Life is a lot and I suck at being timely, but here are the May Patreon designs for our pin club (top-Dark Tower inspired) and sticker club (bottom-Mermay) BEFORE May ends!
Sign up before Friday to help us create these pieces of art and get them into your hot little hands!
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Book recommendations on self-growth and confidence?
Hi love! Here are some of my favorites that come to mind:
Book Recommendations for Self-Growth & Confidence:
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Atomic Habits by James Clear
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
Boundary Boss: The Essential Guide to Talk True, Be Seen, and (Finally) Live Free by Terri Cole
The Confidence Formula: May Cause: Lower Self-Doubt, Higher Self-Esteem, and Comfort In Your Own Skin by Patrick King
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest
Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside Out by Kindra Hall
48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene
How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray
Becoming The One by Sheleana Aiyana
Radical Acceptance: Awakening The Love That Heals Fear and Shame by Tara Brach
Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
Unbound: A Woman’s Guide To Power by Kasia Urbaniak
Pussy: A Reclamation by Regena Thomashauer
Confidence & Assertive Skills for Women by Angelina Williams
A Single Revolution by Shani Silver
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard
Like She Owns the Place by Cara Alwill Leyba
Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliot
Hope this helps xx
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as a person on the inside of the animation industry, are there signs that we might be heading to another dark age of animation like the 1980s (e.g. animation is regulated to just glorified toy commercials or dark fantasy movies)?
"Kid Vid" regulations mean you can't advertise for stuff kids might buy from within a show anymore. Generally, you can't even have (say) Yogi Bear wearing a shirt with his best friend BooBoo's face on it as a gag, because "what if someone made that shirt one day?" Then it would be a retroactive ad, I guess? I'm not schooled in reverse-time law like studio lawyers, so I can't really say. Still, it's almost impossible to get even a fictional product into a kid's show these days, so I think the 1980s will probably stay in their timeline. At least in that way.
I do think a bit of a "Dark Age" is upon us, though. Maybe just a small one. Just a wee little snip of a Dark Age is all.
As far as I can glean, there are going to be precious few animated shows coming out over the next couple of years because not much was picked up during the pandemic. There are only a few things being developed here and there, and I'd wager that those properties "win" simply by existing in a competition-free environment. It takes a long time to produce animation, so almost anything greenlit right now is looking at a full year for turnaround. If you talk to people in the industry right now about jobs, they use words like "wastelend" and "ramen noodles".
Then you've got A.I., of course. The other night I was having dinner with a friend and I found myself in the A.I. conversation I always imagined myself having one day-- the one where we're talking with some immediacy about what the rest of our futures look like as artists, because we know they're not going to look the same ever again. It was pretty cool in a William Gibson sort of way, but I honestly didn't expect to be having that conversation for another decade. Turns out A.I. is becoming a problem right now.
I've already talked about the "art theft" angle, and that's not the problem I'm speaking about here. The problem I'm talking about is the "what do I do when what I do becomes trivial?" problem. If anyone can make a TV show or movie in a week or a day using AI assistance, who determines what gets seen? Networks, I'd imagine, would become redundant. You don't need to fork over $15 a month for Netflix if you can make Netflix-quality content yourself. And if you can't make anything decent even with A.I. assistance, surely someone on the internet can. There would be an incredible glut of content to choose from, so again... who decides what gets seen? An algorithm, probably. Who owns the algorithm?
Peak Dark Age will be the time period when the networks realize that they're going to die, and sink all of their resources into forcing their own survival on the rest of us. I imagine massive layoffs (you don't need multiple writers or artists or support staff when you've got the right tools.) Studios will want to own the tools (of course) and/or suppress the use of those tools by anyone who might want to cut into their profits. Expect to see "A.I. is just too dangerous for the public to utilize, so it needs to be left in the capable hands of corporations". Expect to see customizable Batmans, the ability to put your mom in any Star Wars, and the serialized fever-dreams of billionaires.
I think that's the next 5-10 years. And while that's happening, the tools will keep getting better and better until literally anyone can sit down, ask for an Oscar-worthy part-rom-com/part action movie starring a twenty-five year old Steve McQueen and and eighty year old Daniel Radcliffe rescuing Air Bud from the Death Star, and then watch the resulting film with some degree of satisfaction. There'll come a point when content of any visual, auditory, and written complexity can be generated on-the-fly, and the traditional limits of budgets and schedules will just be gone.
It's easy to spin off into fantasy and try to guess exactly what's coming. I could probably spin on that all day. But what I know is that the future of the animation industry won't look anything like what I've become accustomed to. And maybe that's okay because what I've become accustomed to looks nothing like the industry I started in. Things change, and you roll with the punches. Thanks to the self-fulfilling dystopian prophecy we find ourselves in, just about everyone on the planet is finding themselves rolling with the punches coming from the Powerful Greedy. That's less a "me problem"
and more a planet-wide problem we should probably all sit down and hash out, like, yesterday.
My immediate problem as an artist (and yours if you're an artist too) is figuring out how to get your ideas seen in a world where the amount of entertainment content is exploding exponentially. Especially if you're the sort of artist who needs to eat and live somewhere.
So yeah, I think there's going to be just a little peppering of Dark Age coming up. But in every time of change, there are opportunities. Hey, I'm down for an animated Dark Fantasy movie. Let's do this!
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