#the fact that Making It as an artist on the internet is almost completely about marketing always makes me a little insane

[bandsanitizer]

the way that it doesn’t just make me sad but angry that idols are expected to apologize not just for disappointing fans and their members but for harming them by so much as even having a dating rumor bc is it that bad they found love? or something that could become that? is it that bad for the people you supposedly love and support to be happy? yes I know the industry basically runs on the parasocial relationships but isn’t it high time to recognize that someone else’s happiness is not an attempt to ruin yours? that even if it is painful or difficult for you, that is not the responsibility of the idol. they should not need to apologize for their own happiness and events within their personal life which half the time come out as leaks (read: invasions of their privacy) rather than on their own time. and to go as far as to say it implies they don’t deserve their job or should leave their group… artists experiencing things in life? the emotions of affection and infatuation and love and endearment and everything else that comes with a romantic relationship? that’s only going to give them the capacity to create greater and more enriched art. i’m not saying they’re in a relationship to do (and I certainly hope not) but if you need any reason at all to refrain from causing these idols harm in the way you claim their happiness has so deeply harmed and disappointed you, then take it as them living. that life needs art and art needs life.

[knxfesck]

Something I'm always wondering about is the phenomenon of internet conditions that bring certain artists to fame/influence/household name level among niche groups that I feel like no longer exists since platfirms like tiktok have become popular. There's a whole list of mediocre fanartists that are STILL immediately recognisable to a crazy amount of people on no merit other than being Pinterest Gods or Youtube Posters. And its gets them places too!! (i.e. vivziepop and the officialification of her half assed oc's). We live in a wild society huh

[alcrego]

Digital walls, but walls

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little 'essay' I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I'm doing today. I would be really grateful and I'm sure you'll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be "painted" but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating...

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the "warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing" first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the "erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous" characters or the concept of "famonimity"; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the "leftovers" after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc..... With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting.... Except for the birth of new "isms" within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation... Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. "Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers...

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art" are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

A. L. Crego, 2014.

[dailyrothko]

Hi! I’m already drawn to Rothko’s art so much just by looking at his paintings on my tiny phone screen. But it is quite unlikely that I’ll get to see his paintings irl, at least not for a few years. Would you mind sharing your experience of looking at a Rothko? Thank you for putting in the work on this blog :)

Hi, I'm sorry I didn't answer this sooner but Tumblr has not been notified me that I have messages and I forgot to check. I've had a coupled of weeks of insomnia so you may have to forgive some languid prose.

In my early viewings of Rothko, I think my reactions were fairly standard exchanges with modern art when you're getting acclimated. Among these, were how big the paintings were, and I duplicated this surprise in my viewings of a couple of other abstract, expressionist painters, notably in my mind, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner along with Rothko.

I think there's a hand in the hand reaction about the size that then you are aware the paintings are not hard edged, the way, say an Ellsworth Kelly painting would be. There's a plastic look effective in pop-art that Rothko strenuously avoided. They are undeniably sensual, almost romantic.

Once you get the size, you can really appreciate this because when you read art monographs or look at the internet, the lens is so reduced, one tends to get a constricted notion of color squares like you would see in a color theory book. However, the face-to-face confrontation reveals quite the opposite feeling of that kind of art.

It's a little hard to describe, but it's not that the paintings are completely soft. They have a lot of minor details, brushstrokes, stray lines and bits of splattered paint, but none of those colliding forces interfere with an overall limitless impression of the form that makes it very different from hard edge or gestural painting (like de Kooning). Part of what's hard to describe, is how it is not soft, but rather translucent, not vague, but flowering out to infinity.

I find with Rothko in particular that when you start looking, you want to keep looking. I suppose one of his detractors might say you're doing it because you're looking for something where there is nothing, but my experience with art is that, where there is nothing you quickly move on. Rothko might be equated in some minds with an Antonioni movie (Certainly Antonioni himself thought this) where it has a quality of nothingness but not one of no meaning. We read meaning into everything we are exposed to, it's part of how our brains process things, but perhaps Rothko's great skill is inviting you to look. i would not be the first to think so.

My tendency to invest in things I like leads me to unconsciously test myself as if from the outside, making sure that I am not fooling myself as to the merit of it (who wants to be a sucker, right?) and, I've seen a couple over the years that I felt didn't age well, maybe, something about them didn't look as alive, not the color combinations, but possibly something with the paint dulling overtime. I don't think galleries like to talk about it because the artist so valuable as an investment, but you do see, if rarely, paintings would you feel maybe age got the better of. Much of this, though can be attributed to the way light works with Rothko. The public tends to gripe when a gallery is not brightly lit, but Rothkos tend to wilt under bright lights and lose depth. This has a lot to do with the fact that Rothko painted in dim light like El Greco, and voiced his paintings to speak this way.

When they do work, which is quite often, it's pretty vivid, and I feel, entrancing. When I first got really interested in Rothko in my late teenage years, I did not know a single person who was interested in it among my group of friends and I bought a poster from the cover of Bonnie Clearwater's works on paper book and I hung it on my wall. It was a conversation starter because nobody liked it! I suppose that's the age where some people are geared towards something more classically punchy.

My feeling of the paintings, especially early in my life, remind me of an effect one might feel from music that you've never heard before, much like the response I had from the early rural blues music of the late 1920s. I didn't know how much I loved it exactly, I only knew that it was powerfully beckoning me to return. And, as one returns, you participate in a communion. You relax into it and the feelings you have rise to the surface, sometimes framing emotionally charged interchange between you and the art. I think that's a lovely thing to get from whatever kind of art you like.

Now, I am kind of an old hand at seeing Rothko paintings, but I rarely cease to be surprised by them and that maybe that is their finest attribute.

I can't imagine this helps much, but I hope that when you do see one in person, you will write and share your impressions, because after all, they are the ones that count

[carriesthewind]

"My investigation shows that discussions about the integrity of our news ecosystem, filter bubbles, plagiarism, copyright, and AI art should focus almost entirely on the fact that American tech giants are obsessed with conquering and colonizing the entire world with products that are half baked and are extremely poorly moderated in languages that are not English. Any conversation about the failing business models of news in the United States, the “communities” we build on social media, and the degradation of the English-language internet due to AI spam is completely divorced from the reality that the people actually spamming these platforms are operating in a different cultural, political, and economic context than the artists or journalists who are having their work ripped off. Big tech has built and invested heavily in these tools, and, knowingly or unknowingly they’re paying people to use them."

[ihopesocomic]

Sorry, but Is it wrong to train AI with my own content? For example, making my own characters to use in the character AI, just for inspiration or to practice dialogues. I don't post any of that. Just as drafts or to get ideas. It's like that artists who redesigning AI art. I never would do that to someone's character who doesn't want to.

I've also had very bad experiences on discord and amino before, and because of that I think this ends up being safer too. People encourage kids to look for friends online, but when something bad happens, they just say "That's why kids shouldn't be on the internet talking to strangers!" 😕

I think AI art being implemented in the art market is a bigger problem than kids using an app to talk to a anime character.

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences on Discord and Amino but social interactions on those platforms aren't the be all or end all of social interactions. There's a few people I know who don't use Discord servers at all and just use it to chat to close friends they've met on places like Twitter or Tumblr. Or they still use Skype.

And the fact that it's not good for children to isolate themselves to avoid learning how to use the internet safely aside, you do know these AI chats contain things not appropriate for children, right? Like a lot of them contain NSFW elements? Because yeah, bold of you to assume that it's just kids doing this. oof

"I think AI art being implemented in the art market is a bigger problem than kids using an app to talk to an anime character."

OK, cool, only artwork isn't the only thing AI is imitating. People are out here using generators to draw up fake scenarios with our creations instead of having some integrity and just writing them out themselves. idk it's just wild how you've gone from saying 'I never would do that to someone's character who doesn't want to' and 'well, it's not a big deal - it's only kids talking to a character' in the same ask. Which is it?

You also can't claim that you care about AI art being implemented and then completely discount things like writing, music and voice work being imitated. Those are forms of art that have human effort and talent put into them too and where livelihoods can also be ruined by AI. Journalism is deemed almost obsolete as a human profession now because AI has become that good at writing out articles with a few prompts.

It's either all or nothing. - RJ

[yggdraseed]

An Incomplete Analysis of the Sukunadome

I stress the point that this is an inherently incomplete analysis. It's getting late, I'm tired and unhappy, and… well, the fight isn't over yet, so there's no way this analysis could be complete even if I felt like it. However, it's on my mind, and I feel the need to start exerting myself more on these things. Sometimes sweat is the better medicine. I know this is a long one and doesn’t have any pictures, but if we all support each other, we’ll get through it together.

Full disclosure, I wish more people had gotten filtered by this fight and just stopped talking about Jujutsu Kaisen by now. Like yeah, I think it's great different people see things in different ways, but let's all be honest with ourselves here, most of the people criticizing this fight are not doing so with any sort of literary or artistic perspective or good faith. Most of it is Gojo fans who are still crying, seething, vomiting, pissing, and shitting over the fact that the character they attached their ego to didn't win Jujutsu Kaisen like they wanted. If this describes you, well, this post will probably do you some good, but I'm confident nobody who takes the stance that Gojo should have won would have the space in their mind for what I'm about to say about Sukunadome.

Because that's what I'm calling it. "The Sukuna Cycle" was maybe a little funny for a week or two, but like most memes about this series, it wasn't really based on the story so much as it was on an agenda. Kusakabe was part of the fight since Yuji and Higuruma entered, and up until Miguel, we knew all the combatants who would be tagging in were there. We knew Yuta was off dealing with Kenjaku and would return, we knew Maki was in play, and there really weren't a lot of switches. Just Choso leaving and coming back, Ui Ui retrieving Higuruma's and Gojo's corpses, and… you know, actually, I think that's it. Sure isn't as much as the "Sukuna Cycle" memes made it out to be, huh?

Okay, if you haven't noticed yet, I'm a big JJK fan and a big JJK fandom hater. I think JJK has the worst Western internet fanbase I've seen in a long time, with only a few oases scattered across the internet where you can find intelligent life. Like it's insane what kind of bullshit a person can convince themselves of.

However, I'm not analyzing JJK's fanbase, I'm analyzing JJK. Someday we'll litigate whether or not Lobotomy Kaisen was really funny enough to justify how badly it ruined this fanbase's ability to objectively, productively engage with with one of the most competently written and culturally impactful manga to come out this century. Today is not that day.

So Sukuna's got four arms and knows how to use them. He's got four eyes and so much sass one mouth wasn't enough for the amount of trash he's got to talk to the youths of today. Just on a basic level, having four arms would be such an insignificant power in any other Shonen as to almost be a joke. Yet with how jujutsu sorcery functions as a power system and how adept Sukuna is at using every possible advantage at his disposal - even going so far as to take what probably should be disadvantages and twist them to work for him - having the ability to make hand seals while fighting hand-to-hand, and being able to chant without interrupting his breathing, are inseparable from Sukuna's godlike fighting ability. I love how something seemingly so mundane is such a huge x factor for Sukuna.

We continually see how Sukuna is a complex, but fundamentally vile antagonist. He has a very rich, detailed view of the world, but one that fundamentally reduces every other human being to be his playthings and food. It's just that Sukuna says, "Don't like it? Then get stronger." It's a very Social Darwinist, late stage capitalist view to be coming from the Heian Era, and I think that maybe it's intentional. Shitty people are shitty in mostly the same ways, it's just they find new things to be shitty about or to use to be shitty with.

Like if that were all it is, it'd make Sukuna so effective as a villain to hate and would slot so nicely into Jujutsu Kaisen's overarching social and political commentary. Cruelty within suffering, selfishness as a strength and a weakness, the unfairness of how the strength to pursue one's agency is unevenly distributed and how the haves don’t realize how easily they could have instead been have-nots, it's all there.

But there’s this inherent charisma to Sukuna that I think is intentional. He has this noblesse oblige where he’s so inherently aware of his greatness that he doesn’t have a problem with giving credit where credit is due. Like he talks all the trash when he’s fighting Jogo, but where Gojo’s insults come across as puerile and blunt, Sukuna’s always displaying this wit to him. And when the battle’s over, he acknowledges that even though Jogo wasn’t as strong as him, he was stronger than most and could have gone even further if he hadn’t held himself back. He starts off belittling Gojo in their fight, but by the end, he expresses a profound respect and gratitude towards Gojo. Like it’s a very warped form of those sentiments, but I think it’s sincere. Even with Ishigori, when Sukuna fails to cut him the first time, he just acknowledges it was disrespectful to hold back and that he’ll give it full force the next strike.

Something to keep in mind is that everything Megumi warned Yuji about when it comes to ancient sorcerers applies to Sukuna as well. They’re not treated as uniformly, unambiguously evil anymore than anyone else in JJK is, and are acknowledged as having fundamentally different world views about violence and the value of human life. Kashimo, for instance, seems to value his life only because he’s able to risk his life and lay it on the line. They’re people from an era where children died so young that parents often gave them numbered names so as to not get too attached until they’d see if their kids actually were going to make it or not. If you didn’t give your whole life over to a goal, you probably wouldn’t achieve it. Whereas modern sorcerers, modern people, have all these complex and sometimes contradictory views and needs, ancient sorcerers show a tendency to shave everything away except their one singular conviction because that was what you had to do in an era of much shorter life expectancies and peril on all sides. You’d be very lucky to accomplish one life goal, let alone as many as people of today set out to achieve: graduating high school, graduating college, getting a job, starting a family, and hopefully having one or two passions on the side. Fundamentally different worldviews from fundamentally different periods of history.

And Sukuna is no different. His goal is simple: partake in the many colors and flavors of humanity through mortal combat in the arena of sorcery. Sukuna’s love for sorcery runs deep. He’s always curious about different cursed techniques, even ones that are pedestrian to a sorcerer of his level, like Nanako’s smartphone-based technique. He reminds me of a quote from Baki: “Someone who works hard can never beat someone who enjoys himself.” Sukuna has clearly put forth great effort to master sorcery, but clearly doesn’t see it as work. He sees it as just doing what he enjoys and is good at.

Unfortunately for everyone else, he enjoys killing and is extremely good at it. Sukuna is the ultimate ethical heat death of the “live for yourself, cherish your own agency, don’t let yourself be controlled” mindset that is the ideological starting point of JJK. It’s a very dark, extreme interpretation of Buddhist non-attachment, where even compassion is an attachment to ultimately shed. Sukuna lives perfectly freely, including being free from guilt or compassion.

Naturally, there’s an exception. All things seem to have exceptions. In Sukuna’s case, that would be Uraume. I’ve been fascinated by their dynamic since we first learned of Uraume’s allegiance to Sukuna during Shibuya and I still can’t wait to know more. Suffice to say, Sukuna dotes on Uraume, forgiving their mistakes and seeming to enjoy their company not just because of their service to him, but because their existence makes him happy. I’m reminded of Power in Chainsaw Man, how she was seemingly incapable of empathy or mercy until she met Meowy.

Honestly, Sukuna reminds me a lot of a lot of characters in Chainsaw Man. People who are trying to climb from this state of misery, of struggling just to meet basic desires, and learning to be human. Yet Sukuna is so strong he never needed to learn to be human. He never needed to cooperate with others to survive — or at least, doesn’t seem to believe he did — and so he never saw the value in it. And so he’s basically brute forced his way around having to undergo an arc like Denji’s, and has instead ended up a hedonistic black hole devising all these complicated philosophical arguments to justify what is, really, a very simplistic, predatory desire to only satisfy his basic material wants and creative interests and nothing else for anyone else.

But like, it’s not that simple. If you give to others, you get something immaterial in return. I can’t quantity it or define it, but I’m sure most of you know what I mean. The happiness that comes from taking care of others’ needs, and the deeper levels beyond that happiness. Like I do believe that’s the subtext behind Binding Vows as metaphor: that you almost never give without getting in return. You might not get the same thing back, in the same form, but being changed by the act of putting the needs and wants of others before your own even temporarily still is part of the exchange. It’s part of becoming complete as a human being.

Sukuna has defied that exchange and broken the cycle, and I don’t think it’s inherently for his own benefit. There are some thing about being human that you don’t just get to opt out of, no matter how much you claim you’re more than or less than human. Even if Sukuna doesn’t think he’s lost something of value, he has. And that something of value is inherent to the whole point of this final battle.

Jujutsu Kaisen is basically working on two big problems. There are lots of ideas at play in the series, but there are two fundamental problems for which every fiight, every character arc, every turn of the gears consitutes part of the calculus to solve one or both of those problems.

The first problem, a thematic and philosophical one: “How do you love and fight for something when you know you’re going to die?”

The second problem, a metatextual one: “Is there any artistic and social value left in the Shonen formula as it stands in the modern day?”

And this fight is, ultimately, where GeGe is showing their work. It’s where Yuji has to defeat Sukuna, if not in terms of out-boxing him, then in terms of prevailing over his beliefs about humanity and the world as a whole.

GeGe has stripped Yuji of everything that is supposed to determine the worth of a Shonen protagonist’s victory. He’s not fighting alone, he didn’t go off and train all by himself, he trained with a lot of powerful, smart people who helped him. And Yuji is arguably not even the most important participant in the fight. So why should we care if Yuji wins?

The answer is so simple it’s easy to lose track of it. Yuji is risking his life to rescue someone, his friend, from being exploited, and to save the people of Japan from being exploited. Even after everything that’s happened, Yuji plants his fucking feet and takes a stance that no, shithead, there is such a thing as the right thing. Maybe it isn’t obvious all the time, and it sure as hell isn’t always easy to know what it is, but he knows now with certainty what it isn’t: to exploit others or to destroy yourself. We can find our answers somewhere in-between.

Sometimes we can’t resolve our problems with a tidy solution that makes everyone happy and sometimes we have to carve a piece of ourselves out and give to something we won’t be sure to see the fruition of, but that’s just life. It doesn’t mean we have to throw away all hope for things to get better. Even if the world won’t become utopian, it can still become better, no matter how many nihilists hide their own inequities behind assertions that there is no point.

Nihilism is not a solution to the problems of life, it is the choice to run away and hide. To give into nihilism is to give up the fight even while other people are still fighting all around you.

So that’s the fucking point of the Sukunadome. Nobara already said it better than anyone else has before she made Mahito look like the bitch he was and always will be: “Sometimes you need to fight even when you know you can’t win.” Because you won’t always win and you won’t escape death, nor will you know what lies beyond death. However, you can still live according to your principles and fight for the things you see as meaningful even if other people don’t.

That is why so many characters have come and gone from the fight. All gave some, some gave all. Nobody is truly useless — even if Miwa self-deprecatingly jokes about being useless, she still was the one thing standing between Maki and Malevolent Shrine’s eviscerating hellscape. Even Amai’s sweets-conjuring joke technique saved Hana from a would-be fatal fall and helped to supply sugar to the brains of people using reverse cursed technique in Shoko’s triage. Larue couldn’t do much, but they caught Sukuna’s eye at the perfect time for Yuji to land a Black Flash, and that means something. It all means something.

Given how deeply GeGe clearly respects Hunter X Hunter, I want to end off by citing one of the quotes in Hunter X Hunter that has been the most impactful for me and I suspect has been about as impactful on GeGe: “It seems small things… infinitesimally small things… are needed to build the entire universe. The size of a thing has nothing to do with its power.” We always seem to direct our senses to the superlatives. The largest, the oldest, the loudest, the things that hit the hardest. But while it would be wrong to throw those out, we often lose sight of how many little, important things there are in the midst of those huge, important things.

Seeing someone’s smile when you remembered something they said that showed you were listening to them. The feeling of a warm breeze on a summer morning. The smell of honeysuckle on your walk home. Waking up to rain on a Sunday. The taste of watermelon. Getting married. Having your heart broken. Songs that make you smile, songs that make you cry — songs that do both, and songs that make you feel things you can’t describe. When you’re always looking to those immense, monolithic things, always comparing your seemingly small, seemingley meaningless life to them, you lose sight of just how meaningful all of it is.

Just because it doesn’t have cosmic, absolute meaning doesn’t make it meaningless. Every little thing that means something to you is worthy of being cherished. The people around you, the things that bring you happiness, even if that happiness is going to ebb and flow. It’s all worth fighting for and living for. It just takes bravery and conviction to keep fighting and keep living with authenticity and love. And if there’s an artistic value, a greater meaning to Shonen, now and always, it’s the unerring, unabashed belief that there’s a reason to aim high and not give up.

Because sometimes, life hurts. But if it’s just pain, Yuji Itadori will never stop. We’ll see what I have to amend, reconsider, or elaborate on when the fight is finished. I hope this gave some of you a new way to look at it.

[olderthannetfic]

Ok, wow, this is NOT the type of ask you seem to get usually, but this appears to be my best option...

I'm seeking out a post that is not particularly fandom-y in nature, but I was reminded of it after reading the earlier anon who was burned out from AI discourse - I totally feel the same way, and there was a really great lengthy textpost I reblogged a few months ago (read: "I read it any time from, like, April 2024 to almost a year ago......sorry") that I cannot find on my blog nor on tumblr in general - either because the post has been completely nuked from the internet OR because I'm just bad at SEO searches and remembering the keywords that were actually IN the post. I'm hoping it's a me issue or, if the post IS nuked, at the very least someone here remembers it and has an internet archive link or screenshot or something????

to get to the point, there was a post that was like (paraphrased, quote marks are not literal quotes):

"When it comes to the anti-AI crowd on tumblr, there's basically two schools of thought: people who completely hate AI and everything about it and are opposed to all forms of AI without even learning what AI really is. These people are stuck in their ways and generally can't be reasoned with.

Then there's a second group who are against AI for pretty good reasons - they really are worried that AI is gonna completely take over and steal artists' livelihoods, those who criticize it for environmental activist reasons, etc. These people generally can be reasoned with as they're truly misinformed, and in fact they would be - or already are - receptive to a less harmful AI."

The post then went on to compare AI to other forms of automation and made some really great parallels; such as bringing up the fact that stores that have both self checkout AND cashiers tend to be the best business models, because people who have their preferences can choose how they want to shop, AND we can utilize automated checkouts without completely getting rid of cashiers, which is obviously good for a lot of reasons.

It also debunked a lot of common fearmonger-y arguments against AI, i.e. explaining what "training AI" really entails, with some general copyright-critical philosophy in general. (I don't know the actual, like, political term, if one even exists, but basically they were talking about flaws with "intellectual property" as a concept - or at least how IP works today and why it works the way it does.)

There was also a really good addition to the OP's thoughts that I liked, with another user talking about: Essentially people who are gonna use AI would likely have done something else sketchy anyway, even if AI as it stands today didn't exist. For example, chatGPT isn't to blame for plagiarism. The people who use chatGPT to do their homework would, in an earlier time, likely go on Chegg / pay someone to write an essay / reuse their old work / etc. Likewise, the people who tell open AI to make artwork for them likely wouldn't make (or try to make) their own artwork anyway, nor would they even commission someone. They talked about how since fandom is so damn divided on the topic of AI, that the artists who DO feel as if their commissions are being taken away from them, or the writers who DO fear AI taking over fanfic.......well, to put it nicely, those people likely wouldn't really be losing many fans in the first place. You didn't lose a commission to AI - that person never would've commissioned you in the first place, and the people that do commission you hate AI as much as you do. You're not losing readers to AI - people who choose AI fics over yours are likely already the impatient type who can't handle waiting more than a week for an update, so they just make AI feed them 10k in one sitting! And the people who DO comment and read on your stuff, also hate AI!

I definitely did not agree with every single point made on the post (ie i dont think the self checkout metaphor was a great direct parallel logistically, but I def picked up what they were trying to put out and overall agreed with the general sentiment), overall it made a lot of really, really, really good points about the AI debate that I'd truly never considered before.

I know I've damn near rewritten the whole post myself now at this point but I also know there's a lot of stuff that I'm missing or that I just can't word and I'd love to know if anyone else has seen this post or has it on their blog in some capacity.

--

[nouverx]

Good afternoon!!!

I am Andrew and how I can see your audience is pretty big and you're pretty popular in Hazbin community. So how did you gain you audience? I would wanted to listen some recommendations for new content makers.

Pal I don't know if I'm the right person to ask this ahah because I have no idea, I just draw what I like, post it and see how it goes basically. I just love Alastor and Radiorose so much that I need to talk about them and draw them or else I feel like I'm going to explode. I need art about them to chew on constantly so I check the radiorose tag almost everyday (sometimes I comment on posts and people seem surprised to see me there ahah guys I am just as brainroted as you yk). And I guess people are the same as me and need food to chew on too. Who knows

I'll ramble more under the cut:

Tbh I'm just an hobbyist I want to make art that I love and am passionate about and if it draws people's love and attention in the process then good! If not, then it's ok too. I least I made food for myself to enjoy.

It might be surprising but I spend my free time writing fanfics that I'm never going to post ahah, I just like to reuse some stuff I write and make them into comics. I write my little fake scenarios for my own enjoyment in the first place. For example this recent Radiorose comic originally was a one shot I wrote back in February. I only made it into a comic recently because I really wanted to share it with people (and fun fact at first it ended with Alastor being so startled by this whole conversation that he left her apartment without a word and didn't talk to her for like a week. I changed it to make it funnier because I like to entertain people more than make them sad :'D)

I don't want to be popular or make art for other people, I make it for my own enjoyment first and I just like to share it sometimes to see if people will enjoy my vision! So I dont know what kind of advice I could give you ahah I don't know if I have the right mindset for that.

I also think I have the bonus point of being an experienced artist. I've been drawing for 12 years, studied art academically for 6 years, I work in the animation industry, I have a lot of experience in posting online, and I've been drawing for a lot of fandoms in my life: Death Note, Undertale, Mystic Messenger, Moomin, Steven Universe, One Piece, The Legend of Zelda, Trigun Stampede, and now Hazbin Hotel. My artistic skills are completely different from when I was drawing in my first fandom (Death Note) in 2015 ahah. Now no matter what fandom I draw in I always get a decent amount of reactions thanks to my artistic skills and experience.

It makes me sad to see smaller artists compare themselves to me sometimes and be disappointed that they don't get as much attention as me. Just be aware that I have a degree in art and animation and I've been posting art on Internet since I'm 14. I'm almost 25. Don't beat yourself up you'll get there 💖

[yankaze]

KH OC week 2024 - Day 2: Past What was your character creation process like?

this one will be morally difficult for me 😭😭

I didn't find much old art to show, but I think these ones will say a lot.

Hajime as a character has existed since 2016. In March 2016 (I was 13 uuum 13 ehem) I learned about KH and somewhere around the same time I came up with this, at that time - eh, I don't know- at least unoriginal character who was literally a goth Roxas (I didn't knew about the existence of AUs idk, and Roxas is already ''emo boy'', but 2007 was almost here idkkk, we can joke about it for a very long time actually, but the fact remains a fact).

His name changed many times and there was no special meaning behind them (Sea, Syon), I just liked the way they sounded. I can answer the question why I named him ''Hajime'' right now. Internet says: ''Hajime (Japanese: はじめ) is a Japanese name meaning "beginning" (初め, 始め)''. I liked the way it sounded and its meaning and it gave me a hint where to move the character's story now.

+ in the Hajime's story he chooses this name for himself, because obviously no one gave name to him, but he needed a word to talk about himself and (i'm not sure about that) in the book he finds this name and I can say that it was chosen by him randomly.

He had a terrible written story on the basis of some other AU (???) and without сorvalol I can’t read it, even though it’s stored somewhere in my old dms from those years, I still don’t want to show it 😭

Around 2017 and up until 2019, I tried to make... something... out of him. It feels more like I just periodically returned to KH in a fit of baseless nostalgia and I really wanted to shove a “piece of myself” into this universe (which was already tired of me lmao).

2019 reminded me about KH in the form of KH III release and... this character again (+ my friend's kh oc- Jun).

I think that for a long time I didn't wanted to fundamentally change his concept (which was literally just that he exists and somehow travels around the worlds) because I was emotionally attached to this character. In essence, he was not just a character for me, but also memories that were triggered by each repeated hyperfixation on this universe.

It seems to me that the most obvious indicator of how I jumped back and forth into the KH universe is noticeable by the fact that it gave me the opportunity to look at one of my redraw series with this character through the years.

From 2020 to 2023 there was a long lull with this character.

2023 has been jUiCy in rethinking from the start because the long break gave me the opportunity to finally stop give in to nostalgia (or at least less) and loosen my emotional attachments to unworkable concepts. Therefore, this character now has the opportunity to finally become something better than a copy of another character.

However, this epic attempt was quickly abandoned as soon as the hyperfix ended.

We've reached the present time (mid-2024).

I slammed my fist on the table and decided to finally play through ALL the Kingdom Hearts games (that was therapy for my soul) and finally my understanding of KH universe became kinda complete (I still don't understand everything, the plot is very complex u'know). From what I began to understand, I decided to give this character another chance and close this damned gestalt.

This story is still ongoing, but I told in general details everything that happened to this character all these 8 years. This actually shows not only how the character changed, but also how I changed as an artist. Even my ''psychological problems'' can be seen through this story, and what amazes me the most is how over the years, using Hajime as an example, my drawing skills improved.

At such moments, you understand that you are not standing still and thoughts about "I have no progress in my art" no longer arise.

@khoc-week

[bluecreates25]

Photographer!Ghost

just a silly idea I had

cw (brief mention of mcd, kinda mw3 canon, so ya know)

Ghost was not so much the artist, but was always content to be his lover's muse. Ghost loved seeing what Soap's mind could conjure. Ghost also quite enjoyed spoiling Soap by buying whatever art supplies the man wanted. He supported and encouraged any and every creative outlet possible, even going as far as to give Soap his own art room.

When Soap died, he avoided the art room like the plague, as if stepping in there would physically wound him. He couldn't stand being in the room that once held so much joy. Dangling happiness in front of him, as if the room was trying to taunt him with all he lost. It would take months for him to go in that room again, and even longer for him to dare touching anything.

Ghost was never creative like Soap was, but when someone recommends photography to him, he tries it. Both because he has nothing better to do, and because he secretly hopes that the art of it will connect him to Soap.

He struggles hard at first. He doesn't typically spend much on himself, and without Soap there anymore for him to spoil, his savings are solid. He does research and gets an expensive camera, yet he can't seem to get any cool shots like people on the internet seem so effortlessly able to get. He gives up for a month or so, putting the camera out of sight and almost completely forgetting about it.

He stumbles upon it again by accident, and tries again, more out of his own stubbornness of not wanting to be defeated by it, than actually enjoying it. He owns it, and becomes incredibly good at it, not exactly professional, but good enough. he carries the camera with him everywhere, and even has a few people hire him for small shoots. It's become a major hobby for him and he finds some peace from it.

Eventually, when going through the hundreds of photos he has, even the few he got framed because of how proud he was of them, he realizes something. He realizes how he hardly has any photos of Soap. The man that he cherished, worshiped, loved more than anything, and yet there's hardly any physical evidence that they were ever together. He has far more photos of random people, places and other things, and that fact burns him for a while.

Eventually he makes a resolve, to himself, to capture as many moments as possible with the 141, his friends. Be it the good, the bad, and everything in between, he refuses to let anyone else be erased to so little. He refuses to lose a single moment, a single memory, when he has the constant reminders of how easy it is to loose it all.

[pixies-and-poets]

It was a good attempt

Hey friends. I've had something eating away at me for a while now; I was going to give it a bit more time, but the anxiety around not talking about this is getting to me, so I'll just be direct.

I'm leaving tumblr (sort of).

Without being too melodramatic about this: I've had a lot of complicated thoughts about social media, fandom, the internet in general, being an artist/streamer online, and a bunch of related stuff over the past few years. It's always hard to sort out these thoughts properly, and even harder to talk about them, because I don't want anyone to attack me or assume I'm treating my personal experiences as universal, or belittling something that's important and meaningful to them. I will say I firmly believe that for many people, the modern internet is more harmful to mental health than we're all willing to admit. But I also know it's a great source of connection and friendship where I've met some of the people I love most. If I had a more solid black-and-white conviction or thesis about these complexities, I wouldn't be struggling so constantly to make sense of it all, and the internet's place in my life.

That said, the evidence of my own life points to the fact that the less "online" I am (at this point in my existence), the happier I am. That the remaining sources of self-loathing depression in my life are almost entirely triggered by the internet. That social media is a disaster for my OCD. For many months, I was hoping tumblr would be different. It's not. Realizing that the same old problems I have were just going to resurface here again was a painful process, one I kept denying.

I thought I'd be fine if I only checked in once or twice a day, but the more I do that, the more I find it hard to get myself to check in at all. Because when I do, I feel like I just can't keep up with everything anymore. I don't feel like a part of anything, I don't feel wanted or needed, and it just exacerbates my problems.

But I'm not going to disappear completely. I'll still pop in from time to time and answer any asks, and maybe post doodles. My art account @altermentality will still be active, when I have something worth posting.

You can still find me on twitter for now, and bluesky, but my presence of being truly "active" socially online will be limited to:

Discord- because I enjoy the few smaller, private-ish servers I'm in, and it's my hub for keeping in touch with people one-on-one.

Twitch - At this point in my life, I still greatly enjoy streaming, although my capacity to do it reliably varies. I also love the communities I'm in that I've developed with other streamers.

I'm altermentality on all the places mentioned above. If you'd like to keep in touch, please reach out.

My queue will run until it runs out.

It's been fun and I wish you all the best. Be well.

[sweetmariihs2]

Look at what arrived today 🫶🫶 (there's still more on the way but they didn't arrived yet)

Unfortunately there's only one page where Cedric is in, in the Wassailia magazine. Today I discovered that each magazine revolves specifically around that theme, so in a Wassailia themed magazine there will only be Wassailia themed activities. I don't know why I thought that there would be activities unrelated to the main theme. All of the Wassailia magazine pages are related to Wassailia, the same way that in the costume party magazine the activities all talk about this topic. I guess it makes sense.

In my country there's only 5 available magazines to buy. Two come together (these ones), other two also come together, and there's one that I'm almost DYING to put my hands on that it's the Cedric's apprentice magazine and it's available to buy separately.

Also we got an extra content about what happened to Cedric in the first Wassailia episode! He probably spent his whole holiday in his workshop. Sofia came to visit him and she gave him a snow globe as a gift and he loved it💗

That's the only image of him that we have. I don't know if I should share the whole magazines because I'm afraid of being accused of piracy😭😭😭

But I don't know, the magazines are from 2016 and it's a hell to find their content. I literally had to buy them to see what's inside! And you can say "well if the fans want to see what's inside then yes they should buy it," but it's really difficult to find, and I know that there are people out there who really wanted to own them but they can't since it's not even selling anywhere anymore. I don't know about your contry but in mine there were just 5 available and I bought all of em, and that's because I searched for hours. While I do have some of them and I can share, which is something that I saw some other magazine owners refusing to do.

And I really don't blame them, since some posts that I found were indeed from 2010's and at that time those magazines were still being produced. They wanted to support the artists involved and that is honestly a very noble thing to do! That's why I'm torn too, because I'm an artist myself and it would be nice to have my work properly sold and not just shared everywhere with absolutely no remuneration.

But yeah, after years since those posts were published, now I'm in the STF fandom and searching for all possible Cedric content and merch I can find on the internet and it's being such a torture to search for these magazines since they're not produced, commercialized or even remembered anymore. Some of the images I have are so poorly photographed and framed, poor lighting, bad quality camera, and I can't even know the context behind the illustrations because most of the time there is no information or even the complete image! Which makes me a little mad because if at the time the magazines were being produced, if fans had saved images or shared the magazines, we wouldn't have had so much trouble finding them today. It is obvious that after years on the market, products are being destroyed and becoming more scarce. The main audience for these magazines are children and the magazine encourage children to cut, paint and doodle, so many copies of these magazines simply ended up in the trash or are completely torn up. It's the correct way to use them after all.

It's almost lost media, but luckily there is still someone somewhere in the world who has them in their entirety after more or less 10 years since they were published. Many of the collectors from 2016 today may not even have their collections anymore, as was the case with a blog that unfortunately lost its collection in a flood and which had some of the magazines. I am literally so amazed by the fact that I have discontinued and untouched products in my hands, and in my language, which is even more unlikely to happen. There's only three left to arrive!

I think I should share these images while I can, as later there may not be any more copies available to buy or even view. If fans are no longer going to be able to buy it because of its rarity, then I at least think they should see what's inside. And the rarity it's not even because they're coveted products, it's just that they're forgotten! People care so little about them that it's starting to disappear and no one will care enough to sell or share it, as is already happening now. After all, it's just a silly Sofia The First activity magazine, but it's very important for us fans, at least the few who know about its existence. And all the copies available for viewing or sale don't even pay the artists anymore, as it's been around for many years and these products are surrounded by resellers. There is no longer any way to buy from the artists hoping that they will get a return, because they won't, the 2010s are over and so are the magazine publications.

I'm really thinking about sharing them, but I'm afraid of being misinterpreted or accused of disrespecting those artist's work. Disney it's literally not producing and selling them anymore at all, and they're really hard to find to buy, so I guess that sharing while I can is a viable option, and it's an act of kindness for other fans, who won't go crazy wondering what's inside knowing that no one has ever shared it and they won't ever do. I really wish 2016 fans had shared it at that time because today we would have images of copies that are no longer available for purchase. Real rare stuff!

So yeah, please tell me your opinions about this... I'm really afraid of doing something I shouldn't and disrespecting those artists in the process. But at the same time, well... they're not involved in this anymore. So I don't know.

[ot3]

omg thank you for being the first normal person I've seen so far about AI who's also an artist T-T like obviously all the stealing is horrible and it's good it's talked about but almost everyone really is acting like the idea of computers being capable of creating images killed their firstborn child

(also I don't mean it as one of the weird AI art bros but as an artist myself I'm just glad that there are other artist with open mind to the concept)

no right like its insane to me to see how many other people who seem reasonable and level headed are falling for the kneejerk response to say ai Isn't Art Can't Be Art ! It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we live in an era where essentially all new technology's first and prime purpose will be for ghoulish, capitalistic, anti-human ends. But to reject any other uses for the technology doesn't do anything other than make you look like an anti-tech weirdo. This is genuinely insanely impressive and revolutionary tech! There are a TON of legitimate artistic uses for AI image generation.

It also seems weird that everyone is delving into this false binary of 'dont use AI, learn to draw' as if there is any conceivable reason for these things to be mutually exclusive? Like, before all of the AI discourse really popped off i was doing some experimenting with using AI in my process.

the texturing used in this drawing was made by VQGAN + Clip (different type of image generation than the stable diffusion model that is producing most of the AI art that's up for debate right now) running through google colab. I made a bunch of these weird, ethereal images that would have been almost impossible for me to produce under my own power - it would have taken a titanic amount of time, effort, and design to produce any of these through illustrative or photo editing techniques.

here's a sampling of some of the textures i made. Now I think it would be a real struggle to try and claim that these images made are plagiarisms. However, I stopped messing with the google colab generation for one key reason: i didnt know enough about the image databases being used to train these models. That's the real stumbling block

the internet is CHOCK FULL of images that are free to use commercially and repurposes, there's stuff like wikimedia commons, the smithsonian open access, unsplash and pexels which have free stock photos, etc. I honestly think a nonzero amount of artists would consent to having some of their work used in image generation databases if they were promised noncommercial use of the resulting images, also. But the problem is the people training these AI don't give a shit about any of that. It's just the complete entitlement to other people's work and neglect for creative boundaries that makes AI generation bad.

The fact that people are attempting to replicate the art of living, working artists, or people like kentaro miura who by all accounts were so dedicated to the craft that they worked themselves to death sickens me. And the fact that the companies responsible for this are using that as an active selling point for their product is even worse. It's a pretty miserable time to be an artist, and this is just the icing on the cake.

But I don't want silicon valley greed and bizarre, impotent jealousy from redditors who want custom waifu jpgs to mean that nobody who could really benefit from AI image generation gets to use it.

like, my dad for example. he's been a creative person his whole life but it never really went anywhere. He drew a lot as a kid and then went and got a degree in filmmaking. My parents were living in LA when I was born, with my dad managing a filming/sound studio and the two of them trying to break into writing screenplays. This did not happen because they had three kids, and for the past decade and then some my dad had been doing database programming on contract for the CDC. Now, in his mid 50s, he's finally got a permanent and secure position and, rather than spending all his free time raising children or getting PMP certified to try and angle for a string of promotions, he can start having hobbies again. there's a comic he's been wanting to draw for as long as I can remember.

only, one big problem - in 2021 he had surgery on his cataracts and never healed properly. He's got severely impaired vision and looking at stuff too hard for to long causes him a ton of eye strain and pain. He has to look at a lot of screens for his job so by the time he's off work for the day he's pretty much too fatigued to do all the intense visual stuff it'd take to make a comic.

I wanted to tell him AI image generation could help him make the kind of stuff he always dreamed about making as a kid but instead I had to tell him that as it stands, the predatory nature of AI modeling means it's insanely hard to use it without ripping off vulnerable creatives. Instead we chatted a bit about combining 3d assets, digitally edited photos, or photobashing/digital kitbashing methods to try and make a pipeline he could do without drawing, but the time commitment to learn these methods is probably just not feasible unless his eyes make a pretty unprecedented recovery in future years.

Like, that's the worst thing about all of this. The idea that AI makes the production of certain kinds of art more accessible to people with disabilities isn't just a 'gotcha' being used by the pro-AI people, it's also true. I would love for my dad to be able to make his comic. I myself also have a huge string of health issues and sometimes the main thing stopping me from drawing is that it hurts to do so. Anything in my process that could reduce the strain drawing puts on my body is an accessibility concern in some ways. Eventually degrading so much that I can't draw at all is one of my biggest fears.

But that doesn't counter all of the negatives! It just doesnt! Which fucking sucks man it just sucks so fucking bad that we have this cool incredible thing and we can't use it without being complicit in some stuff i am fully ideologically against! As things stand I really cant imagine that 'ethical' AI image generation will ever exist, so unfortunately it will have to be in the hands of the people using it to decide for themselves if they are using it in a way that is predatory or harmful, or as a legitimate tool to make meaningful works of art.

[pillarsalt]

Hello Ms Pillarsalt, I feel awful at the thought of using you as a pseudo-therapist but I just don't know where else to turn (no one knows I'm gender critical) and you are extremely thoughtful and kind every time you answer asks.

I've become very good internet friends with who I suspected was a trans-identified woman and I just got confirmation of it today. She's sadly long since begun the "" medicalization"" process, but she uniquely has absolutely never mentioned her gender identity at all to me. She doesn't even do pronouns in bio, pronoun introductions, making trans headcanons in her fanart/works, nothing. She even completely ignored my noticing that the indie zine she writes (completely non-trans-related) oneshots for has a website that makes it very very clear they're by and for genderists (which caught me off guard when she sent me the link to it!) like it wasn't even A Thing Central To The Org she's part of.

She has so many common interests with me (which are very much fandoms that are mainly populated by gnc and/or trans-identified women), she's very kind, and we both really enjoy talking to each other for hours and hours. (I really do enjoy our talks, outside of the few times she says something misogynistic of the trans-ideology variety, like tying femaleness to femininity and sexualization "but because I'm *celebrating* it I'm progressive, serve cunt queen 💯 but the deep sense of despair I feel when that gets applied to me it must mean I'm not female, there's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with gender roles of course but the feminine one is just not for me", you know the deal.)

So I'm not at all conflicted about being friends with her from an interpersonal standpoint, I've never ever felt like I couldn't befriend trans-identified people because of my beliefs. (Exactly the opposite in fact! I hope that just being Me while being """cis""", and not at all mentioning my gc views ever, can be a positive influence to them!) But this is the first trans-identified friend I've gotten this close to and I was surprised to feel this deep sense of depression and despair about it. Like I feel this way knowing about how widespread misogyny is in general, but when it's affecting someone you know and care about it makes it more real. And less escapable.

It's hard to turn my brain off and not think about how her syntax and fandoms and idolization of male artists and characters to the point of roleplaying and cosplaying are so... female. Her analysis and interest of characters' relationships, her career, her hobbies in general, it's just female all the way down. And yet because it's not *feminine* (it's stereotypical gnc and/or autistic introverted female stuff) she must not be a woman. (I know the thought, I've had it myself.) Her voice is so deep I second-guessed myself about her being a woman at first, and now that I know she is for sure I fear so deeply for her health knowing what she must have done to get it that way. I guess it's possible she used a filter, it was a voice call, but I don't know.

It's just a special kind of despair to see her talk about the things that make her happy and now as she does, she's using that enjoyment as reinforcement that she can't be a woman. It's what all TIFs do (I know, I was one), I think it's partially why they get so invested in their fandoms (aside from likely being autistic, guilty again): indulging in their interests when, according to misogyny, they're "abnormal" for a woman to like, is like they're crafting a big Bat Signal saying "Look everyone, I can't be female, I like [X]!!!" as they do it.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling so much. I just intimately know and empathize with what my friend believes about herself and women as a whole. I want to help her, but because I was (almost) her once I *know* I can't. I can say "I'm being a good influence by being a gnc non-trans-identified woman ^w^" all I want but honestly I don't know if it works. I've never worn makeup or expressed hatred of my body, and yet my sister-in-law still wears a full face every day and got plastic surgery. I think someone has to want to change to be able to. Unfortunately.

I'm rambling again, sorry.

Like I said, on a person-to-person level, my friend and I are so fine. It's just depressing to be reminded of the pervasiveness of misogyny if I want to voice chat with her or see her. Or hear about her passions, knowing they're not just things she enjoys, but also "proof" of her non-female-ness to her. Even if I thought I could say something to change her mind, it'd be completely out of line to say it because she, again, never brings up her gender identity. I just don't know what to do. I love being friends with her, but I hate the misogynistic voyeur inside her that joins all our conversations.

Hi anon, no worries about venting here, I'm always happy to give some input but also don't forget I'm just some guy.

You seem to be a compassionate and intelligent person, and you obviously care a lot about your friend. I've been (and am currently) in similar situations like the one you've described, and I know how distressing it can be to try to balance both your concern for your friend, your moral conflict with their viewpoints, and trying not to offend them lest they push you away or accuse you of phobe crimes. There's no real great solution to your problem, I think you probably already know that.

People with deeply held beliefs are not going to be open to changing their minds if they aren't ready to do so yet. It does really suck not to be able to say what you're thinking, but in my opinion, the best thing to do is stay the course - keep doing what you're doing. Keep talking to her like you always have, show her she can trust you. There may be a reason why she never brings up trans-related topics with you; maybe she's already questioning the rhetoric behind the ideology? I know from my own experience and what I've heard from others, when you start questioning gender ideology, the first instinct is BAD THOUGHTS SHUT IT DOWN and to lean into it even harder. That's by design. But you can show her that you are a safe person to talk to about the Bad Thoughts. I know you said that you don't know if "being a good influence" works, and I'm sorry to hear about your sister-in-law. I really believe that modelling feminist behaviour does work to influence your female peers, but it might take her escaping bad influences first for her to realize the misogyny behind her thought processes. It might take years too, that's normal. I think pushing back on her sexist flawed logic without getting too overtly "terfy" could help too. Or you could throw in a "It's nice to see that so many woman are interested in [subject she thinks isn't for women] nowadays!" Anything that encourages self-reflection.

You said "I don't want it to have to be my responsibility, women's responsibility, to combat misogyny alone. But the unfortunate reality is that we're the only ones who care so we're the only ones who can make a difference," and it seems to me like you're taking it on yourself to fix this woman's misogyny problem on your own. Sometimes this just isn't possible. Ultimately, even though she's your friend, you aren't responsible for her actions. She's hurting herself, but only she can choose to stop, so you cannot blame yourself for not digging her out on your own. You're just one woman! Let go of your sense of obligation; you're doing what you can. And if her internalized misogyny gets to be too much for you, take a break and take care of yourself, it doesn't make you a bad feminist. Patience and understanding towards other women and towards yourself are the feminist practices to employ in this situation.

Be well and take care 💜

[lotusunset]

Far too many pics of the Palais Garnier (Part Three!)

In October of 2022, I had the extraordinary experience of getting to complete an 15+ year old dream of mine to visit the Palais Garnier. I took a metric fuckton of pictures and now I want to share them with you all, the PotO community!

Before I start dumping, a few things:

Please reblog this post. I usually don’t post a lot, therefore I don’t have a big following. I’d really appreciate people sharing these as much as they can. When I was a dumb kid in ye olden days of the internet, finding a post like this was the sort of thing I would have been hyped up on for weeks. Help spread that kind of joy!

Feel free to use these photos for any sorts of graphics, artistic reference or any other fandom related projects, as long as it’s not for profit. Please just credit me in some way. In fact, I'd love to be tagged to see whatever creations come from sharing all this!

This is part three, which is a continuation of pictures from the interior. I will continue to share information from the tour I took in this post as well. In fact, these are some of my personal favorites, as I never knew about some of these rooms as just some silly American girl on the internet. I hope you guys enjoy these even more than the last!

Part 1 (Exterior) | Part 2 (staircase) | Part 3 (HERE) | Part 4 (stage)

This is the grand foyer, an area that is pretty heavily photographed already. Standing in this room is almost as impressive as the massive staircase. The paintings on the walls and ceilings depict a lot of mythological scenes. In one of them, there is a hidden portrait of Garnier, along with the other artists that were involved in creating the paintings. The doors leading to the 2nd level balcony are located in the grand foyer.

Historically, only the gentlemen were allowed in the grand foyer, as it was seen as a place for them to converse and do business until one night, the Queen of Spain decided that she didn't care about such arbitrary rules. Ignoring it completely, she entered the room. The men all decided to leave, offended that even a queen would dare to encroach on their space. As word traveled around the Opera that night, all the other women soon joined the Queen in the foyer, wanting to see for themselves that she was there. Afterwards, men and women were begrudgingly allowed to mingle.

I found this to be a very interesting room. At the end of the grand foyer, this room was full of sunlight and comparatively simple decorations. The wealthy patrons themselves served as the real decorations of this room, as they would gather here for refreshments! The common folk, while not permitted to enter, would come to simply watch the rich people indulge in lots of expensive treats.

In fact, the menu still hangs on the wall in the form of all the portraits! All the women are holding items that symbolize various food items, tea, coffee, wine, game meat, fish, ice cream, citrus fruits and pastries.

I couldn't help but imagine Raoul taking various treats and sneaking them out to share with Christine.

We weren't allowed to go down this hallway but it just continued to make this place feel like a giant maze.

These two rooms were nearly identical, though on opposite ends of a hallway. A few mistakes were made during their construction. The top room is known as the Sun room, for its warmer ambiance. The bottom is the Moon room.

Firstly, the rooms were meant to be swapped locations. The Sun Room was supposed to lead into the gentlemen's smoking room, but the Moon room leads to it instead. On the ceiling of the Sun room, salamanders are painted. The little amphibians were believed to ward off the danger of fire and protect the building. By the time the mistake was caught, it was too late to change it.

The other mistake can be seen in the mirror illusion in the Sun room. Because of a fault in the construction of the mirrors, the glass is too curved and the error is magnified with the illusion. The light appears to bend around a corner, instead of repeating on into infinity.

I imagine Erik was quite cross with the workers when he realized these errors occurred. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of his temper that day!

Looking at the star motifs painted on both ceilings, I wonder if they could have inspired Christine's Star Princess costume in the musical.

PART 1 (exteriors) | PART 2 (staircase) | PART 3 (here!) | Part 4 (stage)