the work place and lack of safety gear, guidelines and training (source). Safety precautions too are often overlooked to cut corners, which periodically leads to factory accidents, like in 2023 lack of fire exists and fire extinguishers, and goods stacked beyond capacity led to a factory fire in Pakistan which injured dozens of workers (source) or like in 2022 dangerous factory site led to one dead worker and 9 injured workers (source).

Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 is the worst industrial accident in recent history. The factory building did not have proper permits and the factory owner blatantly ignored signs of danger (other businesses abandoned the building a day before the collapse), which led to deaths of 1 134 workers and injuries to 2 500 workers. The factory had or were at the time working for orders of at least Prada, Versace, Primark, Walmart, Zara, H&M, C&A, Mango, Benetton, the Children's Place, El Corte Inglés, Joe Fresh, Carrefour, Auchan, KiK, Loblaw, Bonmarche and Matalan. None of the brands were held legally accountable for the unsafe working conditions which they profited off of. Only 9 of the brands attended a meeting to agree on compensation for the victim's families. Walmart, Carrefour, Auchan, Mango and KiK refused to sight the agreement, it was only signed by Primark, Loblaw, Bonmarche and El Corte Ingles. The compension these companies provided was laughable though. Primemark demanded DNA evidence that they are relatives of one of the victims from these struggling families who had lost their often sole breadwinner for a meager sum of 200 USD (which doesn't even count for two months of living wage in Bangladesh (source)). This obviously proved to be extremely difficult for most families even though US government agreed to donate DNA kits. This is often said to be a turning point in working conditions in the industry, at least in Bangladesh, but while there's more oversight now, as we have seen, there's clearly still massive issues. (source 1, source 2)

One last major concern of working conditions in the industry I will mention is the Xinjiang raw cotton production, which is likely produced mainly with forced labour from Uighur concentration camps, aka slave labour of a suspected genocide. 90% of China's raw cotton production comes from Xinjiang (source). China is the second largest cotton producer in the world, after India, accounting 20% of the yearly global cotton production (source).

Pollution

Synthetic dyes, which synthetic fibers require, are the main cause of water pollution caused by the textile industry, which is estimated to account for 20% of global clean water pollution (source). This water pollution by the textile industry is suspected of causing a lot of health issues like digestive issues in the short term, and allergies, dermatitis, skin inflammation, tumors and human mutations in the long term. Toxins also effect fish and aquatic bacteria. Azo dyes, one of the major pollutants, can cause detrimental effects to aquatic ecosystems by decreasing photosynthetic activity of algae. Synthetic dyes and heavy metals also cause large amounts of soil pollution. Large amounts of heavy metals in soil, which occurs around factories that don't take proper environmental procautions, can cause anaemia, kidney failure, and cortical edoem in humans. That also causes changes in soil texture, decrease in soil microbial diversity and plant health, and changes in genetic structure of organisms growing in the soil. Textile factory waste water has been used for irrigation in Turkey, where other sources of water have been lacking, causing significant damage to the soil. (source)

Rayon produced through viscose process causes significant carbon disulphide and hydrogen sulphide pollution to the environment. CS2 causes cardiovascular, psychiatric, neuropsychological, endocrinal and reproductive disorders. Abortion rates among workers and their partners exposed to CS2 are reported to be significantly higher than in control groups. Many times higher amounts of sick days are reported for workers in spinning rooms of viscose fiber factories. China and India are largest producers of CS2 pollution, accounting respectively 65.74% and 11,11% of the global pollution, since they are also the major viscose producers. Emission of CS2 has increased significantly in India from 26.8 Gg in 2001 to 78.32 Gg in 2020. (source)

Waste

The textile industry is estimated to produce around 92 million tons of textile waste per year. As said before around 30% of the production is never sold and with shortening lifespans used the amount of used clothing that goes to waster is only increasing. This waste is large burned or thrown into landfills in poor countries. (source) H&M was accused in 2017 by investigative journalists of burning up to 12 tonnes of clothes per year themselves, including usable clothing, which they denied claiming they donated clothing they couldn't sell to charity instead (source). Most of the clothing donated to charity though is burned or dumbed to landfills (source).

Most of the waste clothing from rich countries like European countries, US, Australia and Canada are shipped to Chile (source) or African countries, mostly Ghana, but also Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire (source). There's major second-hand fashion industries in these places, but most of the charity clothing is dumbed to landfills, because they are in such bad condition or the quality is too poor. Burning and filling landfills with synthetic fabrics with synthetic dyes causes major air, water and soil pollution. The second-hand clothing industry also suppresses any local clothing production as donated clothing is inherently more competitive than anything else, making these places economically reliant on dumbed clothing, which is destroying their environment and health, and prevents them from creating a more sustainable economy that would befit them more locally. This is not an accident, but required part of the clothing industry. Overproduction let's these companies tap on every new trend quickly, while not letting clothing the prices in rich countries drop so low it would hurt their profits. Production is cheaper than missing a trend.

Micro- and nanoplastics

There is massive amounts of micro- and nanoplastics in all of our environment. It's in our food, drinking water, even sea salt (source). Washing synthetic textiles accounts for roughly 35% of all microplastics released to the environment. It's estimated that it has caused 14 million tonnes of microplastics to accumulate into the bottom of the ocean. (source)

Microplastics build up into the intestines of animals (including humans), and have shown to probably cause cause DNA damage and altered organism behavior in aquatic fauna. Microplastics also contain a lot of the usual pollutants from textile industry like synthetic dyes and heavy metals, which absorb in higher quantities to tissues of animals through microplastics in the intestines. Studies have shown that the adverse effect are higher the longer the microplastics stay in the organism. The effects cause major risks to aquatic biodiversity. (source) The health effects of microplastics to humans are not well known, but studies have shown that they could have adverse effects on digestive, respiratory, endocrine, reproductive and immune systems. (source)

Microplastics degrade in the environment even further to nanoplastics. Nanoplastic being even smaller are found to enter blood circulation, get inside cells and cross the blood-brain barrier. In fishes they have been found to cause neurological damage. Nanoplastics are also in the air, and humans frequently breath them in. Study in office buildings found higher concentration of nanoplastics in indoor air than outdoor air. Inside the nanoplastics are likely caused mostly by synthetic household textiles, and outdoors mostly by car tires. (source) An association between nanoplastics and mitochondrial damage in human respiratory cells was found in a recent study. (source)

Micro and nano plastics are also extremely hard to remove from the environment, making it even more important that we reduce the amount of microplastics we produce as fast as possible.

What can we do?

This is a question that deserves it's own essays and articles written about it, but I will leave you with some action points. Reading about these very bleak realities can easily lead to overwhelming apathy, but we need to channel these horrors into actions. Whatever you do, do not fall into apathy. We don't have the luxury for that, we need to act. These are industry wide problems, that simply cannot be fixed by consumerism. Do not trust any clothing companies, even those who market themselves as ethical and responsible, always assume they are lying. Most of them are, even the so called "good ones". We need legislation. We cannot allow the industry to regulate itself, they will always take the easy way out and lie to their graves. I will for sure write more in dept about what we can do, but for now here's some actions to take, both political and individual ones.

Political actions

Let's start with political actions, since they will be the much more important ones. While we are trying to dismantle capitalism and neocolonialism (the roots of these issues), here's some things that we could do right now. These will be policies that we should be doing everywhere in the world, but especially rich countries, where most of the clothing consumption is taking place. Vote, speak to others, write to your representative, write opinion pieces to your local papers, engage with democracy.

Higher requirements of transparency. Right now product transparency in clothing is laughably low. In EU only the material make up and the origin country of the final product are required to be disclosed. Everything else is up to the company. Mandatory transparency is the only way we can force any positive changes in the production. The minimum of transparency should be: origin countries of the fibers and textiles in the product itself; mandatory reports of the lifecycle emissions; mandatory reports of whole chain of production. Right now the clothing companies make their chain of production intentionally complex, so they have plausible deniability when inevitably they are caught violating environmental or worker protection laws (source). They intentionally don't want to be able to track down their production chain. Forcing them to do so anyway would make it very expensive for them to keep up this unnecessarily complex production chain. These laws are most effective when put in place in large economies like EU or US.

Restrictions on the use of synthetic fibers. Honestly I think they should be banned entirely, since the amount of microplastics in our environment is already extremely distressing and the other environmental effects of synthetic fibers are also massive, but I know there are functions for which they are not easily replaced (though I think they can be replaces in those too, but that's a subject of another post), so we should start with restrictions. I'm not sure how they should be specifically made, I'm not a law expert, but they shouldn't be used in everyday textiles, where there are very easy and obvious other options.

Banning viscose. There are much better options for viscose method that don't cause massive health issues and environmental destruction where ever it's made, like Lyocell. There is absolutely no reason why viscose should be allowed to be sold anywhere.

Governmental support for local production by local businesses. Most of the issues could be much more easily solved and monitored if most clothing were not produced by massive global conglomerations, but rather by local businesses that produce locally. All clothing are made by hand, so centralizing production doesn't even give it advantage in effectiveness (only more profits for the few). Producing locally would make it much more easier to enforce regulations and it would reduce production chains, making production more effective, leaving more profits into the hands of the workers and reducing emissions from transportation. When the production is done by local businesses, the profits would stay in the producing country and they could be taxed and utilized to help the local communities. This would be helpful to do in both exploited and exploiter countries. When done in rich countries who exploit poorer ones, it would reduce the demand for exploitation. In poor countries this is not as easily done, since poor means they don't have money to give around, but maybe this could be a good cause to put some reparations from colonizers and global corporations, which they should pay.

Preventing strategic accounting between subsidiaries and parent companies. Corporate law is obviously not my area of expertise, but I know that allowing corporations to move around the accounting of profits and losses between subsidiaries and parent companies in roughly 1980s, was a major factor in creating this modern global capitalist system, where corporations can very easily manipulate their accounting to utilize tax heavens and avoid taxes where they actually operate, which is how they are upholding this terrible system and extracting the profits from the production countries. How specifically this would be done I can't tell because again I know shit about corporate law, so experts of that field should plan the specifics. Overall this would help deal with a lot of other problems than just the fashion industry. Again for it to be effective a large economic area like EU or US should do this.

Holding companies accountable for their whole chain of production. These companies should be dragged to court and made to answer for the crimes they are profiting of off. We should put fear back into them. This is possible. Victims of child slavery are already doing this for chocolate companies. If it's already not how law works everywhere, the laws should be changed so that the companies are responsible even if they didn't know, because it's their responsibility to find out and make sure they know. They should have been held accountable for the Rana Plaza disaster. Maybe they still could be. Sue the mother fuckers. They should be afraid of us.

Individual actions

I will stress that the previous section is much more important and that there's no need to feel guilty for individual actions. This is not the fault of the average consumer. Still we do need to change our relationship to fashion and consumption. While it's not our fault, one of the ways this system is perpetuated, is by the consumerist propaganda by fashion industry. And it is easier to change our own habits than to change the industry, even if our own habits have little impact. So these are quite easy things we all could do as we are trying to do bigger change to gain some sense of control and keep us from falling to apathy.

Consume less. Better consumption will not save us, since consumption itself is the problem. We consume too much clothing. Don't make impulse purchases. Consider carefully weather you actually need something or if you really really want it. Even only buying second-hand still fuels the industry, so while it's better than buying new, it's still better to not buy.

Take proper care of your clothing. Learn how to properly wash your clothing. There's a lot of internet resources for that. Never wash your wool textiles in washing machine, even if the textile's official instructions allow it. Instead air them regularly, rinse them in cool water if they still smell after airing and wash stains with water or small amount of (wool) detergent. Never use fabric softener! It damages the fabrics, prevents them from properly getting clean and is environmentally damaging. Instead use laundry vinegar for making textiles softer or removing bad smells. (You can easily make laundry vinegar yourself too from white vinegar and water (and essential oils, if you want to add a scent to it) which is much cheaper.) Learn how to take care of your leather products. Most leather can be kept in very good condition for a very long time by occasional waxing with beeswax.

Use the services of dressmakers and shoemakers. Take your broken clothing or clothing which doesn't fit anymore to your local dressmaker and ask them if they can do something about it. Take your broken and worn leather products to your local shoemaker too. Usually it doesn't cost much to get something fixed or refitted and these expert usually have ways to fix things you couldn't even think of. So even if the situation with your clothing or accessory seems desperate, still show it to the dressmaker or shoemaker.

If it's extremely cheap, don't buy it. Remember that every clothing is handmade. Only a small fraction of the cost of the clothing will be paying the wages of the person who made it with their hands. If a shirt costs 5 euros (c. 5,39 USD), it's sewer was only payed mere cents for sewing it. I'm not a quick sewer and it takes me roughly 1-2 hours to cut, prepare and sew a simple shirt, so I'm guessing it would take around half an hour to do all that for a factory worker on a crunch, at the very least 15 minutes. So the hourly pay would still be ridiculously low. However, as I said before, the fact that the workers in clothing factories get criminally low pay is not the fault of the consumer, so if you need a clothing item, and you don't have money to buy anything else than something very cheep, don't feel guilty. And anyway expensive clothing in no way necessarily means reasonable pay or ethical working conditions, cheep clothing just guarantee them.

Learn to recognize higher quality. In addition to exploitation, low price also means low quality, but again high price doesn't guarantee high quality. High quality allows you to buy less, so even if it's not as cheep as low quality, if you can afford it, when you need it, it will be cheaper in long run, and allows you to consume less. Check the materials. Natural fibers are your friends. Do not buy plastic, if it's possible to avoid. Avoid household textiles from synthetic fibers. Avoid textiles with small amounts of spandex to give it stretch, it will shorten the lifespan of the clothing significantly as the spandex quickly wears down and the clothing looses it's shape. Also avoid clothing with rubber bands. They also loose their elasticity very quickly. In some types of clothing (sport wear, underwear) these are basically impossible to avoid, but in many other cases it's entirely possible.

Buy from artisans and local producers, if you can. As said better consumption won't fix this, but supporting artisans and your local producers could help keep them afloat, which in small ways helps create an alternative to the exploitative global corporations. With artisans especially you know the money goes to the one who did the labour and buying locally means less middlemen to take their cut. More generally buy rather from businesses that are located to the same country where the production is, even if it's not local to you. A local business doesn't necessarily produce locally.

Develop your own taste. If you care about fashion and style, it's easy to fall victim to the fashion industry's marketing and trend cycles. That's why I think it's important to develop your personal sense of style and preferences. Pay attention at what type of clothes are comfortable to you. Go through your wardrobe and track for a while which clothing you use most and which least. Understanding your own preferences helps you avoid impulse buying.

Consider learning basics of sewing. Not everyone has the time or interest for this, but if you in anyway might have a bit of both, I suggest learning some very simple and basic mending and reattaching a button.

Further reading on this blog: How to see through the greenwashing propaganda of the fashion industry - Case study 1: Shein

Bibliography

Academic sources

An overview of the contribution of the textiles sector to climate change, 2022, L. F. Walter et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science

How common are aches and pains among garment factory workers? A work-related musculoskeletal disorder assessment study in three factories of south 24 Parganas district, West Bengal, 2021, Arkaprovo Pal et al., J Family Med Prim Care

Sewing shirts with injured fingers and tears: exploring the experience of female garment workers health problems in Bangladesh, 2019, Akhter, S., Rutherford, S. & Chu, C., BMC Int Health Hum Rights

Occupation Related Accidents in Selected Garment Industries in Bangalore City, 2006, Calvin, Sam & Joseph, Bobby, Indian Journal of Community Medicine

A Review on Textile and Clothing Industry Impacts on The Environment, 2022, Nur Farzanah Binti Norarmi et al., International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Carbon disulphide and hydrogen sulphide emissions from viscose fibre manufacturing industry: A case study in India, 2022, Deepanjan Majumdar et al., Atmospheric Environment: X

Microplastics Pollution: A Brief Review of Its Source and Abundance in Different Aquatic Ecosystems, 2023, Asifa Ashrafy et al., Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances

Health Effects of Microplastic Exposures: Current Issues and Perspectives in South Korea, 2023, Yongjin Lee et al., Yonsei Medical Journal

Nanoplastics and Human Health: Hazard Identification and Biointerface, 2022, Hanpeng Lai, Xing Liu, and Man Qu, Nanomaterials

Other sources

The impact of textile production and waste on the environment (infographics), 2020, EU

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers, 2021, AlJazeera

Fashion - Worldwide, 2022 (updated 2024), Statista

Fashion Industry Waste Statistics & Facts 2023, James Evans, Sustainable Ninja (magazine)

Everything You Need to Know About Waste in the Fashion Industry, 2024, Solene Rauturier, Good on You (magazine)

Textiles and the environment, 2022, Nikolina Šajn, European Parliamentary Research Service

Help! I'm addicted to secondhand shopping apps, 2023, Alice Crossley, Cosmopolitan

Addictive, absurdly cheap and controversial: the rise of China’s Temu app, 2023, Helen Davidson, Guardian

Workers' conditions in the textile and clothing sector: just an Asian affair? - Issues at stake after the Rana Plaza tragedy, 2014, Enrico D'Ambrogio, European Parliamentary Research Service

State of The Industry: Lowest Wages to Living Wages, The Lowest Wage Challenge (Industry affiliated campaign)

Fast Fashion Getting Faster: A Look at the Unethical Labor Practices Sustaining a Growing Industry, 2021, Emma Ross, International Law and Policy Brief (George Washington University Law School)

Dozens injured in Pakistan garment factory collapse and fire, 2023, Hannah Abdulla, Just Style (news media)

India: Multiple factory accidents raise concerns over health & safety in the garment industry, campaigners call for freedom of association in factories to ‘stave off’ accidents, 2022, Jasmin Malik Chua, Business & Human Rights Resource Center

Minimum Wage Level for Garment Workers in the World, 2020, Sheng Lu, FASH455 Global Apparel & Textile Trade and Sourcing (University of Delaware)

Rana Plaza collapse, Wikipedia

Buyers’ compensation for Rana Plaza victims far from reality, 2013, Ibrahim Hossain Ovi, Dhaka Tribune (news media)

World cotton production statistics, updated 2024, The World Counts

Dead white man’s clothes, 2021, Linton Besser, ABC News

[genericpuff]

omg can i just say i love your work so much!! it’s so fun to read this i’m over the moon

anyways, i’m aiming to get an art degree! i’m so inspired by your work. is this just a hobby or is it a job? i’d love to make art my full time job when i’m older, tho it’s not known for being very sustainable. how do you make it work??

ALSO your expressions, the anatomy, the faces, the colors, all of it!!! i aspire to draw like you one day!!!!

thank youuu!!

also whoof as for advice... well, for starters, it depends on what specifically you're wanting to pursue. Is it a specialized diploma / degree in a specific trade like animation/illustration/graphic design? Or is it more like a university BA? I ask this not because one is better than the other, more so because different schooling is tailored to different aspects of the overall "arts" industry and whatever you're currently studying (or planning on studying) is gonna be up to you and what you're planning on doing, whether it's being a freelancer or going into a specific industry! (or doing a mix of both!)

So all that said, take my advice with mountains of salt!!! What worked (and didn't work) for me may not apply to you! But I hope in sharing my own experience that it might resonate with you or at least give you an experience to relate to in your present and future endeavors :>

For full transparency though (and this will be a bit of a personal anecdote so bear with me): I am absolutely 100% not making a living off Rekindled, more so that it's just a side thing that I do that's supplemented by my actual job, which is tattooing. So by definition, Rekindled is a hobby! (and one that I very much enjoy doing and keeping as a hobby!)

But tattooing is also pretty rough right now, when I'm making money the money is great, but when I'm not, it feels like the same grind that every artist is on, trying desperately to get people to notice me and buy my work haha

I wish I could say that there's a moment where it all just "clicks" and everything falls into place, but it's more like... you just learn to take the good with the bad, and most importantly, you learn how to prepare for the bad so it's a little less bad the second and third and tenth time around. I know that sounds super bleak, but that's just the cycle of life in general - things aren't always good, we just do what we can to work through the bad times so we can find those good times and come out stronger each and every time.

I'm currently in one of those bad times, and I have been pretty much this entire year. The slow season that I thought would end around March... didn't. So with the slow season now turning into a slow year, it finally happened - a couple months ago, I picked up a retail job. It sucked to have to do because I quit retail YEARS ago in the hopes that I'd never have to return to it and that tattooing would always provide for me, but life has changed since then.

Despite this, I am in a very unique and privileged situation where I can "afford" to have slow seasons at work, but I'm also like... well aware that that can't last forever so I'm doing what I can now to slow the decay until it hopefully picks up again. I'm doing what I can, but ultimately, I know a lot of the circumstances of the past year have been due to the state of the world in general, which is far outside of my control. So I do what I can within my control instead, and that eventually included having to go back to retail.

Thankfully the retail job I work is great and I get to work with really cool people, so it's not all bad! But it definitely felt bad in the beginning because of the internalized shame I had towards going back to retail. Almost felt like I was proving to everyone else - especially within the tattoo industry - that I wasn't "cut out" for it.

But now that I'm doing it... I know that that's not true, and I frankly don't care what opinions people could have about it, because at the end of the day, the economy is shit right now and we all gotta do what we gotta do to survive. And having those couple shifts a week in retail means I can continue to keep doing what I do through both tattooing and making comics, because now I have more income coming in. And that is, overall, a good thing :)

Working retail to help make ends meet doesn't make me any less of an artist. It's just that making a living at this is difficult and isn't guaranteed to be a "happily ever after" type thing where you just "find a job" and the rest sorts itself out later. This is also something that applies to any field / career in general, life happens and things can change a LOT so on the one hand, that can be a hopeful blessing because it means you never have to be stuck where you are right now, you CAN keep moving forward towards the things that you're hoping for; but also, it can suck ass because it means even when the going is good, it's never forever.

When it comes to the art world specifically... regardless of whether or not the going's good, the important thing is to keep creating and keep moving forward.

Buuuut I guess if I had any real advice to offer beyond waxing poetic about my personal experiences, especially to those seeking an art degree - learn the business side too. Because in reality, there's a lot more to doing art as your job than just drawing. In fact, I would say that once you start doing art as your job, the actual creating is often forced to take a backseat to the things you have to do to make your art profitable in the first place - like marketing/networking, attending art markets, collaborating with other artists, running an online shop, building a clientele, etc.

So if you have the opportunity to do a class or two in marketing or event coordinating or anything under the umbrella of "business" that could supplement your art degree, please consider it! The art world is competitive, but that doesn't mean you can't give yourself a competitive edge by arming yourself with skills that others may not consider; and I do find a lot of people entering these fields tend to just completely forget or overlook the fact that doing art as a job means turning it into a business, which means you're gonna have to sharpen the business-adjacent skill sets alongside your art.

And I say this from experience, I SUCK at doing the business side of things because a lot of it I'm either really bored by or really bad at. Marketing myself on social media feels like an exercise in futility. Filing my taxes is torture. But those are still skills that are often necessary that I'm pushing myself to get better at - it's just often really hard to learn it through trial and error so taking classes would have probably helped me out a lot LMAO

It can be boring and it's not art, but it's still worth learning. Learn how to apply to art markets, learn how to file taxes as a self-employed individual, learn how to create a CV and portfolio for the industry you're interested in, learn how to decipher your metrics and statistics, learn how to offer quality customer service. These are all things that are, again, extremely worth learning, but also often overlooked when we think of "making a living off art", especially when it comes to freelancing.

That's pretty much the extent of the advice I can offer, at least in terms of the broad subject matter of "getting an art degree" and "making a living at art". I'm ironically sorta the worst person to ask when it comes to that, though, because there are times - like right now - when I'm very much not making that living! And it's requiring that I change my game plan so that I can continue to live - it doesn't mean I've given up on my art, it just means that right now my art can't pay my bills so I have to find another way to get by until they can again.

And of course, it cannot be understated that the circumstances in which I exist are different from yours. It's kinda like asking a Youtuber "how to get famous on Youtube", because the circumstances that made a Youtuber famous will vary widely from other Youtubers. For some people it was years of hard work and slowly building up an audience, others may have been an overnight sensation, and for anyone the ability to make videos on Youtube at all is dependent on what else is going on in their lives that allows them the time and energy and resources to do so. Sure, we kinda know what the end result "looks like", but how you get to that point is largely influenced by other factors and can't be summarized in some "how to" video beyond the general advice of "here's how to make a video for Youtube" "here's how to make an appealing thumbnail" and "here's how to engage with your community". Many of those famous Youtubers are following the exact same formulas as the smaller Youtubers, they just had other factors influencing their career path that got them to fame first / faster / etc.

I can create Rekindled the way I do now because I have a decade of experience already creating multi-panel comics with longform storytelling on a deadline, but someone who's just starting out in webcomics probably wouldn't be able to do exactly what I'm doing; just like how I can't ever perfectly replicate the look and vibe of Rachel's original work, because her work exists through the experiences and circumstances of her life which I could never copy because they're unique from my own.

When I am making good money again, it will still be influenced by other factors - some within my control, some purely circumstantial - that are unique to me that can't be summed up for the benefit of other artists.

If I were to hypothetically write you a guide on "how to make a living at art" based purely on my own life experiences, it would go something like:

Step 1: Spend your whole childhood drawing weeb anime art and writing Legend of Zelda fanfiction

Step 2: Get a diploma in 2D Animation from a for-profit school that puts you $25k in the hole

Step 3: Work at Starbucks for half a decade and then on your days off work on a really long comic series that you plan to spend the rest of your life making

Step 4: Get hired to do a tattoo apprenticeship with a shitty mentor who treats you like shit

Step 5: Work a bunch of other retail jobs while trying to survive your apprenticeship and then eventually find a job in a basement shop that happens to have a spare bed

Step 6: Survive COVID on savings, root beer, and that really long comic series that you're still working on but isn't getting read by more than 10 people

Step 7: Get really obsessed with an online webtoon that you love; then get really mad about it when that online webtoon turns to shit which motivates you to create an entire blog just to talk shit about it and make a fan comic rewrite about it

Step 8: Get a really cool readerbase from that fan comic through the pre-existing community of shit-talkers that you joined who now ask you questions like "how to make a living at art" which you're not even sure how to answer because you don't know if what you do can even be called a "living"

Step 9: ???

Step 10: Profit ?? Sometimes??

Yeah, not very helpful to literally anyone but myself (and not even myself because if past me was asking present me this question, they'd probably be very confused by my answer LOL)

That was a lot of words, but I hope at least a few of them help arm you with the confidence to pursue your goals!! A lot of it might also sound scary, but remember that the path is long and the scary times don't last forever. That path will often take turns you couldn't have anticipated, but that's okay! Ride along with it and see where it takes you - there's always joy to be found in this line of work so long as you keep moving forward and keep your eyes open for it <3

[reilliane]

This is my personal obligatory post and apology for my poofing disappearance- if you're not up to read things like these, then feel free to scroll past! Have a good day/night!

—

the poofing, the poofed, and the un-poofing.

TLDR; Bad stuff happened for the entire past year, stopped college just a few months ago to learn the materials myself and market myself in the graphic design industry soon, and got a whole dose of religious epiphany that threw my life around. Wrote in a different account a few months ago to ease and destress without much expectation. Will continue to write albeit there won’t be many updates, had/have to drop original writing plans [right now focusing on a short story for Wanderer, though it doesn’t mean I won’t be able to write for others when I get the time]. May unfortunately discontinue ongoing AUs but will provide a summary for them [I think it’s only Tyranny-?] Will also open writing/art commissions soon, maybe set up a kofi account, but I won’t be ‘gatekeeping’ any content I plan to post. I’m thinking, if ever, it’d only be standalone specials or maybe nsfw [gosh I’m really saying that?] in kofi, buuut that’s just a maybe. Everything else is free to read of course <3 

A really detailed and long [I MEAN IT, MAYBE 1.3-.5K?? WC] exposition under the cut, but of course, it’s optional to read!

PS. I opened my drafts and had one or two finished works there, I will publish those soon. Get ready. Because they’re angst AHAAAAAAAAAA-

PPS. I won’t be able to respond to everyone’s sweet shucking messages in my inbox forgive me But know that I’M REALLY SO TOUCHED YALL I really didn’t think anyone would look for me that much 😭 Someone said I vanished like the avatar and it’s sending me crumpling to the floor.

ALRIGHT STORYTIME LET’S GO—first of all, I haven’t been on Tumblr for so long, nor have I interacted with anyone and coming back,, the web interface bamboozled me.

Anyway- the past year was roooough, like settling in and getting into college.

From the start, my brother and I have known of our depleting resources but couldn’t stop because of our mother’s insistence and my father’s very.. volatile attitude. Double the latter since he has cancer and has been nothing short of cranky and infuriated for the past years—knowing that the money is facing a downward slope because of his expensive medicines and learning that we’ll stop because of it would’ve,, been terribly bad and that's understating the nature of my headstrong, independent, and prideful father.

There were times when he was very somber about his state, but then mad—it was just a really bad time, but my brother and I finally convinced our mom that we had to stop for real a few months ago because money was just tight. Until now we’re hiding the fact from our dad that we stopped under the pretense that we’re only taking one course for the semester :v

We were very lost and torn.

I knew I had to go out and look for a job, but my brother would be doing the same, too—the thing was that we knew our mom couldn’t handle our dad being sick alone, so my brother opted to be the one to find work outside.

I’m learning materials and courses on my own at home, but finding a remote job without a degree is no doubt near unimaginable with how remote setups are almost nonexistent now. The time was just bleak at home, too, my father would ask for bad things to eat that would worsen his health and then blame it all on my mother when he felt body pains and repercussions—it was just BAD, that wasn't all of it, but I digress. Cancer sucks. 

Just a few days ago, I lost my uncle to the same thing, and now there’s an overall family dispute over who gets what and it feels like I’m living a kdrama fever dream [pls get me out hfasjdkfhdsaf]. I don’t recommend it if it’s not romance lmao.

Things were getting so out of hand and I also couldn’t get back into writing or socializing with everyone in my writing socials—but I still wanted to write without the expectation of being able to deliver as I used to. It was a de-stresser for me, so I opened a new account in ao3/quotev and wrote in.. November or December, I think. It was nice, I got to just type away and post and leave it at that.

I think one of the reasons why I didn’t go to Tumblr for that was because I knew I wouldn’t be able to commit to updates, and I love you guys, I didn’t want to say something and promise it’d be given but then nothing. I’ve done it back then and I just, don’t want to do that :(

Despite how heavy and dark the past year was, however, something really unexpected happened—okay here it goes.

As a child, I’ve been taught about Christian doctrine and was brought up to believe in the existence of a God. I didn’t have my heart in it though, of course not, how was I to believe something that I only knew because someone said it to me?? I did attend church out of duty and had a shallow fear of the greater being, but as an authentic believing person? Naw. 

Not until June at least.

I don’t know how to explain it rather I, out of the want to give my mother the chance to go somewhere she wanted to for Sunday, decided to join her for church. I was ready to just daze off and think about some solution to our problems, but then the sermon spoke to me—you know, that feeling when someone is passive-aggressively referring to you in a complaint or something?

It felt like that, only it felt like that message was something I was meant to hear, and boy I couldn’t believe it—neither did my mother [lol]. She told me how shocked she was when I listened throughout the what, an hour and a half of preaching that I usually just dismiss. 

It’s cliche, but my life really changed after that one simple Sunday.

All my tweeeeenty years of living, I’ve asked if God really is real and whatnot and I never got answered until July of 2023. What really cemented my belief in knowing that he is real, is when I decided to genuinely pray—then for seven consecutive days, the Bible would lead me to a page [like just randomly opening a part of the book after prayer] that answered my questions and/or convicted me of something. I'd wake up every day and an event would happen that would answer my confusion and I'd sit in the night thinking 'no way that just happened', but it did. Boy, when I tell you I thought I was going crazy.

Not to mention opportunities such as baptism and ministry suddenly popped my way when I only had the idea in my head and I kept it to myself. At first, I thought it was just a coincidence, but when it ‘popped up’ more than thrice in a single week, I knew it wasn’t. Think of it as like, the thing in fanfiction when it seemed like the universe was saying something to you. Yeah, I felt that for myself. Mindblowing.

I could go on and on about the other life-changing things that occurred, but this would be so long LOL.

But I never regret coming to faith and accepting Jesus for real that day, and although life is still dark for me these days, the burden feels light. It’s an amazing feeling. He's really changed everything.

I’m not going to force anyone these beliefs—I knew how it felt to be on the receiving end and it could get very annoying, rather I just spoke on it to say how wonderful it was to know him, and it would be nice to let others know about my side in case they'd also take the faith. Who knows?

Also, I think I understand what those people were saying now. Again, I won’t force anyone—just reminding and asking you to try if you want, because it’s amazing. Bombard me in my inbox if you’re interested, but no pushing here, because I’m a firm believer that things shouldn’t be forced if it’s not the right time yet. 

Anyway, that was my source of strength and hope to go through these days—and I believe it’s also the driving force that led me to write this out in.. in Tumblr of all places lol. If someone told me this would happen two years ago I'd laugh in their face 💀

Rather than just getting back into writing and opening my social circle again, there’s that bit in me that wants to say that religious epiphany. That said, I know how diverse everyone is in their beliefs so I’ll say it very tersely that, no, I will not be parading and pushing people to believe this and that—this space is, after all, my space for writing :)

Ah, and nor will I ramble about it like shuck lol, but I will, in private, when prompted. 

With that out of the way, back into writing—I was floored when I first opened Tumblr and saw all the notifications and messages about my disappearance and I could’ve cried, really. It touches me poor heart :sob: and I wanted to thank all of you for such caring messages—I wouldn’t be able to reply to all of them [there were many!

Like maybe more than fifteen or twenty, not even counting the direct messages] but know that I’m very- very grateful for every one of you.

I could crawl out of your screen and hug yall but I won’t because I can’t and it’d throw people off KJHFSADKJFHALJSKDFHA

Life is, again, still hard—and navigating it is still difficult, but I’m managing these days. I can no longer return to my usual days of sporadic updates and teasers lol, but I’m happy to say I will still be writing, though it won’t be my entire focus nowadays. When I open writing commissions for genshin and art commissions, it’d get me going, of course. 

I have to let go of most of my beloved works because I realized that sticking to them would take up most of my time when I need to be out there upskilling and taking initiative to start earning money to support the bills. I still wanted to write though, and in my downtime I even got to watching One Piece and writing a currently on-hold fanfiction for that in Ao3, but fuuully realized that, no, I’m no longer cut out for really long written stuff unless I commit to writing a long piece that would take weeks for it to be published. 

In the end I settled for a single character [wanderer bb] short story that I get into writing without much hassle, and make myself happy, still :) I have ideas for other characters, too, but getting them out to be posted would take longer than usual.

My other AUs, as well, since my focus is just.. God, life, expenses, work, then hobbies. I don’t guarantee finishing them [I think Tyranny? And others, like Smite/Mercy/etc.], but I have in mind to write a summary because I meant it back then when I said the plot was really finished. Sighgisghsighs

Opening art commissions, I’d do that soon—writing, too.

Maybe a kofi account, as well—but I won’t be having any posts I want to be posted to be locked behind some tip or pay. I’m thinking of only adding specials there, specials like, standalone oneshots from an AU, or an nsfw piece. Oh golly, writing that is so beyond me, I think that’s the only reason why if anything is going to be in kofi, it’d probably be the nsfw. I plan to keep this writing blog sfw, still. 

But we’ll,,, we’ll see [dying]

So yeah! That’s.. Everything. For the writing thing, I think I’ll technically just be .. here, lol, with a focus on that story with wanderer. Gone are the 7k worded oneshots, now we’re just around 1.5k unless I commit to the creation. The story is so fluffy too [not angst? Surprising] 

But again, I will write for others eventually—can’t say when, or how, or who, but I will in time. 

I have so many plans in my head about my life, and I’m glad to say going back to Tumblr is a check off the list. I have an original novel in mind, but would you all be interested in such a thing? I don’t honestly know—other than opening commissions, I also plan on a Youtube Channel, but that’s uncertain. A Webtoon for my original plot too is a maybe, buuuut those are just what-ifs. Time will tell!

Those are just my two cents and I don’t regret sharing that—you guys have been with me for so long, even if I don’t really know you all beyond that screen, you all really became a part of my life, too :”)) 

If you reached the end of this post, wow, I’m touched. I hope you all have a good day–oh wait, what do I say? Ah yes.

I wish you all a good mornight [fhkadjsfhiajhgf].

God bless yall sweet people. 

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP I'm so exhausted and heart broken over this NewJeans mess. Funny thing is I got into the group after seeing you talk about them late last year, I fell in love with Ditto and started watching them closely. I saw how MHJ would treat them and smile at them in candid shots like the Lolla show, and felt at ease that they would continue to succeed with her managing them.

But since this issue started when I try to express why I'm uneasy with HYBE controlling NewJeans, I'm downvoted to negatives on reddit and qrted to hell on Twitter. Army friends have unfollowed me even though I've said I'm against the hate on BTS. I don't even stan NewJeans the way I do BTS, but because I'm critical of Hybe and siding with Ador, I'm called all sorts of names and yesterday Armys tried to suspend my account. Even BigHit's former choreographer has come out in support of Ador, other idols have publicly come out in support of NewJeans and N Capital came out to refuse Hybe's claims that MHJ met them to take Ador out. I feel things are not as Black and White as Armys are saying about this issue, and that NewJeans is under risk if MHJ leaves.

Everybody is calling me crazy and on one hand it's whatever. I know how kpop stans are in general so I'm not surprised, but I'm truly starting to worry. I started writing this ask 3 times before settling on what I've written now, because I kept getting choked up. I know its just kpop and I shouldn't be this attached, but I'm so scared BPP. Those girls are not even 2 years old as a group and their future is already looking so bleak when at the start of this year, their future was so bright. I remember you said they might technically even get a Grammy nomination this year. I feel sad and angry but I'm unable to express myself freely in all the fandom spaces I usually spend time in.

What should I do? How can I handle this? If it were you, what would you do? Sorry if this ask is super whiny but you always have good advice and I need some right now.

***

Listen, you already know what you should do. You just seem to lack the will to do it, at least that's what it seems like.

ARMY is the largest fandom in k-pop and they've deemed NewJeans as persona non grata. Most other HYBE fandoms also aren't looking too keenly on NewJeans and with how obsessive k-pop stans are in everything they do, this will be a long-term problem for NewJeans and their fandom. If Bunnies were a bigger fandom it wouldn't be too much of a problem, but they aren't, so the lifetime of the group is already halved.

If you only got into NewJeans six months ago and you're already this attached, you need a cold turkey break. Things are looking grim given the girls have expressed support for MHJ, and it's very unlikely HYBE will lose this case. Those girls are more or less done, so I'd say you should cut your losses and start detaching from them now to spare yourself more heartbreak later. Also, block the 'ARMY friends' who are downvoting, quote tweeting, and otherwise harassing you. You're in fandom to enjoy a community about the things you love, not to get stuck in never-ending arguments with people who have little else going on in their real lives.

The primary danger of k-pop, is getting sucked in. A lot of people here are fully, irredeemably sucked in. On both sides of this matter, ARMYs, Bunnies and kpoppies alike, the majority of this crowd is people who think they are normal but have lost any real semblance of perspective on what this industry is and of their place in it. You need to cut loose because you seem to already be in a somewhat fragile state, and what this space does is pervert that hurt you feel into a tribal sort of resentment.

I can't really say what I would do if I were you, because I don't feel attached to NewJeans the way you do. It's a shame the girls have become collateral damage, but given how quickly they became massively successful in this industry, this is unfortunately a more expected outcome for them, than not. It's sad, but that's the nature of things here. I like BTS, but like I've said many times before, I don't see myself as having any significant influence over their careers and choices. Whatever they choose to do with HYBE or whatever is their business, I simply keep supporting them for as long as I like them and the music they make.

This mess with HYBE is peculiar (and different from the 50-50 case) because NewJeans and ADOR are saying they don't want to leave HYBE (yet), while HYBE is punishing them as though they are asking the courts to let them leave HYBE. It's created a situation such that even if NewJeans stays or leaves, they are in a sense doomed, to be blunt. And you need to make your peace with that.

Some ideas to help:

A cold turkey break is very needed. The way you're talking about this group doesn't seem healthy. It wouldn't seem healthy if you were talking about BTS either. It might be a good idea to block anything related to k-pop for the next two weeks. Things will only get messier because the stakes are high, and HYBE has shown they have no problem going low. For your sanity, I really think you should stay away cold turkey and tightly curate your online spaces when you return.

Consider stepping away from Twitter and Reddit. I'm less familiar with Reddit but for Twitter, you have the option of making your account private, blocking the ARMYs harassing you, finding more sensible Bunnies to commiserate with, using lists to keep up with topics and accounts, etc.

Consider spending more time on Phoning. After taking some time to cool off, use NewJeans' app to connect more directly with the girls to show them love and support.

Try to focus on the music. NewJeans will have comebacks on May 24th and June 21st. The best way to support those girls now, is to focus on their music and support that. Personally, I've already ordered full sets of their albums since this might be the last ones we see with Min Heejin's creative direction. (Also, they might become collectable lol). Of course I hope that's not the case, but supporting their music is the most direct way to support the girls right now, in my opinion.

I'm sorry you're in this state, I'm even more sorry that the girls are in this state, but you need to detach and remember they have their own lives, are making their own choices, and that has nothing to do with you.

Good luck.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

the thing is - pro prostitution activists (and people who agree with idea) usually never suggest their 'perfect system'. On average, they just scream 'it needs to be legalised and then everything will be great', sometimes you get few ideas on how to protect "sex workers". But you know what? Whenever I do see such discussions and their suggestions, I can easily come up with 3 different scenarios where their rules and laws won't work or just would/can be ignored and women would still be harmed. EVERY TIME. People did and do all kinds of shady stuff, even in highly regulated industries + cool phenomenon called 'corruption'. Do they really think men give a shit about law, especially those who don't see women as human beings (and its all of them)?

The pro 'sex work' discourse is just people using fancy words to state that they don't believe misogyny exists, women are exploited, but most importantly they believe that men's pleasure and need to masturbate (with woman body) are more important than women's feeling and right to be save.

i recently had a very frustrating and saddening exchange with a woman on here who is in prostitution and kept saying the same thing (it should be legal) over and over again and when i told her it is legal in germany and it has not made things better just shifted problems and increased demand she said well but its legal that is definitely better. and you know i myself dont advocate for prostituting oneself to be illegal at all, i think its crazy that 30 % of women incarcerated in the usa where its fully criminalised are prostitutes, but it seems like usual people are only able to grasp the two extremes: full legalisation or full criminalisation. when in reality, abolishing the sex industry is a lengthy and complex process, but you have to start somewhere.

they say, „you wont stop prostitution by criminalising/outlawing it“ but think they can somehow stop the harm of prostitution through legal means, lmao (which also ignores the inherent harm of bought consent compared to freely given consent and knowingly making someone endure sexual acts for money). there has to be a cultural and legal and economic shift and thats a lot. we have to alleviate poverty from women systematically affected by it (single mothers, immigrated women, mentally ill, disabled, addicted women, and so on); this means pulling out the roots of misogyny and we all know this is not in the works. the difference between them and us is, we think a different future is possible if the effort is put in, but they dont. which is so fucking bleak and tells you a lot about how women see their own position in society, and the chances of it getting better.

even if you dont criminalise buying sex, you could still make it more difficult to buy sex. „but then it will move back to the black market“ honey its already there, even here in germany where its legal. so much prostitution is happening invisible, in apartment buildings and deserted areas. we should work towards ways how to reach women in these situations without legalising their abuse. if there was a perfect solution that immediately solved all the issues, we would advocate for it, dont you think? but there is no perfect solution and just accepting men will always use their money to coerce sex is just not something im okay with and we, as a society claiming to want gender equality should be okay with.

why not reverse what we have in germany right now? instead of prostitutes needing to register, its sex buyers who have to register. they need to do regular health checkups. they need to carry their sex buyer id with them or they will get fined. the registry is public because wives, daughters, partners and even your employer should be able to make decisions based on the knowledge that that man is coercing women into sex with his money. most sex buyers are partnered you know. „the government will never do that“ well they sure as hell wont if nobody advocates for it and instead opts for the lazy, superficial „fix“ of legalisation? and also, they say an issue under criminalisation is that prostitutes and other „sex workers“ are hassled by cops. well do tell who will enforce those sacred regulations you want? if it was for them, everybody would just „mind their own business“ and the state does not interfere with the sex industry at all and they somehow think this will protect vulnerable groups?! it doesnt make any fucking sense.

it is really frustrating to me. at the end of the day you have to ask, what is your feminism, if you want to accept, regulate, institutionalise, normalise, legitimise and legalise this form of systemic sexual abuse (because using your money to coerce sexual acts IS abuse of power) at the hands of men instead of working towards a future where we are equal? there is no equality as long as the sex industry exists and profits off and reinforces social inequality, specifically misogyny and racism.

[lukethompsondaily]

He is best known for Netflix hit Bridgerton, but Luke Thompson’s theatre pedigree encompasses Shakespeare, Greek tragedy and Ivo van Hove’s marathon A Little Life. He talks to Fergus Morgan about his passion for the stage and his worries for its future

Luke Thompson might have shot to stardom thanks to his role as Benedict in Netflix’s smash-hit series Bridgerton, but the 35-year-old actor is most at home on stage.

“I spectate on myself,” Thompson says. “I always have done. It’s been a bit painful in my life. And the only place on earth it doesn’t happen is on stage when someone else is spectating instead and so I don’t have to worry. You’re watching me so I don’t have to watch myself. I feel free. Those are the best moments of my life.”

Fortunately, Thompson has not been short of stage work. Born in Southampton in 1988, he grew up just outside Paris, returning to the UK to study English and drama at the University of Bristol, before training at RADA. He landed his first job almost immediately after graduating in 2013: playing Lysander in Dominic Dromgoole’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Since then, alongside screen roles in BBC One’s In the Club and Bridgerton, Thompson has starred in Julius Caesar at the Globe, Oresteia and Hamlet – opposite Andrew Scott – at London’s Almeida, and King Lear and A Little Life in the West End. Both he and co-star James Norton were nominated for Olivier awards for their performances in Ivo van Hove’s acclaimed adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s hard-hitting novel.

“A Little Life was such an intense experience,” Thompson says. “Intense in a good way, I mean. The material was very bleak, but acting is always pleasurable because you are indulging in a fantasy, even if it’s a dark one, and that is inherently fun.”

Thompson also thinks that theatre has lost some of its belief in itself. “Theatre is supposed to be provocative. I’m not on social media, but I think it can be very aggressive and vicious, and I think theatres cave to that a bit. Deep down, theatre is the opposite of social media. It is about people being in a room, exchanging opinions and emotions. I worry that social media is spoiling that a bit, which is a shame.”

What production made you fall in love with theatre?

I remember standing in the Yard at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2009 and watching Thea Sharrock’s production of As You Like It, and thinking: ‘Oh, wow, this is really funny and it actually works. When done simply and confidently, Shakespeare still speaks to us today.’ For my first job to be at the Globe a few years later was magical.

What are you finding inspiring at the moment?

I love watching Ivo [van Hove]’s company do stuff. There is something so wild about the acting in his shows. We get very bogged down with facts in this country, but Ivo understands the dream logic of plays. Some of the most moving things I’ve seen don’t completely make sense. I find that inspiring.

What do you wish you could change about the performing arts industry?

I wish theatre had more confidence. Right now, it feels unsure about how useful it is and about how taboo, complex and provocative it should be. I feel as though theatre has lost confidence in its societal function.

What is the worst thing that has happened to you on stage?

There was a scene in A Little Life in which James ran around naked for a bit, then I would bring him clothes. During one show, I couldn’t find his underpants, so I just brought him his trousers and he put them on. But I forgot that people pulled his trousers off again later and they were expecting him to be wearing underpants. James knew it was coming and I knew it was coming and we couldn’t look at each other for the rest of the play. I hope he doesn’t mind me telling that story. It was so funny.

What is the best thing that has happened to you on stage?

There are so many. That sounds naff but I don’t care. I love the challenge of going on stage night after night and trying to make something feel alive in front of an audience.

What role do you really want to play?

I would work with Ivo again at the drop of a hat. And there are loads and loads of roles I would love to play. I did a reading of a rewriting of The Seagull the other day. The role of Konstantin is really beautiful. I’d love to play that. I’d love to play Iago one day, too. Of course, I’d love to play Hamlet but it’s boring to say that.

What projects are you involved in at the moment?

I’m playing Berowne in Emily Burns’ production of Love’s Labour’s Lost with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has set it on a Polynesian island owned by these big tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, of which I am one. It’s a really smart concept that unlocks a lot of very interesting stuff in the play. Season three of Bridgerton is coming out in May and June, too. And we will be filming season four soon after that. There’s a lot still to come.

Source: The Stage

[housewarningparty]

Your turn!

It's halfway through the year! Got any favorite albums/books/tv shows/whatever to recommend?

thanks to you @badwolfwho1 who both asked me!

music:

right off the top i'm gonna recommend 3 pop albums bc i almost never have this many TO recommend. but tei shi's valerie, empress of's for your consideration, and shygirl's club shy EP have all been on constant repeat for me this year.

big year for metal also - in particular crypt sermon, job for a cowboy, darkest hour, gatecreeper, aborted and tzompantli were all incredible. i feel like between seeing them live and the release of cure, this is the first time erra has really clicked for me and i'm loving it.

for post-hardcore i've loved the debut LPs by with sails aheads and your ghost in glass. the EP lonely people by love rarely was on repeat for me for weeks also - really great stuff.

i got heaven by mannequin pussy slaps too. and i also really, really want to recommend you could do it tonight by couch slut - if you love the queasy, depraved noise that chat pile make, you absolutely should be listening to couch slut.

i threw a couple little playlists together to roundup some of my faves:

(extended version here)

honorable mention: as was really apparent from my charts this year, i spent A LOT of time listening to the saosin s/t again. but also got really back into grouper this year - especially her 2021 album shade, which i missed entirely when it came out.

books:

okay for music i focused mostly on 2024 releases but for books i won't be so strict.

shirley jackson: a rather haunted life by ruth franklin was REALLY good and provided a lot of great insight into jackson's work and also just had some really interesting history in it. really enjoyed it.

hit so hard by patty schemel a rock music and addiction memoir by the drummer of Hole. very dark and upsetting at points, but compelling. was very illuminating re: the 90s seattle music scene and the drug culture around it, provided a lot of context and detail to some stuff i thought i already knew about. really great stuff.

penance by eliza clark - this is a fake true crime book that REALLY got under my skin. it's a meta commentary on true crime as a fandom and an industry and the exploitation inherent in it. it's a mirror to make you stare at your own internal biases. it's SO fucking 2014 tumblr. i've gotten like three other people to read it and they all went insane like me. highly recommended.

hex by thomas olde heuvelt - very late to the party on this one but i loved it. translated AND localized from dutch, with very interesting results. almost goofy to start and ends up totally bleak. i adored it.

magic for beginners and white cat, black dog by kelly link - REALLY falling in love with kelly link this year. read these two and currently re-reading stranger things happen and i just adore her style. weird but SO heartfelt, surreal and dreamy, as often horrifying as it is sweet. she's so talented, i'm really excited to read the book of love later this year.

between two fires by christopher buehlman - FINALLY read this and i loved it. absolutely deserves the hype. kinda wild that dark ages horror isn't more of a thing? i re-read buehlman's the blacktongue thief too and really loved it, definitely cemented it as one of my favorite fantasy books. i'm reading the daughters' war now and enjoying it a lot.

i also re-read the golden enclaves by naomi novik and had such a great time with it.

tv shows:

finished my buffy re-watch! been watching a ton of xena with @holdsteady and @nataliving this year too - we just finished s3 and it was insane and i loved it soooo much.

i watched under the bridge and thought it was very good, but i'd recommend people learn a little about the real reena virk case before engaging.

hacks season 3 was INSANE it made me crazy i loved it so much.

haven't watched much tv aside from that!

[elftwink]

extremely sucks that like once a week i'll be interested in Bideo Jame (generic) because it looks extremely cool and fun and then i'll look into it even slightly and everyone like "yeah its great it's just too bad all the writers got laid off right after the script was finished and it's full of bugs because production was crunched so badly also there's 12 different DLC packs and they each cost an extra 20 dollars but the game is basically unplayable without them like most of the content is not included in the base game and then as soon as it released the studio shuttered because it didn't gain 12 thousand million dollars in presale and now no one's allowed to produce anything more because the studio owns the copyright. besides that it's a great game though" BLEAK. this is not a post trying to shame people for playing games with problems nor is it even about one specific game. it is just extremely bleak that the video games industry is at a point where you're paying upwards of 80 dollars for games that, let's be HONEST, barely work out of the box (not due to dev skill but due to mismangement and crunch), and the people who worked on those games never see your money and have 0 job security. hey maybe it should not work like that. maybe this is real bad.

and don't tell me to buy indie games (a thing i already do). this is a criticism of the industry. no amount of voting with your wallet is going to change policies and regulations, which are the actual things that need to change

[arbitrarygreay]

I would love to hear more Berryz vs C-ute meta if you're interested! I started out as a Momusu fan and dabbled in Berryz but C-ute felt way, way too young for me at first so I mostly ignored them. By the end of their careers though, Berryz sometimes felt like they were miserable performing while C-ute just got better and better. I've never seen anyone seriously ruminate on this though.

Thanks for the ask!

The thing to know about the era is the industry context. MM is the obvious case, starting in the late 90s when there were some pretty big girl groups (Speed, Zone, Folder5), and of course the Golden Age was called that for good reason.

(Huh, weird, now only Wikipedia lists MM's single sales in table format.) But if you look at the singles sales numbers, they've already fallen back down to Morning Coffee/Furusato level sales by 2003. This is why when you read the ancient fan forum archives (o7) the people who are all around for Golden Age have a grudge against 5th and 6th gens, and the taken-for-granted assumption of management's incomptence. So, H!P is already in a decline by this time (not that H!P broadly was ever as successful as MM in this era), but Tsunku is on a total roll musically, so it can be hard to notice.

And outside of H!P, the idol market (for girls, anyways, Johnny's is still trucking along as usual) is pretty bleak. Avex makes a few attempts every now and then (with dream, BRIGHT, and SweetS), but none of them really take off. For reference, AKB48 starts in December of 2005. I have treasured fan forum memories where Maeda Atsuko was "the one who looks like Kamei Eri". They won't get any real traction (especially sales-wise) until 2008, at which point they spearhead the Idol Sengoku Jidai.

This is the environment in which the H!P Kids are formed and have their early careers. H!P in decline but in denial about it and so throwing about some money they probably didn't make back their money on (very notably, the Sports Festivals actually going so far as to rent out Dome arenas). ZYX, Aa!, and early Berikyuu are receiving god-tier music, Berryz skips doing indies and is doing hall tours right off the bat. (Idols won't really get into livehouses until years later thanks to Idol Sengoku Jidai.)

At the same time, there are some signs. Most notably, the similarities between Berryz and Melon Kinenbi. Sure, I just called early Berryz music god-tier, but there are also quite a few songs and singles in those first three albums are now forgotten deep cuts, aren't they? Even the good ones! At the time, people could definitely predict that Kofuku Kangei would get lost, but the ever catchy Piriri to Yukou? More than that, there is the easy sense that this music is already deeply uncool. Those MKB songs are outright cringe now, especially in the visuals. This is why MKB eventually had to re-pivot to that rocker energy (to the point of mosh pits and even crowd surfing at some of their lives). Berryz, however, were never able to do that. To the end, their music retains a composition style harkening to this mid-00s Tsunku pop, even their dance tracks like Want! or Dakishimete Dakishimete. His last hurrah of the unabashed cheesiness that took Love Machine straight to the top and Koi No Dance Site to peak MM's sales. Pata did a series of posts where he complained about Tsunku's intrusions into Buono's otherwise blessedly Tsunku-free run of singles.

Kobushi, of course, also never recovered sales-wise from their scandal parade and exodus of members. However, because the members of Kobushi grew up in the social media age, as well as after H!P had gone through true industry dark ages, the members reacted to the shrinking by upping the sass and DGAF that make for great clips, Jojo Gundan able to engage with them on improv comedy.

Berryz, meanwhile, kind of had a chemistry problem. They were friendly enough. A newbie like me found their early making-of footage compelling. But they could not really carry a non-scripted segment. Again, maybe a newbie might find their DMs sweet, but the moment you switch to another group, you can see the difference when the interactions have snap and rhythm. Wota joke about Yurina's inability to tell anecdotes. There's a very real reason that only Momochi was able to break out on TV, and even Momochi's schtick feels more forced than the attitude the 48G was bringing to the table, honed by late night variety willing to be really mean to them. Maasa and Chinami are getting pretty good at DGAF, but it says something that they seem to get better mileage when interacting with their juniors (like 5nin J=J or 2nd gen S/mileage) than their own group.

So yeah, by 2007 (around Kokuhaku no Funsui Hiroba) Berryz can tell that it is not going to happen for them. I guess given that they started their careers so early, they really didn't know yet what they could possibly do outside of the industry yet, so they all just stuck around because why not? And they broke up when enough of them had found post-Berryz prospects.

Honestly, I can't give you an answer as to why C-ute succeeded. They were why I thought Kobushi's scandal parade and member exodus would actually benefit them, but I was never really into C-ute's music. Their songs were also pretty unabashedly Tsunku cheese? Someone I met through SNSD fandom really liked e.g. The Middle Management, but didn't seem to get any deeper into H!P. Anyways, some kind of magic happened, with Chisato and Nakki embracing late blooms intersecting with being able to snag onto the Idol Sengoku Jidai momentum with with a will. Who knows? Love is timing, after all.

[bogkeep]

14, 15 and 20 for the ask game!

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?

EHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. mostly no! norway does not have a big movie industry, and 80% of the movies we do make seem to be ww2 related in some way, and the rest all seem to be rather depressing and bleak or just... not my thing at all. (here i was going to talk about an animated movie they played for us in middle school that was just horribly graphic for some ungodly reason and it triggered All Of My Mental Illnesses but i just found out that one was danish so nvm haha.) there's also the Awkwardness Vibe. i do not think it's possible for norway to create a movie that is not steeped in awkwardness, so any movie that is made here must take advantage of the awkwardness. my favourite example is The Troll Hunter, which is framed as a school project home video and therefore Works. it might also just be a dialect thing, where only people in oslo (the capital) Speak Like That, and most norwegian cinema is 95% oslo dialect, and it just sounds really fake and theatrical to everyone else.

HOWEVER. THERE IS ONE (well, two. they made two movies) THAT I LIKE. AND THAT MOVIE IS ASKELADDEN / THE ASH LAD. it's an adaptation of norwegian fairytales. which fairytale? all of them. at once.

is it GOOD? i don't think it's good. but i love it. it's for Me. they made the ash lad movies for Me Specifically. it has danish villains. it references paintings by theodor kittelsen. askeladden has a dead magpie in his bag. it's anything i could ever want (i would also add that these movies were made with the help of the czech fairytale movie industrial complex, which makes me very excited. the czech republic is really big on making fairytale movies and have a lot of resources for it! that's also why a knight's tale has so many czech names in the credits!) as for TV, i think the biggest exports are Lilyhammer and Skam, neither of which i have seen. my #1 top favourite norwegian tv show ever is a show called "don't do this at home" where two guys did a bunch of dangerous stuff you're not supposed to do at home in a house that was on track to get demolished anyway.

soap in the dishwasher. it sparks joy To Me. other honorable mentions: - the time they played an 8 hour train ride live on TV which got so popular that they played a 134 hour boat livestream later. - norwegian commercials are surprisingly high quality?? is it weird that i enjoy the norwegian commercial industry more than norwegian cinema as a whole????

15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?

okay i'm struggling a little with this one right now so i'm just gonna post this

20. which sport is The Sport in your country? it's soccer - or football, as we call it here. the only sports that get any attention at all whatsoever are, in descending order: - football - skiing sports such as ski jumping or ski shooting (I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW THIS SPORT WORKS AND I DO NOT CARE TO LEARN) - handball

[invisibleicewands]

Lord almighty!” a middle-aged Welsh woman says in the first episode of Michael Sheen’s steelworks drama The Way (BBC1, Mon). “Isn’t the deal meant to be that we’re hit with just one crisis per generation? Like a war, or a crash, or a pandemic? My daughter … she’s had one of each!”

Now I hate to be pedantic, but I’m not sure that one crisis per generation ever was the deal, cosmologically speaking. “Sorry,” the Great Fire of London didn’t say to the Bubonic Plague. “I’ll just let you finish up.”

Still, you can see the point she is trying to make. Climate emergency, AI apocalypse, far-right lurch: it is a bit crisisy out there, isn’t it? It’s not hard to see why an ambitious TV writer might feel an urge — a calling, even — to try to make sense of a world that seems to be spinning out of control.

Just look at the TV schedules this week as The Way went head to head with ITV’s medical drama Breathtaking, which offered the delightful prospect of reminding everyone just how bleak the Covid-19 crisis was.

The Way is centred on the Port Talbot steelworks, which is so crisis-ridden there’s literally a crisis there right now. But such hyper-topicality is double-edged. For viewers actually living through this stuff you can see why, say, dogs getting cute haircuts on Instagram might be more enticing.

Still, this three-part series about a workers’ uprising has a dream team feel. It’s Sheen’s directorial debut (he also stars as the ghost of a coalminer). The script comes from James “State of the Nation” Graham, and the maverick documentary maker Adam Curtis completes what Sheen has described as an “Avengers assemble” line-up.

The Way makes much of Port Talbot’s dramatic skyline, as well as its status as a last bastion of industrial power. We have steelworkers falling into vats of molten slag, foreign owners indifferent to local communities, smatterings of Welsh folklore, and the rather good line “The British don’t revolt, they grumble”. Curtis’s influence is immediately apparent in the ominous electronic soundtrack, the flickery archive footage and a sinister pouting penguin that on closer inspection appears to be a bin. Perhaps the most Adam Curtis bin ever.

At its centre is the Driscoll family, estranged parents and warring adult kids who find themselves pursued by the British Army through Afan Forest Park, having become accidental revolutionaries. It might be the volume of drugs ingested by Owen Driscoll (Callum Scott Howells), but things escalate fast. The mood shifts from portentous to hysterical to OK this is really quite silly now. The result is Gavin & Stacey meets The Road: a misfit family of Welsh fugitives on the run in a hostile England where suddenly — inexplicably — the merest hint of a Welsh accent is enough to have you lynched by private security forces. I don’t know, I missed Uncle Bryn.

We’re supposed to find the family endearing, maybe even amusing, but honestly there were more laughs in Curtis’s seven-hour dissection of the fall of the Soviet Union. Overall it reminded me of children’s TV dramas from the 1980s. Was it the archival footage? The ancient sword? Or maybe just the hammy crowd scenes? It’s a strange project for Sheen, Graham and Curtis, who have all excelled at verbatim dramas or documentaries that hew close to the facts. The best thing that I can say about The Way is that it’s reassuring that something this eccentric can still make it to screen. Better a mad human mess than more algorithmic mush.

[...]

Which leads us to The Baftas (BBC1, Sun). By strange coincidence last week’s award ceremony was also overshadowed by a Michael Sheen joke that overstayed its welcome. The show’s opening skit was an excruciatingly long prerecorded bit in which this year’s presenter, David Tennant, tried to wriggle out of dog-sitting Sheen’s pup, Bark Ruffalo. Little wonder a bemused Claire Foy described the event as “very LA”.

[canmom]

Heya! I saw ur post about ssris a bit back. Thank you for talking about your experience. I am potentially about to go onto ssris, and I really appreciated hearing about an experience that wasn't good and, in fact, actively harmful. Do you think there are scenarios where ssris are the right choice? Just because I'm curious about your thoughts! Have a nice day :)

so the non-answer is that SSRIs are the right choice iff they work and the benefit they give is not less than the negative impacts of the side effects.

all i can really report is what my experience was, i'm afraid! I feel bad about it and resentful, but I can't actually compare against the counterfactual of 'what my life would have been if I had never taken SSRIs' or 'if they told me they were giving me SSRIs and actually gave me sugar pills'. am I deluding myself, when in reality SSRIs helped me? it's so hard to tell, I only know the life that happened.

so far as i understand, the metastudies of randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trials of SSRIs for depression say... well ok it's kinda prevaricatey. 2008 and 2010 the meta-studies say 'no better than placebo' for 'mild' to 'moderate' depression but stronger for 'severe' depression. 2012 a meta-study says they are significantly effective after all... but the authors work for the pharma industry. ('significant' here means that the apparent effect is unlikely to have occurred coincidentally by chance, not that it is necessarily a particularly large effect. for a weak but significant effect, you need a larger study to detect it.)

in 2017 another study comes along and says that well maybe they're significant but the effect size is really small so it's probably not worth the side effects. another paper criticises this conclusion... but the authors work for the pharma industry. you can go read that WP link for the details and to get the papers. (if they're paywalled, grab the DOI and get them off scihub.)

now, I think if you're dealing with depression, you know it's super hard to have any sense of how you're doing compared to how you were some time ago. when you're really in the thick of it, the world just looks bleak, and you can't really comprehend the time when things were better, even if it was just a day or even an hour ago. in my experience at least, depression varies in severity, and I have a poor memory of 'how bad' it was in the past.

you can imagine how difficult that is for a study design. if i take a pill when i'm at absolute rock bottom and i start to feel better afterwards, is that the effect of the pill, or just regression to the mean?

i don't know how these studies are conducted in detail. they probably have some kind of 'depression inventory' questionnaire to act as a proxy for 'how depressed you are'. seems like a pretty murky subject though.

should you take SSRIs? if i got to go back in time and try those years over, I think I would try going without. but that might be a 'grass is greener' thing. I felt very bad in those years, but that prove I might not have felt even worse had I not been on SSRIs. what I can at least say is that SSRIs did not cure my depression, so if that's what you're hoping to get out of them, I would say it's not very likely.

(what I suspect I really needed back then was stimulants to treat ADHD, which I believe was the root of the situation that was making me feel so desperate and hopeless. but also if I had been given that treatment, my life would be so different it's hard to imagine.)

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Quick Word on the Strike

Say it ain't so... A little over 15 years after the WGA strike of late 2007-early 2008, we have now entered *another* strike.

Whenever I'm not espousing animation opinions and hyperfixations on here, I'm actually writing stories and making comics.

It takes "writers" to tell the story, visually, among many other kinds of artists who get the short end of the stick in this capitalist hellscape. The strike is really exposing where people fall on this whole issue, and the utter indifference and even outright contempt some have towards the people that work their collective bums off to make your entertainment in the first place.

A lot of that is why I've really dialed back how I used to be online about animated features that I didn't think were up to my expectations. It's easy to rag on writers for... Well... Writing, that you don't think works. Most of the time, from my perspective and just simply listening to what filmmakers have to say, it's people making decisions that they think are the right ones at the right time, not knowing if they'll land some 1-2 years later. You certainly won't get that kind of honesty and perceived human mistakes with *AI*... I shudder at the current techbro circlejerking of this nonsense, and the consequences it could have on us artists, writers, and creatives... And we were already seeing some bleak stuff unfold in the industry pre and post-outbreak eras of COVID-19.

And especially in animation, too... What with mergers outright killing projects and whole studios (Disney shuttering Blue Sky in early 2021, and nearly killing NIMONA), favorites, and other completed things being thrown into a black hole - never to be seen again because they're now "tax write-offs". I don't care if that's how the business works, okay, it's inherently garbage that someone's hard work... Something someone worked years and years on... Can't be seen by the public because of green paper and abstract phony concepts. When a work of art is made, it's for the whole entire world, and that's all kinds of wrong to me. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is essentially the poster-boy for this kind of thing, having done this to FINAL SPACE, a largely finished BATGIRL movie, and an entirely-completed SCOOB! prequel called HOLIDAY HAUNT. No work of media should have to be locked away in perpetuity, or in even some cases, erased from existence.

Which is why I also try to appreciate everything that actually *does* get out into the world, even if it's not to my liking. I notice some animation fans here and there vent their not-unfounded frustrations on things that aren't to blame. "Oh come on, and yet BIG MOUTH gets another season?" That's still a show that keeps people employed, and keeps roofs over their heads, food on their tables. Animators, writers, artists, etc. aren't living in posh mansions. They're always on the line...

(I realize BIG MOUTH is ending after its 8th season, but you get the idea, right?)

So... We shall see what this all means for live-action stuff going ahead, considering the big hit a lot of tentpole movies and TV shows took during the 2007-08 strike. The strike is often cited as the reason something like QUANTUM OF SOLACE underwhelmed, or why TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN got such terrible reception in comparison to the first film (which got a more middling reception). As for animation writers, they already have it rough, so I can only imagine what kind of toll this will take on the crews and their projects going forward... But one thing's for certain, it's absurd that these conglomerate CEOs get richer and the writers have to strike in order to make things somewhat right. They deserve so much better. Don't give me that "it's how it goes" mumbojumbo, that's just an excuse to be okay with stuff that needs to be changed. Such indifference is the source of many other problems in this world...

Not to sound melodramatic, but human creativity is a beautiful thing to me... and often times, the business side of it gets too big for its britches and ruins what should be a universal thing, the universal language of telling stories. And that people have to turn that creativity and love of making art into something that merely keeps them alive. Barely, so... Yeah, it's all kinda messed up when you step back and look at it clearly for a second...

[crazy-pages]

Unfortunately this is one of those things where the answer is really boring and then kind of sad:

The boring part: Normal solar panels are more cost efficient, more materials efficient, can be oriented more efficiently relative to the sun, and there's no shortage of places to put them. So there is simply no need for these. Also replacing ordinary glass windows when they break or you need to remodel is cheap. Needing to replace the custom colored solar panel glass is expensive.

The sad part: There are a thousand and one little green energy grifts like this, from tiny wind turbines next to highways to solar panel highways themselves to solar panel car roofs to that sidewalk algae tank idea Tumblr is so obsessed with. And they all share the same concept: What if we took a form of green energy generation, minified it, made it made it aesthetically pleasing, and proposed putting up somewhere where people will see it a lot?

And unfortunately it turns out that minifying energy generation, making it aesthetically pleasing, and putting it where people can see it are three extra design constraints which make the most important thing about green energy generators worse. Which is, you know, how much energy do they generate relative to the effort and resources it takes to put them up.

It's meaningful to discuss making sure green energy generation is environmentally low impact, which sometimes requires minification or integrating it into our living spaces. And it's meaningful to discuss the aesthetic qualities of green energy generation where it has to exist alongside humans. But those are secondary concerns to the primary concern which is: fuck us fuck us fuck us fucks us, alright how fast can we generate the absolute maximum amount of renewable energy possible? And it turns out the best way to do that isn't a bunch of lightly colored solar glass which looks pretty, it's massive fields of black solar panels and raised solar panels on as many roofs as possible, and totally normal looking infrared reflective glass which nevertheless has massive benefits for air conditioning energy costs. We just do not have the surplus production capacity right now to absorb massive inefficiencies like what you get from colored solar glass in the pursuit of green energy, solely for aesthetics.

These green grifts are all based on turning that on its head and convincing people that the future of green energy is cute and pretty and will brighten up your space. It works by creating a mental connection between living spaces which feel better, and the idea that I post renewable energy world will look less industrial and bleak, so that you think that because this looks better it must also be more green. Startup CEOs will approach city governments or medium sized businesses and razzle and dazzle them with the idea that with this ✨ new ✨ hip ✨ cool ✨ green ✨ energy idea your city / business will not only be green it'll be ✨ beautiful ✨! And then they sucker them into paying for investment in a product which is never going to produce the amount of green energy the grifters claim and is never as scalable as they pretend.

Like, we can and should reject brutalism as a societal default, and promote the beautification of our living spaces. But for the most part, the capacity of green energy sources is fundamentally tied to their appearance. The reason solar panels are black (ish, and kind of blue at the right angles) it's because that is the color required to get the maximum amount of energy absorption from the amount of rare earth metals you're putting into them. The reason wind turbines are massive and shaped like that is because that is the most efficient size and cheap we have been able to figure out so far for the amount of materials involved. The reason attempts to turn archaebacteria into a carbon capture source for extracting methane (and maybe converting it into biofuels) doesn't look like a little algae tank on the sidewalk is because you have to heat the archaebacteria slurry up to very high temperatures under a lot of pressure, and you have to pump sewage into it. So it's just more efficient to do that in a centralized location, probably in a sewage processing plant where it's going to look like a bunch of massive tanks of brown-green sludge which smells like death.

Random aside about archaebacteria slurries below.

Side note: The real green energy benefit of archaebacteria isn't direct carbon capture, that's mostly a pipe dream outside of very specific use cases. The benefit is compensating for seasonal energy use variations (typically differences in home AC/heating costs in the summer vs the winter). See, fossil fuel plants have very expensive fuel but cheap infrastructure, so it's cost efficient for them to just reduce output during the seasons when energy use is lower. But renewables tend to have all their costs in infrastructure, with maintenance costs or fuels costs for nuclear power being relatively small in comparison. This makes any period of time in which a renewable power source is existing but doesn't have anywhere to put the energy it's generating very costly. And batteries which can operate on the scale of a power grid, whether these are electrical batteries or gravity batteries which work by pumping water up and down, simply do not exist which can store the surplus energy of an entire power grid for months. They don't exist and likely never will, the scale of energy is simply beyond what I think non-engineering folks can imagine.

So the point of these archaebacteria slurries is to take excess energy from renewables during their off season and use it to convert sewage methane, which has a proportionally high greenhouse effect, into biofuels which will burn off into carbon dioxide, which has a proportionally lower greenhouse effect. So a power grid which has twice the energy drain during the summer because of air conditioning is then wasting less energy if it has enough renewable power for 75% of its summer use. The excess power generated during the winter can be converted into biofuels and then shipped elsewhere reconsumed during the summer. (This is sometimes legitimately more efficient than just piping the energy via power lines to far away, power lines have a lot of energy loss over long distances.)

Just imagine a world full of beautiful stained glass windows which also generate electricity…

[Oxford Photovoltaics]