In The Name of Art ᯓ★ @acryeu - Tumblr Blog

Sethnicky microfic

424 words, possible TW for implied mention of drug use and possible suicidal ideation

Seth is back at the Foxes after extensive rehab, it was foreign for Seth. Someone who wanted a way out instead gets to live long enough to see harm reduction. Getting clean was another challenge for Seth, but for once he was trying. Maybe being alive wasn’t so bad Seth thought, maybe he could actually graduate. Seth enters the fox tower and heads to his old dorm, it felt surreal being back here. He didn’t feel real yet, but he felt alive. He opens the door to his old dorm and the first thing he sees there is Nicky. Nicky Hemmick waiting for Seth Gordon, the man who called him slurs several times and never always treated him nicely and yet. It felt like a relief seeing Nicky, because despite all that. Seth liked Nicky, Seth didn’t hate him but he thought Nicky was out of touch because of his behavior, but there he is. Standing inside his dorm. “Why are you here?” Seth asked cautiously, Nicky replied “I was waiting for you. It felt like I’ve waited a hundred years for you, what took you so long?!”. Seth is confused, why him? Why did he wait for a person like Seth, what did he do to deserve someone as sincere as Nicky to wait for him. “but.. why? Why me? After all I did, after all I put you through. Why wait for me?” Nicky’s smile dropped and got more serious “Because I like you Seth, I don’t know why. I just like you, and despite everything, it’s still you. I mean who else did you promise to be better for?” “I just don’t understand that’s all, I’m mean, I’m cold. Fuck I like you too I just never thought I’d live long enough to express that” he sighs and looks up at the ceiling, he feels like he’s about to cry. His throat is burning, it feels like a big lump. It’s foreign. He pushes it down and look back at Nicky Nicky gives him a sad smile and whispers sadly “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay” he opens his arms for a hug and Seth just falls limp in to his arms, and they enjoy that embrace for a few minutes Nicky breaks the hug off and says “I brought something I thought you’d like, while you’re not sober yet I think this is a huge milestone and I think we should celebrate” Nicky had brought food. It was sushi, Seth hadn’t properly tried sushi so he was excited to try.

starprongs

what type of rollerskaters i think the foxes would be :3

aka i’m fixated on rollerskating at the moment and it’s spread to my fandom fixations

itsradla

on the revolutions of the heavenly bodies (and james potter)

regulus black believed in the geocentric model.

everyone did. the earth was still. the heavens turned above. men sinned below and god watched from crystalline spheres. everything had its place.

he believed this, and he loved it.

not the church’s reasons, perhaps—but the order of it. the nested perfection. earth at the center, stars in their orbits, equations in balance.

and then he met james.

james potter arrived in kraków from somewhere brighter. florence, perhaps. or rome. it didn’t matter. what mattered was how he didn’t belong. not to the structure of the university, not to the rhythm of regulated speech.

he had no discipline, but he drew people with his warmth. he spoke in loose latin, laughed too loud in lectures. his thoughts were fast, messy.

regulus told himself he was above it.

and yet he watched him.

watched the way he moved without hesitation. watched the way others gathered near him.

in the evenings, regulus studied the sky.

he had done so since childhood — mapping orbits, charting planetary tables, measuring angles with instruments of his own design.

but the numbers began to falter.

mars did not behave. neither did jupiter. they looped backward in the night sky when they should have moved forward.

regulus added epicycles. then more. the model bent under the weight of itself. and still it failed.

he grew restless. withdrew from conversation. left kraków for frombork, where the sky was darker and the air colder. he watched longer. wrote more. tried every known correction.

and still, the planets betrayed him.

until—

quietly, without speaking—

he shifted the sun into the center. just to test. just to see. and suddenly the loops made sense. the math resolved.

it is not the sun that moves, he wrote. it is us. the earth is not the center.

he stared at that line for a long time. not for what it meant astronomically. but for what it meant personally.

he had been taught his whole life that the world turned around him.

but it didn’t. not then. not in kraków. not now.

he thought again of james.

the pull. the presence. the strange feeling.

he had not understood it. had tried to place it into proper orbit. into a model that matched what he believed should be.

but james had never fit.

he had been something else.

the first sign that regulus was not still.

that he was turning.

he wrote his manuscript in secret. de revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

he wrote about mathematics, order, elegance. he argued, step by step, that the earth revolved around the sun.

but in a private notebook, never published, he wrote:

i mistook you for chaos, but you were the still point — the unmoving sun around which I turned.

he died with the printed book at his side. the world would take a century to believe him. but the planets moved as he said they would. and the sun remained still, just as he had written.

and james—

wherever he had gone—

remained, in his mind, at the center.

itsradla

artists never made art for the audience that’s satisfied with whatever chatgpt spits out in two seconds

my student club did a celebration of world art day today and we had a discussion panel with artists about “artistic practice in the context of new technologies” and there’s this one thing that really stayed with me—how clear it became that artists never really made art for the kind of audience that’s satisfied with whatever chatgpt spits out in two seconds. that was never the target. the people who see a random ai-generated image and go “wow, that’s the best thing i ever saw” were never the ones showing up to exhibitions or performances in the first place.

because what artists do—and what makes their work last—is rooted in practice. in process. in thought, research, trial and error, care, time.

there’s a huge difference between the work an artist makes for commercial purposes, for clients, brands, jobs, and the work they make as part of their practice. of course, artists need the first ones to make a living, but the latter is where the meaning lives. that’s what builds identity, depth, voice. that’s what makes it art, not content.

ai can be a tool. a useful one. sometimes even necessary, especially for artists without big budgets or teams. it can help visualize ideas, plan spaces, sketch possibilities, calculate logistics of a performance, test things faster. but it doesn’t invent the idea. it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t question, it doesn’t dream. it responds to prompts. and those prompts, the curiosity behind them, the why—that’s human. that’s the artist.

and yes, right now ai feels like this huge, overwhelming thing. people are obsessed, the hype is hyping. but like with every hype, it will settle. it will find its place. and what’s going to survive, what’s going to matter long after the excitement fades, is the practice.

and yes, people working in marketing, advertising, commercial projects—they’ll have to adapt, and artists in that field too, because that’s part of navigating any industry, any tool, any shift in technology. using ai for moodboards, drafts, visuals, speeding up certain processes—that’s inevitable. and that’s fine. that’s work.

i mean in terms of art discussion, not the environment issues, mind you.

but art, real art, the messy, personal, emotional kind, was never about that. passion projects, deeply personal creations, art made not for profit but for expression, for healing, for connection—that will stay. that will survive. because that was always the point.

the people flooding the internet with ai-generated images, ai poems, ai whatever—they were never the ones supporting artists in the first place. they were never buying tickets to performances, going to galleries, following someone’s years-long journey with a project, buying prints, ceramics, clothes from small creators. they were never the audience art was made for.