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wifelinkmtg · 1 year ago

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you guys i’m starting to think magic story might not be that good

I’m really really happy the Phyrexia essay found its intended audience, and i’m glad it resonated so deeply with so many of you! People have asked me if they can quote it or lift concepts from it, and the answer is yes, absolutely! Please attribute it to me if you do, and if you want to send me whatever you’re using it in I would love to read it, though that’s optional. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is, man, was March of the Machine story a wet dud or what? I try to set my expectations low with official WotC stuff, but I did not have them set anywhere near low enough. Consequently, it’s been difficult to muster the energy lately to do things on this blog because, like, jeez, what an unceremonious and largely consequence-free waste of potential all of that was (except for the Ixalan story. The Ixalan story had everything: amazing kaiju fights [sorry Ikoria] and Magic’s best lesbian couple [sorry Gruulfriends, also congrats Gruulfriends.] “But what about the Ravnica story?” you, an incorrect person, say, “I thought the Ravnica story was really good,” you continue, incorrectly. The Ravnica story was very bad! It had really good ideas in it, but it was exceedingly-poorly written. My most charitable interpretation is that there was a miscommunication, and the author expected there would be a thorough editorial pass, and instead they just published it as-is. Sad! I would have really enjoyed a well-written version of that story. </hater>) But also it’s been difficult to muster enthusiasm to do Magic stuff lately because of WotC’s extracurriculars (increasingly-predatory attempts to more thoroughly monetize D&D, the fucking thing with the fucking Pinkertons.) But today I took an Adderall because it’s one of the rare days I actually have to focus on a task at work, and I’m using the residual focus to post an overdue update here, hello!

And I’m not done with this blog! Far from it. I’m going to keep posting dumb horny card art reviews here, for sure, but here’s some other stuff you can expect to see in the next few months or so:

1. a follow-up to the Phyrexia essay digging into the question of what a “fascist aesthetic” is, what it’s for in fiction, what it means to enjoy things that contain those elements. I think this is a really interesting topic with a lot of depth and hopefully nuance to it, and I really only skirted it in the original essay, and oh man did people have things to say about that (most of them polite). I addressed a similar topic previously on this blog when I talked about the conquistador vampires in Ixalan, but I don’t think I’m satisfied with that post. I think we can also talk about how we engage with a text, and how we engage with a text like Magic: the Gathering specifically. This is a lot to cover, and it may end up getting trimmed down, or I may succumb entirely to the seduction of scope creep. Who can say!

2. an essay on chivalry in its historical contexts, how it’s been used, what purposes it serves in a society (its role, for instance, in sustaining white supremacy in America), and what it means when we encounter it in “sword lesbian” media (the Locked Tomb books, Revolutionary Girl Utena, etc.) This is going to require a great deal of research and I have no idea what my ultimate conclusion will be, but it’s a topic I’m personally very invested in for a whole host of reasons.

3, maybe. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing MtG fic for a while, because they keep wasting potential and I think I could do a better job. If I do, I’ll post it here, but no promises. Fiction isn’t my main genre, and fanfic isn’t something I’ve gotten seriously into before, despite being on tumblr since 2011. But someone needs to do Avacyn justice, so we’ll see.

4. other writing. I’m a lightly-published poet in real life, and I’m currently working on my first chapbook, so maybe I’ll try putting some of it on tumblr, and since this blog’s readership has surpassed my personal, I guess? I’d put it here? Or, possibly, the short horror stories I infrequently write. Again, we’ll see.

5. Obviously I’m going to keep doing the horny Magic card art reviews. I’m not feeling the new stuff right now, but there’s a lot of older sets I haven’t done yet. The Tarkir block is next - and in fact, I think that will be the next post on this blog. I think it’s time we started appreciating Monastery Swiftspear for more than her brutal efficiency in aggro decks, because frankly she’s a snack and this should be acknowledged.

Anyway, thank you all for reading, hit me up if you wanna play some Commander, and I’ll see y’all in the next one!

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dicebound · 1 year ago

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RPG Spotlight

✨ A game I wish more people were talking about.

Free From the Yoke Is a Slavic Fantasy TTRPG by UFO Press based on their other game, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition. The players takes on roles of Houses as well as Characters in that house, dealing with the aftermath of a revolution in which they regained their independence from the Empire. I recently purchased this game and have been diving deep into its rule book and I am terribly impressed with it. It seems like the most comprehensive system for collaboratively building a world with your players and playing both the small and big players in its political sphere. It only has one actually play series and a single review on Youtube. I need more people to know this game! 🌱 An unreleased game I’m looking forward to. I recently backed Dolmenwood by Necrotic Gnome on Kickstarter after seeing it talked about here on Tumblr and covered by QuestingBeast on his Youtube Channel. It's a beautiful OSR Style Fairy Tale RPG inspired by Celtic and Irish Folklore. The artwork is absolutely stunning and the setting has been lovely crafted for over 10 years. Its got highly detailed, useful information to run a game in its world and I literally cannot wait to get my hands on the full version. You can get the free Quick Start here. 🌠 A game with a mechanic I love. I recently got ahold of Household by Two Little Mice when it was on sale on DrivethruRPG and I have been engrossed in reading the books cover to cover. I've already covered it on this blog, but it's basically a High Fantasy Setting about little fairies living in an abandoned house complete with tiny cities, saddle mice, and spider hunters. After reading the Core Rulebook, I discovered a quite lovely aspect of their Aces mechanic. Aces are metacurrency players get and their tied to the four suites (Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, Clubs) as well as a Joker. The Aces can be spent to do things like get an additional die to your dice pool for a check, remove a condition, get a another use out of a once-per-session move etc. The Joker is all that and more with one aspect I found very fascinating. It can be spent by another player to prevent someone else's character from Bowing Out. Bowing Out removes a character from the story for a while and can be as serious as dying depending on the fiction. The Idea of a Meta Currency used to prevent character "death" that can only be used for others was really fascinating to me and I'm looking forward to seeing it in play.

You can get the pay-what-you-want Quick Start rules here. 📖 My favorite class or playbook from a game. We played Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games for the first time a while back, using the critically acclaimed Sailors on the Starless Sea adventure. It was my first time encountering the concept of the 0th-level funnel, in which you each player controls 3 or even 4 no-class no-powers peasants, such as farmers, chicken chasers, and cheese makers, and tries to take their 1st level in adventurer without dying. We had 15 characters overall and lost all but 3 of them by the end and it was a BLAST. So, I'm gonna say 0th Level Classless is my favorite class from a game and I'd like to see more system implement this. I was begging to play more DCC by the end. Free Quick Start Rules here. 🌺 A game with stunning layout or visual design. Frontier Scum by Games Omnivorous is the first thing that came to mind. It was the 2023 Silver Ennie Winner for Best Layout & Design and it absolutely deserved it. Frontier Scum is an Acid Punk Weird West Rules-Light Western TTRPG inspired by Mork Borg. It is an absolute blast to play with wild and weird characters but the book's layout is absolutely stunning. It really looks like a diegetic chapbook from the setting complete with odd ads and interesting locals laid out in a similar fashion to an old-timey newspaper. It is an overall treat to look at.

💡 A game that inspired my own creative process. I tend not to play an RPG if it doesn't creatively inspire me, but I'm going to call out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition by Cubicle 7 as it is the system my group is currently playing as we work through the Evil Within Campaign. Starter Set Here. I was very inspired by this game's "Class" system, in which you're very likely to start off as a Rat Catcher or a Servant but slowly work you way into being a Knight of the White Wolf or a Duelist. It feels like the best of both worlds between classes as jobs and classes as feature grab-bags. I desperately want to see this type of profession system implemented into an more OSR style game or a PbtA Game, or even base DnD, the longshot that it may be. It inspired me to start conceiving how I might make such a thing a reality and really consider which games I plan to run might benefit from said system.

🔥 A game designer whose whole design corpus I admire.

City of Mist by Son of Oak Games is just an all around impressively design game and piece of narrative fiction. The core idea is that all the players are living in a world covered by the mist, which obscures the supernatural happenings of the world. Additionally, they're all vessels for legendary stories and powers, walking around and influence by the tales. We're talking a journalist rift of Don Quixote, a guttersnipe rift of Little Red Riding Hood, a Mob Boss rift of Hades, etc. Their Theme Book, Logos vs Mythos, and Power Tags system is so versatile that you could build literally anything with it and get a mechanically balanced, narrative focused and interesting character. It can be a bit difficult to get your head around it at first, but once you do you'll likely find City of Mist as revelatory as I did. Free Quick Start Rules Here. 🔮 One of my favorite memories playing a game.

After a decade of playing all sorts of TTRPGs its so hard to call out a single memory. I'll call out a more recently one, that occurred Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu 7e system in which we played the one-shot adventure the Lightless Beacon. Quick Start Rules Here.

My Character was Horse Driver and Trick Shooter by Trade in an Wild West Show (look it up, it's a real thing). She was also a Catholic. Myself and another PC were being chased by fish men after they'd swarmed and killed our other companion. We had no way off the island, but saw a boat in the distance rowing towards us. When we signaled for help, it was then that it tried to turn around. I was very nervous about shooting an innocent person and it was only after my GM assured me that the rower was also a fishman that I proclaimed, in character, "Wait, You aren't made in the image of God!" and shot the fishman dead where he sat. We all broke out in raucous laughter and we still quote the phrase from time to time.

#ttrpgs #call of cthulhu 7e #city of mist #free from the yoke #legacy - life among the ruins 2e #warhammer fantasy roleplay 4e #dungeon crawl classics #dolmenwood #household ttrpg #osr game #indie ttrpg

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finishinglinepress · 8 months ago

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: This body was never made by Tara Propper

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/this-body-was-never-made-by-tara-propper/

This body was never made is a meditation on #grief and its attendant fears surrounding the #body – the body’s frailty, lineage, and legacy. Its #poems paint portraits of #maternal #loss, of a fractured #family, of nature’s eloquence, and of transcendental beauty. While This body was never made does not solve the problem of death, it embraces the “night sounds” that accompany an awareness of the body’s temporality, resolving in the chapbook’s final lines, “There is nothing in this room but shapes of us—amorphous/organs ascending and descending underneath the bed sheets.” In this collection, still-life speaks, seascapes listen, and math provides counsel, reminding us that #life exists before and beyond the body.

Tara Propper has earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English. Her poetry has appeared in the Southampton Review, Janus Unbound, Literature Today, Ekstasis Magazine, Shuili Magazine, Taj Mahal International Literary Journal, Moveable Type, Vagabond City Press, and P – Queue. Her scholarly work has been published in Composition Forum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Resources for American Literary Study. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler.

PRAISE FOR This body was never made by Tara Propper

Cerebral, lyrical, witty, loving and grief-worn, Tara Propper’s life-infusing poems in the collection, This body was never made, reveal an immense talent, a rare gift to the world of poetry. In a sky of many, Propper is singular. The poem “Seascape at 4:42 PM” concludes: “One chiseled cloud makes a metonymy/ of itself. Cotton mammals lurk above/ both pure and untrue. /4:43 PM drops/its un-blessings. It’s the ugliest of day–/and most aware.” Propper’s poems are sinuous tracings that unnerve the tick of the clock; a lot happens between 4:42 PM and 4:43 PM, a lot that is “most aware.”

–Star Black, author of three books of sonnets: Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood; a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas

Tara Propper’s This body was never made tests the precision and range of mathematical concepts in particular and, more broadly, any intellectual construct we use to understand the stunning input of our senses. Can a fractal describe a pregnant female body? A miscarriage? Rage? Death? This body was never made also tests the language with which we express these concepts, using rhymes, chimes, puns and syntactical play to push words to their limits: “Outnumbered, she let the numb root.” The raw power of these poems comes from the pressure they are under to bridge the rational and the anything but.

–Julie Sheehan, author of Orient Point and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise and Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, NY

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

#poetry #flp authors #preorder #flp #poets on tumblr #american poets #chapbook #chapbooks #finishing line press #small press

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roses-and-split-open-peaches · 1 year ago

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Faces of Babalon - Mishlen Linden (editor)

The Faces of Babalon is a collection of essays written by a small group of cis women that have connected with the deity in a meaningful way. The essays are brief, not more than 30 pages and self-described as a chapbook, and bracketed by channelled messages from D. Koons.

The authors are a mixed bag. Assuming I have found the right people: Linda Falorio was an artist that created The Shadow Tarot as well as a psychotherapist (according to an obituary), Soror Chen does not exist online as far as I could find, Mishlen Linden is a fine artist that mixes spirituality with sculpture and has contributed to other books on Babalon, Nema’s name is to vague to find any results, and the main result for Raven Greywalker is an essay on Thelemic sadomasochistic magic rituals (which is fitting with her essay).

The essays are dense with information and all of them are heavily based in a mix of sex magic, the various aspects of Babalon as a figure and as a deity, and with a liberal helping of appropriation of chakras, east Asian concepts, and Kabbalah. In my opinion, the first is the best.

I have read this book twice now, once as a PDF and once as a print copy that I now own. The writing that focuses exclusively on Babalon is intensely interesting and explorative in a way I’ve not seen in other books (yet). It probes unmarked territory in ways of conceptualising the goddess and includes gender expansive and trans readings of Her, as well as being a collection of essays written without the influence or need to cater to cisgender men. One essay plunges into Babalon as a sex worker - something often alluded to in other writings but shied away from confirming or exploring deeper.

A few essays are intensely critical of Crowley & his attempts at constructing Babalon as a goddess that is both liberated but submissive to men, a welcome read considering some writings on Her.

I do not recommend this book at all for beginners to metaphysical or religious practice, since the appropriation is mixed in with non-appropriative writings on Babalon and may be hard to parse in parts (in other parts, it’s incredibly blatant and obvious), however I do recommend it for those experienced in picking appropriation out from a text and interested in different and unique views on Babalon.

posted first on my patreon

#The Faces of Babalon #book review #occult book #babalon #babalon thelema #babalon deity #babalon devotional #babalond

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calamitys-child · 1 year ago

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not a question but since hearing it i have been fucking Obsessed with your “let your fingers find wet fur” poem i am so normal about it holy fuck i love church grims

Thank u omg!!! I've had that character concept at the back of my mind for Years but haven't figured out where to fit it, that piece is hopefully eventually gonna be part of a poetry and short fiction chapbook called Changelings with my own various interpretations of Scottish folklore one day, I was so delighted to find the ideal format for that story with the help of Words With Fangs on Instagram, who I am tentatively in talks with for a potential live show next year x

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chromegnomes · 2 years ago

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AI Art, or:

how I learned to start worrying and loathe the bot

As a writer and artist who initially saw promise in the technology, the current state of AI art (both visual and written) saddens and scares me.

My introduction to AI art wasn't the jeering tech grifters who champion it today. In early 2021 I followed AI Curio, a disabled nonbinary artist who was coding their own AI image generator to allow themself a form of artistic expression after losing the ability to draw. Their program, ZOEtrope, was a lovably janky and difficult-to-use Google Colab form--a far cry from the sleek interfaces of Dall-E and Midjourney.

The work that AI Curio produced with ZOEtrope was fascinating to me: barren hellscapes, impossible monsters, uncanny haloed human forms paired with handwritten lore. All of this was done for the love of art, with a strict anti-exploitation (and anti-crypto) code of ethics.

Sketches of the Next World

In March 2020, recently laid off due to the pandemic, I released Sketches of the Next World, a chapbook of erasure poetry about faith, doubt, and death, blacked out from the pages of Near Death Experience books. Sketches is held together by ten numbered "Sketch" poems which paint surreal and upsetting afterlife scenes, and I hope to eventually release a full-length version in which the Sketch poems are accompanied by actual sketches. So when I first encountered ZOEtrope, I thought I'd found the perfect medium: what better to pair with off-putting blackout poetry about heaven than sterile, off-putting AI heavenscapes?

Critics of AI art point out that the AI is not capable of generating anything consciously, but can only regurgitate what it thinks you want from a statistical average of existing art that it's been "trained" on. For me, this was the point! I saw, and still see, fascinating artistic potential in the conversation between human and machine, and the alienating strangeness of religious art produced by a robot with no concept of God or the soul.

This is, of course, not the primary or intended use case of AI image generation. The actions and intentions of the software's most prominent developers and cheerleaders have killed my hope for the medium's artistic potential.

Very few of its users are interested in creating capital-A Art that interrogates the medium itself; most tutorials and demonstrations of its power highlight its ability to mimic the glossy look of professional illustration to save time and money. But to this day, when I see someone say "AI art isn't art," my knee-jerk reaction is that they're half-wrong; an AI can't make "art," but a human operator could make art with it, if they wanted to. It just takes more effort and intention than typing "beautiful landscape busty woman by [artist name] trending on artstation."

I am not optimistic that AI Art will ever move past this point, however, especially as the increasingly loud and hostile attitude of its advocates chases off anyone who might be interested in using it from a place of artistic curiosity rather than a race to the bottom of “passive income” grifts.

“Good Enough” Machine Slop

When AI art started to break into the mainstream a bit more, at least on twitter, I thought that my fellow artists' fears of being replaced were overblown, and said as much. I'd been playing with ZOEtrope for a good while by then, and I knew it was FAR from easy to get good results out of it, and even then, the "good" results were always muddy and impressionistic, not up to the standards of professional illustration. Early DALL-E output didn't dissuade me from this stance; the startup bros who bragged that it would replace human artists were fully incapable of seeing the flaws in its output. I went out of my way to point out the jarring inconsistencies in DALL-E "art" wherever they popped up, and they were surprised every time. DALL-E Mini, apparently unrelated, only made me feel more vindicated in this by outputting 9 murky images that roughly approximated the input prompt, rather than one even passable piece.

Based on the shortcomings of the existing software, I predicted that AI art would blow over quickly as people realized that, without human intentionality, the programs would never be aware enough of what they're drawing to produce quality work. I predicted that we may be in for a few months to a year of companies pushing "good enough" AI art products before AI generation became, to consumers, a mark of corner-cutting and poor quality.

I'm still not certain I was wrong about that. Even as AI art becomes more saturated than I expected, the most advanced programs remain incapable of drawing hands, and their results become incomprehensible when asked to draw more than a simple landscape or portrait. But I underestimated three things:

The speed with which programs like DALL-E and Midjourney would become very easy to use for quick generation of passable (at a glance) outputs;

How mainstream and inescapable AI art and the surrounding discourse would become;

How demoralizing it would be to live through that predicted period of corporate devaluation of artists' labor.

Now, artists, if this next section angers you, please stick with me. I promise there's a BUT coming.

The Fetishization of “Effort”

Part of what has made this discourse so demoralizing is the vitriol and line-drawing that, backed into a corner with their livelihoods on the line, my fellow artists have been driven to. AI Curio, whom I consider one of the few "ethical" AI artists, has been chased off twitter by a constant stream of death threats, gory DMs, and doxxing, in what I can only see as a classic case of Trashed Bathrooms.

Beyond that (possibly isolated) instance, I keep seeing artists I respect reinventing definitions of "art" barely removed from far-right "degenerate art" talking points, or spinning up definitions of "art theft" adjacent to those of DMCA vultures or teens on deviantart complaining about "color palette theft." I’ve already seen plenty of takes that define art by the effort and skill required to produce it, going so far as to say that photography is not an art, rolling back decades of modern and postmodern art theory to make a desperate point.

I understand why. This is murky territory. The tech startups creating these programs are running roughshod over what was previously a kind of honor-system digital commons, with art shared freely under the assumption of good faith. Now, any art posted online is under threat of being taken to train a program to emulate your style for use by faceless suits who would like to use your art without compensation. Being taken advantage of in this way shatters trust. In the absence of preexisting progressive talking points against this kind of betrayal, people fall back on traditionalist ideas of art as "expressive of the human soul" or maximalist concepts of "intellectual property" that would make a Disney lawyer blush.

I don't want to make art in the world implied by these arguments. I love the public domain, I love the creative commons, I love the spirit of sharing that has previously flourished in so many artistic communities. If I could keep myself housed and fed in the process, I would give away every story and game I ever produce for free. And I don't think there's any way to define "theft" such that it includes "my drawing of an apple was part of a dataset used to train an AI to understand the concept of An Apple" without drawing hard fences around intellectual property in a way that benefits wealthy copyright abusers more than any living artist.

BUT.

I'm just not convinced that the way these programs use their data is meaningfully different from illicit tracing or uncredited photobashing.

Write Me a Story Like “The Call of Cthulhu”

In my opening paragraph, I mentioned that I had concerns not just about AI-generated images, but AI-generated writing as well. In addition to ZOEtrope, I've spent a decent amount of time playing with OpenAI's GPT-3 Playground. Initially, I just wanted in on the fad of making it write bespoke "greentexts" about silly topics, but eventually I started feeding it scraps of my poetry and unfinished novels.

The latter results were concerning. Its prose was both largely unrelated to my prompts and also a little TOO coherent, in a way that made me suspect it must be regurgitating large sections of existing works. To test this further, knowing that the full text of this story existed on the web and could easily be part of the AI's training data, I fed it the first few sentences of HP Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

In response, it gave me the first paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. Every time. No matter how I tweaked the output settings, it spat entire paragraphs of the story back out, and then refused to innovate. It either hit a dead end or gave me more Lovecraft, verbatim, a word or two changed at most. Disheartened, I looked up some of the funniest phrases from greentexts and tweets the bot had written me, and found that they were frequently also taken verbatim from other places on the web.

I stopped playing with GPT-3 after that. I'd hoped to use it for the same purpose as AI-generated visual art, a curated conversation between human and machine, and now I couldn't trust that anything it "created" would be mine to use. I feared that the same problem may arise with visual AI art as well, and tentatively stopped using it.

“Everyone Copies”

Proponents of AI art love to claim that it doesn’t steal art, because it doesn’t “store” the images it’s trained on. What does this mean, really? The machine analyzes images to “learn” what certain objects look like, and then recreates something like that when prompted, but what data is kept in this “knowledge”? Even a JPG is ultimately just a set of code that tells a computer how to assemble an image. Given how closely many AI images resemble specific existing artworks and photographs, there is clearly data retained which is referenced when the AI creates its version. Even in my own experiments, which I consciously limited to public domain training data, I saw bits and pieces of classic paintings.

At this point, defenders will claim that “all art is inspired by and references other art.” This comparison is fundamentally in bad faith. Machine learning algorithms are not “inspired” in the same way a human artist is, and saying as much requires anthropomorphizing a bundle of code that was produced by a human programmer with the purpose of analyzing and recreating artwork, with no will of its own. The process may be infinitely more complex than copying and pasting, but in both cases, an image is broken down into code and then reconstructed with no human intentionality involved.

Even if that anthropomorphism is granted, humans are fully capable of plagiarism that goes beyond “inspiration.” Human artists, driven by envy, laziness, or tight deadlines, often trace others’ artwork, and are only caught when telltale signs of the original remain in the new work, the same as AI. “Everyone copies” does not end the conversation--the degree and manner of copying are all-important.

I am not a machine learning expert. Right now, I have seen enough AI-generated text and artwork which retains recognizable chunks of its source material to know that these programs absolutely do plagiarize. It may be possible that, in the future, they will become advanced enough to “understand” the objects they draw more independently of their source images.

Even in this hypothetical future, I have come to believe that this technology has more bad applications than good.

Maximally Efficient C O N T E N T Production

The Ammaar Reshi thread, which I linked earlier, is emblematic of a massive problem: the ease with which AI art algorithms generate okay-ish work leads to a frenzied drive to create glitzy pictures that serve no purpose other than hopefully snaring a buyer. Portfolio websites are currently completely overloaded with AI generated “artwork,” with hundreds of people creating thousands of images with the hope of impressing, well, whom exactly? The current gold rush feels similar to the NFT bubble, with “passive income” enthusiasts thrilled at the prospect of automatic content generation without a pause to ask what market may actually exist for automated content. The only plausible buyer of a book written by an AI is a mark who doesn’t realize what they’ve purchased.

The other obvious use case for this technology is, of course, cutting human artists out of the grunt work which currently provides the bulk of their pay. I had thought that the poor quality of most AI artwork might prevent this outcome, which was why I believed that fear over lost jobs was overblown; however, this has apparently not stopped publishers like Tor from using AI artwork on the covers for some of their biggest authors, even when said artwork has massive flaws which require human correction.

In a better world, this might be exciting, freeing artists to work on their own projects rather than working for hire. The fact that we live in a world where any industry becoming automated is a threat rather than a relief is one of the great tragedies of the last few centuries. I, personally, have pursued freelance work because I need to make art, but the present economy makes finding the time to pursue my craft impossible unless I am paid for it.

I do not expect non-artists to care about this. Most people are indifferent, a few recognize the danger but see it as inevitable, and a very vocal minority is giddy at the thought of artists being “put in their place” for daring to expect compensation for their labor. I do not believe that human artists being replaced by AI is inevitable, but I do not expect it to be stopped by goodwill toward artists.

Conclusion

My only hope is the fact that, from what I can see, normal people DO see businesses using AI art as lazy corner-cutting. Consumer demand for pretty pictures may drive the AI art boom, but consumers of all kinds are generally hypercritical of anything that smacks of laziness, justified or otherwise. Outside of art twitter and Midjourney hype threads, most people seem to regard claims to have “created” art using AI prompts as tantamount to lying.

So I hope that the AI Content Ouroboros will fully swallow its own tail before it irreparably damages the art industry. In the meantime, I would like to never have to hear about it again, but the algorithms of every website I use are intent on forcing it upon me--more reason to hate algorithms.

#the final count here is 2461 words #i hope getting this out of my head will set me free

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bettsfic · 2 years ago

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craft essay a day #5

my response to this one maybe derailed a little.

"On Imagination" by Mary Ruefle

beginner | intermediate | advanced | masterclass

filed under: process, poetry

summary

first i must describe to you the physical object that is this essay:

it is a chapbook (published by Sarabande Books, an indie poetry press i really admire), which means it is more or less a staple-bound pamphlet. there is a goat on the cover. inside, on each even-numbered page, is a picture: an ocean wave, a lettuce leaf, the night sky, a bed, 3 fish, a bird in a tree, a pie, 4 dyed eggs, a human ribcage, grass, trees, a slug, and the goat that is on the cover, whose presence permeates the essay.

on the back of the chapbook, instead of blurbs, there is a quote in very small font:

"My imagination was roaming at sunset and placed his bare foot on a blade of withered grass, which ran into it like a thorny needle, and injured him."

this quote appears not to be attributed, which makes me think i should know what it's from, and i don't.

Ruefle has a collection of essays called Madness, Rack, & Honey (published by Wave Books, another great poetry press) which is one of my favorite craft books and i highly recommend it. it'll be a while before i summarize the chapters, though, since i only recently finished reading it.

i've been lucky enough to attend several of her lectures, and although i got a lot out of them, when i go back and look at my notes, they are utterly indecipherable:

partly this is because, as you can see, my handwriting is not legible. but it's also partly because this particular lecture was kinda bonkers. i've been waiting for her to publish it in written form but i don't think she has yet. "Hell's Bells" is my second favorite of her lectures (Ruefle's lectures and essays are one and the same), my favorite being "On Fear" which i'm sure i'll write about in a future post.

still laughing at "does the artist...become time?" with the star beside it (which in my notes always indicates an Action Item, so in 2018 i clearly intended to Do Something about becoming time). also "put a hole in meaning - give space, aerate?" then in pink, "(how?)" i also apparently intended to Do Something about "Beginning of universe was striking of tremendous bell."

another lecture of hers i attended was a recreation of John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," and i am ashamed to say that it took me so, so long to realize it was literally a lecture on nothing. i wrote like 3 pages of notes and about a half hour in, i flipped through the pages and realized literally nothing of substance was being said. and i was furious. like, why am i wasting my time here? and i realized i was supposed to be having a reaction to it, and thinking about the nature of the concept of a lecture at a creative writing workshop, and what am i even doing here, etc.

in retrospect, that spoke well to the "Hell's Bells" lecture, which, for me, was all about how listening is sometimes just about hearing, and not trying to make meaning of all that we hear. as someone with an audio processing problem who has to attend a lot of readings and can't understand a word of them, it made me feel a lot better. like i could attend a reading just to appreciate the voice of the writer (which Ruefle likened to a bell), and not what's being said.

at the end of the lecture on nothing, Ruefle took questions, and responded to each of them with the answers provided in the original lecture. it was quite a time.

back to "On Imagination."

in any Ruefle essay/lecture, there is not much to summarize because they function more or less as poems: each is a series of thoughts or anecdotes on a general topic, and never firmly declare their point. however, on the first page, she does make a pretty big declaration:

"I am going to tell you now, before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one."

to me, that's the kind of statement that's so simple it seems almost meaningless, but i know if i consider it long enough, i'll reach a deeper conclusion about it. since i finished reading this essay 37 minutes ago, i have no such deeper conclusion as of yet.

i appreciate that on page one, she also points out that thought is only ever an interpretation of reality, and words exist only to conjure meaning in the imagination. when a person says the word "tree" to another person, the recipient of that word can mentally conclude or conjure the object that is a tree. we can always refer to a tree, but in speaking it or thinking it, it does not become real.

she declares that imagination is not necessarily good; imagining things can hurt us as equally as help us, and we don't really have control of it.

"...the imagination has its own life and its own autonomy, the imagination is not what you play with, the imagination plays with you."

she introduces an anecdote in which a poet, after a reading, is asked, "is that a real poem, or did you make it up?" and concludes her point with a fact that punched me right in the face:

"Real things are made things."

she goes on to talk about an elementary school reading primer from 1880, Ukranian dyed eggs, Johnny Cash, a misinterpretation of the bible by Keats, and a goat in Emily Dickenson's attic. each of these, somehow, connect and make sense, yet i cannot attempt to do so in a (not so) brief summary.

"Imagination, deep in each of us, can give us what we need and want, that which we dream of, the reality of love and communion, help in our tired loneliness."

yeah :(

she notes that many believe some people have more imagination than others, and that's why there are artists and not-artists, but she claims we all have the same amount of imagination; it's just that some of us don't discriminate between "imaginative and unimaginative acts" and that paying close attention to the mundane "paradoxically opens a new door to the imaginative."

i am having trouble figuring out how the end of the essay is about imagination. she talks about how, in her old age, she feels isolated in her interests, and that because she has a limited future, she's only motivated to dwell in the present.

"All I can tell you is that at long last I am myself and free, even if isolated, and I am happy when I want to be and sad when I feel like it, and about the only thing that troubles me is knowing how many people on earth do not have that privilege...and to these I bow and for these I pray."

my thoughts

this got kind of personal, so i'm putting it under a cut.

i rated this essay advanced, not because i think it's hard to understand, but that it goes beyond the work of beginner and intermediate essays, which focus primarily on mechanics and concepts and how to get the work down on paper. this essay makes no real claim about writing, and i imagine wouldn't help anyone looking for advice on how to write.

a few days ago i wrote about Smiley's introduction in 13 Ways to Look at the Novel. that, coupled with the Ruefle essay, have fucked me up a little. in Smiley's intro, she talks about how she always had one foot in the fictional worlds of her novels at the cost of her presence in reality. in Ruefle's essay, she talks about the uncontrollability of imagination. i've never considered myself a creative person; i think in expected patterns and can't really devise anything truly novel. that's why i consider myself more a teacher than a writer--i'm better at fostering creativity in others than developing it in myself. i am, however, an imaginative person. i never stop imagining. i'm so imaginative that existing in reality is sometimes unbearable. even things that make me happy--seeing my family, hanging out with friends, reading a book--come second to dwelling (drowning?) in my imagination. i have to pry myself away to go do those things. when i'm really into something i'm working on, i can write over 10k in a day. i can write from the second i wake up at 9am to the moment, usually at 3am or so, my brain can no longer make clear sentences, stopping only throughout to eat a spoonful of peanut butter and maybe reply to a text.

these are the kinds of days i live for. they make me truly happy. and yet there's such an enormous cost to them: i'm beginning to have hand problems, and i have so little control of writing that i can't force myself to stop and let it heal (i did upgrade to an ergonomic keyboard and mouse but they're not helping as much as i'd hoped); i'm no nutritionist, but i'm pretty sure 3 tablespoons of peanut butter a day and walking fewer than 100 steps is not particularly healthy; and big picture, i want to get married and have kids, and that's not going to happen if i'm spending all my time in my imagination with fictional characters getting married and having kids. and if i somehow against all odds do get married and have kids, will i be able to be fully present with them, or will i always in the state i am now, counting down the seconds when i can escape reality and return to the peace of my own head?

i think this is a conflict i'll always have, because ultimately i'm writing work i'm proud of to an audience that (i hope) appreciates it. writing and being read is the greatest privilege i can imagine. but i'm also always thinking about my dad, who died at 59 after enduring years of agonizing pain and a lifetime of trauma and depression, and how he never got to do a fraction of the things he wanted. i imagine myself at the same age less than 30 years from now with the same fate, if i am even so lucky to make it to that far. i'm in this between space of the hopefulness of being young, of the gross entitlement of believing things will keep getting better for me; and the hopelessness of ptsd, the kernel of doubt that remains even after so long in recovery, that joy and success are never owed to me. rationally i know both of these to be true, that there will be some good and some bad, and whatever happens will never turn out as i expect. and yet that doesn't abate the conflict or quell the fear that the conflict creates.

it is probably a bad idea to write about my deepest fears and insecurities on a blog with thousands of followers. it's easy to be misinterpreted and taken out of context. honesty is totally antithetical to branding or gaining a following. and yet i think i'd rather be known than not. i think i'd always prefer to take a risk in the hope of being understood.

i'm sorry i have no conclusions or advice or anything helpful to say here. but imagination is a big thing. it's the biggest thing. in allowing us the power to interpret and create, it might be the only thing.

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#cead #process #poetry

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