Show & Tell
No title available
Xuebing Du
$LAYYYTER
Keni
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
ellievsbear
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Cosmic Funnies
Jules of Nature
No title available
No title available
Cosimo Galluzzi
shark vs the universe
Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tannertan36
RMH
Claire Keane
we're not kids anymore.
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from Colombia
seen from Liechtenstein
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Malaysia
@realtrashwriting
Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.
Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.
Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭
reblog to instantly disintegrate some of your peers to dust
Local man chooses to stand by principles, much to his chagrin.
Is one of my favorite character types. Yes, he is going to be idealistic, and righteous, and virtuous and it's going to make things so much harder for him and he knows this dang well and he hates it.
Chile… Yes.
Btw when people say "if you want to be a writer you need to read a lot of books" that means bad books too. This applies to all creative mediums and also even if you don't want to make it you should immerse yourself in some mediocre slop here and there and even abysmal dogshit on occasion. As a fan of the medium. If all you eat is perfect A5 wagyu prepared by a Michelen star chef youre gonna end up thinking a well cooked and seasoned grocery store ribeye is basically dog food and this is the path to spiritual rot
Betrayed and backstabbed by your scheming evil advisor? Psch. Skill issue. Absolute amateur problem. Just hire two of them and reward them for snitching on each other. Just make sure that neither of them is gay or they'll just end up hate-fucking each other and fucking you over all the same.
"hire two evil advisors but make sure neither of them is gay" are you hearing yourself right now. be serious
Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction
Reblog to give prev the TIME to write their fanfiction
Comment on prev's fic to give prev ENCOURAGEMENT to write their fanfiction
Honestly I can tell you finding out art was made by AI really does immediately, legitimately sour it for me, like people will trot this out as a Gotcha for anti-AI people but it's just making it clear they don't consider art to be the conversation that it is lol. It's similar to the way Harry Potter immediately soured for me because engaging with it while knowing the kind of heart Rowling is writing from changes the way the work feels; there isn't any moralizing or whatever that I have to do, it's easy to drop it because it's rotted in my hands.
"Oh but you LIKED this song before, nothing changed!" The conversational partner did. A very large portion of what is interesting to me about art is thinking of why the creator chose that instrumentation, or what made them want to make the thing in the first place. Finding out I've been talking to a wall completely removes an entire third of the force that art is to me, and I can't argue that anything about art or its consumption is Objectively Correct but I can argue it's fucking boring lmao
100%
In 2003, James Frey published a book titled Million Little Pieces that was ostensibly about his personal history with substance abuse. It was a critical darling that received frequent plaudits and a great deal of commercial success.
In 2006 it was revealed that the book was actually a work of fiction and that Frey had not experienced the struggles he claimed in the text. The house of cards immediately collapsed as audiences and critics realized the deception. Overnight Frey's cultural cache vanished and with it, his novel.
There were, as with AI today, people defending Frey after the truth emerged. They argued that the content was the same and even when known as a work of fiction, the prose hadn't changed. But the broader culture felt the shift. Their relationship to the work was not the same as before. This was not connecting with a real person's loved experience. This was a lie. Regardless of where one fell on the acceptability of Frey's misrepresentation, his book is now largely forgotten from our culture.
AI is the same. The people hawking them are pretending as if it's the same as a real person's experience and artistry, but it isn't. It's shapes in the clouds. It's offloading the entire artistic experience onto the audience and asking them to pay you for the privilege. There is no artist who you're understanding and sharing a moment of human connection. It's just lines on a page.
They should block chatgpt on uni WiFi the way they used to block coolmathgames
they should make chatgpt automatically redirect to coolmathgames so you can actually fucking learn something
The most human thing a character can do is contradict themselves.
The cynic who still carries a childhood stuffed animal.
The liar who craves honesty.
The overthinker who makes reckless decisions.
The heartbreaker who believes in soulmates.
The pacifist who holds lifelong grudges.
The tough guy who cries during old movies.
The thrill-seeker who's terrified of commitment.
The grump who’s unfailingly polite to waitstaff.
People aren’t consistent. Your characters shouldn’t be either.
Honestly, y'all, I'm begging you. Take the time to think and learn for yourself. Even if it's just something casual like knitting or cooking. Exercise your brain. It's important.
if you’re not into some dumb embarrassing shit you’re not living your truth
always abide by the golden rule of fandom. talk shit in private and ignore things you dont like in public.
and the silver rule of fandom. if you wouldn’t put it on YOUR blog, someone probably doesn’t want it sent as an anonymous message on theirs!
kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it
Steven Universe is interesting to me because it’s got the most extreme dichotomy between ideas that would be better fleshed out in a show for adults, and ideas that are interesting specifically because they’re native to an unironic children’s show.
Can you elaborate on this? It seems interesting.
Sure. This is gonna be a long one.
Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:
First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:
The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags.
The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.
The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.
The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.
However.
Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.
Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.
Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.
Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.
Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.
And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity. And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.
Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff.
(Indeed, I feel like it was a very pointed choice to have this whole OC-friendly gem-with-weapons-and-powers character-design schema and then have huge chunks of the show where the fighting and custom weapons and monster hunting weren’t relevant to what was going on, they lure you in with the promise of a RWBY-style monster-fighting show and then do mostly slice of life. Very funny trick.)
I'm not even frustrated with AI art anymore I'm just sad. I feel like this is just. A symptom of a much larger issue. Things just poof into existence for our consumption, and we don't really care about the details. Everything is about instant gratification and convenience. Everything is taken for granted. I don't like it. 😭
My latest Guardian Books Cartoon
