#worth money

[tariah23]

Oh…. Well, it’s over for Crunchyroll I guess

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

imagine getting twenty four hours of a fraction of a taste of what marginalized bloggers on this fucking site have been told "doesn't break TOS" for the past 15 years and deciding to openly threaten to just nuke the entire website lmfao

[klapollo]

literally why the fuck are disney world and universal open and why are people in the fucking parks trying to ride rides and shit. this is so disgusting, why are you demanding to be entertained by already underpaid workers who should be running for their lives

[sofipitch]

So we were on vacation visiting some pretty Catholic church not for mass but just to see and there was a spot for vigil candles and at the time they were like 25 cents (they are like one or two dollars now, even prayers get hit by inflation I guess) and my mom paid for both me and my brother (~5 yrs old at the time) to light one. She explained that it's usually for someone who died or you feel needs a prayer. I lit one for a family member who passed, I didn't remember but my mom told me a lot about her and really loved her. My mom was tearing up a little in happiness that that person was on my little kid mind. And my brother, who was obsessed with the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie lit one for Willy Wonka

[that-rad-jewish-girl]

Palestine should have already built their own port, but they didn’t.

They should have their own greenhouses and farms, but they don’t.

They should have their own bomb shelters, but that’s clearly not the case.

Their hospitals should be state-of-the-art - they shouldn’t need to go to Israel for treatments - but they do largely rely on Israel.

And instead of asking why this country that has received billions in aid still doesn’t have basic infrastructure, you get mad and blame Israel.

You don’t question why the leaders of Hamas are billionaires. You don’t question why their military budget is so high if their people apparently live in squalor. And you don’t question how this country can build extensive tunnel networks, but not a single damn bomb shelter.

No, you just blame Israel - a separate country - for the failings of the Palestinian people and their government.

[briebysabs]

When JJK ends y’all better make t-shirts that say “I survived Gege Akutami”

[galoogamelady]

If Buttons was real what's his McDonald's order

"Hug machine's broke."

[hollowwish]

You guys do realize a lot of watcher fans complaining about the six dollars don't just need to "cancel their disney+ or hulu subscriptions." They're the people who ALREADY can't afford streaming services. It's not that they should be supporting independent creators over big corporations, it's that they literally cannot afford to do either.

[snapscube]

Since you're really into Ace Attorney right now, I'm recommending Ghost Trick. It's a completely new story, but it's made by the same guy as the PW Trilogy and has similarly lovable cast of characters tangled in a big conspiracy.

[skyrim-forever]

My toxic trait is that if they rereleased Skyrim and all they did was add more marriage candidates I’d buy it

[hajihiko]

hey Hajime, Valentine's must be REALLY busy for you huh?

Don't forget the most important Valentine, yourself 💛

(Somewhat ko-fi doodle for Vi but I was gonna make a Valentine's post anyway)

[neckromantics]

Cazador talks a lot of shit for a dude that's only got 200 gold when you pickpocket him. Like, I thought you were rich and powerful? Untouchable? Yet, here we are standing over your dead² body, and all you've got to your person is wack ass vibes and a measly 200gp?? Disappointing. I bet you lied on your fantasy taxes, you wet sack.

[mr-ribbit]

ladies, do you hate shaving? you wish you didn't have to go through all that work before every date night? want to wear shorts or a swimsuit or just exist in public without it being a whole ordeal of exhaustion, self harm, and emotional stress? do you put yourself through hell solely to keep up the illusion that you have zero body hair? great news, we have a solution!

"is it to surround yourself with people who don't care about body hair?"

no!!

"is it to improve my personal stigma against body hair by accepting its beauty on others?"

no!!!!!!!

"does it involve me getting to stop shaving at all?"

of course not!!!!!!!!!! ITS AN INSANE ALTERNATIVE SHAVING PRODUCT! ITS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN RAZORS, TAKES JUST AS LONG, AND AND ITS WEIRD! BUY OUR HANDHELD LASER POWERED PINK TAXED MAGIC LEG SHAVING THINGIE FOR A MILLION DOLLARS!! USE IT TO GET RID OF THAT UGLY LEG HAIR YOU HIRSUTE FREAK! YOURE NOT NATURAL YOURE NOT NORMAL IF YOU DONT LIKE SHAVING THEN YOU *NEED* TO USE THIS BRAND NEW THERAPY WAX TWEEZER BEAM RADIATION BLISTER WAND PROCESS!!!! YOU HAVE TO CHARGE IT! IT'LL GET RID OF THAT HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HAIR WITHOUT ALL THE CUMBERSOME STRUGGLES OF HAVING TO SHAVE - THATS RIGHT, THIS PRODUCT GIVES YOU BRAND NEW CUMBERSOME STRUGGLES TO ADD TO YOUR ALREADY JAM PACKED MORNING ROUTINE OF SHIT YOU HAVE TO DO TO YOUR STUPID WOMAN BODY BEFORE YOU LET ANYBODY OUT IN THE REAL WORLD SEE IT

NOW WITH ESSENTIAL OILS

[crackedegotheories]

Hey, advertising/marketing managers, YOU could be responsible for Markiplier's next Bathtub Breakdown! Is that not reason enough to sponsor this man?

[tangibletechnomancy]

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

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

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

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

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[bergoozter]

oh slay