#i promise i have a job

[corruptballin]

her: you better not be a john c calhoun piñata when i get there

me:

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[umblrspectrum]

friendly pal buddy copy of mine told me uzi would legally need a booster seat so i imagine the bus is like this

[bepoucorp]

trying to remember how i draw them...

[misterpseudonym]

you said forever / tell me why can’t you stay?

[daily-odile]

AUGH I’d love to see more time looping odile if possible,,,,, how do you think she’d like; “devolve” over each of the acts as compared to Siffrin over time :O

ok im gonna be honest i did like portrait edits months ago and just never finished them. so here you go

act 3:

act 5:

[shorthaltsjester]

i truly am baffled by some of the cr fandom when it comes to the topic of the gods and c1 and death in general because. the raven queen didn’t kill vax. in fact she gave him more time. she Does get the blame from keyleth and some from vex but even those two by the end were more so just holding grudges wrapped up in their own issues that were exacerbated by vax’s choices. but it was always vax’s choice. which, y’know, i’m aware of a portion of the cr fandom’s propensity for dismantling every interesting choice a character makes into something forced upon them, but the role of fate in exandria has never been like bad faith you must adhere to the path chosen for you, it’s much more like what brennan has spoken about wrt specificity: as one makes more choices they become more particular to a given outcome. but that’s not some curse by the gods that dooms characters that’s literally just. what living is.

and of course death is a complicated thing that everyone approaches differently but. god the amount of people who view vax’s dynamic with the raven queen as an injustice or his death as some unforgivable thing the raven queen caused some how? in the words of laura bailey, Were We Watching The Same Orb? it isn’t an injustice that vax, completely willing to pay whatever it cost him to save his sister, was bound to the Deal He Agreed To. his role as the champion was one he found meaning and purpose in. further, it was the raven queen that allowed him to be resurrected later in the campaign. like, it isn’t fair that vax had so little time but it is time he chose and time he was given, but vox machina tends to fall on the reaping the benefits side of unfairness of power in exandria. if what makes the gods — particularly the matron of ravens — irredeemable is that they have the power to make choices that mortals can’t like denying someone’s resurrection, how irredeemable must the group of heroes called vox machina (whose members drop like flies to be revived moments later) be to the everyday person who just has to watch the people they love die and make peace with it?

of course it sucks that vax could not have a happy ending or epilogue like the rest of vm, except of course, vex has a family and is happy and loved, and keyleth is strong and alive and protected, and i think that looks a lot like what vax wanted most.

[judgedarts]

when in doubt... draw kaibabros

[reasonsforhope]

Btw, if you really just Need A Job (tm)

I'd really recommend looking into care work

Care work here is specifically being a home care aid, a care aid or assistant at any kind of residential home.

This for usually for elderly or disabled adults - and those are the ones that tend to be most entry level, from what I've seen, but also for mental health, addiction recovery etc. (With the obvious caveat that some of these jobs will be more emotionally intense than others)

I'm so serious about this guys. I was applying to jobs in care work for just three weeks, starting a couple days before Christmas, and in that time I got three interviews, two jobs offers, and five additional interview requests

Care work needs people CONSTANTLY

because it's a huge sector but very hard for them to keep staff long-term. Partly because it can be high burn-out, and there's definitely toxic places out there you should watch out for. And partly because a lot of people think care work is beneath them

AND they ACTUALLY MEAN IT when they say they're entry level. Because it's so hard for them to get staff that a lot of them will advertise super aggressively that they will train you themselves. A lot of them will straight up pay for your CPR and First Aid certifications, once they hire you, too (and you can get a leg up on applications by getting a CPR/First Aid certification for like. $30 to $80, at least in the US). They also accept experience taking care of elderly/disabled/etc. family members as real experience

Like, obviously don't do it if you hate taking care of people, but if you're open to it, it's probably by far your best shot of getting hired rn, statistically

(eta: Genuinely disclaimer that it can be super taxing emotionally and large portions of the industry are indeed fucked, and def don't take a job in this field if you're gonna be an asshole to the people you're caring for, but sometimes you just need whatever job you can get.)

Seriously, though, the first time I applied for a care work job (in October 2023, yes short timeline, like I said there's some toxic workplaces etc. out there), I applied to like ten or fifteen jobs over the course of a week or so. Within three weeks, I was working.

(And they did provide all of the training, fwiw)

If you need a job and no one is hiring, seriously consider looking into it

[weedsmokingmacca]

beatlevember day 1: bored

[lindseymcdonaldseyelashes]

Leverage 3x13 - "The Morning After Job"

[razables]

round 2

[mickeywabbit]

make the orange m&m sexc !!!!!!! 😾😾

original

[imjustspacetrash]

Some fanart for a fanfic that I love! Honest Man by girlpigeon. I'm obsessed with their fics (babe wake up, they just dropped a new fic for serirei week 2024).

Here we have my visual interpretation of Reigen's sister and brother-in-law! Love how they are written in the fanfic, they are so canon to me now, this is how I imagen the Reigen Family to be. And I love the Reigen's dyed hair detail!, I headcanon that his original color is his manga colors.

My Carrd

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Having the Pool Dream again, handsome?

[anti-workshop]

Hey US friends! Ok, so obviously the voting discourse on here is vile. We don't know who's a psyop, who's a bot etc. Also people are legitimately pissed at the failures of the system to actually represent us in any meaningful way, and livid about the myriad ongoing genocides being committed with our money, in our name.

So, I'm not going to tell you what to do in November.

Before November, after November, NOW, for the love of God, please fucking organize at your jobs. That is probably the only place you can actually exercise real, direct power.

Voting is one very very small way to exercise indirect power. It's saying, "ok I am giving power to you, other person/people, now please do what you said you would that enticed me to give you this power in the first place."

Direct power is saying "Fuck you, no. We're doing this." and then doing that.

Organizing is hard and it takes time and you have to learn how to do it well, or it doesn't work. But when it works it works really fucking well. And when we organize a lot of us, we can win everything.

Y'all know I'm in the IWW. Right now the union is struggling with some administrative bs, same old story it's always been a messy organization. Doesn't matter. Branches and Unions in the IWW are autonomous to organize how they want to. It's a structure you can use if you want, to organize well. That's the route I'm taking because I trust and respect the people in my local, and I desperately want to help build worker power in my city and I'll do anything to help that.

You don't have to join an org, but please take a training on organizing and start organizing. The IWW has an intensive, 16 hour training that is free called the OT101. We feed you 4 meals and teach you how to organize to win. The training is even fun!

If there are unions in your area, or a labor council, reach out to them too, they regularly have organizing trainings! Theirs are more geared to getting contract negotiations, which in my opinion isn't the main goal, but training is always good and helpful.

But please please please, you have to organize your jobs. That's where we have them by the balls. They need us to run this shit, everything runs because we make it run.

Yes, they can fire you if you organize or get uppity. Yeah, right now that's illegal but probably won't be for long. Guess what, they have to hire someone to replace you! If that worker is also organizing, the bosses are fucked and we win!

The other thing is everyone can organize! My ass is disabled, decrepit, a major depressive and I can do it! You can too! You're not alone! That's the whole point! We can't do shit alone, we need each other and when we have each others' backs we can get shit done.

We all can see with our own eyes that shit is bad, it's been bad forever and it's going to get worse before it gets better and the only way it gets better is us making it better.

If you're in Milwaukee, or Wisconsin, or fuck generally the Midwest feel free to reach out to me and I will personally get you set up in an OT101 here. Get yourself here and we'll put you up somewhere, feed you, train you, get your connected to people in your area who are also organizing and build through from there.

Solidarity is where we have power, so let's use it.