#its about the LOSS

[whimsicmimic]

once again in absolute agony listening to repeat until death by novo amor + thinking about vash and knives

[oars]

[hinamie]

brighter days ahead

[shepscapades]

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [PART 6] [Part 7] [Don’t Let it Reach the Heart]

[This comic is part of my dbhc au, following the chaos and panic that ensues after Doc and Xisuma try to get Etho back online at the start of s9 after a very rough s8 finale that leaves him a little. broken. It's set to the vibes of Joywave's Destruction!]

[southern--downpour]

gl!ranboo doodle sheet bc i am actually going insane

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[g1deonthefirst]

what the ninth house did to wake's body — presumably picking her apart for resources and then perpetually enslaving her bones — must have been one of wake's greatest nightmares. the nine houses kill you and then they use each part of you and puppet your bones in service of them forever.

[zephyrartz-owo]

Mental Health Tip! Don't skip meals lest you be fighting demons

[sadcoms]

until i recently read posts on here about how there is an inherent queerness to the doctor and rose's relationship in how it's unspoken and filled with yearning that i'd never really considered that element, despite knowing for ages that RTD is gay but. man. it's just reframed a lot of the series for me, like the idea that you have this lonely man who's just watched his people die and is self-destructive and misanthropic and traumatised and he can love again and he wants to but it has so many risks.

but especially S3 and how it adds even more weight to the doctor's grieving widower status. how he tells martha that he and rose were together but martha refers to rose as a friend to tallulah; the fact that he can only say they were together once she is gone; how the only other person that both can feel how he feels but also understands the depth of his feelings is jack, a queer man himself. and I've been thinking to myself lately oh, it's ok, the doctor and rose probably accidentally got married on at least one planet or something but also the point is that there was no official title that could convey to people the extent that they meant to each other, that the doctor can really only tell donna that rose was his friend even though it is so wholly inadequate and she comes to see that by the end of the episode (and martha too of course). how people who saw the doctor and rose together assumed they were a couple, like on krop tor, but once there's no more physical evidence of the relationship it becomes more vague (and simultaneously clearer).

anyway something about how christopher eccleston said he based his portrayal of nine on RTD and something about RTD saying that his husband is "in every good man i write now" and how the doctor and ruby seeing each other in the club mimics his first meeting with his husband aka the one moment he would use a time machine to go back to hmmm

[bananonbinary]

Tumblr's debt is a problem of their own creation. The app is buggy, the userbase is flooded with porn bots, nazis roam free, hate speech roams free, trans women have sfw content marked mature, art and posts are stolen for promotion, features are forced down our throats, ads are malicious and often gross or triggering and giving them money will not stop this.

If we give tumblr money they're not going to get rid of Tumblr live or restore the nsfw or remove ads or whatever you think they're going to do, they're going to KEEP DOING THE SAME THING except with more money to blow. Tumblr is a CORPORATION, they can get a government bailout like any other corporate entity can, and while people are throwing money at a dumbass corporation there are people begging to get bills paid and for food and other necessities.

Please open your eyes to the reality of the situation, its not just some guy anymore, David Karp is long gone its a soulless conglomerate now and they do not need our pity

a lot of yall seem to think that i want to like, bake sale save the baseball team. that's not what this is about. i don't think we need to "fix tumblr's debt," i think we need to make the website profitable (and the debt shows it isnt, altho from what i can gather a better word is "deficit" rather than "debt," ie, they are losing that much more money than they take in annually), because as it stands tumblr has no reason whatsoever to want to keep the current user base around. it's trying to attract a different userbase, because yall are PROUD of the fact that tumblr is a failing website and you dont want to pay them. you're loitering inside a store and acting surprised when the store wants you gone. of COURSE they're constantly introducing new features and not listening to what the users want, they don't want you here.

it's not a protest, it's not an attempt to buy good will, it's a simple business transaction: i spend a lot of time here, and i would like to keep spending a lot of time here. so i will buy my shitty internet crab, and tell my fellow loiterers that they can as well if they want. if you dont want to do that, you literally don't have to, but you can't tell me not to.

you people are all like "ohh tumblr isnt your friend dont give it money" but like. yeah. its not my friend. i would like to pay it for a service it provides, instead of expecting it to continue to provide that service out of the goodness of its non-existant heart. i dont think im the one with the parasocial relationship here.

also:

dont tell me to help a poor people. i am a poor people. i am allowed to spend THREE DOLLARS on something i like for myself, and not give literally every single dollar i have to charity and mutual aid. you have NO IDEA how much or if i do for other people, and you won't, because you aren't owed every detail of my life like that. people are allowed to have things they want for no other reason than they want them sometimes.

[pine-needle-shuffle]

Something I haven't seen people talk about pertaining to Aerith's death is a) Sephiroth's intent of how it was to affect Cloud and b) how it failed

So Sephiroth killed Aerith partly because he knew that she was attempting to stop him. But another major motive behind many of Sephiroth's actions is revenge. He views others as being below him. Including Cloud. The one person who stopped him.

In turn, Sephiroth made it part of his plan to knock Cloud down a peg, make him regret stepping out of line. Killing Aerith was the most efficient course of action in this scenario. Sephiroth wanted to take from Cloud, as he felt Cloud had taken from him.

This is where Sephiroth's desired effect doesn't happen. Cloud doesn't view him killing Aerith as a slight against him. His entire reaction revolved around the fact that she was robbed of her life. Not that she was taken from him, or anyone else.

Aerith was her own person, she had her own dreams and desires, she lived life the best she could. And Sephiroth took that from her. Not from Cloud.

It highlights the difference between how Cloud views others and how Sephiroth views others. Sephiroth applies his own views and ideas of how the world works. How feelings work.

He claims Cloud has no feelings. That he's just a puppet. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. Cloud sees the people around him, Sephiroth sees tools. Just like how Cloud saw Aerith as someone robbed of her life, Sephiroth only saw a tool to hurt someone else.

[rambunctioustoons]

hold 🌙 ✨

[feniksido]

Discussing the failures of our predecessors and how to avoid them aka They should have given Gortash a Gun

[haunted-xander]

One thing I really love about Marcille is that despite her deep fear of outliving her loved ones, she never, never let's it get in the way of her making bonds and getting close to people. She loves deeply and strongly and she doesn't try to supress that! She embraces it wholeheartedly! Her friends are so important to her and she's not ashamed or scared of it!

Actually, out of all the characters, I'd say Marcille is one of the ones who care the most about bonds of friendship. She's angry at Namari for leaving after Falin got eaten and holds that grudge up until Namari helps defeat the Undine (and therefore having 'proven' herself). She's shocked and upset when Chilchuck explains his policy of payment and that he's not really here bc of friendship. She puts a lot of focus on the party being a Group Of Friends rather than a team of hired hands dedicated to the specific role(s) they are paid for. Which of course makes sense since she joined the party to begin with because of her friend! To her, the party has always been 'Falin and her brothers' friend group' rather than a hired party. (A little reminder: Marcille was the most recent member when the story starts. She never met the previous members who left so the team of Laios, Falin, Chilchuck, Namari and 'Shuro' is what she's always known it as.)

When she becomes dungeon lord, the thing that manages to snap her out of the Winged Lions grasp is the earnest care and love her party is showing her. Literally 'power of friendship'ed their way through the Lions hold and gave her her clarity of mind back.

And!!!! At the end of the feast right before they're about to attempt to revive Falin again, she says!!! this!!!!

She's ready to accept that Falin might not come back, even after everything. The entire story she's been running away from death, from having to outlive her loved ones (in this case: Falin). But here she is, ready to let her stay dead if this last attempt doesn't work.

And it's not giving up. It's realizing that she did all she could, and that it's okay. Because she still got to meet and be friends with Falin. That time with her might be just a speck in the length of life Marcille will have to live still, but it still happened and that's what matters.

It's not about escaping death; it's about cherising the moments before it.

[simmonsized]

A Day in the Life of Private Michael J Caboose, Post-Restoration.

It's three days late, but this is my comic for #makeaterriblecomicday. I became possessed by the idea, and could not stop until it was complete. I haven't drawn rvb in a really long time, but I had a lot of fun!

[artsy-1diot]

firesetter that I keep finding excuses to post for and then forgetting