god i finally revived this tumblr. everyone please ignore all my old posts theyre from like 2021... i forgot tumblr had the weird primary and secondary account thing so ill be following people from here <3
*putting my hand in the cavernous space between what you are and what you pretend to be, and wiggling it around* woah haha is there meant to be that much emptiness here? lol are you like okay bestie? omg this kind of tickles my hand does this tickle your nothing? #yournothing <3
Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.
No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.
We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.
Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.
And they especially are not scabs.
*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.
Guys do u know that one meme where there's a girl and like a bodyguard (???) ordering drinks and the waiter give them the wrong drinks so they switch them on the last panel,???????? BECAUSE I C1NT FING IT^
[ID: two paintings of an astronaut in space. in the first, they float in blackness and reach a hand out to where bright colors and white streaks vividly converge at a horizontal line splitting the image in half. in the second, they float backwards into black surrounded by broken shards from the upper half of the painting, which is dully glittering, shattered, and emitting light from the cracks and the hole the astronaut seems to have emerged from.]
the kicker is he was being asked if his work was coming from the approach of man vs. nature aka “THE ENVIRONMENT STRIKES BACK” but no. his literal words were along the lines of “sharks are not very scary if you are never in the water so i had to make them scarier, and now they have legs.”
One of his strangest stories is about a cursed type of honey that, when ingested, is guaranteed to be the best thing you’ve ever tasted. But, if you consume it, you have a 25% of being flattened like a pancake by a giant tree demon. Characters eat it, get addicted, and that addiction forces them to risk it over and over again until they eventually get turned into a gory puddle by this ghost tree thing.
It’s a weird story, but the funny part is that Ito wrote it because he thought it would suck to be a mosquito.
Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:
Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.
We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]
But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
- Rachel Carson (1952)
no one can write truthfully about evolution and leave out the poetry, etc.
people will use “animal impulses” to describe mankinds pension for committing acts of violence unto the other but why. my animal impulse is to eat a lot of warm food and sleep whenever there is a storm, or i have had a particularly bad day, and also for the majority of the winter season. also to roll in grass
i'm thinking so hard about the dhmis trio's characterizations and how interesting i find all of them. let's start by framing this discussion with a quote from this interview
i want to talk about them in terms of their surface levels and their hidden depths. you can see the roles that they're supposed to play on the in-universe "show world", but then you dig deeper and you find something more real.
...
yellow? plays the role of the innocently stupid one who's always the butt of the joke and can't see that his friends are jerks.
but we find out that he's the one with the most awareness of their situation and that his knowledge was literally taken from him. and he knows full well that his friends are jerks! throughout the show that is made clear. and even after he's functioning at full power and he admits that he thinks his friends are trying to control him, he still loves them enough to bring the book back to them so that they can all escape. he's shown to be genuinely kind, not just unwittingly innocent. and even when he's at low power he displays some memory of their situation, but he just can't express it.
red? plays the role of the chill and laid-back one who's always handy with a sarcastic comment and doesn't care very much.
but we find that he cares quite a bit about many things. he seems to have a rather sensitive heart, is prone to existential dread, and is distressed by the nonsense of their world. he wants so strongly; he wants something better, something more gentle and more sincere and more real than all this. he wants to feel comfortable somewhere but can't quite find that in either this life or any other. he's curious and imaginative but repressing it due to arbitrary standards, whether it's by the show world's rules or social rules (original 6's "real world" and new 3's illusion of a family).
duck? plays the role of the the high-strung, fussy one with an overinflated ego, dramatic emotions, and a sharp tongue.
but we see that, even if he can be cruel, he finds comfort in being with his friends and loves their daily life together. he sees them as a family! he can't just be by himself, and he genuinely doesn't want them to be separated. and pedantic as he is, he seems blind to the inconsistent nature of their reality. it's only when the status quo of their daily life is disrupted that he really freaks out, like when yellow goes off-script in 6 or when red disappears in the original series' 5. but this also makes him grounded in who he is; he just does not assimilate into new roles as well as the other two, and as dramatic as he is, he's often the most stable.
...
and it's their inner traits that lead to their downfalls, when they do occur. yellow's love leads him to go back downstairs and lose his memory over and over and over again. red's curiosity for more strands him outside of his world with no way back in besides intervention from a higher level, in both the original and new series. duck's stability makes him unable to deal with some lessons and thus liable to be violently removed or changed (perhaps this is why he seems to be so often replaced?), in both the original and new series.
and they all have their deeper personalities masked by the roles they must play in this tv-show-world. yellow's is most easy to see, because he is literally forced to lose all memory and return to his role as lovable idiot, but the abrupt shift in demeanor that red and duck experienced in 6 when a ray of stage light came back into the dark is also notable, as was red's sudden reset from desperate in 5 to apathetic in 6, right after the group came too close to knowing what was going on.
and on a level wider than the individual characters... you can see it with the undercutting of any almost-sincere moments by gags. you can see it in how full of holes their memories are. there are moments where their selves beneath the roles shine through anyway, but the status quo is always god. nobody can grow or change or be anything other than what they are supposed to be. and that's the tragedy of it
the whole 'internet prophecy apollo' thing is interesting in that like. 20 or so years ago it might have been good scifi. the idea that the net would grow so large, and have such a surge of information going through it at any one time, that it would occasionally predict future events with stunning precision. monkeys on typewriters, but realised through humans on keyboards. it's at the same time terrifying and mundane - which is, I guess, emblematic.
I have had a really full and busy day today, but the highlight was:
So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.
"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."
"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."
And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...
Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"
"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"
"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.
We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.
Guess who I saw again today! I say 'saw', he hunted me down to invite me to train on using his microscopes - it turned out some of the engineers asked if they could look at explosive substances with it and he was like NO YOU MAY NOT IT'S POWERED BY A LASER so now he's insisting that everyone train on it, but wanted to ask me if I'd like to do it. Obviously I have said yes. He's getting an SEN as well so he's put my name down for that, too.
And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE
Why did the chemical cupboard have three and a half kilos of trinitrotolulene (the full name for TNT, for those unaware), and was it at the very least an explosives cupboard?
It was not in an explosives cupboard, and he didn't know. Basically this was in an HE building being converted over to a young offenders institute, and for whatever reason, all the science teachers quit en masse as the switch was happening, leaving all their students in the lurch. So one morning he came into work, was told he was being promoted to Technical Demonstrator, given a Bunch of Mysterious Keys, and told he had three hours to familiarise himself with the contents of the chemical cupboard.
"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"
"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.
So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.
"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."
But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.
The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.
It had crystallised.
("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")
The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.
The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.
"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.
"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."
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