#with this art I can now move on from the whole thing

[smir7]

If 5000 people donated just 1$ each, it can save my career and life

Im an artist and I'll draw everyone who donates to me even if its 1$

Hi guys,

Im smir im an 18 year old University student i live alone and doing art is my only source of income

The past 2 months have been very hard for me and i am now late on all the bills but my biggest problem rn is that i might be expelled from my university if I don't pay the tution fee in 3 days as im already late for it

I know joining a college with weak financial condition was very risky move for me but it was my dream college and i didn't expect all the bad things that happened the past month

For me the college is my last hope for my future career as well because I can't be doing art for my whole life because just like this anything can go wrong and since i live alone college is my last hope for my life

I dont like asking for free money especially on the internet, this is a very tough situation for me so i will draw a sketch of everyone who donates to me 1$

I will draw a quick 10 min sketch to a detailed 90 min sketch depending on the amount

And if you want a sketch like the 1st,4th and 5th images above (sketch with some text on it)

I have created a seperate commision section for it as well

https://ko-fi.com/smir7/commissions

If you want a simple normal potrait like the 3rd image you can donate any amount to me on this link and I'll draw it https://ko-fi.com/smir7

I'll be forever grateful for everyone who donates and I'll make sure to draw a nice sketch for you

Please don't worry that i might not have time for doing your commision , im ready to work hard for a few weeks i can take as many commisions and sketches rn , it will be a busy 2 weeks from now but I'll draw all the requests without any exception

I will send a high resolution printable pic for all the sketches and commisions

Im planning on doing live streaming of drawing and doing personal art journal commisions soon once im free from this situation

Follow me if you're interested in the journey

(watermark to verify its me)

[goodlucktai]

raised on little light (1/3)

rise of the tmnt word count: 2k pairing: leo & oc i've had this idea rattling around since the rise farewell comic earlier this year made it canon that the turtles had another brother and a sister floating around somewhere. we know who their sister is, so this is my take on that 5th brother. i hope you enjoy meeting him <3 big thank you to @soldrawss and @mykimouser for enabling my insane behavior (and thank you again to sol for drawing the art i included in this chapter!!!) title borrowed from northern attitude by noah kahan read on ao3

x

2020

Leo regretted his last words as soon as they left his mouth.

“Hero moves are totally your style”? As if Raph doesn’t have enough issues already.

But what he meant—what he would have tried to explain if there was time—was that Raph is his hero. He’s always been Leo’s hero. And if Leo could be anything like him, even for a second, even if it was the last thing he ever did, then he could be satisfied with that. 

It’s a silly thing to be stuck thinking about, laying on a torn up chunk of earth with a monster ominously lumbering somewhere below, looking for where it threw its toy. Laying there, feeling every bruise and broken bone, and hoping that he didn’t hurt his big brother’s feelings.

They’ll be okay, Leo thinks, trying to make it be the thing that gives him courage instead of just more homesickness. They’ll miss me, maybe for a long time, but they’ll be okay.

Leo’s supposed to be fighting for his life, but it’s all he can do to keep a grip on the photo in his hand, the only thing in this entire dimension worth holding onto. It’s all he can do to keep his eyes open when every blink is longer than the last. 

It feels like enough of a rebellion. The Krang looked annoyed that he was still breathing the last time it batted him through the void like a fly, which gives Leo the idea that he should probably be dead by now. He feels a detached sort of pride at how grown-up he’s being about all this. Better late than never

Leo waits for the Krang to come for him, dripping his blood and sneering his daddy’s nickname for him hatefully as it does, and hopes he made his family proud. 

Leo hopes he’ll go wherever Gram-gram is. It would be nice to know someone when he gets there. 

Movement in his periphery snags Leo’s attention. His brain starts throwing up warning flags, signaling danger—anything moving around in here is another parasite, or a Krang hound, nothing he’ll want to be sprawled out on a silver platter for—but he can’t summon any urgency. 

He turns his head and finds himself looking up at another turtle. 

It’s the very last thing he expected to see. They both just stare at each other for a moment. 

The newcomer appears to be a few years older than Leo, based on the broadness of their shoulders, and half a head taller. Their skin is more gray than green and their plastron is so pale it’s closer to white than yellow. Their carapace, what Leo can see of it, is a deep blue-black and they’re covered, skin and shell both, in white spots. Two of the spots on their face give the impression of eyebrows lowered in a glare, but they don’t seem angry at him.

The turtle is completely unfamiliar to Leo, which is saying something. He thought he and his family had the monopoly on… this whole situation. 

Disquieted, Leo remembers that he’s supposed to be the only turtle here. That was a very significant part of the decision he’d made. 

It must be a hallucination, he decides, instantly comforted by his own reasoning. That makes sense. He just wished that if his mind was going to conjure him some dying company it could at least be someone he knows. An imaginary Mikey or Donnie or Raphie for one last hug. One last affectionate forehead bonk. An “I still love you,” if that wasn’t asking too much. 

Don’t you cry now, he scolds himself sternly when his eyes start to blur and burn. It’s not about you. 

With a resounding crash of metal against stone, the Krang finds them at last. He’s snarling something that Leo is too slow to piece together before he cuts himself off—surprising the hell out of Leonardo by acknowledging the hallucination. That’s not how that works. 

“Another pest ,” the Krang hisses. His serrated teeth glint when he draws his gummy lips back in an ugly smile. His tone is oily and unpleasant when he adds, “You’re less colorful than those other ones. I would have remembered seeing you. Where were you when your accomplices were fumbling about in my Technodrome like the stupid creatures they are?”

“We won,” Leo reminds the alien, even though it makes him cough. His lips are warm and wet now but he won’t think about why. “Blew up your ugly ship. Who looks stupid now?” 

“Shut your mouth!” the Krang roars, going from slimy to homicidal in about three seconds. Leo cringes, every ounce of animal instinct in his body urging him to hide in his shell and ride the rest of this nightmare out. 

The spotted turtle snaps, “Don’t talk to him.” 

It would have made sense if he was looking at Leo when he said it. Don’t engage, don’t bait the big monster that could kill you with as much effort as it takes you to blink, et cetera ad nauseum. If only he’d had a nickel for every time he heard that. 

But instead the turtle is looking at the Krang, and he’s radiating the kind of cold-blooded murder that you mostly only see in movies. He has one arm flung out in front of Leo like he actually means to use it to stop the Krang from getting any closer. 

“Don’t even look at him,” he goes on, sounding seconds away from baring his teeth. 

This guy is significantly unaware of the danger he’s facing, and Leo ought to warn him about what enormous clusterfuck he’d just wandered into. Leo ought to say he appreciates the reptile solidarity, but you should definitely run, new guy. 

But this probably isn’t actually happening outside of his own head. And besides, Leo has to focus really hard on his numb fingers so he doesn’t drop his photo. 

“I’ll look where I please,” the Krang says, as unbothered by the hallucination as he was by Leo’s entire family. “Starting with that fool head of yours. I’m interested in whatever backdoor led you here. If it’s my way out, well —”

Adrenaline surges through Leo, and he’s hardly aware of moving before he’s lurching up and shouting out, “No!” 

He can’t get out, he can’t. Leonardo won’t be able to trick him again. He won’t be there to help this time. 

“I do have one thing for you,” the spotted turtle interrupts to say, reaching over his shoulder for what turns out to be a compound crossbow strapped to his back. 

Leo doesn’t know a lot about archery so it’s weird his fictional turtle does, crank-cocking the weapon like it’s an extension of his arm. He watches cluelessly as the turtle slides something very purple out of his jacket pocket and notches it into the groove where the bolts are supposed to go. It’s definitely not a bolt, but it’s a piercing-type projectile of some kind, and it fits in the crossbow like it was designed with crossbows in mind. 

The turtle aims the bow at the Krang, who clicks the claws of his metal suit on the ground the way Splinter would drum his fingers on the kitchen counter when he was waiting on the microwave. The Krang looks condescending and mildly curious, like he’s watching dumb little animals do something they’re not trained to do. 

“He told me to tell you he’s sorry he couldn’t be here to see this part,” the spotted turtle says, and then shoots without a second of hesitation or unnecessary dramatics. 

The Krang bats the projectile away, or tries to, but it explodes on contact with his armor, and suddenly all Leo can smell is burning metal. Then burning meat. 

The Krang begins to scream, clawing at something defiantly purple with a mind of its own that eats straight through him the effortless, immediate way corrosive acid chews through soft tissue. It moves like nanotech, covering as much of the Krang as possible in a manner of seconds and clearly designed to consume whatever it touches like a school of cartoon piranhas. 

Donnie would love it, color scheme and all. 

The Krang stumbles drunkenly, howling like a creature possessed, and Leo and his turtle companion both watch silently until he tips over the edge of the hunk of torn earth they’re on. Gravity is nonexistent in this dimension, so he doesn’t so much fall as sort of drift in another direction while he’s distracted with the purple stuff that’s doing its best to eat him alive. 

The last handful of minutes have been so bizarre that it’s actually going pretty far in convincing Leo that none of it happened for real. The Krang hasn’t actually found him yet. This is clearly a dream. Or a pre-death electrical storm as the neurons in his brain fire up to fizzle out.  

He tips his head to the side again to stare up at the archer, who is putting his bow away with perfect confidence that whatever that purple thing was, it will do the job. 

“Who are you?” Leo asks stupidly. 

“Gio,” the probably imaginary turtle replies.

Leo’s mouth runs off before he can stop it. “Just Gio? Like Cher?”

God, he thinks. That was stupid, Leo. Not the time or place, Leo. You’re in the prison dimension. You’re dying here and you can’t even cut the jokes now? Raph was so right about you.

But the imaginary turtle surprises him by smiling slightly, the corners of his mouth pulling just barely upwards in a way that somehow completely transforms him. Not the time or place for jokes or smiling at them but here they are. Like company.

“Giorgio Hamato,” ‘Gio’ says. That lands in Leo’s ears as something remarkably worth making a lot of noise over, but he can’t begin to unpack it. And after a second, he forgets what the remarkable part was. His mind is a deck of cards that got shuffled too enthusiastically and ended up scattered all over the floor. Gio doesn’t seem to mind when Leo just blinks at him, adding, “I’m here to take you home.”  

“Pretty sure Uber doesn’t come out this far,” Leo mumbles, the words a paint smear, all thick and wet and muddy. One of his teeth feels broken and it’s keeping him awake, a blistering ache that cracks through the back of his mouth like lightning. “And I’ve got, like, zero bars.”

This is how I cope, he thinks, watching the bigger turtle absorb the second bad joke in as many minutes. Leo’s blinking fast so he doesn’t cry. He’s trying to focus on anything but the pain radiating through his whole body, and the swallowing darkness all around him, and the ruins of ancient metal ships looming where they float unrestricted by gravity, and the ballistic howls of a pissed-off pink alien still dealing with whatever the heck this Gio guy did to him.

He can’t focus on any of that because all of that is scary and he’s already terrified. He needs to not be terrified because he doesn’t want to be that kind of ghost when he haunts his family. He wants to be the friendly, funny kind, the kind that gets to stay at the end of the movie, the kind that will make silly faces at Mikey so he doesn’t get scared, and leave sticky notes for Donnie to remember to charge his phone and drink enough water, and cover Raphie with an extra blanket while he’s asleep because it gets cold at night but he always leaves his bedroom door open for them.

If Leo’s friendly and funny, if he helps, he’ll get to stay. He didn’t get to stay the first time, so this time he has to make it stick.

Larger hands wrap around his. It doesn’t register for a second, and then it does in a big way.

Leo jerks his head up. Moving just that much hurts like his ribs are broken all the way down and the bones in his leg have all melted into liquid agony, but it clears some of the fog away.

Someone is holding his hands in the prison dimension.

An alien like the Krang wouldn’t know the first thing about the human gesture, the togetherness of it, so it’s not some mean trick that’s being played. And it can’t be an imaginary turtle that Leo dreamed up, after all, because kindness would be the last thing he’d give himself.

Possibly very real Gio says, “Fuck Uber. Whatever that is. And don’t repeat that word.”

The punchy breath Leo chokes in is going to punch out again as a laugh or a sob. Leo squeezes the bigger turtle’s hands, photo crinkling between them, suddenly tethered to something in this void and hysterically certain that he’ll die for real if Gio lets go.

“I’m sixteen.” Leo’s voice wobbles. He doesn’t know what to react to first. He doesn’t understand how this is happening. He holds on. “I can say the fuck word if I want to, I’m practically an adult.”

Gio’s face does something it hurts to look at. His eyes are dark and sincere, the shape of them entirely familiar. There’s a warmth inside him that permeates the gloom. A star belonging to a much larger galaxy, but more significantly, belonging to the same crooked constellation Leo belongs to.

I know you, he thinks, surprised by the truth of it. I do. Where have you been?

“We’re going home,” Gio says, the certainty in his voice like one of those huge stones a river parts around, unmoved by the currents and crashing water. “I know the way out. Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes.”   

The worst thing that could happen has already happened, Leo thinks. There’s no reason not to trust him. There’s nothing left to lose. He closes his eyes.

He feels himself drawn in, tucked against the built-in armor of a turtle chest, head resting on a broad shoulder. He’s been carried like this a million times before. He didn’t think it would happen again. Somewhere along the line, he’d been picked up for the last time and put down for the last time, and now he’s here, where no one who loves him can reach him, to scoop him up when he falls asleep on the sofa and take him to bed.

But Gio lifts him up like he’s still a kid. The Krang is bellowing hateful promises in between the grating shrieks of pain, promises of what he’ll do when he gets his hands on Leo, but all of that is far away. 

Leo isn’t afraid anymore. He isn’t going to be a ghost.

He’s pretty sure he’s going home.   

[lj-lephemstar]

Progress Checkup! (Nov. 2024) | Scratchin' Melodii Devlog

​​Hey again guys! Sorry if it's been a bit since the last devlog. With how much I've been up to, it sure feels like it!

Let's get right into it. For starters, the 3rd rival battle of Act 2 is complete! I'll likely be showing a gameplay preview of it sometime soon. This is the first song to use the new framework that I'll be using for all the other stages going forward, which also means I've had to spend the past couple weeks getting the previous songs working with this new system too... Did you know that in the demo builds, if I wanted to change something about the gameplay, I'd have to manually go back and change it for EACH individual song one by one? Well now, imagine all the songs had like a peace treaty to just share one good, clean, and organized system that I can easily tweak and add to as I please. So development is gonna be smoother than ever from here! This is how most games are SUPPOSED to work, but I was a liiittle too stupid to figure out how to do this until recently!

While I was moving Cream Cheese Icing over to this new system, I took the opportunity to make the chart a bit more beginner-friendly! For example, the first line went from this...

To just this!

As you can see, it has less notes, therefore it is less scary for new players. Believe it or not, I actually never intended for Cream Cheese Icing to be so difficult for new players in the first place! Naturally, being too good at my own game can make gauging the difficulty curve a bit tricky at times, but I think I'm figuring it out!​

You may have also noticed that the characters have new UI icons too! I felt like the old ones were too flat and boring, so I did a new take on them, aiming for more dynamic shapes and angles, not to mention how my art style's just kinda grown a bit in general since I last drew the icons. I also ended up leaving out the circles behind them. I was a little worried I was gonna run out of unique colors for all of them at some point, plus SOME of these guys can have really big hair and/or hats that pretty much just cover up the whole circle anyway. (hi rensa)

Speaking of artwork, here's a little look at some of the updated animation I've done for Stir & Mix! (Try to imagine it in not highly-compressed-gif-form. I promise it looks better in-game!)

When working on Stir & Mix related stuff, I can't help but feel a bit of a sense of dread knowing how people may react to it... Honestly, sometimes I kinda wish it never got as popular as it did in 2022. But hey, doing my own thing regardless of what's expected of me is the most Scratchin' Melodii thing I could do!

Speaking of which, Mia learned a ton of new stuff while doing the VOCALOID tuning for the last rival battle we worked on, so we might revisit Stir & Mix's vocals again at some point before release to give it even more style! (By the way, Mia and 2cada are the same person! Sorry if I refer to both names interchangeably! She's been the one doing all the VOCALOID tuning and vocal mixing for the game since 2023.)

Well, I think that's all for now! Here's another friendly reminder that there will NOT be anymore demos of the game. Any new content will be saved for the full game's release. I know I've said it before, but I probably won't stop saying it until people stop getting confused about it LOL. Thanks for reading!! I appreciate you. - LJ

[scarletsaphire]

This is my fic for @ecto-implosion 2024 with my artist partner @kaidebat! You can find their incredible art here, go check them out!

---

Phantom comes back to Danny's workshop damaged. Luckily, Danny can fix him. He's the one who built him, after all.

--

Danny did not look up at the sound of metal against metal; that instinct had been phased out of him after spending his whole life around the rumbling of gears and the clanging of pistons. If he jumped at every mechanical squeak in his own workshop, he’d never get anything done.

He did, however, jump at the mechanical hand on his shoulder. He calmed down once he saw Phantom’s glowing green eyes. “How did it go?”

Phantom’s eyes darted down to his other arm in lieu of an answer, and Danny followed his gaze. The arm hung stiff at a 20 degree angle, a metal rod stuck in the elbow and sparks flying off of the shoulder. 

“Poorly, I take it.” Danny let the chain he’d been fiddling with fall to the desk. He could continue working on the project later; he had more important things to take care of right now. “Get comfortable. I just need to grab my stuff.”

It didn’t take him long to find the tools he would need and a small collection of spare parts; the clocktower he’d repurposed into his workshop was smaller than his parents, and he prided himself on being neater than they were. Not that he was complaining about their poor organizational habits; if they kept better track of their stuff, then he wouldn’t have a need for a workshop at all.

Phantom was sitting in one of two chairs, his functioning hand hovering around his throat and his face pointed up towards the inner face of the clock. He smiled at Danny as he set down his tools. 

Danny grabbed his own chair from his work desk and dragged it across the floor. “So, who got you this time?” He sat on Phantom’s right, tracing his finger over the cool metal of his arm. It was normally warmer, just above or below the temperature of a normal human, depending on how hard he’d been fighting. Cold to the touch meant the pipes were being interrupted. That wasn’t good.

Phantom did not reply.

Danny furrowed his brow, glancing up at Phantom’s face. He still had his good arm rubbing lightly at his throat. “You’re not talking.” That also wasn’t a good thing; Phantom was always talking. “Move your hand?”

It fell to his side with a clang, revealing a puncture in the metal. Steam leaked from the gash with a slow hiss, mirroring Danny’s own. “Ouch. Nicked your voice box, I assume?” 

Phantom began to tilt his head in a nod, but Danny grabbed his chin before he could. “Don’t! You could hurt yourself. Just-” 

It was a challenge, holding Phantom’s head still while maneuvering over him. 

Keeping his grip steady while climbing over the armrest was awkward, not to mention getting into a position where he could more clearly see into the gash was a tight squeeze on the small chair. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t let Phantom do anymore damage to himself.

The damage wasn’t as bad as it could be, mostly a surface level scratch. It was a miracle that it didn’t damage more; there was a lot of complicated machinery in Phantom’s neck, and if it had cut any deeper, Danny might’ve needed to do a full emergency reconstruction. 

“I think I can fix this right here.” Danny didn’t look up, reaching between the gap in the chair for his tool box. “You just need to stay very, very… still…” He trailed off as his hand wrapped around what he was looking for. 

There were three things he needed to worry about: the pipe, the voice box, and the surface metal. Danny’s first concern was the pipe. Steam leaked from it slowly but steadily, condensing on the surrounding metal and dripping further into his throat. He needed to take care of it quickly, before it interfered with the other parts. 

“I’m going to need to stop the flow to your head,” Danny mumbled. “I can’t fix this without burning myself otherwise. You okay with that?” His eyes darted up to meet Phantom’s.

He couldn’t talk, obviously. With Danny holding his chin, he couldn’t even nod. None of that mattered; Phantom’s eyes sparkled and Danny knew the answer as clearly as if he had spoken. “I trust you.”

Danny nodded, then got to work. 

It was not an easy process by any means. Having an off switch would’ve been far too much of a risk, what with everything he needed to be doing. In fact, Danny didn’t think there was a way to turn Phantom off, not completely. Even disabling a specific part or pipe was very, very difficult, and ideally no one would be able to get close enough to ever begin to figure it out. 

Danny didn’t need to figure it out. He knew exactly what to do, and exactly how to do it, just like he knew every cog, ever gear, every scrap of metal inside Phantom’s body. He’d spent far too much time building him to know anything less. 

A few moments later and Phantom’s head fell limp on Danny’s shoulder, his eyes still glowing faintly, darting around in the sockets. “You’re okay,” Danny whispered, shifting to once again grab Phantom’s face. “I’ve got you.” He held Phantom’s head up, tilting his head up by the chin to give him better access. “I’ll be as quick as possible.”

With the steam out of the way, Danny could make out the exact problems much, much easier. The puncture in the pipe was miniscule, so small that it would’ve been invisible to the untrained eye. Just enough to cause problems, but an easy one to fix. The voice box was in a worse state, but still manageable. The mechanisms that caused it to vibrate had remained undamaged, but was disconnected from the functional speaker. Tricky, but quick. The gash into the metal of the neck was a nonissue - if Danny had a nickel for every time he had to tear through Phantom’s “skin,” he’d be working with fresh, new metal, not scraps, and that wasn’t even considering how often the other automatons punctured it.

“I’m going to need two hands for this,” Danny said. The back of the chair was ever so slightly shorter than Phantom, which was a blessing; Danny settled his head on the back of the chair as delicately as he could. “Is that comfortable?” 

Phantom’s face remained perfectly still, his eyes staring directly into Danny’s, and the gears in his neck whirred. 

Danny shrugged. “Well, I can’t do much else for you, so it’ll have to do.” He grabbed his goggles from the work desk and a soldering iron from his bag. “Don’t try and talk while I’m working, ok? We don’t need both of us hurt.” He leaned towards Phantom’s neck, and started the repair.

There was something oddly comforting about poking around Phantom’s insides. Nostalgic, almost, which was stupid. Danny had only finished building Phantom a few months ago, and it was dumb to be nostalgic from something so recent. It didn’t change the fact that the inner workings of Phantom’s body were familiar, and working on them again - not just surface level repairs, but actually working in him - felt a little bit like returning home.

It made sense, in a way. Danny had spent more hours in the clocktower than he’d spent in his actual house, even before he’d started thinking of it as his workshop. So much of that time, all meticulously measured by the resounding hourly echoes of the bell, was spent working on Phantom - on blueprints and concept sketches, and then individual parts, all long before he’d ever even began to work on the body - of course it would be more familiar than his bedroom at home.

Thinking about it, Danny couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d spent a whole day in his house. It was before his parents started the construction, that was a given. There’s no way Danny would’ve been able to stay overnight with the racket they’d been making, even before they ever finished the first automaton.

He’d thought it was harmless, at first. The first ones had been. A couple of robots with funny shapes whose only real purpose was to prove that they worked, that through science and mechanical work his parents could create life , or at least a semblance of it. It was only after the fourth one that Danny got worried.

It had taken them months to perfect the shell of a kindly old lady, complete with a warm smile and the smallest of hunchbacks. 

“She’s here to help with meals!” his father had said, his arm thrown over the machine’s shoulders. “Make sure that we all stay fed while your mother and I work.”

“We can’t have our kids going hungry, now can we?” His mother smiled at them, and then the two of them had retreated back into the basement, leaving Danny and Jazz with the automaton. 

For an hour it had stood there, perfectly still, smile stretched across the metallic faceplate. The longer Danny stared at it, the further it went from warm to unsettling. When the clock struck noon, it only got worse.

“I-I-I-I-It’s lunch time!” she stuttered to life, wheels below her fake dress spurring her towards the kitchen. “Children need to e-e-e-eat three square meals a day!”

The two of them sat on the couch, watching from a safe distance as she banged around in the kitchen, making a comical amount of noise for the small sandwiches she brought to the table a few minutes later.

If it had ended there, it would’ve been great. If it had ended at the soup she brought out a little while later, that would’ve also been fine. If it had ended at the salad, or the brownies, or the pitcher of lemonade, that would’ve been excessive, but manageable. The problem was that it didn’t end at any of that. It didn’t end until every last possible ingredient in the kitchen had been used up, and even then it was only because Jazz took a bat to the things wheels when it tried to leave the house to get more food.

That was the problem with automatons. They never knew when to quit. They were created with one task in mind, and they would do anything to reach it, over and over and over again. It was only through destruction, when the damage to their physical bodies was too great for them to continue, that they would stop.

Danny’s parents cared about this problem, of course. It was an issue in their process, a barrier between real life and the artificial one they were trying to perfect. They just didn’t care enough not to make more.

It’s why Danny started designing Phantom in the first place; an automaton to make sure that the others don’t go haywire and hurt somebody. An automaton that wouldn’t stop trying to help people until there was no more help left to do. A protector that doesn’t need to worry about the damage the others could do, because he could be fixed. Because Danny could fix him. 

“Done.” 

He removed his goggles, letting them settle around his neck while he inspected the patch. He’d needed to open the gash further to access Phantom’s inner workings, which meant that it couldn’t just be welded shut. The square of scrap metal was a different color than the rest of Phantom’s body, but not noticeably so; at least, Danny hoped not.  

“Go ahead and say something.”

“Testing, testing, one two three.” Phantom’s voice came through clearly, with only the slightest bit of static from the speaker. 

“It sounds good to me. Is it comfortable?”

Phantom hummed. “Much better than before.”

“Yeah, well, a monkey with a brick could’ve made it feel better than before.”

Phantom’s laugh was warm and crackly, as if the speaker couldn’t transmit all of the feeling in it. “You’re selling yourself short again.”

“Yeah, yeah, you keep saying that.” Danny rolled his eyes. “I’m going to power your upper motor functions back up, and then I’ll deal with your arm. Sound good?”

“Everything you say sounds good.”

The soft thud of flesh hitting metal resounded as Danny playfully slapped Phantom’s shoulder. “I could just turn you all the way off if you want to be like that.”

“But you won’t.” Phantom couldn’t turn his head to look at Danny, but he could feel the automaton’s burning gaze on him anyway. 

He couldn’t help the soft smile that spread across his face. “But I won’t.”

Phantom’s first move after getting powered on was to roll his head, testing the new metal patch. It held, bending with the rest of Phantom, blending into the fluid motion as if it was skin. “It’s good.”

Danny’s smile widened. “Wonderful. Means I can get started on the bigger problem.” He moved to slide off of Phantom’s lap, only to be met by his metallic arm, holding him in place.

"You can fix it from here, can't you?"

Danny was suddenly struck by the warmth emanating through Phantom's body, the subtle vibration of hidden mechanisms working inside of him, and Phantom's hand, settled in the crook of his hip, holding him firm. He’s sitting in Phantom’s lap. He’s been sitting in Phantom’s lap for the better part of an hour now. 

If Phantom were alive, it would’ve been an incredibly intimate position. But he wasn’t alive. He was an automaton, nothing but metal and steam. It couldn’t be intimate.

So why did Danny suddenly feel so warm?

 "Um. I can?

"Then stay." Phantom lets his grip loosen ever so slightly, but he didn’t pull his arm away. The only movement was to gently rub the small section of skin just under Danny’s shirt. "Please."

It was Danny's turn to burn far, far too hot. “I don’t- I-.” Danny swallowed hard, trying to will away the feeling of Phantom’s fingers on his back. “I don’t know if I can… focus very well. Sitting here.”

Phantom looked up at Danny, staring directly into his eyes. “I have faith in you.”

Danny breathed in the smell of the workshop, letting the piercing scent of metal cut through him. He blocked out the feeling of Phantom’s fingertips on his back, the feeling of his cheeks flushed and red, and the feelings rushing through his head far, far too quickly for him to process. Phantom was hurt. He was hurt and Danny needed to help him before he could deal with…whatever was wrong.

Removing the pipe lodged in Phantom’s arm was a clear step one. Ideally, the job would be as simple as grabbing and pulling, but that would depend on how it was bent, and what exactly it was lodged between. Danny bent to the side, reaching into his toolbox on the floor and ignoring the way that Phantom’s fingers slid further up his back. He tightened his grip around his screwdriver and straightened, then got to work removing the arm plates.

Undoing the screws was easy, repetitive, and time consuming, and Danny couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. Something was… off. Not just the weird fluttering in his stomach as Phantom’s hand slowly migrated from his back to his thigh. Something was off about Phantom himself. It was only after Danny had managed to get the first panel unscrewed that he realized what was bothering him.

Phantom wanted something. 

He had wanted things in the past, of course. Upgrades and repairs and disguises and techniques to help him stop the other automatons, or to help repair damage, or a dozen other things. A dozen other things all related to helping . 

That’s why he was created, to help. To help stop the destruction his parent’s experiments wrought, and to help restore what he couldn’t stop, but always to help. As far as Danny had figured, he couldn’t want anything outside of that. 

But here he was. Asking Danny to stay sitting on his lap, even though it would slow the repair. Even though it had nothing to do with a threat. Something was wrong. Or maybe Phantom had a reason for asking, something that made sense within his metallic brain that Danny just couldn’t compute. 

“Tell me about the fight?” That was a safe topic, and Danny could gather information from it. Maybe there was something that happened that caused this weird behavior?

Phantom sighed in a small puff of steam. “Must I? I was savoring the moment.”

Danny’s hands stalled for just a second before continuing their work. “You don’t want to talk about it?”

Phantom was quiet for a moment, his thumb rubbing absentminded circles. “I can if you need me to.”

“I’m more curious about why you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Like I said, I am savoring the moment.” 

Danny turned his eyes to Phantom’s face for a moment, studying it from the corner of his vision. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say that Phantom was zoned out. That he was telling the truth. But Danny did know better; that shouldn’t be possible.

“Are you okay?”

“Besides the obvious, I assume?”

Danny realized he’d stopped working again, and quickly went back to removing the last arm panel. “Yeah. Besides that.”

“I don’t believe I suffered any other damages.” Phantom frowned ever so slightly. “Have you noticed something I haven’t?”

Danny turned his eyes back to his hands. Should he say anything? Phantom had never lied about his injuries before, and if he said that he didn’t think anything was wrong, he was telling the truth as he knew it. Of course, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t damaged in some way that Phantom didn’t know. If Danny told him, then they could try and figure out what was wrong together. Unless whatever was wrong was messing with his head and had some kind of self preservation built in. 

“You said you wanted me to stay.” He wouldn’t be able to figure out anything if Phantom couldn’t help him, not when so many of these problems lied within internal reasoning. “What purpose does that serve you?”

Phantom tilted his head to the side in confusion. “Does it need to serve a purpose?” 

“Of course it needs to serve a purpose!” The final panel of Phantom’s arm fell to floor with a clatter, punctuating Danny’s statement. “You’re an automaton. Everything needs to serve a purpose. That’s part of what you are, how you work.”

The green glow of Phantom’s eyes burn bright and hot, but Danny did not look away, did not blink in the face of the fire. “Is that truly what you think?”

“I don’t need to think about it, I know it! I know it because I know every inch of you, every cog and gear and piston and screw. I know it just like I know that you’ll be just fine when I do this.” Danny grabbed a hold of the pipe’s top part and pulled, generating a horrible grating metal sound. It finally came out with a pop. “I know you, Phantom. And I know that this isn’t normal, and if something is wrong I can fix it.”

“I don’t think you know me as well as you think you do.” 

“How can you-” Danny was cut off by Phantom leaning forward, metallic lips pressing against his own. 

It was strange. Danny knew these lips, had worked for days and days to sculpt them and make them mobile. Having them pressed against his own, feeling those infinitesimal motions on his skin, the slightest feeling of steam drifting through the space between them? It was something else entirely, something completely foreign and yet so much like home. It was almost instinct to kiss back.

Phantom’s hand, now free from the pipe, raised to the back of Danny’s neck. It made an ugly sound as it moved, slow and sluggish without the final repairs put in place, but neither of them seemed to care right now. When Phantom finally pulled away, Danny was staring at him wide eyed and open mouthed.

“I have wanted to do that for as long as I can remember, and I know you didn’t know that.”

Danny blinked slowly, his own hand raising to his lips, his mind lagging behind his body. “I- I don’t.” He swallowed, trying to buy himself a moment to catch up. “How? How are you…?”

Danny trailed off, and Phantom continued. “How am I like this?” Danny nodded. “I have no idea. I just… am.”

“You’ve always been different.” Danny’s voice was quiet, barely above a whisper. “I just didn’t realize… how much.”

“And I never told you.”

“Why not?”

Phantom finally looked away from Danny. “I was worried. That you would deconstruct me. Try and make me more like them.”

Danny grabbed Phantom’s chin, just like he’d done to fix his neck, but now it had a different air to it. More delicate. More human. “I’m not going to do that to you. Not now, not ever.”

Phantom smiled. “Thank you.” A moment of silence, before, “Now what?”

Danny dropped Phantom’s chin to crack his knuckles. “Now I finish fixing your arm.”

“And then?”

“We’ll figure that out then. Hold still, will you?”

“Whatever you need.” Phantom’s smile grew and Danny couldn't help but return it.

[snail-studios]

queers them into oblivion

[zephyrartz-owo]

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

[sysig]

Hiya :) I've been getting into DSMP animatics, and I love seeing the different interpretations of the character designs even though I only have a vague sense of the lore so far. It's all got cool vibes!! Can I request a drawing of Ranboo or Wilbur, or maybe even both? I'm not sure if they actually ever interact in the story or not, but I'd say interpret the prompt however you want and have fun??

Day 19 - Stuck inside

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[luck-of-the-drawings]

when i was in highschool one o my biggest coping mechanisms was drawing all the kids i hated getting killed and eaten and killed. and well. time is a slowly ascending spiral. you will find patterns.(i work as a blackjack dealer. gamblers are FASCINATING

[ghostie-gengar]

does anybody know if google docs' ai thing is actually going to be taking everyone's stuff to use for prompts without consent? i've heard a lot of rumours about it but i don't wanna go through the trouble of moving all my stuff and deleting it if it's not true

[piplupod]

fatigue my beloathed 👎

[krysmcscience]

At long last: either an alternate explanation for or continuation of my prior comic regarding how Bill was ABSOLUTELY naked in Ford's karaoke night drawing. (Because errors in art do not exist. Artists do not make mistakes. So if you see any in this comic, No You Do Not.)

I am so normal about these old dorks.

I'm not really clear on exactly when Bill started throwing his desperation book at Ford just like a needy ex do, but I find it extremely funny to imagine it happening literally the day of or after the makeshift funeral. Bill just gets this weird sense of 'Ford is taking steps to move on' and CANNOT FUCKING ABIDE.

I hope you enjoy all the goofy things I added to each page of Bill's sad spieling. (Everything SHOULD be readable so long as you view the full size, but I have added basically this whole little fanfic in the image descriptions, LMAO, which lays out all the little written notes and such.) Also don't ask how Bill managed to sneak that vampire pen in there. I have no idea, and honestly? I don't wanna know.

Oh, and a little bonus comic:

Of course Bill would take it as flirting. Because between the two of them, Bill is the bigger masochist By Far. :)

Also I have continued applying The Good Place logic to any of Bill's attempts to swear. Case in point, one last bonus image, this time with a motivational line from my slapdash Theraprism OC, EV-01:

Yes, its name is just 'love' backwards. No, I will not be taking any feedback on this. Yes, EV-01 was only ever assigned to Bill's case due to the Theraprism being desperate to make some progress in rehabilitating him. No, it did not work anywhere close to staff's expectations - Bill didn't even appreciate EV-01's matching fondness for bowties! (He claimed the fondness to be "cultural appropriation" and insisted he'd been traumatized by it.)

Anyway, if you like my stuff, reblogs are very much appreciated, and if you really really like it, perhaps consider my commissions or yeeting a teeny tiny tip my way? I am trying to recoup over 500 dollars in vet bills, ahaha... 🙃

In other news, I loved all the fun tags people added to the prior naked-karaoke comic (such as 'the hat and bow-tie stay ON during sex' and the classic '[insert keysmash here]', as well as the many amused/bewildered remarks about how I either made the bricks a piece of clothing or just straight up peeled Bill's skin off). However, I think my favorite thing by far was the several people losing their shit over the fact that I gave Bill toes. Like, excuse me? The magical talking triangle can have fingers but not toes??? Since when was that a rule????? 🤣 (Also the one person who reblogged with the cropped panel where Bill's fishnets pants are falling off to ask why Bill peed himself. Dude, I want to examine your brain...?)

Okie-dokie, I'm sick of looking at all of this stuff now and I'm off to go to work, after which I will either scribble some more goofy "Billford" comics or perhaps draw my lame human!Bill in Situations, idk yet. Maybe I'll even finally draw more than just a single other person's human!Bill...? Who knows, but I sure hope I can mix it up a little and not turn whatever I draw into a month-long fukken project. >:\

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[swampjawn]

Dungeon Meshi Episode 7 was super interesting from an adaptation standpoint - this'll be a little different from what I usually write about (though I do still talk about the animation in the full video).

Studio Trigger have never done a straight-up manga adaptation before - and led by Yoshihiro Miyajima, a big fan of the manga who pushed hard for the adaptation to get made, and who has never directed a full series before, it was unclear if they'd be able to find the right balance between a simple panel-for-panel recreation and making something that's completely different.

And in the first few episodes, you could really feel the tension between the influence of a cautious young creative with great respect for the source material, and a studio with a unique established visual style. It kinda seemed like they were ping-ponging willy-nillily between the two sides of that spectrum.

But this episode showed that Miyajima (and series writer Kimiko Ueno) can take 3 chapters, slice them up and rearrange them into a cohesive-feeling episode while taking into account the differences between screen and page, and using them to their advantage.

Starting with the way the water looks. This line from the manga describes a faint magical glow to the water in this lake and you can see that the cavern fades into darkness above, but Kui's illustration style doesn't really define lighting and shadows very much compared to the cel-drawing style of animation. So the animators took the opportunity to use the water as the light source, and make a whole episode that's lit almost entirely from below. It really gives an otherworldly feeling to this area.

Particularly when the Kelpie shows up, that under-lighting works wonders to define its anatomy within the relatively simple line art.

What do you do when you can't show the immense fuck-off scale of a monster with a beautiful full-page spread like this?

Well you use what you do have: the ability to move the camera instead. This is such a great way to communicate the scale of this thing, AND such a great way to show some of Senshi's anime-original butt-cheeks!

This is one of my favorite shots from this episode - this whole sequence is super hectic, cutting quickly from character to character, but they use tricks like this to keep you from getting confused. This is framed much like it is in the manga, but with the moving image, they're able to use the trajectory of the fish head in the background to lead your eye directly from Chilchuck, right to the point where Senshi pops up in the foreground and transition seamlessly from one character to another!

Now, it's not all good - I am a bit disappointed that they removed Marcille's own Senshi-style soap-making montage, which was the perfect visual representation of the culmination of the character development and understanding built between Senshi and Marcille.

It's a shame to see it go.

I get more into that, what else was cut, and much more in this video where I broke down the entire episode!

Check it out if you feel like it. If you don't, jump in a ditch, cover yourself in leaves and jump out at people as they walk by.

Thanks for reading!

[pocket-deer-boy]

This is just a personal pet peeve of mine but i feel like a lot of online art tutorials overstate the importance of stuff like guidelines to get “correct” anatomy every single time and while those are typically really good handgrips for beginners we should also tell beginners about gesture drawing. Like maybe i’m being too animatorbrained here but being able to pump out a pose in anywhere from 15 seconds to 2 minutes and quickly move onto the next drawing without lingering on every little mistake is a really really good way at getting good at drawing people proportions quickly. If you make mistakes fast you learn from them fast. So here’s a little exercise:

Sit down, grab some reference images, draw ten poses in twenty minutes (or do ten poses in ten minutes if you’re feeling adventurous or confident) and take a step back and look at your work after the fact. Be sure to move from drawing to drawing quickly once your timer is done. Pretend you’re in a model drawing class and the model has already changed pose whenever your timer hits - finish up whatever lines you were drawing, move on to looking at what the model is doing now.

You will make a lot of shitty drawings, of course, but that’s not so bad. You only spent a minute or two making each one. Focus on the drawings you do like, and look at them as a whole.

Look at all the drawings together and how they fit together on the page. Look at little details and lines you’re proud of. Take note of things you found difficult to get right in such a short time. Take note of the things you liked doing. Do the exercise again, and focus in on the things you want to improve or explore.

Maybe you want to focus on how the torso conveys its weight on the legs. Maybe you want to focus on how shoulders and arms bend around the neck. Maybe you want to focus on how to convey depth on the torso. Maybe you can learn something more about how to draw a body if you only draw using sharp lines and angles. Maybe you can learn something more if you only draw using squiggly, overlapping lines. Maybe you can learn more about how to draw a body if you only fill out the shadows with thick, quick lines. Congratulations! You’re not just learning how to draw a body, but you’re now also exploring your tastes!

This is a fine exercise to do alone, but it’s a lot more fun to do as an activity with a small group so you get to discuss the art you made together.

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.