Screaming into the void

Blog for following Hannibal/Hannigram, MCU, DC, Seisub, and random art/feel good/inspirational blogs. Occasionally writer's lament. Most posts are queued. Fanfics locked to registered users only on AO3.

[fellshish]

when you write fanfic you touch as many lives as traditionally published authors btw. sometimes many many more and in much more meaningful ways. in case you need to hear it today

[egberts]

you literally cannot look at anything online anymore without the company hunting you down in an email or notification being like "you forgot to buy this. you left this in your cart btw. did you want anything else? something similar or entirely random and different? we have options but to see them you have come back and buy stuff thanks"

[egberts]

this is the future

[sycamorality]

writing a canon divergent fix-it fic while also shaking my head to show that i actually really like the canon's tragic narrative and am not trying to say i think it would be better if canon was like this

[roselalonde]

wheres that one quote about the guy obsessively downloading media and staying up all night to do it and saying “its like all my birthdays have come at once” and its about like.. attachment in the digital age where archiving is easy as fuck. i havent given enough consideration nor read enough on the topic to have well formed opinions but the wording of it is so good it plays in my mind without warning

[roselalonde]

FOUND IT

“Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot… He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar… He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

—Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

[centrally-unplanned]

This is absolutely aspirational

[centrally-unplanned]

Gonna go off this for a sec because that’s what I do here, but this book was written in 2007. At that time (or well, a few years before that time) the idea of ownership on the internet seemed almost quaint. Hoarding for its own sake has always been a human vice, but the internet threw its contradictions into stark relief - the songs were *always there*, waiting, on the internet. If you wanted to listen to them, you could just find them! You no longer *had* to own, you could simply need, and dip into the collective to sake the thirst. And of course, the ability of the internet to serve as that collective was only growing, connection speeds and server clusters expanding piece by piece to form the Akashic Record of human creative output.

And it always would continue to expand…right?

Hah. Even back then the idea was a bit of a smokescreen, the dumping of endless streams of anime torrents and ‘zine pdf’s not done by a digital weltgeist but instead by a disparate groups of like 20 guys in Lvov or Hong Kong, who time and boredom could easily destroy. But of course far more sinister in the past twenty years has been the brick-by-brick dismantling of the digital commons to erect paywalled fiefdoms of exclusive DRM’d content. In the face of the dual forces of greed and entropy, your saved links have rotted, your go-to torrent sites flit from registry to registry if they don’t die entirely, your favourite alt-rock AMV from middle school that first got you into Inuyasha got DCM-striked in 2014 and you didn’t even *notice* until 2018. The Akashic Record turned out to not be a monument, but a front in a war - one that hasn’t been lost yet, sure, but *could be lost* at any time, and you won’t receive any more warning than you already have. And once you know this, not by reading words but the only way one can - from the first time you look for something you thought was always there only to find it locked away forever - you can’t regain the innocence lost. Now you download out of fear.

The man above is man fully embodying an ethos of a time and place. Not simply because he is obtaining free songs; in the end, if you want the song, you can buy the song, or use spotify, you can find a way to listen! But precisely because he does not care, in the moment, to listen, he has achieved enlightenment; to take with reckless abandon from a moment in history, a moment of spatial infinity and infinitesimal temporality, is worth the sleep deprivation. Maybe you should too, if you still can, while the moment lasts.

[json-derulo]

earlier I was coming back up from skating and one of the starstruck little kids from across the hall asked me, “how are you allowed to drive on the inside?” (referring to the fact that I carefully skate in the hallway and elevator, because swapping shoes on and off for the one-block commute to and from the park is a massive pain in the ass), and I swear to god the dialogue options that flashed up on my heads-up display were

[] Nothing in the lease explicitly says I can’t, and all uncodified rules are merely suggestions

[] I’m probably not, but the only people in this building who are fast enough to actually stop me are the maintenance guys who are all charmed by my kind green eyes and adorable dog

[x] I ate all my vegetables and did my homework so my mom said I’m allowed to do whatever I want

[anarchopuppy]

sometimes being a fan of something means not wanting them to make any more of it

[ao3commentoftheday]

Did you know that AO3 allows fics with homicide in them? There’s a whole tag for Major Character Death and even more tags so you can find exactly what kind of character death you want to read. 

Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people. 

Anyone can read the stories on AO3! Kids can read them! They’re getting exposed to stabbing, poisoning, even guns! And they’re writing the heroes doing the killing, too! That’s basically telling kids it’s okay to go out and murder their families. It’s promoting violence and encouraging homicide and if we don’t do something about it soon, you’ll be murdered next!

[zoanzon]

[ao3commentoftheday]

The devil came to my house and tried to burn it down, which is why this post exists in the first place.

[prismatic-bell]

I saw Goody OP writing darkfic with the devil.

[darkandstormydolls]

I was talking to my mom about John Green today and I mentioned that “he’s still on tumblr” and she asked why that would be weird and I said that no one is on tumblr these days, “except him and I guess me”

So

I don’t know what all of you guys are doing here, because clearly this website is occupied only by me and John Green

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

just the two of us / we can make it if we try.

[munchycrunchysoup]

I love it when people make Damian a lil blob with his cape. Look at him, taking after his father.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

vampire with the ability to put humans in thrall but they use it solely to make viral asmr videos

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

you are feeling sleepy. you are feeling sooooooo relaxed. you are going to like and subscribe for more content

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#need someone to enthrall me so i can do basic household chores

vampire life coach who hypnotizes you into pursuing your dreams

[sixohsixoheightfourtwo]

The Art of the Deal

By wearing this watch you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor

The Fence has published an exposé on Stuart Semple (of Anish Kapoor 'feud' notoriety) which they have been working on for six months.

investigation reveals Semple / his studio / his partner Emily Mann (who's described as acting as his 'enforcer' in his business) :

mishandled £400k grant of public money intended for a public gallery, allowing the money to flow freely between the public project, his own personal studio and personal projects such as Culture Hustle (his online business selling paint etc)

underpaid or failed to pay many of his assistants to the tune of several thousand pounds each.

former assistants have taken him to court and he simply hasn't bothered to show up and he's threatened to sue former assistants who asked for their back pay

repeatedly funds ambitious projects that never see release eg Abode, an 'Adobe-rivalling' suite of creative software (he claims he still intends to release this)

encouraged a cult-like atmosphere at his studio in Bournemouth

was frequently in debt and having to negotiate with bailiffs etc for his debts while at the same time crowdfunding various projects

ran fake social media accounts boosting Semple and his work

The portrait that emerges is one of decades-long scam artistry tbh and someone who's juvenile, manipulative, narcissistic.

The Fence btw is a decent fairly small-circulation quarterly magazine from the UK which specialises in satire, investigative journalism, culture, and fiction. You can read the piece in its entirety if you register (which is free).

a few links:

The Fence's newsletter from April discusses this article & how Semple has tried to muddy the SEO waters

Semple threatened to sue The Fence for publishing this story - many of you are American so here's the relevant UK law on defamation.

& the subreddit r/culturehustle is worth a look to get an idea of just how badly run his paint business is

[prismatic-bell]

Holy fuck.

I had a feeling something was up with him, but like, I assumed it was going to be something slightly sketchy, not...this.

[beowulf22121]

I got some of his paints when he first announced the mirrored paint.

The first thig that put up a solid red flag was the shipping material. It's cool that he has custom boxes for his studio, it looked really neat. Then I opened it and sae things like "Not for bean boy" printed all over the inside of the box.

Between Mirror, hyper pigments, and black 2.0, none of them were as extremely out there as the videos on his site made them seem. The colors are vibrant, the black is dark, and the mirror is shiny. But the level the videos showed them at are not levels I can recreate.

So like, he exaggerated as an advertising scheme. Alright, shame on him.

But reading that... Yeah. I don't expect him to sell anymore stuff.

[marsipain]

The duality of a cross-planetary friendship .

[dddreamscape]

Mutuals do this

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

You've heard of parallel play, now get ready for perpendicular play.

[amuseoffyre]

Hot cross buns?

[depsidase]

[mckitterick]

[rip-quizilla]

[christianborle]

the fact that 99% of project hail mary fan art is grace hugging rocky in his little orb. or ditching the orb altogether and they hug For Real. something something it’s so human to hug. hugs are so important to us. hugs are the pinnacle of sharing love and gratitude with someone else and we want grace and rocky to share that love and gratitude with each other so badly. we want rocky to understand the gravity of what a human hug means. squishing my barbie’s together despite their opposing environments and making the human and eridian express their happiness through intertwined limbs dammit!!!!

[penandinkprincess]

3 pm: god, I'm EXHAUSTED. going to bed early for SURE.

midnight: I Have Literally Never Been More Awake And Alert