#i learned a lot about perspective from this year

[icyfox62]

I didn’t get sarcasm from your response at all and if I did, I’d just have to deal with it. People have emotions and it seems you’re passionate about this. You shouldn’t have to sound like a robot to get your point across. I know exactly what you mean about sounding a certain type of way on the internet. I type so much and people assume I’m being a know it all about it. And the thing is, I feel like I have to type so much because even when you directly spell out what you’re trying to say, people still will just you say meant something else.

Also, I’m not viewing this from a jewish perspective. I’m not jewish. I’ve just spent the past year or so learning to better identify things like antisemitism because I’d been severely lacking in that department before.

And, you’re right. A lot of “criticism” about Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance was coming from twitter users and considering the echo chamber it is now, I understand your reaction. Black us americans are still the number one target of hate crimes in the us. It’s so hard to tell if someone has legitimate points when you spend so much time on the defense because of racism. However, when op said “super bowl fans,” I interpreted it as “if you’re watching the Super Bowl, you should know that Kendrick has a history of doing these things.” Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems you might have interpreted that as “he’s actively doing it during the 2025 Super Bowl performance.” Reading back over this post, it doesn’t seem like anyone here said he used the songs during the Super Bowl. Just a warning that this is who Kendrick is.

The use of the voicemail in the song is not the only proof. The voicemail definitely started ringing bells but it’s not all that’s out here. The claim that Kendrick is associated with the BHI is because of his own words. During the Rolling Stones interview I posted earlier in this post, Kendrick did express that he found some truth in the words of the BHI. That’s why I was saying this isn’t some surface level interaction with the BHI, he’s admitted to a least being partially aware of and finding truth in the teachings. Also, I remember Kodak doing a 2022 interview saying “Me and Kendrick, we got a lot of little things in common that people probably don’t wanna understand. Both of us, we Geminis. Both of us are Hebrew Israelites.” Not that we should 100% believe everything Kodak says about Kendrick, but once again, Kendrick isn’t denying this. And I’m not saying that Kendrick needs to share his entire life. However, and maybe it’s just me, but if somebody said I was associated with a group like the BHIs, especially when I have previous admitted to having knowledge about some of their principles, I’m coming out and being firm on my stance.

You’re right though. This is an extremely long post. I’m also sorry all that happened with some of your followers. The constant on edge feelings of distrust and betrayal are really taking a toll on a lot of people. Going forward, I really hope you get to engage in more conversations about topics that you’d like and not because racists grew even more comfortable after trump’s reelection.

Fun fact for superbowl enjoyers! Kendrick Lamar hates Jews almost as much as Kanye does, he just doesn't use Hitler to do so!

[b-skarsgard]

Bill Skarsgård in King Magazine

Nosferatu-current Bill Skarsgård on anemic roles, Mongolian throat singing and comfortable clothes.

This interview is a publishing of an interview first released by Café on Dec 26, 2024

Full article and links under the cut.

(translated via google)

Do you still feel doubts before every acting role?

- Yes, it's a real wrestling match before every project and the wrestling match gets more aggressive the more extreme the character I play. This role, as Count Orlok in Nosferatu, is the most extreme I've done. It was a transformation into something so far beyond myself that I didn't know if I could handle it. I wasn't sure if I could go that far, let alone make it true. There were a lot of nerves and a lot of self-doubt. But I never feel it when we're filming.

I work hard during the preparations to be as free as possible when we're getting ready. Count Orlok is also a character who isn't insecure for a second throughout the entire film. He just oozes self-confidence, control and dominance.

The voice is very prominent in the role - how did you achieve it?

- I worked with an opera singer to get my voice as deep as possible. My brother Gustaf visited the filming and sat in one of the chairs in front of a monitor with headphones. Our microphones were on between takes and all he heard was a dark roar. (Bill leans back on the couch and imitates a monstrous half-singing.) I was sitting and doing some kind of Mongolian neck-swing to activate the voice and Gustaf said: "What the hell are they wearing and snoring here?" Haha.

- It was a pitch-black hole to dive into the psyche of this character.

He's an occult magician, a 350-year-old vampire - trying to get into his perspective on the world and the universe was quite dark.

Do roles tend to rub off on you?

- Yes. you spend twelve hours a day in some form of madness and illusion. In relation to this monster, it was impossible for it not to fade.

What stuck?

- Some things that are far too personal to tell, haha. I was very grateful when we finished the project and I had to leave it.

Then it felt like Orlok's claws finally released my soul.

Is that usually the case?

- After working on the role of Pennywise in It, I had very strange dreams that were about my relationship with the character and that it was me. There was something very revealing about that role. But with Orlok, it was different once we finished filming: When he left me, it was just ice cold, it was completely silent.

I am very grateful for that.

Acting is not said to be a successful recipe for personal happiness.

- I don't think acting is good for mental stability. That said, this is also what I'm going through, I'm going through the pain a little bit.

Got it.

- It might get better with age. As a young actor, it's more about life and death and you almost take a cold on yourself. I can look at my dad. who has a healthy attitude towards acting. I actually talked to him about this recently. He told me about his role in Godafton, Herr Wallenberg. It was a film where he almost took a cold on himself.

After that, he didn't film for two years, and when he returned, he found a healthier attitude towards work. At the same time, I don't know how many happy people I meet overall. Everyone has their own shit that they go through and we live in very strange times. It's confusing and messy in some ways.

You've become a father of toddlers yourself - when do you usually call your own dad about life's challenges these days: about family life or acting?

- He has eight children so there's a lot to learn from his fatherhood. haha. Things you should and shouldn't do. Then it's especially when we're a family where so many people have the same job, I never feel alone in that way. You have people who understand what you're going through.

You dress nicely and recently fronted a campaign for H&M - do you have an interest in fashion?

- I'm not someone who thinks of outfits for every day or goes looking for bargains in vintage stores. My expression is not clothes in that way.

But I think fashion is fun, and clothes can also be a tool like skadis to get into characters. My own style is not that "flashy". I just want to wear comfortable clothes and not have to think about it so much. But I am becoming more and more exposed to the fashion world and can see both the charm and the expression in it. You can be creative in many different ways.

Your fellow actor in Nosferatu - Willem Dafoe - has walked for Prada. Is that something you are keen on?

- I wouldn't mind, he has almost become the face of the whole brand. Prada did a show with Tim Roth, Adrien Brody, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe and all those cool actors.

It was cool, I think.

Today you are one of our biggest international actors - what is the strangest place where you have been recognised?

- I have probably been recognised on every continent I have been to.

Maybe not Asia, but I haven't been there for a long time, so it's very big in Japan as an actor. I started acting in Sweden and thought it was nice to leave the country and not be recognized. At that time, all I had to do was drive to Denmark and I was completely anonymous. I barely remember what it was like anymore. At the same time, it's part of the job.

I live in Södermalm and here the eyebrow lift when I pass by is quite nice. It's my South and I run into my childhood friends all the time, so I'm not anonymous, but I feel like Bill. •

[bloo0o0]

(I don’t normally post on social media let alone tumblr but I need a place to document this so it doesn’t leave my brain) I know a lot of ppl have speculated as to if Rhonda’s body was actually the skeleton or are confused about how police couldn’t find her body but I think people are ignoring the emotional purpose of that scene for Rhonda. I think that after she found out Maddie isn’t actually dead, that she has a body and a life to go back to, she got angry and sad because she doesn’t.

She’s been dead for 60 years and has no way of knowing what happened to her body bc she’s been trapped in that school. I think police did find her body (bc like she was murdered in the middle of the school day and I doubt Mr.Manfredo could’ve hid it without anyone seeing) but she doesn’t know if she was cremated, buried, donated to science, for all she knows her body could’ve been used to create a scientific breakthrough but she’ll never know. Even if they somehow didn’t find it, it’s been rotten and decomposed for decades. Everyone she ever knew is probably dead or is on the brink of death. She has no dorm waiting for her at Berkeley. She is estranged from not only her body but the life she had and was going to have. And she’s bitter and sad!!

I think people ignore that she was one of the first ghosts there. She died in 63’ (abt 5 years after Janet and Mr.Martin?) and she didn’t seem particularly close to them. Even when she was alive she didn’t really have anyone except her guidance counselor who ended up grooming and killing her and her best friend who she thought blamed her for her own death for like 50 years. Because of this she pushes everyone away and feels extremely lonely (bc this is how she has learned she is meant to be bc it keeps her safest). I mean hell when she did try and branch out she was groomed and betrayed AGAIN. Even when dead her teachers moved on fast (and couldn’t bring themselves to talk bad about her murderer) and her classmates mocked her.

Then here comes Maddie. She is likable and connects with everyone easily. (Not saying Maddie has had it easy by any means this is just from Rhonda’s perspective) and now she has a body to go back to. A life and family and friends she gets to be with again. And Rhonda is still wasting away. So she is projecting on that skeleton bc she wants to feel closer to her body. Because if she’s closer to her body she’s becomes more tangible, is closer to the living.

[prapaiwife]

Est recap on today's scene with earn!!

⁃Suddenly met my ex-boyfriend, the person who “used to be” my whole life. If you ask why I’m not angry and still talk to Earn, the answer is because I’m Po. I’m too good. It is so good that I can overlook the bad times and depressions of many years because I was dumped. Even though I did so much for Earn, I still see the good in the bad. I choose to think that if I hadn’t been dumped that day, I wouldn’t have met Them. I wouldn’t have become a director. But I didn’t think about the thought that if I hadn’t been dumped that day, I would have been able to do Earnchop with Earn smoothly like I had planned. I still thanked her for doing that that day. But in reality, from another perspective… the problem that was once big is that it always gets smaller as time passes. Therefore, it’s not strange that I moved on and don’t hold a grudge against Earn (because our lives are so short).

⁃The phrase “We’ve all grown up, right?” for Earn and Po might relate to the relationship of many people (from Po’s perspective only, not Earn’s perspective). It gives a feeling that when time passes, we see that in the past, we were too focused on a lot of things. And then as time passes, We looked at ourselves from another perspective and talked about our experiences. It may not be the same, but for me, it's like these days when I'm working and I get to meet my friends from high school and we talk about our school moments. We talk about our childhood. It's so happy.

⁃But Earn is an unlucky person. He was the same as he was before. It's a shame that Phi Po took 3 years to get to know Earn's true nature. He still had the nerve to come back and ask to use his name as credit to enhance the company's image, even though he didn't really see the value in it. In real life, sometimes God wants to test us by throwing these people into our lives.

And that's the thing I know. Some were annoyed that po forgave him too easily or even gave him the time of day! but when you look at it from a wider lens, and again some really don't care which is your opinion, but for some they see it as life is short why waste time holding grudges. Because for some they don't want the question weighing on them aboyt why me? They don't wanna regret saying i didn't get my closure or wondering will they ever get an answer like po did today. He got the answer and that's that earn didn't change and that's not po problem to care anymore. But he can say that he was able to stand up to him and tell him how he's so much better. Without him, he knows what he deserves cause of what that relationship taught him, and that's all that matters. in life, ppl come and go in seasons, but u learn something, and it's like, as if God is really testing u to see that people will show you who they are eventually it's up to us to remove ourselves from them.

[simonskizm]

I wanna reblog this with a counter-opinion and not to argue the validity of yours- because I honestly felt the same at first.

Now, I'm not elbow deep in Invincible discourse, much less knowledged on the comics. All my information came from the TV series and some vague internet articles. Take my shit with a grain of salt. Also, this might end up gibberish, so bear with me lol.

Now, at first I will admit I was the same. It felt off and weird in the beginning of S3 because that wasn't what I experienced from Cecil or the Guardians myself. What helped me is if you look at this in Cecil's perspective and what he'd experienced with Nolan, he had every right to behave how he did with Mark. Even all badass and stoic, he's still (mostly) human. Sure, the decisions he made weren't all that ethical, much less ones I'd make myself, but he's not wrong about them as shitty as it sounds. "You can either be the good guy, or save the world- you can't do both." He was in the same mindset as Mark in his own youth before imprisonment, and it changed when he realized that the world might be in more danger than he bargained for.

Mark on the other hand, is still practically a kid. He's dealt with so much in such a short time- like, what, 2 years? He's 19 now and 17 when he got his powers and started training. Between then, it was like a lifetime of bullshit came hitting him in the face. Of course his crash outs are justified. But he is still a Viltrumite. His father's race is an aggressive warmonger race- they intentionally are vicious and merciless. When they're angry, the get ANGRY.

That's why Cecil had done the things he did- he doesn't want another Nolan incident. And with Oliver aging so quickly and being partially Viltrumite, he doesn't have the time to learn morals like Mark did. That's another problem Cecil has to work with. I don't know how much you've seen on this season, but Oliver is indeed a problem if Debbie and Mark can't get through to him easily. (Although, so far it seems that Oliver is doing mostly fine in the morality department, so props to him and them fr. Love these guys to death lol)

It's a lot to take in if you don't really know much about just how bad the Viltrumites are. Everyone is scared of them. They are quite literally an unstoppable infestation of near god-like aliens hellbent on taking over the universe.

Now to the Guardians.

Them splitting up was not on my bingo card, but it seemed rational. Most of the team were younger people anyways- Rae, Rudy, Rex, etc. They're all Mark's friends- they're gonna side with him no matter what unless GDA decides otherwise. (Staring at the Immortal and Kate, I am not fond of them.)

I will admit- they all are rational in their own making. They come in to see one of their own being tortured by an unsolicited and invasive device. It's honestly the only thing that could keep Mark at bay since he is far weaker than Nolan but still pretty fucking strong. However- the others know Cecil is doing what he can with what he has (Darkwing, the bots, etc) to help make the world safer. Sure, maybe what he's doing is inethical, but everyone seems to be... less inclined to crime. Cecil's predecessor tried to get that through to him too- and that's why he came to the same conclusion after taking over the prison and reforming most of the guys there.

I have more but my brain took a shit right here lol- if I have more to say, then I'll add. Sorry if my reblog came off weird- I just really like Invincible and discussing shit abt it.

idk if this is a hot take or a widely shared consensus bc i havent been in the invincible fandom until like. yesterday maybe, but can i just say why is everyone suddenly so insane and stupid this season. like their level of rage and violence feels so out of character to me that when mark got all mad about darkwing and the other guy and started going crazy i was straight up convinced that they were about to reveal that overirritability was a symptom of the venom from those centipede things and i was like screaming at the tv the whole time like "why is nobody questioning the giant gaping hole in his chest with weird green goop pouring out of it" and then all of the sudden cecil was being like antagonising against mark for it and then i spent the whole episode just confused af why everyone was acting wild and rash and never using their words or brains to the point that by the end of it i had a headache. like i can reframe it in my head with analysis and stuff in retrospect in order to still be able to enjoy and appreciate the canon of a show i like, but like. rly bad first impressions anyway. i thought they were gonna pull something akin to the art gallery car in infinity train but it just never happened bwuh. and then, the argument between the guardians afterwards just worsened it all because all the dialogue felt like they were just pushing the plot forward, using it as a means to an end to get the guardians to split up, with like little to no regard for the actual characters. and also the way everyone on marks side treated him after all gave like therapyspeak joker i swear. and then the stupid ass unstoppable constant miscommunication rage kept going to with oliver because why the hell were they constantly just yelling at this kid and never putting their words together in any remotely effective way ever. yk honestly maybe its always been kinda like this but i watched it all in like 4 days so the drastic shift felt really noticable to me. idrk. explode me if im wrong

[nightroo]

May or may not have forgotten what I posted here myself months ago so the last post had a few repeats. oops.

Well I know for sure this one won’t because I stopped posting when I started the second semester, which is what this post is about. So the drawing above is the start of working with more complex shapes, using the ones we learned from last semester. This is also where things got interesting, since I could see the potential for architectural drawings.

There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of drawings like these in my sketchbook, I’m gonna show you only the ones I find interesting.

After that we went back a bit for cast shadows, which I have decided are my new mortal enemy in art. A long time ago it was rendering hair, but that’s nothing compared to this.

The amount of calculations you need to do for this and the different formulas for each shape make me wanna rip my hair off. And that’s before getting into more complex shapes.

They're not 100% correct but my teacher said the majority of people won’t notice anything wrong so I shouldn’t worry about it. I won’t until I need it for a personal project, then I’ll get very annoyed again.

After that nightmare I got rewarded with finally using colors to render for the first time!!! I love rendering with colors so I was very excited haha

The copper (right middle sphere) is my absolute favorite, and my teacher really liked it as well.

We also had a small lecture on arrows and ribbons/fabric and we got to render them with colors as well.

For all the colored drawings I used a combination of alcohol markers and colored pencils. The markers melted and blended the pencils and I could use this to mix colors I didn't have. For example, I didn’t have a red marker at all.

After that we had a fun exercise where we needed to either study an object or design our own. The purpose was to use the previous lessons about shapes in perspective, and the rendering of different materials. I went with a gun design, but not just any gun-this one is technically 3 guns, a pistol and an SMG that you can connect and form an assault rifle. So I designed each gun separately (somehow I managed to turn this exercise to designing 3 objects instead of one, leave it to me to make it harder on myself lmao), and thought about how they connect, making sure the chambers kinda align and stuff like that.

I don’t wanna brag but I got the highest grade in the class for this assignment. Mostly because I’m the only one that actually rendered the different materials (or tried to), but also because my teacher liked the idea and thought it was interesting, and something people would actually buy if it was real.

It’s not the best but I literally didn’t have a grey marker so I was pretty limited. I chose a stained-glass theme for some reason, I didn’t want to make it a normal looking gun. The scan made it a bit more contrast-y than it is irl.

After a huge break we came back and had one lesson of silhouettes, something I kinda knew but never went out and made studies of. The challenging part of this was the time limit, at the start we had a minute, but it went down to 30 seconds. We were allowed to go overtime but it wasn't considered good.

On the same lesson, we also had life drawing, using each other as models. We had to get the pose down in one minute, and then take that as a reference for a more detailed drawing. I chose to completely change the context at that point lol

The next lesson was about isometric perspective. I don’t think I’ve actually talked about this here, but I got scammed by a guy who asked me to make him a city island in isometric perspective, then when it came time to pay, he “took a vacation” for two weeks. Came back to tell me he’s definitely gonna pay me. Proceeded to disappear. Anyways I haven’t done isometric from that moment until this lesson, where we were given a prompt word and had to draw an environment following it. I used only colored pencils for this one because I forgot to bring my markers, but it was a nice restriction to only use 12 colors and try to combine them to make the rest. I really enjoyed this one since I got the freedom to make something cool.

(the prompts are top-to-bottom forest, COVID-19, underwater and space) my teacher walked up to my desk to see what I’m doing while I worked on the space one, and he said “you are crazy” every time he passed by. He showed everyone’s work around, and a lot of people liked mine :) The space one is based on a black hole btw, but if it was an eldritch horror.

The last lesson was a time for the teacher to review everyone’s work one by one, so most of the time we were waiting for our turn. He put up a pic of an old camera if any of us wanted to draw it, but I used it as a reference for a building because it reminded me of art deco architecture. After finishing that, I had an idea for a shrine kind of place, inspired by a spot I built for a friend’s minecraft server that we didn’t end up using. And I topped it off with Lykena and Eivrun sketches (that for Eivrun might turn into a full painting when it’s her turn)

The entire year my teacher was occasionally asking me if I’m not getting bored, because we were going through a lot of basics I was obviously proficient at already, but I always found something new to learn, no matter how small, even on topics I practiced a lot before. So I’d say this workshop was very useful for me. And besides, it’s always good to get critiques from a professional, and from people who are interested in art.

[sunlight-shunlight]

thinking about veilguard and bioware in general, i think we are reaching a point where people need to grapple with the inherent limits of what stories can be told in our Current Society and in AAA gaming companies.

on a labour level: mass layoffs, tons of developers leaving despite previously talking about how passionate and happy they were to be involved, not even paying severance, and crunching employees to the point of burnout. this is unfortunately pretty standard for AAA game companies.

on a cultural level: it is SO white and SO centrist-ly Canadian. i wrote up these asks outlining how. it is a repeated pattern of writing in which they go into tortured racial oppression allegories at best, while constantly peppering in a "but BOTH SIDES were wrong and made mistakes :( :( :(", in between their fictional atrocities that are clearly mirroring irl genocides and enslavement. or at worst, it's "the qunari are radical islamic borg" which has even less nuance. i personally thought, since dai came out in 2014, and a lot has changed since then about the world and in public awareness, that this would have filtered into the narrative and resulted in more satisfying and historically grounded writing. unfortunately not the case. it's shocking if you compare it to how sharp and aware and unflinching something like disco elysium is.

so what does this mean?

under these conditions, it is unavoidable that we get development by people who are rapidly cycled out of the company or demoralized into burnout. we get digestible, easy little soundbites of lore without much substance, because any complexity needs more time and coordination rather than the process of "quick, we have these assets, a lot of people involved in making them just got laid off, we need to make Something by next quarter to show the CEO". we get very little cohesion between games, despite the clear intent from dai to have so many plot points set up to follow through in a sequel, because the team and development are so chaotic that they can't hold onto a vision and complete it.

we also get this inherent caution and "conservatism" from the narrative, because on an ideological level, they're largely white people who want cops to be included in pride. so any major change to even a fictional society is Bad and Scary, and shouldn't be done without making sure that every character finger-wags appropriately at non-state violence. there is clearly not much ideological or even ethnic diversity within the leadership; or at least not enough that anyone there felt comfortable even speaking up on minor issues like the Incredibly Orientalist Isabela Outfit, let alone anything larger.

i don't personally think there's too much value in trying to analyze veilguard's plot or lore at this point. the final product is chaotically developed and does not seem to reflect the goals of the creators as set up in prior games, it's basically a ship of theseus in terms of the people and ideas involved in making it. this is sad for all of us, who were interested in the story, and attached to the characters, and were creatively fulfilled by engaging in the fandom. it's probably worse for the developers who have lost their jobs, burnt out, or feel unhappy with the game that they spent years of their life working on. it's certainly miserable as an indictment of The Industry, as well as the general societal climate of white Canadian centrism.

the solution is to create a society where people can develop games in peace and prosperity and stay on projects for longer, rather than constantly getting turfed out without severance pay. and to get some genuine leftists, poc, and indigenous people on staff who can weigh in and provide significant input, rather than a Council Of Liberal White Edmontonians every time.

in the meantime, at the very least, let's please stop preordering AAA games and supporting companies who notably abuse their employees.

[swifterthings]

People who think that Eddie could never be a dom need to meet my roommates gf stat… it’s crazy how much she reminds me of him 😭😭😭 big d&d nerd and talks about her party frequently, loves Metallica and is a singer in a metal band who gets booked a lot for parties, is always hyper and flailing about and looks like she couldn’t throw you around but the things I hear from his room… listen, its not a big place and sometimes when they go upstairs for that it’s not like I always want to listen to music and put headphones in at that time 😂

[roguemonsterfucker]

Sorry to talk about it again but I'm just still flabbergasted by the whole plagiarism thing

Like... When watching hbomb's video the first time and seeing him point out the rewording of stuff to change it *just* enough to (hopefully) not get caught stealing... I flashed back to my college days of when I did exactly that. 😅

There was a limit on how many actual quotes I could use, so I got around that by literally looking at my sources and rewording it enough to get past the plagiarism checker (TurnItIn.com my belothed) without losing the meaning of the text that I honestly didn't fully understand because I was writing on topics I had no real knowledge of myself.

BUT BUT BUT

I still cited my fucking sources.

Yes, I was using other people's words so I could get through the hell that was college, but if you read my stuff, you'd know exactly where I got it from. I never claimed credit for all the ideas.

And... again... I was just doing it to survive. I wasn't making money. I didn't even end up actually graduating, so it didn't even help me academically.

Somerton on the other hand not only rarely *if ever* credited the people whose words he stole, he was doing it for money, while also putting down fellow queer creators. He *wanted* full credit for all the ideas in his videos. To cite his sources would be to pass the credit on to others. And he couldn't do that.

Edited to add: It's probably a bit extreme to say I "stole" anything for my papers. Like I said, I cited my sources. I just paraphrased what I could when needed, probably to a degree that was questionable at worst. I just have anxiety and feel like "OH NO I"M A TERRIBLE PLAGIARIST."

[zhuhongs]

just found out the lead singer of taiwans biggest death metal band is also an active parliament member since like 2015.... and is still active as a death metal singer. he's a pretty standard taiwanese center left anti communist from what i could gather. which like as a leftist i dont really agree with but i also dont know enough abt taiwanese politics to like make a full judgement. though he seems to be a standard liberal nothing remarkable, radical, or new, not overtly horrible but just bland. but that was something i definitely did Not expect. apparently he's very pro indigenous rights and self determination for indigenous people but being in a centre left mega party like the DPP does not seem like the best way to achieve that. But yea, just thought I'd share

[milo-is-rambling]

Me looking at my own mood boards like “oh yeah this guy gets it”

[kivaember]

Heya! Do you have any tips for writing fanfics and writing in general? Planning on doing a story for Elden Ring and this is my first time writing something like this.

HMM, i'm very much a vibe writer where i just go off in a haze of inspiration and then edit the result, so I suppose any tips I'd have would be: don't be afraid to just write whatever pops into your head. Don't worry about it being perfect or making sense or, hell, turning into a bullet point list.

When I'm writing, I'll usually write the whole thing chronologically, but if i encounter a scene that i'm stuck on or just not sure how to transition into a scene I know I want to write, I usually put down something like:

(insert character walking to the shop here, or some other way to conenect to following scene)

and then continue on. Usually you figure out what to do with that once you finish the rest of the fic/chapter, or you realise you can cut it out entirely.

Sometimes I even do a quick sort of outline for what I want to write, so example:

(character a runs into character b -> they have a fight!!! -> character a runs away -> character c finds them -> comfort!!!! -> end)

it's very loose, so it lets you adjust as and when you want, but it keeps the very core of what you're aiming for in the fic. I also do this for like, conversation scenes to help keep me on task, since when writing dialogue it's very easy to get sidetracks lmao

AND SPEAKING OF DIALOGUE: act out long stretches of dialogue between characters. Actually voice them outloud with the emotion they're meant to be conveying, to make sure it all sounds natural. I do this with my fic, because the amount of times I write dialogue, but then speak it aloud and find out it sounds clunky or awkward as hell, is too many. When you say it aloud too, you'll automatically try to recite the dialogue in the most natural sounding way, correcting bits that sound kinda wrong... idk, I always do this and I feel like it helps to make my dialogue sound very natural and flows nicely. At least, I like to think this!

And finally: sit on your fic. I write, then sit on it for a day or two, and read through it again with fresh eyes. Don't be afraid to cut scenes too when you hit a block, because usually the problem is like 10 lines or so back.

Really, at the end of the day, it's just experience and writing lots and having fun while writing! Everyone has their own style and methods, so I hope you have fun with your first fic! :) just go wild and bake your cake!

I hope all of that helped hhaaa

[randomalistic]

You ever feel sad after a hyperfixation goes away… i used to love dinosaurs so much as a child but it sorta just went away and I still think they’re so cool but I feel like I lost something.

I guess there was a tradeoff cuz now I love birds, which are still technically dinosaurs lol

Recently went to a museum with an awesome dinosaur exhibit and got a big book, I wanna read it sometime so I can learn about them again

[sunuism]

everyone please pray or manifest for me that i get one of the easy texts for my exam pleaseeeee

[nthflower]

I need to do arttttttlttttttttt

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.