#i object on aesthetic principles (aesthetic)

[txttletale]

do you think locked tomb has any banger lines or is it more of a big picture synthesis thing, more than the sum of its parts?

thje idea of a 'banger line' is an interesting one because like i think that like being a good line in the context of a work and being like, an epic postable quote in isolation are basically two nearly unrelated qualities with very little correlation. the best line from gideon the 8th is 'cam, go loud' -- but that means absolutely nothing without the context of the entire book to back it up. similarly, 'one flesh, one end' sounds 'aesthetic' and so on but in the book is very much like a mantra about subordinating yourself wholly to societal systems of oppression. so i guess to give an annoyign answer to your reasonable question i kind of object to the 'banger line' concept on principle

[patricia-taxxon]

I can't separate the art from the artist, not because of some moral principle but because the aesthetic experience of the art object is worse when i know the artist is evil. before any discussion can be had over whether it's still "okay" to like harry potter, it must be remarked that harry potter is worse for having been written by a vocal opponent of trans rights.

[leonaquitaine]

Virtual Photography Guide: Composition

One of the in-game activities I enjoy the most is trying to replicate real-life photography techniques in gpose, and it’s surprising how much can be achieved. So today, let’s play around with composition!

Leading Lines

Leading lines can help guide the viewer's eye through an image. They’re visual elements that form lines, like buildings or roads, or even an area with high contrast, like the horizon line. So by aligning convergent lines to create these ‘focal zones’ you build a sense of depth and lead the viewer's gaze toward it.

Framing

You can use elements within the scene to enclose or surround your main subject. These elements could be natural, like branches or foliage, or architectural, like doorways or windows. This adds depth and context, and helps the viewers immerse themselves in the scene:

Symmetry

Symmetry creates a pleasing sense of order and balance in an image. You can do this by dividing your frame equally and positioning similar elements on either side:

Depth and Layering

Adding depth to your virtual photographs enhances the sense of immersion. By placing objects of interest in the foreground, middle ground, and background, you can create a layered effect that adds depth and dimension to your composition. DoF (Depth of Field) shaders are particularly well suited for cases like these:

Point of View

Experimenting with different and unusual camera angles and perspectives can yield surprisingly dynamic and engaging shots. For example, positioning the camera at a low angle and looking up at the character can create a very impactful composition:

On the other hand, top-down pictures can not only give the viewer a sensation of being ‘in the scene’ but also help put elements together that would otherwise be scattered around in a horizontal shot:

Negative Space

Negative space refers to the empty or minimalistic areas in your composition. It provides breathing room for your main subject and can evoke emotions, or create a sense of balance and calmness.

And let’s not forget the most important rule of all:

Break the rules

These principles serve more as guidelines than anything. Sometimes trying to force a composition into one of those categories can detract from an unusual yet powerful shot, so trust your eye and aesthetic sense.

I'll cover more composition techniques like the Rule of Thirds, Rule of Odds, Rule of Space, Golden Ratio, and others in part 2. Enjoy!

[403tarot]

Hiii can you please do riize sungchan or antons ideal type? Thank u sm if you can🌷

# . . . sungchan's ideal type 🍀

sungchan is drawn to more positive and welcoming energies, which gives me strong vibes of earth signs, especially the virgo sign — women of this sign tend to be a bit more methodical, something sungchan seems to appreciate, thinking that this way of acting and thinking aligns with his own. i see him as a straightforward guy who prefers clarity without mind games, and a partner sharing these principles is what he values most.

he likes romantic women who don't mind following a relationship model where he would be the main provider and driver of the relationship, but this doesn't mean he seeks a submissive woman—quite the opposite. one of the things that attracts him is the ability to handle problems and keep up with his pace. with significant goals and ambitious objectives, he's incompatible with someone with a narrow mindset and shallow goals.

sungchan seems to be looking for someone fascinating with many facets, as if searching for a world within a person. while he considers beauty, it's meaningless if the person has emotionless eyes — he wants someone who knows how to live, aspire, and add value to his life.

he avoids shy women, preferring those who can express themselves easily, form bonds, and aren't afraid to express their feelings or fulfill his need for direct words of love (affirmation). he likes feeling cared for and welcomed, seeking someone to hug, kiss, and bring the feeling of home even if they're thousands of kilometers away.

sungchan has a preference for more homely women who enjoy cooking, have an interest in arts of any kind, and are not oblivious to what's happening around them (disliking alienated or superficial people).

appearance traits that might catch his attention:

smaller structure than his

light-colored hair, shoulder-length

cute nd big cheeks

button nose

little or no makeup

clothes in light tones, cottage girls

korean aesthetic of "purity"

[3rdvoice]

New letter column

--- Question about visual design... I believe that making stuff that’s fun and exciting to you, the author, is hugely important to staying engaged in a project. That said, there are times when the direction that most benefits the work isn’t the one that you’re most interested in. 1. How do you approach finding that balance self indulgent design/writing/whatever (things that you find personally appealing or enjoyable to draw) and design that’s less "fun" but serves a purpose. 2. When are "sacrifices"-- exchanging fun for variety or cohesion or flow-- worth it? How much do you think about "fun" when designing? --- Question about "secrets"... The story may not really be *about* the world’s secrets, but given your considerable, cross-platform efforts to avoid spoilers, them nonetheless seems important to what you’re trying to accomplish. 1. How important do you think "secrets" are to this kind of story. Would it be the same if you had a lore blog where you answered everyone’s burning questions? 2. How do you cultivate the self-discipline to avoid blabbing about your ideas. Maybe you don’t struggle with this, but I definitely do. C * September 9, 2024

I’m struggling a little with this framing around self-indulgence! I maybe don’t think of it in a parallel way to you. The whole thing is kind of self-indulgent to me… like cohesion, everything feeling of a piece and moving forward to build a big structure, this is self-indulgent, this is my aesthetic, basically. In terms of vis dev at least, I definitely HAVE built my approach around things I like to draw. I made this setting with room to mess around in ways I can’t predict… A lot of “staying engaged” for me, I have discovered after some thousands of pages of comics, is about planning in ways that don’t lock me in too tightly, and allowing the whole process to have some room for exploration throughout.

The avoiding revealing setting-details thing is firstly just a big central philosophical principle I have about this stuff, which maybe isn’t as widely-held as it used to be. Any story is about sequential information revelation… I am designing the story in every moment to reveal information in a particular order, and I don’t want to undercut the integrity and cohesion of the story by revealing things elsewhere out-of-order. This feels like a basic principle people making stories have kind of always had to abide by! You can’t rely on a reader knowing stuff about your story that’s outside of the text in question (I am interested in how habits of writers and readers seem to be shifting around this lately however). So it’s not ABOUT the secrets maybe, or calling them “secrets” puts too fine a point on it, but I am intentional with how things are laid out!

This info-revelation thing is maybe a little complicated by the literary device of the “INVENTED SETTING” that figures so loudly in my comics. The way we do invented settings lately depends on a shared illusion of an objective PLACE, with its own existence outside of the story. The TRICK, as a writer, is I think to see this illusion itself as something that serves the story. The thing LOOKS bigger than the story in order to lend gravity and evocativeness to the story, but it ISN’T bigger than the story. Or if it IS bigger, it’s only bigger in my own personal notes and inside my own personal brain, so in no way that is relevant to readers. I know that I have broken the rules and done word-of-god stuff sometimes in the past because the “real beyond the story” thing is compelling to me too! But I aim for this. The “self-discipline” question I don’t really have an answer for; it is always kind of a struggle but I’m interested in making comics because that is how I want to reveal the stuff, so that is how I reveal the stuff!

If I were to do a lore-blog it would be me on-the-spot making up answers to questions based on the broad setting-principles I’ve established for myself. It would probably be useful for me as a writing exercise, but I’d lock myself into all sorts of decisions I would later regret, or I’d agonize over how seriously to take material “canonized” in the lore blog. It would extend the space of the story beyond the bounds I’ve so far established, and make it flimsy and untenable!

Picking up on some of this thinking in an answer to another letter, will post in a few days.

lettercol archive

rice-boy.com

[ghelgheli]

So I absolutely agree that gender is socially constructed, but I have always had a hard time with the idea of gender as being a set of "behaviors/expressions/desires" like you say, for the same reason why I'm uncomfortable with the Judith Butler "performance" idea. Doesn't that inherently leave the door open to say that, if someone says they are a trans woman, but they're behaviors/expressions/performance/etc don't line up with what a woman's are supposed to be, then we can just say "No, you're not a woman. You don't fulfill the criteria for womanhood." Like it feels like this inherently sets gender nonconforming people up to be blocked from the gender they identify with and forced back into one they don't. Am I missing something? This isn't a gotcha, I genuinely think I must be misunderstanding something, but no matter how I look at it, it seems like that would be the result of defining gender that way.

oh I don't think this at all! did I say I thought this? if I did I fucked up.

to start, my (second-hand, tbf) understanding of performativity in butler's sense is that it is widely misunderstood. the notion of gender as performativity is descended in part from speech-act theory a la JL Austin and so on; these are discussions of how certain utterances (like a priest declaring a marriage) can have uptake in the world and change it—ive just summoned the phrase "illocutionary force" into the minds of those readers that know. to perform such a speech act is to change the world just by speaking. this is the notion of performance at work in butler's theory (again, as far as my second-hand understanding goes. I'll read gender trouble soon)

in that theory, gender is built by people performing gender, and people performing gender constantly rebuild it. I think this can accommodate gnc expression because, like a speech act, someone can assert that they are performing a particular gender by fiat even if that performance is aberrant relative to whatever the dominant performance is. that is the kind of thing a masc woman does when she asserts that she's a woman despite "doing gender wrong". but that's enough of me defending butler by proxy. I don't actually think performance is a successful theory of gender, because it fails at identifying its material etiology

as far as I'm concerned gender is something that is done to people and that people take up themselves because they are wise to the ways it can and will be done to them. it is an organizing principle of cisheteropatriarchy which, along (and inseparably) with racialization, constitutes part of the superstructural foundation of our political economy. this precedes capitalism, but today has been fully adapted by it. it is the stabilizing grip of the family as an economic unit and is essential to the maintenance of division of labour as it exists today, designating certain groups (again, bearing in mind intersections with race) not just for reproductive labour but for any of the more invisibilized, precarious, subservient forms of labour c.f. the relationship between trans womanhood and sex work

the aesthetics of gender (behaviour expressions whatever) are just its visible surfacing and one of—along with its medicalization and racialization, e.g.—the methods of demarcating and enforcing it. deviation is punished only proximally because of this or that kind of outrage. the ultimate reason for punishment is the maintenance of capitalist homeostasis, insofar as such a thing is supposed to be possible (it is not, of course). and as the post I cannot stop talking about points out, transmisogyny is one of the most violently feverish of capitalism's autoimmune responses. but despite its violence, it is never a successful response, and on the contrary it manages just to condition defenses against it.

trans womanhood, for example, is not a historically stable object. it has as much ontological essence as any gender-inflected concept: none. it is one construction in response to the experiences of betraying maleness and its demands (linguistic, economic, behavioural, psychological... these are fuzzy concepts. there is no one narrative) and being subject to transmisogyny as a result. there are other constructions (crossdresser, transvestite, travesti, hijra...) that have been formed in response to transmisogyny, and all of them are stubborn tumours that capitalism will never be rid of; thus it tries to starve them.

but to get to your point: gender concepts, particularly "deviant" ones like trans womanhood, but even womanhood itself (which I conceive of as an umbrella) can accommodate nonconformity because no amount of, say, masculinity is going to redeem a trans lesbian as far as cisheteropatriarchy is concerned—ask me how I know. trans lesbianism, as a declared divestment from simply being a man, is unacceptable however it is instantiated. you may accuse me of being pessimistic here. I am!

[twothpaste]

as much as it sucks on sheer principle that tumblr is dipping into the AI kool-aid, i feel like it'll impact the aesthetic blog side of the site wayyy more than folks who draw. and aesthetic bloggers already treat photography like an infinite resource of stealable content, so idk how much of a difference it'll make in the grand scheme of things. i think we'll witness a dystopian development where aesthetic photosets get increasingly ungrounded from reality. generating totally unreal slop that vaguely resembles "cottagecore" or "dark academia" or "vaporwave," but the longer you squint at it, the more you realize you can't fully grasp any object in the image, and it becomes just sludge emulating sludge emulating sludge

[licncourt]

Do you think Louis is "good with emotions"? What I mean is is he consciously aware of how he feels about what's happening around him, does he have a handle on emotions or does he have.. Issues with translating what he's feeling, therefore he is oblivious to his own emotions. Does he fine tune emotions in a conscious funnel that gives the reader an impression that he's quite adept at being a person you can go to with your problems. Does this make sense? I guess what I'm asking is would he be the best friend you can count on to have a deep talk with or is Louis so repressed he needs to write out his thoughts in a journal before he can give advice. Does he give terrible advice. Would he make a good therapist? I think he's a bit too mentally lost himself to be the person to depend on for advice even though compared to Lestat he's more emotionally mature, but (I'm sorry this is so winded) is Louis aware of his emotions enough to make good life choices, and is Louis able to distinguish emotions or does he struggle with them enough to be that person everyone goes to for advice (hypothetically). I hope I'm making sense.. I'm not too keen on the side of fandom that leans on Louis being the "sane" one while Lestat is the "insane" one, but in my short time in this fandom, that's been my experience 🤷🏻‍♀️ Everyone wants to lean on Louis, and they want him to be the family friendly one. It doesn't give room for him to flesh himself out. Why does Lestat get all the fun stuff. Louis started the shenanigans and he is obviously very unhinged. I don't think it's fair is all. But please give me your thoughts on this very long ask.

Oh God that's a hard question, but my answer is no, he isn't really. He's emotional but I wouldn't say he's good with those emotions or those of others (especially not those actually). In general he reminds me of when you meet a guy who sucks but they call themselves an empath.

Even Lestat says in one of the books that Louis is oblivious to the suffering of others in a lot of ways and I think that's true. He sees human misery when it supports his internal beliefs because he's actively looking for it, but he's not in tune with people in general, especially not when other people's feelings contradict his world view (ie owning slaves while acting like he's some kind of hero for the downtrodden because he eats rats).

I think the fact that he feels his own emotions so intensely is part of what makes him so selfish. He's incredibly caught up in what HE'S feeling, so the inner world of someone else is not really being considered, nor would it occur to him to consider it. That happens a lot in IWTV where, at least the way Louis portrays it, the only explanations he can come up with for Lestat's behavior are that he's stupid or he just has a bad personality.

There's always the implication that their relationship was deeper than Louis made it seem, but I also don't think he was interested in exploring Lestat's deeper motives for his behavior. He got his feelings hurt and therefore whatever Lestat had going on was irrelevant to him. There was no effort to understand and empathize when it was hard and he faced resistantance.

At the very least, be seems to be hellbent on strong-arming his own emotions to suit his will. He's very externally adamant about his chosen narrative, but he spends enough time just Having Feelings that at least deep down, he knows for himself what the truth is most of the time when it comes to his inner thoughts unless he's in true denial. He just chooses to be stubborn and force his way through life ignoring those feelings if he thinks they shouldn't be that way.

His thoughtfulness and how carefully he chooses his words does give the impression of some kind of emotional intelligence, but I think a lot of that is artificial, like when he's talking in IWTV about how his objections to killing are about the principle and the aesthetics. There's a lot of convoluted thinking and justifications, but not much consistent or reasonable logic to suggest that he's tapped into something grounded and honest within himself or the world.

Another indicator of whatever emotional imbalance he has is the way he cycles between being so rigidly repressed and then snapping. That's not the hallmark of someone who's processed or is capable of coping with any hard feelings, much like an addict who never gets treatment but manages to white knuckle their way through stretches of time before losing control again.

I suppose he is more emotionally mature than Lestat in his ability to exercise restraint and be calculated (in good and bad ways), but that doesn't always translate to an emotionally intelligent mindset that influences larger choices or patterns. No matter how good he is at it, his semi-frequent, massive lapses in judgement and self control kind of negate how helpful those skills can be.

This comes across in subtler ways too. He was more the family man than Lestat, but rather than responsibly parent Claudia through her adult challenges, he allowed and fostered an emotionally incestuous dynamic that was incredibly toxic for both of them. Other times he played calm and collected in the face of Lestat's outbursts, but he didn't actually work to resolve anything, just to keep the upper hand through his performative apathy. It's all very surface level and hardly ever productive.

The one credit I'll genuinely give to him was his willingness to let Lestat get whatever all that was out of his system in the 90s and 00s. He was very patient and honest about his feelings and finally had enough softness and genuine care for Lestat that he was able to see objectively the pain, confusion, and trauma those behaviors were born from. It's definitely growth on Louis' end compared to IWTV so golf clap for that.

I will say though that I definitely think he's too self-absorbed and judgmental to make a great listener unless he REALLY cares about the person talking to him. If he thinks he could've handled whatever the problem is better, it's going to show it accidentally even if he's being polite. The truth is he would not have handled it better most likely. Differently maybe, but not better. You had a freakout? Well. He simply would have repressed those feelings and then acted like a bitch later over nothing.

[sleepvines]

can you go into a whole tangent about rain world naming pretty please. :D

I wanna hear your thoughts!

SURE THING! (spoilers below) (also this isn't a proper essay so I get to be messy 👍)

So first of all. Rain world naming conventions seem to follow a somewhat consistent pattern, but the pattern varies.

Let's divide them up by types for iterators specifically: Type A names are those that involve a number, measurement, or count of objects. Type B names involve concepts and actions. Now we can list all the known iterators (since iterators started this tangent) in those categories.

Type A: Five Pebbles, Seven Red Suns, Sliver of Straw (Implied 1-count), Epoch of Clouds (implied time measurement)

Type B: Looks To The Moon, No Significant Harassment, Unparalleled Innocence, Chasing Wind, Pleading Intellect, Wandering Omen, Gazing Stars, Secluded Instinct

There's a few things we could gather from this, notably that "Type B" names are more prevalent, at least in this list. Sometimes these particular names are characteristic of their owners, such as Gazing Stars holding a fascination with ascension, while Secluded Instinct is optimistic and excited about the future. Which to me thematically opposes the whole mission statement of iterators, and thus it's a bit of a hidden (unusual, taboo) instinct to have hope. Other times these names seem ironic, as seen with Unparalleled Innocence's apparently mean spirited nature. Looks to the Moon feels like a happy accident with how fitting it is, since she's the Local Sector's "Big Sis Moon" and her peers look up to her. There's a possibility they named her Looks to the Moon because their city would be resting on top of her can which would have it face the moon.

To note, Moon and Wandering Omen are both older superstructures. "Type B" names might be tied to more antiquated models of iterators, but there's not much evidence to support it. Something my roommate @acewarden (incredible brainstorming & lore discussion pal) mentioned offhand is that Five Pebbles goes by Erratic Pulse as a communication alias, and that if the name seniority thing is true, he could be trying to seem older and more experienced. But again, that's conjecture.

"Type A" names are a bit of a mystery, but could be tied to a date, an event, a location... In particular I'm reminded of ancient Nahua naming conventions, which you can read about here. Keep in mind this article includes old excerpts/quotes from a missionary, so there is some dated and insensitive language, but it has examples of what I'm reminded of:

Names referring to particular time units/periods/seasons eg Maxihuitl (“Five Years”), Xopantzin (“Venerable Raining Season”)

Anyhow, the article supposes that these names not only marked the day a naming ceremony took place, but the potential fortune of the individual being named due to the date. I have to wonder if there was a similar reasoning for these "Type A" names. some Nahua names related to a day on a specific intersection of their calendar cycle. In Rain World, THE Cycle was an unavoidable and religiously significant aspect of the ancients lives, I don't see why they wouldn't also construct their naming scheme on a similar principle.

In fact I definitely see aesthetic influence from ancient Mexica art in how the ancients depict and dress themselves, and it's not unlikely the developers pulled from it for their inspiration. Take these for example:

Side note just for me, I have a sneaking suspicion the way dates are logged in Rain World is similar to some things I noticed while looking into the Mexica Calendar but maybe that's a reach. I won't dive into it here EDIT: I couldn't find anything satisfactory so I'm dropping that theory

Now we can take a look at the Echoes, which were once ancients. Since they were the ones to build iterators in the first place, their names would inform their super computer's names. Of course. (of course.)

Note the difference in these names, they are either in two distinct parts and/or reflect a "positional" intermediary term. Ancient's canonically had a very complex and hierarchical naming scheme, with many variations of honorifics and titles that were always formally addressed in their complete entirety, but for echoes we get the base names. (Also note I'll use a ; to break up the names so they're more convenient to list.)

Echoes: Nineteen Spades; Endless Reflections, Four Needles under Plentiful Leaves, Droplets upon Five Large Droplets, A Bell; Eighteen Amber Beads, Six Grains of Gravel; Mountains Abound, Two Sprouts; Twelve Brackets, Twelve Beads among Burning Skies, Distant Towers upon Cracked Earth, Rhinestones beneath Shattered Glass, Eight Spots on a Blind Eye

Note that we see vastly more "Type A" names! Additionally there's a prevalence of size or measurement related terms that emphasize some kind of grandiosity. Things like Abound, Large, Endless, Plentiful.... I believe that, while the literal counts (Five, Six, Eight, etc.) are indicators of something specific, the adjectives here sound like they serve a fortune bearing and/or self-aggrandizing purpose. lol.

One thing I do notice is that some families? groups? in the ancient society (as outlined by the pearls) have numbers or concepts tied to them. Such as the house of Eight or the house of Braids. One ancient is noted as being "of pure Braid Heritage" However these are not included in the base name, and are instead tacked on as a separate title, indicating the names themselves are not of familial origin.

Let's break some of these Echo names into their constituent parts. (With color)

Red being the measurement itself, orange being the object that conveys the measurement/units of measurement, purple being an intermediary term, green being a secondary location/object noun, blue being what I'll call the "grand element."

Six Grains of Gravel; Mountains Abound

Twelve Beads among Burning Skies

A Bell; Eighteen Amber Beads

Distant Towers upon Cracked Earth

Four Needles under Plentiful Leaves

You could argue "A Bell" is instead read "A Bell" but I DIGRESS!

Not every name has a measurement association, but they do consistently have some kind of object. I'm led to wonder if some names are earned or altered later in life. Maybe they have absolutely nothing to do with a calendar cycle and instead reflect the status, history, and hierarchy of the supposed individual. Come to think of it, that would make sense. Nineteen Spades; Endless Reflections recounts they had progeny, and well, what are children if not a reflection of an organism into the future? Twelve Beads among Burning Skies says that they were "an angry fool." I find Six Grains of Gravel; Mountains Abound evocative in the sense that, maybe as an individual they are "Gravel" but their family/accomplishments/legacy is so bountiful it's considered mountainous. But that's a stretch.

I would be remiss not to mention my favourite ancients. The following are Pearl excerpts of their full name and associated titles.

"In this vessel is the living memories of Seventeen Axes, Fifteen Spoked Wheel, of the House of Braids, Count of 8 living blocks, Counselor of 16, Grand Master of the Twelfth Pillar of Community, High Commander of opinion group Winged Opinions, of pure Braid heritage, voted Local Champion in the speaking tournament of 1511.090, Mother, Father and Spouse, Spiritual Explorer and honorary member of the Congregation of Balanced Ambiguity. Artist, Warrior, and Fashion Legend." ((Deep Magenta pearl, Shaded Citadel))

And my all time favourite:

"It is with Honor I, Eight Suns-Countless Leaves, of the House of Six Wagons, Count of no living blocks, Counselor of 2, Duke of 1, Humble Secretary of the Congregation of Never Dwindling Righteousness, write this to You." ((The rest of this one is really funny, please read the Deep Pink farm arrays pearl if you have time.))

To come full circle, to me, iterator names sound like they're composed of only half of an ancient's name. Make of that what you will, I think it says something about the two way parent-child relationship between ancients and iterators. A more diminutive/simplified name for their creations? Likely. A shortened name for a respected figure and venerated grounds? Also likely. Shrugs.

All this to say that without access to more concrete concepts from the ancient's society, we're left with a lot of guesswork. Still super fun to pick apart, though!

[kata4a]

a. you can image a subculture of musicians who assign short melodic fragments to each letter of the alphabet, and write music by stringing those fragments together into words and sentences—musical analysis then becomes a process of "decoding" longs pieces into text, and then analyzing them against the frameworks you would typically use for written literature.

I happen to think that a culture of music like this would be pretty aesthetically unrewarding to participate in

b. it seems to me that a lot of people want music theory to be an empirical study of "what effects different musical features have in listeners." I think that taken to its logical conclusion, a music theory with this goal would become obsessed with the straightforward emotivity of pop music and fail to say anything of substance about more avant garde styles (after all, the empirical effect of twelve-tone serialism on most people is "they think it sounds bad")

while I'm certainly as ardent a proponent of the straightforward emotivity of pop music as any, I nonetheless can't find myself fully on board with this approach to music theory either: I do like experimental styles, and I do find it rewarding to engage with music (and art in general) that asks more of me as a listener than to merely passively respond to stimuli

a. there are a number of features of "melodic ciphers," as I'll call this hypothetical genre of music, that I think contribute to its aesthetic paucity:

first and I think most obviously is the unsatisfying arbitrariness of a premise like this. given that this is a community which essentially treats pieces of music as literature, why not simply write pieces of literature? it is reminiscent of the tedium of analyzing a musical composition by annotating a page of sheet music, without ever actually listening to the piece

c. the aesthetic principles underlying classic music (sensu lato 😘) are often presented both very theoretically and very abstractly. the classical theories of western harmony, the linear approaches of schenker and his sympathizers, and the twelve-tone systems of the second viennese school, despite being three dramatically different ways of composing and listening to music, all treat musical fundamentals as essentially theoretical objects. what does it matter to a theorist whether a harmonic progression is played on an organ or a ukulele?

for that matter, what does it matter to a theorist that a piece of music be sound at all? one could "arrange" a piano sonata for a set of colored lights (with hues corresponding to different frequencies of sound), and while I'm sure an astute enough "listener" could learn and even deeply internalize those correspondences, I am skeptical that they would ever find the lightshow as musically satisfying as if they actually got to hear the piece with their ears

b. the late romantics and the impressionists, despite very much working under the theoretical principles of classical harmony, also present the strongest case for how even solo instrumental music can be medium-specific: sound symbolism. here, piano arpeggios evoke the ebb and flow of canal boats, here, a trill suggests birdsong, here, a low bass ostinato sounds like the grumbling of an old man

and of course once you have been presented with the type-case, you can see the same ideas in other pieces, albeit in perhaps much subtler forms. the mood and character of a set of mozart's variations are very much influenced by the kinds of things it sounds like, even if it is not trying to sound like any one specific thing

c. bach's prelude in c major from the well-tempered clavier is I think a particularly good example of the kind of depth that can be opened up by sincere and active engagement with the aesthetic background of a piece

I think this prelude is very easy to listen to as a series of pleasant, unoffensive chords. mostly people, I would imagine, could put in on in the background and do some work relatively undistracted, treating it as a sort of peaceful background melody

I also think that there is a subtle but very present sense of tension and release and climactic buildup and payoff underlying the harmony of the piece, a feature which is much easier to pick up on if you're familiar with the musical conventions bach was working with

a. when I listen to a prelude as a vehicle for classical harmony, I'm not perform an act of "translation"—I do not listen to a chord, think "ah, a seventh chord," and then "that means that this is a point of tension in the piece,"—I simply hear the chord and feel the tension as a direct feature of the chord. even though I may have had to learn that association originally, once I do learn it it becomes an immanent feature of my perception, not a process I need to consciously perform

this immanence, I argue, is the crucial feature that musical ciphers lack. while I can imagine becoming, with practice, extremely good at performing the translation from melody to letter, I am skeptical of the possibility of internalizing that process so thoroughly as to make it a direct feature of my perception; and certainly never more direct than simply hearing or reading the sentences

abc. what I take to be the goal of any music theory—and in fact of any aesthetic framework—is not to teach you a way to analyze or value some medium, but to give you a way to perceiving it; and therefore the criteria by which I judge a music theory is 1. how effectively it can give me a new way to see the world and 2. how I feel about the way that the world looks when I adopt that way of seeing

[justforbooks]

Ben Vautier

French conceptual artist known for his work featuring handwritten texts with quirky messages that had mass appeal

The French conceptual artist Ben Vautier – known simply as “Ben” – who has died aged 88, was best known for his Écritures – trademark painted epigrams in a simple cursive script on a monochrome background.

Instantly recognisable with their bold messages to the world, sometimes humorous, often political, always thought-provoking, his “writings” shout out from the canvas as if craving to be heard. “In my Écritures it is not the aestheticism that counts,” Ben said in 2010, in conversation with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. “I write to be read and understood. It’s the meaning that has to come across.”

The first Écriture, created in 1953, said, simply: “Il faut manger. Il faut dormir” (“You have to eat. You have to sleep”). It was an affirmation of life and the beginning of a series that would define his oeuvre for more than 70 years.

And, escaping from the walls, these mini-manifestos, which originated in the experimental culture of the Nice school of the 1950s, and Fluxus movement of the 60s, are now ubiquitous across France, to be found on postcards, stamps, wine labels, stationery and rucksacks.

Following Ben’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “On our children’s pencil cases, on so many everyday objects and even in our imaginations, Ben had left his mark, made up of freedom and poetry, apparent lightness and overwhelming depth.”

Born in Naples, Italy, Ben was the son of an Occitan French-Irish mother, Janet (nee Giraud), and a Swiss father, Max-Ferdinand Vautier. His grandfather was the Swiss painter and illustrator Marc Louis Benjamin Vautier. Following his parents’ divorce, Ben lived with his mother in Switzerland, Turkey, Egypt and Italy before they settled in Nice aged 14.He left the city’s Lycée du Parc Impérial at 16 and worked at a bookshop, Le Nain Bleu, where he first discovered volumes on the artists who would influence him. Interviewed last year for Forbes magazine and asked about his early artistic encounters, Ben said: “I picked only artists who shocked me because I was looking for something new, so I started with the abstract painters: Poliakoff, Soulages and Picasso. The shock of Marcel Duchamp came from a meeting with Arman, and after that, I opened up to the possibility that everything was art.”

“Everything is art” became his lifelong mantra, together with the other driving principle for Ben that “art must be new”. Elsewhere he said “My art will be an art of appropriation. I seek to sign everything that has not been signed. I believe that art is in the intention and that it is enough to sign.” When the Italian artist Piero Manzoni died in 1963, Ben signed his death certificate and declared it a work of art. And, following the birth of Ben’s daughter, Eva, in 1965, he signed her, as a new creation and a “living sculpture”.

Between 1958 and 1973 he ran a shop, Laboratoire 32, selling secondhand records, cameras, books and other publications. The space became a favourite meeting venue for artists of the Nice school, such as Yves Klein, César and Arman. N’importe quoi (Just anything), an installation composed of the shop’s interior, was acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 1975 and remains a testament to those early years in Nice.

In 1962 Ben had come to London as part of the festival of Misfits to perform a geste (happening) that involved spending two weeks living and sleeping in the window of Gallery One in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair. That year he met George Maciunas, founder of Fluxus, the Dada-influenced movement whose members, including Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys and John Cage, engaged in experimental performances and events.

Fluxus encouraged a “do-it-yourself” approach in its artistic creations, valuing simplicity above complexity. Ben’s work embraced this approach and made the movement’s aesthetic clearly visible to the public, in art galleries and beyond.

Striking works include the self-referential Je suis transparent (I am transparent, 1970), a print edition in black writing on a see-through perspex background; and If art is everywhere it is also in this box (1972), with inscriptions in French, English, Italian and Nissart (a subdialect of Provençal), decorating four sides of a large plastic cube.

Initially selling as multiples in limited editions at his shop in the 60s, his productions soon moved into the mainstream, making his signed works available as mass-produced “Ben”-branded objects. He believed that there was “no art without ego”.

His works are now in private and public collections worldwide, including MoMA in New York and the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. Retrospectives have been held at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (2010), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2015) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico (2022).

Arriving as a visitor in 2000 to Ben’s home in Saint-Pancrace, in the heights above Nice, which he shared with his second wife, Annie Baricalla, an artist whom he married in 1964, I was struck by the volume and variety of work that lay within and in the grounds of the house.

Commenting on this cuckoo-in-the-nest among a row of bourgeois residences that looked like a combination of fine art gallery, circus and junkyard, Ben confided with a chuckle: “Mes voisins me detestent.” (“My neighbours hate me.”)

He was a champion of minority languages, campaigning especially for Occitan – the tongue of southern France – and others, including Alsatian, Basque and Corsican, to be recognised in a country whose only official language is French. He reasoned that by preserving the vernacular, one can preserve the culture and dynamism of its people.

Ben’s first marriage, to Jacqueline Robert, in 1959, ended in divorce. Following Annie’s death on 5 June, “unwilling and unable to live without her”, according to a statement by his children, “Ben killed himself a few hours later”.

He is survived by his daughter, Eva, and his son, François, from his marriage to Annie.

🔔 Ben (Benjamin Vautier), artist, born 18 July 1935; died 5 June 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ante--meridiem]

Actually yes I do roll my eyes equally at any argument that starts with "thing I aesthetically dislike is ~soulless~" and if you think people are hypocrites for accepting the argument when they share the aesthetic dislike I think you might be doing the "conflating every opinion you see on tumblr as if they were all coming from the same person" thing, because everyone I've seen protest the term dislikes all applications of it on principle. Idk maybe it's somehow possible for the argument to be a shorthand for more valid moral arguments but at some point it just pisses me off to be asked to construe every sentiment people nominally on my side express that bothers me as just a shorthand for something that I would agree with when I can tell that's not how it's generally meant and you know what, even if someone who talks about soulessness is actually very rigorous about only applying it to inanimate objects/concepts they also have valid criticisms of and not deciding that if soulfulness/~humanness~ (said in a specific tone) is a meaningful concept then actual people can have more or less of it depending on whether they feel/think/process things the right way, I cannot from an external perspective trust them to maintain that rigour and I definitely don't trust anyone listening to their rhetoric to.

[skaruresonic]

My question about remakes and their faithfulness was also about remakes of bad games, not just classics

It's easy to say that a remake should remain faithful when it's adapting a game that was already highly regarded, but what about when the source material is genuinely very flawed?

Of course throwing everything into the trash can and making something wholly different is a copout even then, but being too faithful in this case might result in a remake repeating the original's mistakes, which defeats the purpose of the original

Easy example, I know, but think about something like Sonic 06: if you were tasked with remaking a game of that level how faithful could you really be? Think of the art style: it's one of that game's biggest flaws, in some ways replacing it with something more in line with Sonic's general aesthetics would be an objective improvement yet by doing so you would effectively eliminate a core aspect of the game's identity, yet if the identity itself is so flawed is it worth preserving in its entirety?

What about the story? You can't leave it as it is, character motivations and characters like Elise are fine, but stuff like the time travel mechanic and characters acting dumber than rocks breaks the narrative, should it be redone mostly from scratch even at the cost of the original vision?

I ask this because the biggest issue with modern remake culture I think is the focus on remaking old classics due to the ensured success they bring, rather than bad or mediocre which you'd think would be more in need of a second wind

Personally I'm someone who, on average, would prefer a remake to keep itself anchored to the original vision as much as possible, but if I find that a remake does something (like a gameplay mechanic) better than the original, even if in a way that is not faithful to the original vision, then I can't bring myself to ignore that on principle alone.

I guess that at the end of the day I have a rather simplistic mindset about it: outside of some egregious example I'll mostly gravitate what I'll find the most fun within the context of what's being offered to me

It's easy to say that a remake should remain faithful when it's adapting a game that was already highly regarded, but what about when the source material is genuinely very flawed?

Why does even "flawed" source material need to be remade? Can't bad art be allowed to exist without necessitating that it be improved?

Sometimes bad art can be bad from the very premise, and there's no amount of polish that can turn a turd into a masterpiece. Nobody's going to turn Sharknado into a Martin Scorsese film with a billion-dollar budget. It's just not happening.

For another thing, how bad must something be to warrant a remake? Mid? Terrible? So bad, it's good? What about boring works? What about obscure works? What about works that appeal to no one? What about works that are technically sound, but otherwise too weird and niche to sell? What about works that are almost good but not quite? What metric do we use to determine which works deserve revamping, who will enforce those standards, and how?

For a third thing, what if the adaptation winds up fucking up something it should have improved? Will we need an adaptation to fix the adaptation?

I think we need to start making original art again, and if it turns out bad, oh well, we'll do better next time, instead of implying each work deserves a certain number of do-overs. Because then that lets creators off the hook for creating something of sufficient quality the first time around.

---

Of course throwing everything into the trash can and making something wholly different is a copout even then, but being too faithful in this case might result in a remake repeating the original's mistakes, which defeats the purpose of the original

I don't really know about this. Bad art is worth studying in what it did poorly, and scrubbing away the flaws also risks erasing learning opportunities.

Not sure if bad games ought to be remade so much as given the black-box treatment.

---

Easy example, I know, but think about something like Sonic 06: if you were tasked with remaking a game of that level how faithful could you really be? Think of the art style: it's one of that game's biggest flaws, in some ways replacing it with something more in line with Sonic's general aesthetics would be an objective improvement yet by doing so you would effectively eliminate a core aspect of the game's identity, yet if the identity itself is so flawed is it worth preserving in its entirety?

Maybe I'm too reductionist but I would rather let '06 be.

It's not just that the gameplay was soul-suckingly terrible, it's also that the story itself was so forgettable I have to question whether it is indeed worth it. Especially given how it erases itself from continuity.

---

I ask this because the biggest issue with modern remake culture I think is the focus on remaking old classics due to the ensured success they bring, rather than bad or mediocre which you'd think would be more in need of a second wind

Okay, they could remake bad games too. But they don't. They don't because money. Even if they thought remaking bad games to be lucrative business - which it won't be since it's too much financial risk - that still doesn't solve the problem of treating games as expendable.

To be clear, I don't take issue with the platonic concept of remakes; I take umbrage with remake culture generated by corporate quest for profit, which influences the public to treat games as expendable and not a "real" art form in need of preservation.

Besides, it doesn't really matter whether big publishers remake good or bad games if the underlying idea they're still trying to peddle to you is that games, period, have an expiration date. Even the bad ones, but especially the masterpieces. Nothing is exempt.

It won't matter if you, the AAA studio, publish a dud, because in five years' time you'll just "fix" it in post with a remake, and people will throw their cash money at you. Future game devs have no reason to learn from your mistakes. Nothing progresses.

---

Personally I'm someone who, on average, would prefer a remake to keep itself anchored to the original vision as much as possible, but if I find that a remake does something (like a gameplay mechanic) better than the original, even if in a way that is not faithful to the original vision, then I can't bring myself to ignore that on principle alone.

I guess I'm biased because I tend to find older games more solid in terms of gameplay mechanics, even if they are "clunky" and annoying in parts. They're a lot less hand-holdy. And what are games for, if not challenge?

When you're developing a game, you won't know whether a remake improves the original's mechanics until the horse has bolted from the stable. There's always the possibility the change turns out neither better nor worse than the original, just different.

This is what Takayoshi Sato was talking about when he said art direction accomplishes what technology alone cannot. Shiny tech isn't everything; you need to involve skill and craft as well. You can't just assume something will be better simply for being new.

---

I guess that at the end of the day I have a rather simplistic mindset about it: outside of some egregious example I'll mostly gravitate what I'll find the most fun within the context of what's being offered to me

I mean, that's valid. But at the risk of sounding pretentious, Silent Hill 2 is one of those games where people on both sides of the fence are a little wrong. SH2 cannot be anything other than a video game, and furthermore cannot work as anything other than a PS2 video game with PS2-era sensibilities.

The way it was designed is too deeply baked into the grain for a remake to even hope to be "faithful" to its idiosyncrasies. Not unless the PS5 has some ultra-awesome transparent fog tech we've not heard of yet, but even then.

The game parts matter more than the "play for the story, not the game" crowd will have you believe, because the game experience is the story. Your choices, the UI elements, the memos, the puzzles - they all are too carefully designed to not be deliberate.

This is a game where its... game-ness... was incorporated into the design in inextricable ways, down to the fact that saving represents lifing blocks from James' mind, so selling it as a game you play for story and nothing else discredits it.

More linear mediums would force one ending upon you, whereas being a video game means SH2 retains moral vagary with multiple, equally ambiguous, endings. You, the player, form just as much a part of James' character study as anything else; remove that interactive element, and a significant source of thematic resonance is lost.

Yet there's not much denying that playing on anything other than native hardware means you're not getting the full experience; James' motions map to pressure-sensitive buttons, and people playing on emulator frequently complain about the combat being "unresponsive" due to the emulator's inability to mimic pressure sensitivity.

Furthermore, I don't think SH2 is meant to be A Video Game(tm) in the sense that it's particularly fun to play. But that's kind of the point; what's fun about murder, trauma, mental illness, and suicide?

And yet, despite being disappointing in regard to traditional video game expectations, plenty of people have gleaned enjoyment from the experience SH2 offers. It's fun exploring the town, searching every nook and cranny for things you missed.

[tanadrin]

i think you have to be really careful with criticisms like “your [dis]like of X is just confusing aesthetics with actual policy” because trying to tell people why they believe something is both obnoxious and usually wrong. it requires constructing an accurate model of your opponent’s beliefs, which most people seem pretty bad at! and people are not include to impute charitable motives to people they disagree with.

but i think you can say that specific criticisms or specific kinds of criticism trade more in aesthetics than substance. obviously this is pretty endemic in traditional political discourse (politics has always been about aesthetics as much as anything else), but there are also loads of people who think of themselves as charitable, thoughtful, hard-nosed, policy-oriented political critics, of all different affiliations and stripes, who nevertheless are absolutely infuriated by certain political tendencies they violently reject on political grounds, and which they never actually seem to get around to making a substantive critique of.

the ur-example of this is probably left-anarchists who loathe right-libertarians on principle, even though there are some productive points of cooperation the two groups could profit from. their utopian visions are equally improbable, but as an aesthetic object it has outsized importance.

[keuscheliebe]

If the new art is not accessible to every man this implies that its impulses are not of a generically human kind. It is an art not for men in general but for a special class of men who may not be better but who evidently are different.

One point must be clarified before we go on. What is it the majority of people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their minds when they like a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is easy. A man likes a play when he has become interested in the human destinies presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the personages so move his heart that he participates in it all as though it were happening in real life. And he calls a work "good" if it succeeds in creating the illusion necessary to make the imaginary personages appear like living persons. I n poetry he seeks the passion and pain of the man behind the poet. Paintings attract him if he finds on them figures of men or women whom it would be interesting to meet. A landscape is pronounced "pretty" if the country it represents deserves for its loveliness or its grandeur to be visited on a trip.

It thus appears that to the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a state of mind which is essentially undistinguishable from their ordinary behavior. It differs merely in accidental qualities, being perhaps less utilitarian, more intense, and free from painful consequences. But the object towards which their attention and, consequently, all their other mental activities are directed is the same as in daily life : people and passions. By art they understand a means through which they are brought in contact with interesting human affairs. Artistic forms proper—figments, fantasy— are tolerated only if they do not interfere with the perception of human forms and fates. As soon as purely aesthetic elements predominate and the story of John and Mary grows elusive, most people feel out of their depth and are at a loss what to make of the scene, the book, or the painting. As they have never practiced any other attitude but the practical one in which a man's feelings are aroused and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental intervention leaves them without a cue.

Now, this is a point which has to be made perfectly clear. Not only is grieving and rejoicing at such human destinies as a work of art presents or narrates a very different thing from true artistic pleasure, but preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.

José Ortega y Gasset

[cloudsoffire]

musings on the weapons of giant robots: an incoherent ramble

when it comes to the weapons of giant robots, there are usually two kinds. a scaled up version of a regular weapon, and a weapon that's built into the body. a lot of older stuff uses a combination of the two (g1 transformers, gundam 0079), while the newer stuff errs towards the latter (modern transformers, pacific rim). but which is better? since my opinion is always the objective truth, i'll be going over my personal preferences.

i don't usually like the blaster-style weapons. not only do i just generally prefer melee combat when it comes to giant robots, but i feel like it's a little cheap. you've got a massive hunk of metal and electronics and the best you could come up with was a gun? it kinda works for gundam because the gundam also has a shield, but overall it's just an aesthetics issue.

that might make you think that i prefer it when the ranged weapon is built in. and that's both a yes and a no. it depends on how they go about it. like megatron's arm cannon is top tier, and when parts of the robot flip open to reveal guns that's cool. my issue is with the transforming kind of weapons. like when a hand swaps out for a gun. which like... ehh... if the gun is bigger than the hand then it's fine. (it's not a ranged weapon but gurren lagann's drills are big enough and have enough cool factor to circumvent this problem) but generally i much prefer it when the hand stays. maybe something comes out of the palm, or a bracelet of laser blasters comes out of its wrist. retractable shoulder mounted rockets. etc.

when it comes to melee weapons i think the same general principle applies. improvised weapons like the cargo ship in pacific rim are badass, but just carrying around a sword is a bit eh. not as eh as a blaster, especially if it's a really cool like whip sword or something, but still eh. gundam does this well by having the laser swords as part of the gundam's design. pacific rim has the blades come out above the back of the hand. now i was kinda iffy on guns, but for swords, THEY SHOULD NEVER REPLACE THE HAND. it looks weird and if you make it like a full length sword it's fully impractical. that goes for wrist blades, too. they have a maximum length before it gets into impracticality. in terms of weapons that can replace the hand, there are gurren lagann's drills that i mentioned prior, and i really like optimus prime's axe. but generally there should be more robots using sledgehammers and spiked knuckles and stuff.

uh. those were all my thoughts. it's 1pm but for my sleep schedule it's basically 4am.