#this might be the most capitalist thing I have ever written

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Why increasing public sector wages won’t cause inflation.

One of the current Tory arguments about wages is that if they increase public sector wages, inflation will go up. Even by their own logic, this is clear nonsense, and there’s a reasonably strong argument that increasing public sector wages could actually stimulate the economy too.

So, where does this idea come from? Well, it comes from business, where the idea is that if you increase wages, some or all of that price rise gets passed on to the consumer, and prices go up. Of course, even this is false, because in many cases the consumer will say “fuck that” and not buy the product, or choose a cheaper alternative. Thus, the company must instead reduce profits to retain consumers (and let’s not be fooled, a lot of companies are still making huge, untaxed profits right now). Or they cut hours and provide a less good service.

But this doesn’t apply in the public sector. Increasing wages of people in education, or in healthcare or in the civil service etc has no direct impact on the price of anything, because the public don’t directly buy our services.

However, it may actually stimulate the economy more widely.

In general, when you give rich people more money, they save it, or possibly “invest it”- meaning it basically goes out of circulation and doesn’t further benefit anyone.

If you give people right at the bottom more money, then they almost inevitably spend it right away, usually on essentials- which benefits the economy because more money is being spent, so companies have more money to pay wages, etc etc. But this doesn’t work soooo well, because people always need essentials, and will find some way of getting them, generally, if they possibly can. Of course, we want a world where everyone has access to these essentials easily, but we��re trying to think like an economist right now.

Most public sector workers are somewhere between these two extremes although some are definitely in the second category.

Right now, however a lot of people like teachers, nurses, junior doctors, junior civil servants etc etc are “feeling the squeeze”- caught between high housing prices, rising bills and stagnating wages, there’s less and less money to spend on “luxuries”. People might cut back on eating out, on take aways, on buying new clothes, on buying presents, on “treats”, on non-essential travel, on buying things like books and nice stationery, on make up and toiletries, on haircuts and getting their nails done- the list goes on.

These things aren’t essential to survival, you can do without them. So if you can’t afford to buy them, you don’t. But of course, if a lot of people stop buying these things at once, it hurts the economy. Companies that make or sell these things see profits go down, perhaps reduce hours or lay off staff, which in turn gives them less money to spend, and it all becomes a vicious cycle which shrinks your economy- i.e. the worst possible thing if you’re a Tory, supposedly.

(Investing in education and health also has long term pay off, but anyway).

If the people at the bottom and the people a bit above the bottom had a bit more spare cash, there would be more spending, and more businesses would see a proportion of that spending. And so they can offer staff more hours, pay higher wages, employ more staff. There’s more money going around and it’s a virtuous circle. The economy grows.

Would some companies then put their prices up? Maybe. Companies will often raise prices whenever they can. But the pressure to increase prices tends to come from increased costs, not increased custom. And it would matter less because everyone or nearly everyone would be earning more.

Cutting and cutting just leaves everyone poorer. We know this.

So why do the Tories keep going on TV and spouting bollocks? It might be because they don’t actually understand the economics of the situation (scarily likely) but it’s also likely to be ideological. They’d rather “win” the fight with the unions than do something that could actually help everyone.

[ariaste]

So listen i have this book coming out in uhhh 10 days and I am Worried about it, because it is a Comedy, and comedy is really hard to market (why????? it's funny pirates, what's not to like??) even when it is, yanno, normal mainstream comedy.

It is even worse when it is Unhinged Comedy That's Mostly Going To Be Funny To People On Tumblr. (For example, the main character being a supreme gremlin made of 90% memes by weight (examples: carries around a bag that is never called anything but his "little rucksack"; has a near-verbatim "stick me legy out real far" moment; talks about his metaphorical "orphan gruel bowl" which is a direct reference to that one Oliver Twist gif) because those are funny to me personally.) Unhinged Tumblr Comedy is difficult because tumblr is not a platform where it is easy to market things to people, because we are generally violently anti-capitalist and LOATHE advertisements and reflexively resist being marketed to for most anything. I LOVE that about this website. Except for right now, because I have bills to pay and a cat to feed. So look, fellow tumblr gremlins, I am just trying to say that if your personal brand of comedy is laughing at the kind of jokes that could only be produced on this hell website, and:

you like pirates

you're queer and want to read more books by queer authors

you want your fictional queer characters to be a hell of a lot more Messy and Unhinged than they often are depicted as being

you're interested in seeing a love triangle (M/M/NB) that resolves into polyamory

you want books where the hottest character gets to makes Passionate Speeches about rebelling against oppressive institutional regimes like governments and organized religions

you believe that capitalism is the most oppressive institutional regime of them all

you think it's fun when two characters have been in a 15-year-long relationship where the vibes have been "We're Newly Divorced" nearly since day one

you believe that All Cops Are Bastards and want to know what to do when you get pulled over by the boat cops

you think the Great British Bake-Off would be improved with weaponry, ritualized bribery/coercion of judges, and elaborate shit-talk

then this book might be for you. Beneath the wall-to-wall hijinks, it is political and it is righteously angry and it is the funniest thing I have ever written (which is saying something, because I have written some funny shit). It's called RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND. Here's a picture of it.

If all that sounds cool, you can read a review of it here and the first chapter of it here to see if it as funny as I am claiming it is, and then if you think that it is, you can preorder it here. It comes out on June 11! Ten days from now!

Thank you for letting me market to you for a minute. Signal boosting would be very much appreciated.

[loquarocoeur]

Thank you for tagging me @kichona-s <33

Who is your favourite driver?

Considering my digital footprint and the state of my F1 pinterest board which is nothing but his face, I probably have to admit that I'm basic and it is in fact my cunty little bitch Max Verstappen

Do you have other favourite drivers?

I'd say Charles and Oscar are tied for second favourite, then it's Lando and I quite liked Logan. There's also just something about K Mag and his warcrimes ngl and I'd say Zhou, but actually I think I just like sweetcorn and his sauber tiktoks

Who is your least favourite driver?

I wouldn't say I hate any of the drivers

Do you pull for drivers or do you like teams as well?

Just drivers, teams are just so capitalist megacorporation-esque that I feel the socio-economic rift widening just thinking about them and the principals all seem sketchy

Also, I'm already embarrassed enough to be obsessed with these young men with too much money in a sorely lacking women, most of which aren't even seasoned, they're so white they're see through.

If you like teams what teams do you pull for?

I'm going to avert my gaze now

How long have you been into F1?

I got into it with the first race this year (2024) in January I think

What got you into F1?

My friend would not shut up about the fast cars, so then I thought, alright let me try it. And of course I can't get into anything there isn't fanfic for so I just looked up the most popular ship, discovered lestappen, and sorted by kudos, started with top max, had a fic idea, thinking I'd just write one, because it's funny, and then continue to lurk, as is my standard practice...

So I wrote one top max fic, thought it was neat, had another idea (En Francais), was totally also going to do top max, but then it was just not working

So it turned into bottom Max...

And then I wrote another bottom Max...

And then another one and another one and another one and now I might need psychiatric help

Do you enjoy fic/rpf?

It would be a bit weird if I didn't. But actually I haven't been reading much recently, just writing

How do you view new fans?

I'm still a baby fan myself, but nobody should ever make fun of or be rude to someone who's new to something I think, why would you want to discourage people from joining the community? It makes no sense and you never know if they could have written the next classic fic for the fandom or been an otherwise amazing creator

If you could take over as team principal for any team, who would it be and why?

Ferrari, because with this season even I could do better than whatever they're doing. I think they also just need the common sense of a woman sometimes, I think it could do wonders

Are your friends and family into F1?

My family no, I have three (and sort of a half) irl friends into F1. No, they are not on tumblr, and if they ever found me here I would die

Are you open to talking to other fans/making friends?

I suppose I am, but I'm still new to tumblr culture, I'm still figuring out all the social rules and things, so idk what's going on here, and I'm also very picky and choosy with friends/mutuals, I quite like having just my two or three of them

I don't have anyone to tag unless you want to have a go @zettychez , but you seem more of a lurker. I don't have anyone else because I have the social skills of a pebble

[balketh]

Lol, sorry if I want clear: I'm not here to debate. If you disagree with my thoughts on Starfield because you still like what Bethesda are doing, keep it to yourself. Triple A gaming has gotten worse because of this acceptance of shit (aside from the CEO capitalistic nightmare in the industry atm.) I truly could not want to hear those opinions less; it's like hearing from sports video game fans that current gen sports games are fine being so utterly engorged with dark pattern microtransations. Have some fucking standards, please.

Skyrim was truly only worth a damn because of modding. Oblivion, Morrowind; only still relevant because they're moddable. Bethesda wouldn't have been the first company ever to successfully shoehorn PAID MODDING on CONSOLES if that wasn't 100% the case. Something literally NO other company forced through before them. Skyrim would not have been a mega success if players on PC couldn't fix their issues. It didn't last because of console players. It lasted because of bugfixing and pornmaking modders, and that's a goddamn fact.

Nothing else they've done since has been nearly as good or long lasting. That longevity - because of modding - is the only real reason they've had so many chances to make more games. It's the only reason they're such a big fucking company now. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have released the CK for Starfield.

They have not learned; their games keep getting worse, their sales keep going down. It might be slow, but it's a fucking fact. Reviews aren't everything, just as sales aren't everything, but Bethesda is, largely, on the decline, and that's not up for debate.

Jee, it's almost like headlines like "An All-Time Low For Bethesda Studios" re: Starfield DLC completely support my entire point that Bethesda is in a serious decline that they won't recover from because they keep making worse shit than the last thing they made, and it's been that way SINCE THEY JUST KEPT REMAKING SKYRIM.

I cannot be clear enough when I say it won't improve. A writer for Bethesda, Will Shen, (one of the better writers - responsible for all of Nick Valentine/Far Harbour in FO4, the best bits of FO4), left Bethesda after Starfield, because of how awfully run by upper management it was. That's 1000000% what I'm talking about. I could not be more correct. You don't have to believe me if you don't want to, but people inside the fucking company can see it, exactly as I said.

Emil Pagliarulo, lead writer on - let's see, Bethesda's four worst written games, games known for having shitty stories that people actively disregard in favour of just playing with the game like a sandbox full of toys - FO3, Skyrim, FO4, and Starfield, (with known shitty contributions to Oblivion) claims that Starfield is Bethesda's best work yet. The guy who wrote the Dark Brotherhood storyline in Oblivion, which, to be clear, is dogshit. Not the 'kill creatively' gameplay, not the lore from TES at large, the actual writing, dialogue, and in-game narrative surrounding your actions; go and look it up right now. It's contrived slop, and this was his 'big win'.

The man who openly stated that he doesn't like using design documents in his work. On massive, sprawling, open-world narrative games. The man literally responsible for every single bad story Bethesda has released since Oblivion - yes, all of them, because that's what lead writers do, they approve and direct the writing of their team. The awful non-protag from-birth-fInD-uR-dAd of FO3. Skyrim's utterly generic dRaGoNs-R-bAcK! Go shout at them until they stop! and the god awful lol-all-sides-are-shitheels-but-whatever Thalmor, Legion, and Stormcloaks. FO4's hilarious improvement on FO3, 'SHAUN, WHERE IS MY BABY SHAUN', with the most obvious fucking minute-one twist imaginable, and now, his pièce de résistance, an entire universe of uninteresting, themeless, cookie-cutter sci-fi drudgery with no real reason to explore or be invested. A man so anti-protag in singleplayer games that rather than make you the protagonist in Starfield, they used the restartable ending to write off your singular importance by having there be infinity of you.

The fucker responsible for Shattered Space's absolutely dogshit reception, and its terrible writing and narrative direction. That lead to article headlines like 'Bethesda Honcho says Starfield is "the best game we've ever made" in massive bout of amnesia', something that would only fly if, oh, I don't know, we were generally all aware of how dogshit Bethesda's writing and dialogue have been for a decade. He might not have done the genuinely fucking bland, soulless gameplay, or riddled the game with fucking BETHESDA MENUS, but he's responsible for the most unfixable thing in all of these games: the writing.

That's who will be doing ES6, probably with Todd backing him.

People didn't buy Skyrim 17 times (yes, that's how many discrete versions of Skyrim you could have bought without buying the same game on the same console twice) for the fucking story. They bought it because it's a fucking fantasy sandbox that did not have a competitor of similar scope for years. Starfield is a bad sandbox, and it shows.

Yeah, no, Bethesda's a fucking goner if he does ES6. It won't flop, because people will fucking RUSH to buy it day 1 without knowing a thing about it, but the reviews that follow will eviscerate it. ES6 will be the downfall of Bethesda. Both of them need to fuckin' retire, and let some actual talent do the writing for once in this decade.

I can only wish it would drop sooner rather than later, so they could just fucking stop.

[blunt-force-therapy]

Finally, an intro post!

POSTING LIMIT: hit

Drafts counter: 1670 of 1750 left

ASKBOX: Askbox open, Asks w/ media open, Anons open

SUBMISSIONS: Open

Basics:

My name is Maximilian, or Max for short. I am Brazilian, 19 years old, NB, panmasculine but mostly nonhuman, bi, maybe a little ace. Preferred pronouns are it/its, but she/her is also fine (no they/them, he/him only if you know me). I've been here since January 2023 and still haven't figured this place out, but I hope you'll have fun snooping around my blog.

My Community:

So I made this thing. I didn't expect it to be approved but it is indeed one of the things that exist. Come in to have some fun if you want :3

Hobbies: work in progress

Main interests:

Academic: General history, particularly of European and Amerindian societies, ancient European history, early Slavic history, 16th and 17th century Taiwan, Tokugawa Japan, the Republic of China, and of course Brazilian history. Language and linguistics, particularly Romance and Slavic languages.

Anime: Code Geass, Soul Eater, Death Note are the ones I like the most (will reblog stuff from Hetalia, Dungeon Meshi, and whatever's gay, cute, or even both)

Fanfiction: Meh. Only recently getting back into reading Harry Potter fanfics and that's after a while. If you have fanfics from a fandom I'm not in I'll still read them though.

Games: Uhhhh, Minecraft? And Tetris? I play Grepolis too.

Literature: For non-fiction I mostly enjoy historical and biographical works; my favourite authors so far are Anthony Beevor and Laurentino Gomes. For fiction I mostly enjoy fantasy and historical fiction, some of my favourite books are the Harry Potter, Leviathan, and Artemis Fowl series. I also love anything ever written by Finnish author Mika Waltari.

Movies: I don't do that.

Random: Calligraphy, conlanging and conscripting, language learning (currently Russian), legal history, true crime, execution methods, calendar reform, antidisestablishmentarianism, and others, and others, and others.

People I'll block on sight:

Just the usual. TERFs, "gender critical", radfems, serial killers (unless you're hot), and so on. I'm also very careful to avoid any interaction whatsoever from antisemites and people who spread antisemitic language and materials. Furthermore, if you seek to deny, minimise, justify, or ignore war crimes and crimes against humanity by any regime or political movement (communist, capitalist, fascist, etc) I wish explosive diarrhoea upon you.

If you're a minor and make any advances towards me I'll tell you to cut that out once, if it happens again I'll softblock.

If you're devoutly Christian (which is not a strict DNI criteria) and post about it very very frequently, I might not want to follow you back in order to avoid that sort of content.

Sideblogs:

Active: @official-macau

Inactive: @official-svetka

Inconsistently active: @aljamianova @extendedcyrillicblog

Good stuff about me:

Proficient in Word, Excel and PowerPoint;

Always willing to at least listen and in the case of an argument, to hear out your side of it;

Aspiring casual writer; occasionally creative and even poetic when not hysterical;

Poly, Trans, NB, Intersex, Therian, etc friendly;

Will make an effort to use your pronouns accurately;

Have been cringe enough in my time to not be upset with "edgy" humour, just vaguely disappointed;

Will react to your ships positively or neutrally, no ship is truly bad, I may not enjoy it though;

I pee sitting down

Bad stuff about me:

I have a lot of trouble with communication and that's very frustrating, so might take a good while to respond if you message me;

You might see a lot of very incoherent vent posts here, I don't mind interaction with them;

I don't enjoy talking or hearing about most subjects to do with maths or physics. I also don't enjoy talk of Christianity no matter how progressive;

I tend to lash out at mostly inconsequential things sometimes.

Tags:

#s3lf for posts I write myself

#pos reblogs for posts I reblogged where someone in the reblog chain is a genuine piece of shit (will specify who)

#büllshit (old) for joke posts, I'll figure out another tag to use sometime later

#mail💜 for asks from my beloved mutuals or asks I especially liked

#mail for asks from people I don't know

#...mail for generally weird asks and anon hate

#vent, kinda self-explanatory

#bad music, also kinda self explanatory

#!!!!!!!, for beautiful art and beautiful mutuals :)

#nsfw, anything my boss wouldn't want me to see at work if I had a boss or worked

#@~@ for all the horny shit I'm REALLY into

#boydinner for all the cannibalism, occasionally #girldinner if the context of the post requires it

I usually trigger tag starting with "tw", as in "tw blood", "tw violence", etc. Send me an ask if you want me to trigger tag specific stuff, I really wouldn't mind at all

I should collect those text bands that tell you stuff like "this user is a faggot" and other things like that. This is still a work in progress, I'll Ship of Theseus the hell out of this bitch

[traewilson]

Thinking about Wish, genuinely one of the most bafflingly incompetent incoherent films ever made by a mainstream film studio. It and (from the sounds of it, there was no way I was seeing this in theaters) Kung-Fu Panda 4 are true blue capitalist cinema - the marketers are king, the executives are God himself - and friends, they make the Old Testament God look like a prince of Hell. All attempts at creative thought subverted and stamped out at every turn, in favor of strictly what has been proven to work before. The test audiences know what they want, and the executives aren't here to gamble - they're here to invest in safe property.

The two archenemy of cinema, it seems, are the Test Audience and the Executive. Not incorrectly, I feel, but Wish (and KFP4 by the sounds of it) aren't enough to describe a failure like this. Wish is truly unique in its failure. From everything I've heard about the productions of both Wish and KFP2 point to a trend where the creative teams are at war with each other - one team wants to do things, well, creatively. Well, in other words. Wishing to take actions that make sense narratively even if they may not be brand friendly. Those who pushed for Wish to be traditionally animated; those who pushed for KFP4 to maintain a level of quality AT LEAST to the level of KFP3.

And then you have the other camp: what I call the executive-minded creative. The people who saw the demands for a return to traditional animation, remembered how traditional animation consistently financially flopped (thanks in no small part to deliberate sabotage on the part of film executives withholding marketing) and they decide to actively work against their own. Eventually, they settle on a compromise that works (for them and the executives) - hand-drawn textures on the animation. The end result looks like Disney made yet another Frozen-era Disney film, but now it has this bad image filter going on that makes it look worse.

Team members on Wish wanted to make a classic Disney villain again, but Disney execs and the team leaders in turn are under the impression that's not what sells, so they won't do it. The villain has to be complex-ish, nuanced-ish. Just nuanced enough to be more complicated than Maleficent, but not SO nuanced the audience might think the villain was actually right the whole time. The conflict between these two camps is never resolved because they are fundamentally diametrically opposed, and the result is King Magnifico, a villain who is written with such startling carelessness he is simultaneously too evil and too nice, and a character who it could very easily be argued didn't do anything that wrong.

Once upon a time, the archenemy of cinema was the executive. But I think we're seeing lately a rise in something more insidious and therefore effective - creatives who are so firmly molded by capitalist realism that they are, themselves, executives with pretensions of being creative. Nothing matters but what makes us richer. Any move that would jeopardize the money is inherently the wrong decision. To these false creatives, it's only art if it can sell. If these people are the next evolution of the creative, then my friends, we are in some deep shit here.

[ender--slime]

i wanna share some thoughts i have about. some stuff i guess!!

i think the way people treat post canon, no matter which team was writing it or which version of it you’re looking at, is also similar to the way people treat. literally any other artist in this fandom. which is ��your interpretation is Wrong and that means your art and morals are Bad”

which is sad to me because. we all took english classes right? we all learned about different literary lenses and different ways to interpret a piece of media. and that everyone can have different takeaways from the same thing. and they might not be equal or even the authors intent but like. that’s okay. it’s not that serious. sometimes a person is 14 or like. just cares more about Background Character than anyone else. and that’s okay!

i’ve been reading homestuck with a friend who’s never read it before- she works on the fanadventures with me and it’s simply required reading :p And she said something a lil bit ago, basically that she reads the kids as a lot older than 13. she doesn’t feel as though they are written as realistic 13 year olds- 15-16, for sure. but 13? to my friend, not so much.

and that got me thinking about the way people treat HSAU. “why’d you age them up? they were written to be 13 for a reason!” is definitely a valid critique i think, if you yourself had that interpretation of the original character writing. but if you’re my friend, who feels as though they act a bit old to be 13, aging them up probably makes a lot of sense. i think she’d really like HSAU. also because i showed her the ranma 1/2 june scene and she CRIED. on that note- “why did june come out so early?” probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to someone who enjoys post-game adult trans headcanons, but it’s simply the same thing post canon is doing. a What If. What if Egbert realizes she’s a woman at age 40? What if she realizes it at age 18? What are the different themes and interpretations that can be found in both of these headcanons? what personal experiences and interpretations of the post canon and HSBC writers can be found in PQ trans vriska? or middle aged june egbert? what personal experiences and interpretations of a certain content creator can be found in a teenaged june egbert reading ranma 1/2?

artists rip out their hearts and draw them, paint them, write them, compose them onto a canvas for Us to see. what more must they do simply to get Our approval? in this late late late stage capitalist society, must we demand that artists make art for Us? and not for themselves? are we not lucky to be surrounded by so many cakes?

i have all the drawings my partner has ever made me on display in my room. she doesn’t draw very well- but they are so special. they look about the same as an elementary schoolers art skills- like the Little Chuck E kid who visits me at work. but to me they are the most amazing pieces of art in the world!!

all the art we make has our own hearts and souls poured into it. and that’s pretty cool.

this is my tumblr exclusive opinion twitter doesn’t get to see this one shhhhhh also i am not accounting for every nuance of media literacy and analysis ofc im just yapping. so plz don’t kill me or whatever

[thesinglesjukebox]

REMI WOLF - "PRESCRIPTION"

Ask your doctor if Remi Wolf is right for you. Aaron, who brought "Prescription" to our attention, did...

[6.40]

Aaron Bergstrom: Boots Riley starts big. His new show I'm A Virgo comes with the contradictions pre-heightened, a masterful Afro-surrealist fun house with every absurdity stretched to its breaking point, amplifying a message that has never been more timely: real change doesn't come from painstakingly crafted anti-capitalist rhetoric or even aspiring revolutionaries with questionable superpowers, as convenient as that might be. It comes from community. It comes from solidarity. It comes from other people. Remi Wolf starts small. "Prescription," written at Riley's request for a very specific plot point in I'm A Virgo (I won't spoil it, but the episode is called "Balance Beam"), opens on spare drums and descending synths, Gen Z Prince working through some social anxiety issues. Wolf said that the song is about "being in love and being really, really scared about it," and it's that underlying fear that underpins the subsequent ascent into ecstasy, the horns and the key change and the climax that probably only works if you're just a little bit nostalgic for Macy Gray. It all hinges on giving up control. This isn't the kind of joy you can find on your own. It comes from connection. It comes from other people. Riley and Wolf arrive at the same place: whether your revolution is personal or political, you're going to have to let yourself be vulnerable. You're going to have to reach out. [9]

David Moore: Remi Wolf, the little pop engine that couldn't -- thanks to the peculiar vagaries of Spotify's algorithms and curated playlists, I think I've heard almost everything Remi Wolf has ever released, and every time I hear a song, I'm really into it for about 15 seconds before the pleasure slowly ebbs. (My favorite Remi Wolf song is this Little Dragon remix of "Disco Man," which must employ some kind of Energy Star plugin to keep things humming along consistently.) At the same time, I don't know that there's a single bad Remi Wolf song either -- there's something sort of captivating about Remi Wolf's oeuvre, all these little candles emitting a few dazzling flickers before inevitably snuffing themselves out. [6]

Peter Ryan: A smidge more narratively straight-ahead than the gnarly, motormouthed Juno or its predecessor EPs; here Wolf's sonic freak-out puts a point on the exhilaration of the lyric -- you couldn't really call it mellowed, but it's less wickedly hedonistic in sound than a lot of her work, more a snowballing sugar overload. In three-minute form it's a bit of a band showcase, a rich thicket of soul-pop horns punctuated by Wolf's increasingly enraptured vocal breaks and ad-libbing. I'll take the seven-minute version, of course, indulgent and luxuriating in the thrall of yearning while affording the arrangement more time to unfold and Wolf more space to settle into it, goofy jam-interlude and all. At any length it might sound like a stopover for one of pop's most chaotic, inventive voices, but that restless energy at the core of her work would enliven even the most dependable of tropes. [8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: A sex jam with more than cursory shout outs to depression, "Prescription" pulls off one of my favorite tricks, layering instruments progressively with each chorus. Wolf's squeaky half shouts play nicely off a rich round bass guitar, which in turn plays off the bouncy, just buzzy enough acoustic. The layered vocals in the bridge feel earned, breaking through into a lush horn and piano-scape. [9]

Nortey Dowuona: The way this song opens up with flat demo synths and drums, with Remi's high voice catapulting over thin guitar, made me feel like we were not going to go anywhere. Then the bass slid in, the horns started stabbing and punctuating certain lyrics and sidewinding during the chorus and the piano riff appears at the tail end of the second verse, and I was hooked. The lush and muscular bass rumbles below the mix and girds an otherwise very thin song with a strength it needs. But the extended version, which has an extra verse and refrain and chorus, feels both less abrupt and more vivid, allowing the song space to become bigger and bigger and delightful, while Remi -- even in all the lushness -- is still visible at the roots, her thin keening voice which was allowed no space on the standard version spreading far and wide, at ease, excited, delighted to refill. [8]

Ian Mathers: "Effortful" is not necessarily a synonym for "bad." [7]

Leah Isobel: Surprised to not hate a Tones & I-style vocal affection in 2023, but I think it's because the production's vaporwave synth textures and aggressively contained snare hits aim at an equally unreal emotional tone. It's not soulful, but "soulful": aware of its own absurdity and desperation. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: An absolute vocal ordeal. [1]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: She's singing her damn heart out, maybe even literally. [3]

Alfred Soto: No way I'd listen to this indie playroom "Purple Rain" meets "Brownsville Girl" again, but the soupy mix in which a brass section and pattern bob and turn complements the deliberately unhinged vocal performance. If I'd watched it on a busy street corner I'd look over my shoulder once. [6]

Brad Shoup: On the one hand, isn't pumping your devotional funk ballad with enough vocal fuckery to induce hypoxia a perfect Prince tribute? Some of those hoots in the post-chorus made me rip my headphones off, not because they were bad (they were), but because I thought one of my kids woke up. In places it sounds like she's trying to triangulate the Troutman talkbox through sheer vocal layering. Still, as insistent as she is, the arrangement of oozy synth/banjo pluck/brass hits is easy as hell, even if it's hard to pick out. Like she says, it makes my skin crawl in the best way (Adderall). [7]

Will Adams: All those vocal pyrotechnics only for them to be shoved way down in the mix. Why? It's not like the instrumental's ~chill vibes~ are particularly attention-grabbing. [5]

Hannah Jocelyn: I love that Remi Wolf stretches her voice as far as it can go and she's never actively grating for most of the song. Maybe it's because Nathan Phillips places Wolf (and the choir of Remi Wolves) far back in the mix; I can't explain why, but the effect is less someone screaming in your face and more witnessing Ken barely step out of frame to yell "SUBLIME!" The outro goes too over-the-top and bright -- the situation calls for Brittany Howard, someone who Remi Wolf is decidedly not -- but until then, there's a lot to love.. [7]

Vikram Joseph: Turns out the difference between "classic-sounding" and "derivative" is largely just charm, which Remi Wolf has in buckets and which turns a song that could have been a rote gospel-pop exercise into a full-hearted, grin-inducing joy of a song. It has shades of "I Try", and while it's not quite as beautifully constructed it more than matches it in endearing vocal acrobatics and in exuberant dorkiness -- "Prescription" is a love song that's totally sincere but which doesn't take itself remotely seriously. It feels like walking through your city in the sun and being weightless; it feels like "climbing over the walls I made"; it feels like giving yourself completely to someone and it not hurting at all. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I do not believe that one's background inherently determines one's future but as a Californian I must call it as I see it: this is exactly the kind of song you make when you go to Palo Alto High School and then USC Thornton. [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[mollybecameanengineer]

✨🌻💝 for the fic writer ask :)

Thanks for the ask, @lilolilyr! Here is the orignal post.

✨What's a fic you've posted you wish you could breathe life into again and have people talking about it? (or simply a fic you wish got more credit)

I have two answers for this. (As you all probably noticed) I've recently become fixated on the X-Files, but before that it was Star Trek: Voyager, so most of my fic is for that show. But I'll give one from each, because it's hard for me to consolidate the two. I was in a very different mental space writing Voyager (circa 2015-2017) than I am today.

For The X-Files: Keys,Wallet, Phone. It's the first one I wrote for this fandom, and it's very different than anything I'd written before. One of the asks on here was 'which fic would you like to be a podfic?' and this one would be my answer as well. It has a lyrical quality that I really like and I think would be great read aloud.

For Voyager: My baby, The Lament of a Daughter. This is all B'Elanna backstory... the culminations of years and years of thinking about this character. This, and The Sea of Gatan are probably some of the best things I ever wrote.

🌻what makes you want to give up on writing? what makes you keep going?

What makes me give up? Two things: anxiety and lack of head space.

For the anxiety bit, this is why I stopped writing in 2017. Trying to improve and what not was just driving me insane. This is also why, despite the fact I want to, I'll likely not participate in exchanges. When the prompt is right, it's magic. But man, it can really get to me if I can't think of anything. So this time around I've been posting things unbetaed (which likely leads to way more typos, sorry) but this has really been a path back to joy for me. Just write and release.

On lack of head space: I have a job that could consume every moment of my life if I let it. I have an idea for an original novel, which I started writing, but I found my mind was always preoccupied with it, and I wasn't thinking about my research (and therefore not making progress.) So, I don't really know what to do about that. The problem is less one of time, and more about have to pick and choose what I think about. (Which might be a weird problem to have.) It seems to work better for me to write short things to get the idea out of my head, and then move on. I am looking forward to a stage in my life where this won’t be an issue anymore.

Moving on to what makes me keep going: it’s fun (if I'm not busy being my own worse enemy). I like getting my thoughts out of my head and I like the reaction others have to those thoughts. Most of my stories are about something that is going on in my life, so it’s cathartic (or amusing, depending on what it is) to put OTP of the week in those situations. Sometimes I wonder if I could write professionally, but I do that would remove the fun and the joy. I do like my job, but there are for sure times that are NOT joyful.

💝what is a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?

Well, I didn't expect people to like Qualifying Life Events this much! I wrote it in like an hour on Monday when the internet went out, so I couldn't do work. (Well, really, I should have been reviewing papers, which were saved on my computer, but see above comment on not concentrating on work so well these days.) In general, all the pieces I’ve quickly written and posted have been way more enjoyed than I expected. They tend to be silly little things (ex: The Case of the Nip Slip, The Joy of Cooking, and the above-mentioned Qualifying Life Events). I have other pieces that took way more effort, but they are just as enjoyed as the short silly ones. So, I think it’s been freeing to break the association of my effort to other people’s enjoyment (which is probably a capitalistic way of looking at things, anyway).

(Aside: for some reason, the tumblr editor isn’t spell checking, which is a huge issue for me. So I had to write this elsewhere and paste it in and Tumblr was being a dick… Why is this editor so bad?)

[fallloverfic]

@pandemonium-14 replied to your post I am legitimately confused by repeated comments that ORV's opening is slow or boring or uninteresting...:

I think the reason people say it's slow to start is because it's somewhat slow at giving glimpses what the story becomes later. I think people deep in ORV are really enamoured with its meta aspects (me included), and those aspects start paying off pretty late. Before that, Dokja's knowledge is used in a pretty normal way that can be compared to a lot of regression manhwas. I also think the start is very strong, but it doesn't actually show its hand until later.

I disagree, honestly, in part because I'm talking about both the novel and the manhwa, not just the manhwa, and I think you're giving people way too much credit for this stuff, especially since most often I heard the opening described as bad or boring compared to the "good" later parts, and I seldom if ever see people even namedrop stories that do it better or do it the same. They just describe it as, on its own, slow, bad, or boring, and unable to entice new people (even though the point of an opening is to entice people? I don't comprehend this crowd of people willing to stick around for hundreds of chapters to get to the "good" stuff). And I think that this response misses the point of my original post: even if folks love the later parts of the narrative more, the opening is good, and very good, and people framing the story as if there's nothing of goodness in the opening of ORV are incomprehensible to me.

There are probably a lot of reasons people say the series is slow to start, and this explanation is way too complex for that. The story is about companionship, what you're willing to do for other people, what you're willing to sacrifice, the complexities of contract negotiation (which is maybe boring for some folks but fascinating from a legal perspective, especially as contracts make up so much of our lives living in capitalist hellscapes), dealing with apocalyptic scenarios, the power of reading and what reading means, and a lot of other things, all of which are brought up at the start of the story. Dokja literally starts with reading his webnovel on his phone, he gets introduced properly to Sangah, he meets Gilyoung, he starts recruiting people on his team. The story gets more complex as time moves on, in part because it's a long narrative and a lot happens, and any narrative is going to gain complexity as time passes and characters grow and their stories with each other evolve. The story rewards rereads, because you actually see a lot of foreshadowing early on (you literally see Kimcom in episode 0 of the manhwa).

The meta is a big part of what people love, and I do like it, too, but I think you might be ignoring the meta that gets introduced in the first chapters. It's not for nothing the protagonist is a webnovel reader who is literally reading the end of a story at the beginning of his own story that's not really his story but was truly his story all along (and one of his past reads is another story by the author of this webnovel). In the novel Dokja tries to do what little he can to give thanks to an author who gave him something he loves, and gets attacked for it, in a way that's very familiar to folks who have been online for any amount of time. As someone who's written fiction and read fiction and enjoys art, it's heartbreaking and wonderful. There's meta about the act of streaming, and how invasive streaming and streaming audiences can be, and how demanding life as performance is. There are deep questions about what we view as heroic and villainous and why (Dokja's entire narrative, really, but also in the station demanding money for his food, even from a child, and people expecting him to give it away). There's meta about being doomed by the narrative - Dokja is doomed by his name, which he didn't pick, by an uncaring capitalist society, by just not being lucky enough generally to be good at things or even being literally doomed by a narrative because he prefers reading over self-improvement, which tanks his job prospects - right from the get-go. Like I could go on but the story's already written, I don't need to write it.

I'm sure plenty of people just love later parts of the story, which is fair, to each their own, as I said in my original post, but maybe they skimmed through or forgot the opening because to insist it only gets much better later is, in my opinion, a disservice to the opening, particularly since how long the "bad" opening section is, is quite variable, depending on which person is saying it's bad or boring or slow. Like the specific reason I never mention a cut-off is because the goalpost for where the good stuff allegedly starts keeps changing. There was one week I saw multiple people saying you had to read through hundreds of chapters to get to the "actual" good stuff! And I just... do not understand it at all. Saying you personally like later parts of a story more than earlier parts or find them likable at all is not the same as "the opening is bad because the meta I like doesn't start/unfold until [insert much later portion]" or "the opening is similar to other stories in the genre, but it gets unique later on." And it's especially annoying when, on the cusp of maybe getting two new visual adaptations of the novel, people are using this reasoning to argue that it'll be bad at attracting new folks cause the opening - the thing meant to keep people watching - is going to be too uninteresting.

Openings are not easy to make. ORV has a good one. And unless people start predicating these comments with "it's the same as other manhwa until y happens" or whatever their reasoning is, I'm going to take it at face value: they think the opening is bad/slow/boring. And while they're perfectly within their right to think so, I disagree with that as a statement, or that it should be commonly accepted that the opening is bad/slow/boring.

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

Murders in the Rue Morgue: Unexpected, Yet Expected.

Upon viewing Murders in the Rue Morgue and Maniac, I can now say, without a doubt, that Murders in the Rue Morgue is the superior film. For one thing, Murders in the Rue Morgue was produced by an actual studio, Universal. That already sets it ahead of Maniac, as being produced by a major studio such as Universal automatically means that there is a good budget. While it might not have had as much money as say MGM or Paramount, it still had a great deal more than an independent film. 

Universal’s Dracula sets up a structural template that the other Universal horror films would follow: the monster as outside of normative culture, seen as a threat to social/patriarchy/gender roles, and needing to be destroyed in order to disavow chaos and restore order to ‘bourgeois/capitalist ideology’ (Wood, 2002: 226). This quote is taken from the novel, Gothic Film, in the chapter, ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films, written by Andy W. Smith. This quote is definitely accurate to the following films that Universal produced over the years after Frankenstein(1931). Murders in the Rue Morgue, released in 1932, also follows this pattern. The ape, along with a mad doctor who is crazy about evolution,  serve as the monster. The ape is the physical form, while the doctor represents the mental and emotional aspects behind it. There are other tropes as well. Main characters Pierre and Camille can be seen as star-crossed lovers. And Erik the ape kidnapping Camille to be rescued by Pierre is the classic  damsel in distress due to evil or monsters. What switches it up is the slight science fiction aspect and well as the true absurdity of it all when you think about it. Unless you had read the Edgar Allan Poe short story, upon which this film is based, most audiences watching the films for the first time would assume they are watching a regular mystery horror film. The fact that the monster is an an ape, in a film that takes place in Paris, seems quite out of place. But, it does work. In fact, the ape isn’t even the scariest part. In fact, he isn’t even completely at fault. Much like Frankenstein, it all started with the creator. The mad doctor in this film was responsible for the gorilla, as well as the kidnapping, experimenting on, and murder of multiple women. Between the doctor’s treatment of him, which includes underestimating his intelligence, it is no surprise that Erik turned on him.  While the scientist claimed he was doing the experiments to find the ape, Erik, a mate, it was really all for his greed and ego, to see what he could accomplish and how far he could go. 

The quality of Murders is ten times better than Maniac, in my opinion. The cast, compared to Maniac, is much more well known, with names such as Bela Lugosi and Sidney Fox. Bela Lugosi, who played the mad doctor, also played famous characters such as Count Dracula and Igor. Sidney Fox  made her debut in the film Bad Sister, which was also the film debut of famous actress Bette Davis. The editing, score, production design, camera,  etc. Not to mention, the plot is much more concrete and entertaining. It almost reminded me a bit of Godzilla. While I do realize that the differences in quality and story may be the point in Maniac, that does not mean it comes across the way they wanted it to.  I will always view Maniac as one of the strangest films I have ever seen.  

By: Callahan Coffey

Resources: https://quinnipiac.blackboard.com/bbcswebdav/pid-5740967-dt-content-rid-69967182_1/xid-69967182_1 

[undinegeist]

The bible is the worst sort of dumpster fire, written like shit…no wonder, how else are the masses supposed to read it? And here, ladiex & gentx, comes the elitist cunt…but it could be true, for real.

That’s the only reason I can think of that it’d be written that way, so fucking simple (which is not my kinda dive, I’d rather read something I don’t get than something so easy there’s no need to think about it) so that people who aren’t in the habit of reading can consume that shit, and internalize it.

And it’s sick, dude, it’s so sick…even me, being agnostic at most, like…there’s some trick there, idk what it is but there were bits I was reading where I went like…oh fuck, I’m doomed, I’m gonna go to hell, and I started getting legit scared. Not of going to hell, I don’t think, just that I was doing something wrong…by just being the way I am…I can’t quite tell wtf that was. But it’s something in there, in the way it was written maybe…something that hooks you, and what creeps me the fuck out is how if you have nothing else you’re holding on to while you’re reading it - in my case a deep hatred for monotheistic bitches and their bitch gods, plus a general mistrust of human-written bs claiming to come from gods - you’ll probably fucking drown in it. And personally? I don’t think that’s cool.

It’s like all the shit in there is teaching you to be a slave, bend down before your master…your master in this instance being god (ick), though it strikes me that it also preps people to obey their capitalistic bosses, gives them a slavery mindset.

This is tenuous ground, I know - mentioning slavery in connection to religion, but like…read it and you’ll see.

It’s like one big let’s-tame-the-masses take…that’s what I fucking hate, that it makes people stop thinking critically to follow blindly, which is exactly what the people who wrote it want (nevermind their god, whether he exists or not - I’m ever more convinced this book has nothing to do with him one way or the other).

Also, excuse moi if you didn’t want to read this. If you did, thanks. I just had some thoughts I was writing down in a journal type thing and thought they might make interesting food for thought for somebody else?

I’d not recommend anybody reading this read the bible though…I’m doing it sort of as a dare - what won’t we do as a dare, amiright? - and also so I can criticise it properly, ‘cause how can you criticise something you haven’t read? Same reason I tried to read After - though I couldn’t, that was too shit even for me, ugh. Anyway.

Please don’t read After or the bible - you’d be better off surfing Booktube. Or…let me think of the last good book I read…yeah, can’t. But I’ve got a lil something for you, that I can’t say what it is to protect us from the copyright gods overlords.

click hell over here - you won’t be sorry, I hope.

[jomatto]

More Than Machine

I spent most of yesterday playing around with ChatGPT since its impact has been making rounds in the headlines. I can’t deny that it does amazing in some specialized tasks like writing SEO copy, and I wanted to know how it would fare in more creative endeavors. 

The assault of machine learning on once thought unassailable institutions of human ingenuity such as writing, art, and music, has presented cracks in some long held beliefs in the uniqueness of humanity. We might scoff and point to one too many fingers as evidence of a machine’s inability to address things that only a human can, but given the exponential development of machine learning, the day in which we can readily identify the “soul” in a work may soon be ending much more quickly than we realize. It is both an exciting and exceedingly frightening time to be in.

I’ve never been one to shy away from technology. Back when I was kid, I used a typewriter, literal imprinting of ink on paper, to write my stories. Today? I use a mix of voice dictation and typing on my iPad with my documents stored on the cloud, so things have changed quite a bit when it comes to my process. AI seemingly looms as the next frontier. While it’s no secret that our capitalist overlords are salivating at the thought of rendering large swaths of the working population obsolete, perhaps we can reclaim some of our autonomy through those very same tools. 

I’ve always dreamed of creating my own anime, and it may not be a pipedream that a single individual can produce the art, design, animation, voice, and music all on their own through machine-learning. Putting aside, of course, the ethical breach of how these datasets are acquired and the deprecation of art, reduced to a mere data point in an array of many.

With all these things in mind, just how sophisticated is ChatGPT today and how worried should I be as a writer that my ass would soon be replaced by a bot? 

I started out my experiments with some simple prompts. I asked it to write me a love story with elements A, B, and C. To my surprise, it was able to write out a self-contained and complete narrative from start to finish. In mere seconds, it managed to accomplish more than 50% of the dreck that adorns the pages of FanFiction.net. 

But that thing we call “soul” was distinctly missing. Now, not to say that anything written by a person is imbued with this nebulous quality, but to put it simply, what ChatGPT wrote was boring, cookie-cutter, and generic. Now detractors will immediately point to this as an abject failure of machine learning, but I decided to change up my approach. The age old adage of how much you get very much applies here. The results are only as good as your prompts. One of the things I wanted to test was its memory.

I established characters, assigning them traits and idiosyncrasies, and then put the characters in situations where these elements would collide. The bot spit out perfectly coherent scenarios with all the variables provided. I was very impressed by the results.

I would ask for dialogue, conversations, monologues, and descriptive passages. On its own, these small snippets wouldn’t be very valuable, but it can serve as building blocks to something greater. I was able to bounce ideas off the bot and it would occasionally provide me with inspiration.

So I continued changing my prompts, keying in on small details, while zooming out and asking for possible overarching themes and ideas. To sum up my conclusion: ChatGPT can be an amazing writing tool. It almost feels like having your very own personal editor. 

Don’t expect it to surprise you, but therein lies its value, because it is a treasure trove of tropes and clichés, and half of being a good writer is knowing what those are and how to use them well. I can easily see myself resorting to this bot if I’m ever stuck on a writer’s block. 

Perhaps its greatest value is in research, figuring details about locations, cultures, and other fields. Say, for instance, you’ve set a story in a different country and you have no idea about its customs, or perhaps one of the characters is in an occupation and you don’t have much clue in what their day-to-day entails. ChatGPT can fill in those gaps. 

While I’m sure that some of the details won’t stand up to scrutiny from true professionals, it would very much pass the smell test for the majority. For the purposes of writing fiction, it is more than enough.  

In regards to FanFiction, ChatGPT is like the ultimate lore master and wiki guide. If there’s something you need to know, you can just ask it and it may reply with startling accuracy. For funsies, I asked it to proofread some badly written stories and it managed to make it readable. This stuff is crazy, yo.

There is one caveat though, ChatGPT is prohibited from giving you anything sexually suggestive, so don’t expect it to be your instant lemon/lime generator. Y’all gonna have to do that the good ol’ fashioned way.

To answer the question, ChatGPT is not creative enough to stand on its own, but can be a huge boon to writers who know how to use it well. Should my ass be worried? It’s hard to tell at the rate machine learning is developing, but I believe my writer’s ass should be good for at least a couple more years. 

Famous last words.

Maybe?

[chubsonthemoon]

DOVEEEEEEEE oh gosh THANK YOU SO MUCH. This is???? The kindest most flattering thing ever AHHH I am beside myself!!

the way art and creation is part of an ongoing conversation no matter where it's happening and the way that fandom in particular is so founded on that community and the creation of that conversation in real time for the love of it--YOU!!!! YOU GET ITTTTT oh gosh exactly what you said right here!! This is exactly what I set out to capture and I'm SO happy to hear you say that.

This part especially is making me tear up >>> hosting it in the same format as that used for the long-term version of that collaborative process in a volume like the Odyssey (the conversation between the storytellers and translators and academics and historians surrounding something like a Homeric epic) I ADORE how you say "long-term" here, because YES!!! That's what these books are made for, really (although the love they get now continues to astound and humble me!)--they're for the future, and your pointing it out here is so vindicating. It also reminds me of how we even got here--how the many pieces which now make up the Odyssey were orally transmitted before they were ever written down, and what it means to take those pieces and bind them. What it truly means to bind a story--anchoring it to not only a physical location, but also to a specific point in time. Beyond annotations in the margins (MARGINALIA MY BELOVED) and just straight-up tearing it apart and Frankensteining it to something else, the story is set. It's...like a congealing, of sorts, set in something not quite as permanent as stone, but still very difficult to change.

And now with Wings--what it means to bind fanfiction of it. I've heard modern media fandom described as modern folklore in our capitalist society (wrote a bit about it here in my reply to Heather!), and idk I just think it's kinda neat how unique (or perhaps not unique at all--perhaps only unique recently, with commercial book publishing in its current form) the fic writer-fandom relationship is. We're all just sitting around a virtual fire listening to each other tell stories, and like you said!!! It's ongoing, it's collaborative, it's yes and-ing each other to make new narratives.

Layli Long Soldier once came to my university to speak, and she said something I will never forget, about how orally transmitted histories and stories are just as reliably passed down and preserved as the written word. I don't know how true that is (and there's undoubtedly Very Heated Discussions going on about it in a room somewhere), but it still really got me thinking! About what we remember and what we tell others--human memory is fickle, but are we not containers of stories also, just as much as any codex or scroll or line of code on a screen? And beyond that, we have direct access to the means and medium of telling that story (I guess...our brains? Our mouths? Our hand motions? But then that is all influenced by language which is in turn influenced by culture and individual experience and AHHH--), and we can alter it at will in a way we just can't with something physical. When we tell a story, we're also physically anchoring the intangible to the tangible; we breathe life into it, literally. What never was, is not, and never shall be--and yet we somehow make it so!

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this--every book I bind, I think about what myself and other fanbinders doing--taking fics from the ether of the Internet and giving them a physical home in meatspace. (Reading and watching The Sandman has certainly lent a particular sadboi goth flavoring to the thought process XD) I'm three years into this fanbinding thing, and I don't have any plans of stopping. But I think even if I stop one day, I'll always be thinking, whenever I read a story, about possible methods to increase the chances a binding of it might live on, how to best represent this or that element of the story in a physical space, and with books like Wings--how to best represent a community at a certain point in time. Like, explicitly that community, with a focus on its members and their conversations, in addition to what one might be able to glean about that community from the story itself. Providing context--both for the story, and for the people surrounding the story (which are, perhaps, even the same story), if you will.

ANYWAY. I won't have the answers today or possibly ever LOLL, but thank you so much for listening to my rambles and for this incredibly generous response. On a less armchair note: OMGGGG twinning Robert Fagles translation!!! I love hearing the stories of books and this is now one of my favorites--the lard ball has me CACKLING. And it such an honor to even be mentioned in the same sentence as a specialty edition of the LOTR, thank you so much, I am crying a little T_T

Thank you as well for pointing out all the little details you noticed--you have the keenest eye and are so generous and insightful in your analyses of not just my work, but the work of others in this incredible fandom!! I'm also so mf glad we get to chat about this kind of stuff--it's so uplifting, interesting as hell, and above all just plain pure fun :3

Thank you so, so much, friend!! It means the world <333

Last Binderary book is DONE!!!! This is the incredible Maybe sprout wings, by @moorishflower.

This post is going to be a doozy, so gonna just skip straight to the cut!

INTERIOR

INTRODUCTION

I really wanted to model this bind after my own copy of the Odyssey, (which is all highlighted and bookmarked and annotated to hell from my Great Text courses in undergrad ehe, so this bind was such a fun trip down memory lane!). But beyond just the cover/general aesthetic, I also wanted to give the book a similar feel to these kinds of editions of classics--there's usually an introduction, translation notes, and other supplementary materials, right? Like, a physical manifestation of the work of many, many people, all having conversations with one another across time and space.

So that's what I did! I wrote a short introduction (I will also probably post it to my AO3/my blog as well, in the name of preservation etc. etc.) and began reaching out to folks in the fandom who I knew had created art and meta for the fic. The result? 18k words of analysis, comments, and meta, and nearly twenty pages of art!

And this is what I love most about this bind, I think! This book is the work of several people--truly a collaborative work by the fandom--all of whom I will now be shamelessly calling out below :D

CHAPTER HEADER ART

First and foremost, this book would not be what it is without the gorgeous header art by @fancy-rock-dove! Thank you so much Dove for letting include your work, and for being so supportive and kind these past few weeks about this bind <3 You in particular have contributed so much to this book (which I will be getting more into in the next section ehe), and I'm so psyched I get to hold your art and words, too!

NOTES ON THE TEXT

This section was divided into four parts: Asks and Answers, Meta, Selected Comments, and Chapter Heading Art: Process

For Asks and Answers, I trawled Heather's blog for meta she had written in response to questions and other meta about the fic. Asks came from @fancy-rock-dove, @quillingwords, @kulapti, and myself! (I THINK I got all of them--tumblr's search function is finnicky even on its best days, so so sorry if I missed something T_T) I first got hooked into reading this fic because of one of these asks, so I'm very fond of this section in particular :D

For Meta, I included two wonderful essays written by @pastrypuppy (also known as @kulapti) about Hob as an author figure and the Disrupted Fisher King narrative in MSW. Her analyses were so fascinating and I just had to include them in the book! (And thank you as well for your permission, friend!) (also hello fellow Renegade comrade 🫡)

For Selected Comments, I owe everything to (once again :3) @fancy-rock-dove, whose insights are the epitome of transformative fandom at work. I'd look for their comments after I read every chapter to see what their takes were on this or that element of the story, and every single time I would go "!!!!! I didn't even realize!!!" or "OOOOOOOH I hadn't thought of that!!" It was like being in a lecture hall and always whipping your head around when one of your classmates raised their hand, because you knew they were going to say something fascinating that you hadn't considered before.

Aside from one of my own comments, Dove's comments make up the entirety of this section (for which I owe you my life--your long-form responses to fics are a gift to this world) but GOSH was it also so much fun going through the comments section while typesetting and seeing all the keyboard smashing, yelling, and crying from the other commenters. Communal nature of storytelling and ongoing meaning-making of fanfiction, babey!

And finally for Chapter Heading Art: Process: once again Dove coming in clutch with some wonderful insights into the design of each of the chapter heading art pieces! This kind of stuff is honestly my favorite: meta about art for a fic which is, in turn, a transformation of an existing story (not even to mention that The Sandman is its own kind of fanfiction of existing mythologies and histories)--I just!! Think it's all really, really neat :'D (for more coherent/polished thoughts on this pls see my introduction asjdfkls)

ART

The art gallery!!! A million thanks to @fishfingersandscarves, @honeyseller, @jazzpsych, @doctor-rainbowfoxey, and (HI AGAIN DOVE) @fancy-rock-dove for granting me permission to include all of your beautiful pieces!

As usual for artworks in my binds, I printed each piece out on specialty photo paper to really make the colors pop, then sewed each page separately to the text block! Behold, everyone's beautiful beautiful pieces!

The art gallery also satisfies the certain "oooh shiny" part of my brain that always activates when I see pictures in a book, so am also very fond of this section :3

CONSTRUCTION

And now on to the nitty gritty stuff! I used the German Bradel binding technique again, my second time using it. Even though it's more complicated than the case bind, I really love how it gives you the full board space for the cover designs (~it's free real estate~). Keep it a secret but I kiiiiiiind of made a small goof in the last few steps (I did the turn-ins a step too early and so had to paste an extra sheet of cardstock to secure the spine to the boards, whoopsie), but it's a pretty small difference, aesthetically speaking, so it wasn't the end of the world XD

Edges are once again fake gilded, but this time I tried something new with the colors! I did two layers of acrylic paint--one watered down shade of red for the base, then one metallic gold on top of that. I really like the red/gold effect! I'll have to keep experimenting with this kind of layering:

ALSO. Y'ALL! I think I'm finally getting the hang of endbands!!! Many thanks to the folks at Renegade who hosted all the endband workshops last month--I'm still working through them, but even the few sessions I've seen have been TREMENDOUSLY helpful. I learned that tension is Very Important, as well as thread thickness, so I tried doubling my thread and keeping a Very Close Eye on how I was holding the threads while doing the beads. And behold! I still have a ways to go (and one day I would LOVE to do the fancier designs), but I'm v happy with the progress I've made so far!

And finally the covers!! ARCHIVAL MOD PODGE MY BELOVED. I printed on the same matte presentation paper that I used for the art, then did several coats of archival matte mod podge + a pass of gloss mod podge over the title strip to make it ~shiny~. Then once those had dried and I'd adhered them to the boards, I sprayed two layers of matte clear acrylic sealer (also mod podge!) to finish it off. I had some issues with the paper tearing when I handled it before it was fully dry, but luckily the blemishes were small enough that it was easy to do spot corrections with my black acrylic paint. And now I know to be more patient next time LOL

(some non-photoshoot shots that show the shine a little better!)

FINAL THOUGHTS

I had a lot of thoughts while I was binding this book--about Sandman fandom, about Dreamling fandom, about the Odyssey, about storytelling, about fanbinding, about Binderary, about Renegade, about my friends--but really what came to mind the most was gratitude!

Simply put, I'm so grateful to everyone I've met both in this fandom and throughout the years I've been active online--this is SO fun, y'all. It's so much fun to love stories together--to talk about them, to write them, and of course to bind them! I hope I've adequately conveyed that gratitude.

But of course, this book would not exist without the wonderful words of @moorishflower. Heather, thank you so, SO much for sharing your stories, thoughts, and time with us--it is always a happier, better day when I get an email notif from you and when I see you on my dash. I love your work so much, and I'm so happy I finally get to put it on my shelf! So thank you so much again, for everything <3

and OKAY THAT'S IT FROM ME FOLKS!!!!! Binderary 2023 is officially a wrap! I had SUCH a blast--will probably write up a reflection post on it uhhhh after I take a very long nap ajslkdfjslk _(:3」∠)_

all my love! <3

[nonbinarygerard]

this is a rant about AI generated art because I am enraged.

if you want to hear a professional artist speak on AI art more elegantly than me then I highly recommend Steven Zapata’s video. he said everything better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&t=5s

the more i learn about AI art the more i literally believe in like 10 years or so we will somehow live in a worst capitalist dystopia where most artistic professional jobs don't exist. You pay a subscription fee to some AI company that just spits out art, movies, comics, novels etc whatever you want on mass, so fast, that art will be personalised to you as in you know how google and other companies track you everywhere on the internet well so will AI companies. they’ll know you more than you know yourself. their algorithms will be fine-tuned just to ur tastes. you won't even need to type in prompts, it will do it for you and show you hundreds, thousands, of art in your feed. You can scroll forever and the algorithm will just make more art. the AI will be so trained to keep ur retention, making ur session time longer and longer and you’ll lose more hours.

Like how many tiktoks do you actually remember? vs how many hours do you stay on the app? do you think the time you spend on tiktok is worthwhile? i use tiktok as an example bc that's only the start of how good AI algorithms can get. give them a few more years with more silicon valley companies competing to be the next big app and they’ll get smart and better in ways you can never imagine.

in the eyes of companies, humans make flaws and humans take too long to make art. it's ripe for automation. companies don't give a fuck about real art and human expression. they only care about profit, profit, profit. what all tech companies want is ur time, your attention, they want to fill all ur waking moments with their products. literally billions of dollars have already been put into AI and though some of the AI art right now might be cringe or just funny, it wont be at some point. In a few months, years, decades, who knows, it will a lot more indistinguishable from human art. that's going to be a problem. you're not going to be able to avoid it because you're not going to be able to what was made by a human and what was made by an AI.

you may think that humans will stop watching or consuming AI art that is bland and seems well AI generated but thats the thing, it will always evolve. In fact companies might just make up fake people to say it was made by and you will never know how much of it was made by humans and how much was made by AI algorithms. if you dont think at some point a bunch of big budget movies, video games, tv shows etc wont be written by AI when it's possible to create a script that doesn't seem like it's written by an AI then you’re crazy.

its going to be a lot harder to make living if you’re not one of the top artists because how the fuck do you compete again AI. you can’t and that’s the point.

its so fitting for evil capitalists that they would rather fund billions of dollars into AI that was designed to replace artists than ever pay artists fair wages.

i dont think people will stop creating art but i do think that a lot of professionals are going to find a hard time keeping their careers without serious changes. you really cant become a master of ur craft without being a professional artist, it just takes that long to gain the experience, knowledge and insight to walk in the footsteps of the masters before. thats what art is. hard work, dedication and discipline. its not something that only a divine few who have the gifts of the gods can do. anyone can become a master artist it just takes devoting ur life to pursue your craft and what a fucking insult it is for billionaires to just fund their extreme amount of money into some goddam shaddy af AI companies to replace professional artists' job, well thats their hope anyway.

this isnt the same like photography was to painting or digital was to traditional. its true that those technological innovations did destroy a lot of jobs but also created new artistic jobs, and they did have massive effects on the industry and i dont want to minimize the number of people who’s careers were destroyed bc of it. But those were massive changes in tools. They didn't actually replace the concept of artists themselves. AI is meant to do as much, if not all, of the artists work for them, so artists don't need to exist in a professional sense.

why would a games company hire concept artists if an AI can come up with hundreds of different concepts in a matter of seconds? maybe human artists might be better but when the AI is good enough a company won't give a shit.

I dont know when this change will happen or how it will occur and how people will react to it but mark my words these AI companies are going to try to make it happen while maintaining the face of just their just simply pushing human progress and this was somehow just a natural evolution of technology.

none of this was natural it was funded by billionaires.

this is not even to mention how these AI’s train on copyrighted artworks with no permission from the artists. and this process is not like how humans learning from other artists, AI’s dont think, they just copy, steal, combine artworks very fast and on mass scale in away no human could ever do. You cant compare how AI’s and how humans learn. there are not the same no matter how big shot programmers try to make them more similar, AI is a machine we could never do what it does. and it is stealing from artists every time it generates art.

I study programming and literally you dont even know the number of jobs there are in AI. its a field that's expanding every day. it's not just a few companies but every big tech company putting massive resources into it. for them, algorithms are the future of humanity.

I am not saying there isn't some actually usefulness in AI created images for example i think getting insane highly specific poses and references at the click of a button is extremely useful but that's just a by-product of what these AI companies want out of their product. they are meant to replace artists' jobs by the click of a button. that's their dream.

AI companies dont care about integrity or intention or the artistic cannon or mastering one’s craft. Companies don’t pour billions of dollars into a technology just for it to be used for meme culture or quirky images. Every time you type in a prompt you are training the AI, its how neural networks work, by releasing them for free to the public you are training the AI for them. and they will train faster than you ever thought. i cant even imagine what the AI images will look like this time next year and they will improve drastically. mark my words.

You are a fool if you dont think AI won’t have a massive and very dystopian effect on society. Capitalism is somehow killing art even more.

maybe you think I’m being dramatic and I hope I am wrong but there is no doubt that AI generated art will change commercial and professional art as we know it.

[justastrugglinghotchocolate]

This is a long post!!

Okay, so I’m spitballing here because I just had this idea hit me like a truck so things might be a little incoherent. Anyways, what if Dorian and Basil switch roles? Not personality mind you, just the portrait was never enchanted/cursed/etc, and somehow Basil becomes more susceptible to an amoral attitude?

Here’s the thing, I don’t think Basil would abandon all morals in the same way Dorian did. He’s older and wiser than Dorian, it seems unlikely that he’d change because of the fear of getting older/uglier. For the most part we don’t have a whole lot to work with since all of Basil after the first chapter is only seen with reference to Dorian, so there isn’t (as far as I know) a lot to work with there. So I propose desperation being what leads to Basil’s accidental soul selling.

So the rough idea that came with goes as follows: Somehow, Basil becomes destitute/generally disliked in the public (perhaps believable rumors regarding “unseemly behavior” or something along the lines). Regardless, Basil is struggling.

I like to think that Dorian and Henry would try to help him, but Basil being Basil would probably decline, not wanting to damage their reputations.

In this AU, Dorian becomes a composer and full-time pianist, at the beginning, he probably leaves for a tour in France or something. Before he leaves he makes a song for Basil and has it put into a music box as a gift. This would be the portrait equivalent for Basil.

After being gifted the box, he probably makes some wish along similar lines to Dorian’s in the original, albeit without the being young and beautiful forever part.

I don’t think Henry would be the one to lead Basil astray. Despite my personal hatred of the man, I can recognize that he either a) cares enough (which isn’t very much) not to actively terrorize Basil or b) finds Basil to be too boring.

Additionally with the switch from Dorian to Basil being corrupted, I think the story would move away from more carnal sins and emphasize more capitalist ones. (Maybe Basil’s paintings suck the life out of their sitters and when he finds out he choose monetary security over them, maybe he begins painting the aristocracy more embarrassing/hedonistic and because of his wish the paintings look so lifelike people mistake them for photos and he just never clears that up) The main sin of Basil’s is his profit over the suffering of others. So there would be a villainous capitalist leading Basil down the same road.

Anyways I think this all culminates to Dorian returning from France and finding a very different Basil. He’d probably confront him and then Basil would accidentally kill him. His capitalist bud would get rid of the body maybe frame Henry for it, or something equally nefarious, effectively killing off the last remnants of the Basil Hallward from the beginning/book. If I ever write a fic for this, I think I’ll leave the ending ambiguous, mainly because I don’t know what would be a fitting end, lol. Maybe Basil just dies like Dorian does.

If you took your time to read this, thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed. Please let me know what you think and if you have any ideas for this, please share I’d love to hear them!

EDIT: i have now written a fic