#the loss is the same

[a-sketchy]

i kinda like akechi’s status being unknown. him being dead or purposely staying out of akira’s life are net equal, which is fun

[on-a-lucky-tide]

cw: omegaverse

Having thoughts about dominant omega Price who helps his lads through their ruts because he's a pragmatist. He's clean, he won't get knocked up because he has that shit on lockdown, and the bloody muppets won't go biting some pretty little thing in the local villages, causing all sorts of issues. It's all part of the greater good schtick he has going on.

He takes them back to his flat when it's time so they get the whole nesting experience, cooks them a nice meal with a few beers, and then takes them to bed for the time they need to get it out of their systems.

He's attentive, performing all the chuffs, purrs and trills they need at the height of their rut to feel like they're doing a good job. Doesn't complain when Soap gets rough, or Simon is big, or Gaz likes to kiss and groom him. He bites his arm, grunts out encouragement, breathes deep through his nose when they knot him for the third time in a row without rest. When they occasionally get too excited and try to claim him, he knows how to stop it.

They're soon back to fighting fit, back on the job, focused, and he doesn't take long to be right again, even if he's feeling tender and his hormones are out of wack for a day or two. He's a professional. Mind over matter is his mantra, and it's nothing that won't repair itself with time.

Price promised them that if they followed him he'd have their backs, that he'd cut through the red tape and the obstacles. For him, using his body to carry them out of a fire fight is no different to letting them fuck and knot him to manage their ruts.

His heat though? He suffers through that on his own. Price, who can't stomach any kind of vulnerability, who can't feel like he's leaning on or needs anyone, who does everything on his own terms and no one else's. The thought of any one of his lads seeing him in that state turns his stomach; a mewling, weak, pathetic mess, unfit for command.

No, Price's heats are his private shame, and he has managed them just fine without interference for two decades, even when Nikolai kisses him one night and Simon's scent begins to change as he reaches his prime, and Price's instincts are starting to fuck with his head.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[fluffylord]

Look how far I went, for fear of losing you.

[lesbinewren]

not lost on me that the conversation around white women voting for trump is “dumb bitches voting against their own rights, can’t trust them ever” while the narrative for white men is “oh no how can we get them back*? we must have hurt their feelings, we need to be nicer to them!”

*we never had them to begin with

[zishuge]

The only thing I remember is killing people. You say I'm someone who saves people. I won't kill you — but I don't believe you either. Do you think I'm a fool? You're not a fool. Mysterious Lotus Casebook (2023) | Ep. 20

[eastofedean]

they are all the same btw

[an-na-ko]

Lyra, my beloved cat of 13 years, passed away this year on Father's Day. She's been by my side through very difficult times and was my little rock of steady and unrelenting love. I struggled a lot drawing this, and struggled a lot posting it, but I know I would've wanted to read a comic like this that validated my grief for her when I lost her.

Wherever you are, Lyra my little summer star, I love you always! Thank you for being the best thing in my life.

[crustyfloor]

'Angel Sua' has eyes that interest me in the "damn,,, I see em" way and the "this must be another aspect of her religious themes" kind of way, I mean that only because her pupils are so big, I almost think it's meant to look similar to a biblical angel, they have eyes like that to signify their all-knowing awareness, I see it as a connection to Sua's inherently omniscient and mysterious nature

[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?

[3-aem]

universal healthcare is not broken and anyone trying to convince you it is is delusional and a dckrider for big health insurance. yes there are wait times but waiting for care is Not the same as being denied care.

in america your physician prescribes care and an insurer can still cuck you out of it because someone across the continent who has never met you can say: doesn’t seem medically necessary. Leaving you to handle a bill that is wildly inflated by the same insurers that just denied you.

let me drill it through your head you can pay thousands a year in premiums and still end up sick and financially burdened for years by One incident. no insurance company is Avoiding going broke by denying claims. theyre doing it to profit off your misfortune and your illness. Because healthcare fundamentally does not cost the amount that they claim it to be.

[naamahdarling]

You know what? You know what I think?

I think that if we lived as we were meant to, in larger intimate ("extended family") groups and with more shared labor and time to do it (UBI NOW) people like me would not feel so useless and burdensome because there would be people around to help and to do what neurodivergent people can't while making valuable space for the neurodivergent to do what they ARE good at.

The way we live right now, all right, the way we live right now forces units of two adults to be able to do EVERYTHING or PAY to have someone come do it for them. I have to do the housework. I have to do it! But I am having to do a million different things and most of them I am not good at. I suck at them.

I wouldn't feel like shit, okay, if I had more than one other person around who was not a child and who could do the things I can't, like do the yard and cook and do repairs and basic maintenance; and someone else to split everything else that I like but is too much for me. It would free me to do what I am good at and enjoy. Cleaning, as in the sink and toilet, the windows, the blinds. Taking out trash. Folding, hanging, and sorting laundry.

But because all the shit I can do often relies on other shit being done first, and I can't do or have trouble doing those things, the shit I can do often can't be done. And even the shit I can do, I can't do ALL of it. So I can't keep up, and things get very bad.

We aren't meant to live like this. We are not meant to live like this.

That thought hurts so much because being able to flee the birth family is integral to survival for so many people. I'm so afraid that living in larger family groups would create more opportunities for, say, queer kids to be isolated, rejected, bullied, and abused. But if we gave people enough money to survive, and stopped considering children the property of their parents with no system in place to help them escape bad situations except a system that is often just as bad, just different.

I'm aware that communes and collectives aren't all that successful and are kind of a joke. I don't mean that. I mean a fundamental shift to multigenerational families where taking in "strays" (which my family did) is also normalized so people escaping abuse into existing households was accepted, with these families centered in maybe a couple of different larger residences so not everyone has to buy and maintain their own fucking washing machine and vacuum cleaner, and so people can benefit from large group meals that yield leftovers, and so child and elder care can also be centralized.

Then disabled people and the neurodivergent and sick and injured people, and pregnant people, and grieving people, would not have to either labor through all those stressors or consign themselves to living off an unlivable pittance or being put under legal guardianship.

I'm not saying anything new. People live like this in other parts of the world and maybe it sucks and I am wrong. But I'm just really mad right now because I can either do laundry or clean the sink but not both, and I really think we could improve society somewhat by making it so I did not have to choose one without sacrificing the other.

[lightasthesun]

art by Chris Trevas/// Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello/Holding On by Shane/ Lang Leaf, Twin Flames/ first eye drawing by Alice X. Zhang/ second eye close up art by Tony Pro/ The Song of Achilles/ to speak of precious evenings by littlekaracan/ battlefront ll stills/ Hamilton the Musical, who lives, who dies, who tells your story/mark z. danielewski, house of leaves/ 5000 letters/ Bastille, the Anchor/ fyodor dostoyevsky, the brothers karamazov/ Kote Darasuum/ Vode An/ street art/ The Arcadian Wind, envy green/ Margaret Atwood, There are better ways of doing this/ Power Politics Emily Dickinson, In this short life that only lasts an hour/ Maggie Smith, First Fall/ Carl Friedrich Lessing, "The Hermit" (art) + November by Margaret Atwood/ Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire/ The Bad Batch s2EP03 screenshot of Cody/ Alan Stephan Foster, "The Fall" (art) + poem by @erdarieldraws

a gift for my codywan besties cilly, tea, kasey, aixa and lauren🫶

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Alas, this beautiful dream could not last.

[beastwhimsy]

pretty janky gif but I wanted to compare my simon design to my ice king design. behold! old person

[alackofghosts]

whatever happened to the man of tomorrow?