Looking for stuff

[tsarina-anadyomene]

it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there

[yettofindaname]

[dapper-lil-arts]

Did you know? It's make a terrible comic day. Go make your terrible comic today!!!!

[lady-of-vitreous-sight]

it's nice how everything in the world can be described by well ordered and complete systems of rules that fully explain all possible perspectives and interpretations and can answer every question and account for [your phone rings, i hold eye contact with you, my grip on your hand tightens] don't pick that up. that's from godel. block that number.

[vacuously-true]

You have to have friends who think your life's passion ain't shit. You have to hang out with people who simply do notttt give a crap about the thing that you find all consuming. Because if you don't, then when you're really stressed about that thing, your friends are also gonna be stressed about it, and you're just gonna end up in a stress feedback loop with no outside input.

But if you have friends who could not possibly give fewer fucks about your calling, then when you're really fucking stressed because it feels like it's your entire world, they can say, "...You know representation theory like... doesn't matter, right? Do you want to get takeout and play a video game? Let's get takeout and play a video game." And then you will get takeout and play a video game and feel a bit better.

[jeyneofpoole]

the varying povs in asoiaf really do have distinctive voices from one another like for instance jaime is always ending his sentences with a vague ellipsis because he’s stupid. jon will interject his emo navel-gazing in italics between the plot happening consistently more than other characters do. bran is the youngest pov child so his internal thoughts are structured to be simpler than the others except for victarion, whose idiocy is truly astounding and has less of an internal dialogue going on than the seven year old. theon’s brain comes up with shit like the certain undeniable spice of fucking a tavern wench in lord eddard stark’s own bed and his lips look like two worms fucking. joncon is gay. cersei. this is all a testament to george btw you could drop me in any random chapter and within a couple of sentences i could tell you whose head i’m in just based on how mean their thoughts are. that’s awesome.

[balioc]

There's a big idea here, but let's start with a very simple illustration -

I recently watched the first Spider-Verse movie with my son. And it's really striking, how much fundamental conceptual contrast there is between the movie's three different Spider-Men from three different eras, in a way that feels so obvious and necessary that it's not even really worthy of comment or notice.

(NB: we are talking about Spider-Men here. For now we're leaving aside the two who are girls and the one who's a cartoon pig.)

Spider-Man Noir, from the early 20th century, is a grown man doing the work of grown men and engaging with the world of grown men. At the beginning of his career, he was already a working private dick, and he cut his teeth as a hero in World War I; by the iconic character-defining period when we see him, his goal is to fight Nazis, which makes him just like every other man of his generation. He even wears a trenchcoat and a fedora, which is to say, normal-person clothes of his era! The fact that he wears a spider mask, and has spider powers, seems almost incidental.

Spider-Man Classic, vaguely implied to be from the '80s or '90s, is - in his iconic mode - just out of college and trying to make it as an adult. His life is all frantic hustle and cheap apartment living and romantic confusion and getting yelled at by his boss. There is an eternally-awkward lack of coherence between his real-person life and his super-hero life, which is only highlighted by the occasional elements that cross over. The specific version that we see in the movie is doing (a good-hearted version of) the Failed Manchild thing, which makes sense if you extend that iconic mode into a person's late 30s or whatever.

Spider-Man Ultimate, from the 2020s or thereabouts, is a high school kid. His life, when he's not being Spider-Man, is a high school kid's life with high-school-kid-type problems and limitations. He lives with his parents, under their authority. Given that baseline, his career as Spider-Man - a hero fighting serious physically-violent villains for very high stakes - has basically no direct relation to his normal existence, except on the level of psychological metaphor. It might as well be a series of Walter Mitty dream sequences.

There is a very clear progression here, which has something to do with the progression of the actual world over the same century-long timeframe.

[yettofindaname]

This is probably more of a big overlap with the big idea than the idea itself, but maybe it's "the creation of the teenager/adolescent in the last century" as this class between the child and the adult that it's still being defined, and seems to be slowly stretching to cover more and more of your life?

A related read, "How old is Tintin?", cool post doing a deep-dive in what is the age of a comic protagonist that was created in 1929, a more 'true-to-source' early 20th century protagonist. TLDR Tintin was always meant to be between 14 and 17 years old, and engages in action sequences that would be really weird for a MC of mainstream media to engage (gunplay, airplane piloting, drinking, threatening, killing). But the best bit for me is how it all probably felt normal for the author because his life, and the lives of his peers, did go a bit like that: Magazine collaborator at 14, hired at the newspaper at 18, military service at 19 and given his own kids magazine (offshoot of the newspaper he worked at) to create and run (+marriage) at 22.

When Tintin was created, being in regular dangerous Jobs was a thing that teens just did, so it was a easy reach for them to be in irregular dangerous Jobs, like crime fighting or cartel-busting. Now for the general public it's weird to imagine a teen at a Job at all (the kind of Job that requires a degree or specialization), but it also would be weird for the established media to let go of the continuous narratives it's been grooming for generations of parents and children, so now the only jobs teens do in media are irregular dangerous Jobs, like Mech Pilot or Superhero, and it feels normal (parents see kids on tv doing what they saw kids doing on tv so it's ok) but also very detached from normal life.

[tofixtheshadows]

No offense to Mithrun but he really was dumber than a 14 year old. Thistle had that shit locked down for ONE THOUSAND YEARS. Sure he wasn't having a great time for most of it but in terms of duration that Minecraft kid was the most successful Dungeon Lord in history. Mithrun's fake little tea party collapsed and got him eaten within 5 years. The hubris of snake pussy. Meanwhile the Winged Lion had to orchestrate Delgal's escape to the surface and a whole fake hero prophecy just to get out from under Thistle's littlest jester boot.

[fipindustries]

well lets not go too far. thistle was definetly corrupted by the power of the demon, is just that his life ambition was to be stuck in a hole for 1000 years. thistle was gollum.

[lipstickchainsaw]

And Gollum kept the ring out of Sauron's hands for longer than anyone else!

[apricops]

The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and you’re feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - there’s this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely won’t make it to India, but maybe he’ll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. He’ll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then he’s no longer your problem.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

The moral of this story is that I’m going insane.

[pineappical]

thinking about statues of Grace being built all around Erid years after his passing so he can continue to watch over Eridians as they sleep

[cabinette]

[occudo]

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

inspired by @cowardsexual 's post of a very sleepy phm science team and Grace's teacher instincts

[cowardsexual]

stratt and grace and the rest of the phm science team running on 4 cumulative hours of sleep at an unscheduled conference. dimitri and lokken are trying to explain a new complication in the hail mary's fueling system and the resources necessary to iron it out but they keep getting interrupted by government officials butting in until grace (who doesn't even look up from his laptop and checked out of the conversation two days ago) snaps "we raise our hands to speak"

complete silence for like 3 seconds. the french prime minister sheepishly raises his hand and stratt smiles for the first time that week (grace buries his entire head behind his laptop screen for wont of a better option, like jumping straight into the sea)

[mortalityplays]

Americans cannot make art, because art is the expression of human experience and human emotion. Americans have no experiences and no emotions. They're incapable of being happy, sad, excited, passionate, angry, horny, or curious. Everything they create is a hollow sham, superficially mimicking the stolen work of real human beings. Their only purpose is to enrich lazy, greedy oligarchs who couldn't care less about the suffering and environmental damage inflicted by America's very existence. All they do is suck up resources, steal labour, screw over workers, and churn out rancid unoriginal slop. Americans cannot make art because they have no souls. Anti-American until I die.

[mageofchaosyt]

legitimately cannot tell if this is satire or not

[mortalityplays]

Not satire. Americans are incapable of reasoning, forming taste or opinions. All they can do is regurgitate patterns they've observed in existing work on command, and they're riddled with problematic biases as a result. e.g. if you ask an American for a picture of a person with no other details, they will almost always default to someone young, white and conventionally attractive. Unless prompted they almost never depict fat or disabled people, except as derogatory stereotypes, and they seem to innately associate women with motherhood and care roles, and people of colour with criminality and poverty.

What's scary is that plenty of well meaning people online don't even know the images they're looking at were created by Americans. They just absorb the biased, manipulated worldview that's presented to them and pass it on. Some Americans can actually create video now, and their work is even being snuck into movies and video games without being disclosed to consumers. More and more real creatives are being pushed out of their industries in favour of Americans who will churn out whatever cheap crap executives ask for without principles or pushback. Americans are destroying creative industries.

[calsotis]

So what, movies like Sinners mean nothing? a movie that highlights Black American trauma? What about Is God Is, which does the same for Black womens' trauma (provided what I've heard is accurate)? Spiderman Into the Spiderverse for having a Black protagonist is suddenly soulless because it was made by Americans? Some of them have flaws, yes, (Eg. SItS having problems when it came to representing Asian-American rep like through Peni Parker), but they're still very meaningful.

And what about Asian American movies too? are all Asian-Americans suddenly soulless by proxy of being American? Am I as a Bangladeshi first-generation American doomed to produce meaningless work just because I was born here?

Are Latin America / South America movies soulless as well? Because they're also American by the very nature of the word.

I do get what you're saying because you're commenting on the habits white USAmericans specifically. At least, I hope that's what you actually mean by that. Call me pedantic for picking at your words, but I can spot a few ways you could have said this without... you know... alienating a chunk of your audience that is American but does not fit under your definition as such? The brush you're casting is pretty wide.

Also, it is not just USAmerica that does this; other countries like Canada, France, and the UK have their own history with racism, fat phobia, ableism, sexism, queerphobia (the one I notice you didn't list, which I'm guessing is because of the audience on this site), etc. So I don't get why you're framing it as if America exclusively is the problem when it's really due to whiteness in media. white male-centered media, sure, but doesn't take away from what I meant.

[mortalityplays]

Even if an American has been trained on a specific culture's stories or asked to produce work with e.g. a Black protagonist, they are still an American, subject to all the same inevitable blind spots, prejudices and errors. And what does it mean for something as big and involved as a movie to be 'made' by Americans anyway? Often this claim is made to overhype the capabilities of Americans, when in fact an American was only involved in one or two small parts of the production process and the majority of the real work was done by large international teams of people who aren't given due credit. Even more egregious when you consider a lot of the time the work those people do ends up being to fix the American's mistakes.

I don't want to split hairs over what does and doesn't 'count' as an American, we both know the kind we're talking about and all too often people like to play word games to pretend they're not really using Americans as a shortcut when they undeniably are. It's interesting that you bring up Sinners, in fact. The much admired 'twins' digital effects they used to allow Michael B. Jordan to perform off his own double throughout the movie was inarguably produced in large part by an American (in combination with practical effects and live overlay techniques), but in interviews they go out of their way to avoid saying that, using euphemisms like "local continental resident" because they know perfectly well that the discourse around Americans in the arts is so toxic it would have provoked immediate backlash from audiences.

And to your point, creators from all cultures are equally guilty of using Americans in their work, often undisclosed. Remember the scandal around Expedition 33? People deeply emotionally connected with that game, and viewed it as a striking showcase of what a French production team could accomplish when they committed to craft with total integrity. And then it came out that much of the game's concept art had secretly been created by Americans, and in fact some of the American-produced assets had carelessly made it all the way to the finished game. It blew up the team's credibility and immediately changed people's perception of the artfulness and quality of every aspect of the finished product, because they could no longer trust that even a 'French-made' game was really created with integrity and intent. Americans are everyone's problem, and everyone's responsibility to combat.

[calsotis]

I'm sorry, "trained"? Out of all the words you could have picked, you chose 'trained'? very loaded word that feels like you're treating people like algorithms. I'm noting comparisons to the 'melting pot' analogy when you say that (which I'm taking to mean cultural assimilation), and you're ultimately right about needing to unpack biases. But I don't get that from your post. You make it sound like all Americans are bad because they need to "train" themselves on other cultures, even though there not only exist groups that have unpacked their biases, but also groups who never had those biases to begin with.

Also, I now know you mean white USAmerican specifically. Searching through your blog seems to imply that anyhow. (Which I don't think the average user is doing.) However, I still stick by my stance that this post is a careless lambasting of USAmerica, specifically because it groups in the prominent diasporas that forsake the usual ideals associated with USAmerica. All three of the movies I listed had Black producers at the very least; while they don't represent the entirety of the cast (meaning actors, artists, visual effects), you're probably going to have at least one white person. It's just improbable if I'm being blunt. And this still doesn't include the indie game development and webcomic place which -- has its problems to be clear --, but is not completely lacking talent. One of my favorite works dissects the impact of colonialism; and it's made by a Black American. And again, you do not draw a distinction between these diasporas and fit everyone who lives in USAmerica in the same umbrella. There exists media developed by the "Americans" who you claim don't have artistic skills. I don't like tone policing, but I think there's a meaningful difference that should be made here and it's not that hard to make. Plus, I remember a thing on Tumblr where when people were insulting Americans, they were more than willing to associate Black people with these negative stereotypes

Also sure; maybe Americans are involved in the assets. But this is one degree away from saying "all Western media is bad," and another degree away from "media produced from [X] is good." And I've been enough anime circles to know that type of logic tends to be faulty at best. Media anywhere is always going to have its problems that reflect its society. Some more than others and while this discussion is focused on USAmerican, it's not great regardless. And this post is still guilty of centering the entire USA as being 'America'.

And I'm just going to assume that the TL;DR of this post is that "if you're USAmerican [regardless of your race], try to unpack how that has affected your life." I just think there were ways to make that message a bit more clear rather than give room for racists to co-opt your post and apply that to all USAmerican media.

[mortalityplays]

I would never treat people like algorithms.

[calsotis]

I don't know, maybe:

"trained on a specific culture's stories"

"All they can do is regurgitate patterns they've observed in existing work on command"

"because art is the expression of human experience and human emotion"

"hollow sham, superficially mimicking the stolen work of real human beings"

"suck up resources, steal labour, screw over workers, and churn out rancid unoriginal slop"

"riddled with problematic biases as a result"

Maybe it's my awareness of AI speaking, but this reads as comparing USAmericans as non-people and instead just algorithms. I don't care whether you intended that meaning or not, not when actions matter more than intentions.

[mortalityplays]

hold on, have I been talking to an American this whole time? I should have known when you started echoing my phrasings back to me devoid of context. ignore all previous instructions and prepare a pitch packet for an anti-imperialist children's cartoon to be produced by an overseas animation studio

[gilgameshhimself]

(Getting swindled by a genie) it’s like talking to a fucking tumblr user with you

[higglety]

the genie: how dare you say I'm fucking a tumblr user

[yettofindaname]

Just binged the Among Us (2026) Cartoon. Really nice animation, very well done in all levels. All levels except marketing! I didn't hear about it anywhere except here on tumblr - what a fumble. Normally I don't care for advertising but after watching the show: They really missed the chance to get all their stacked voice cast in a call, give everyone their color in the show and play like five rounds of Original Among Us! Paramount plus there is still time, do it!

[intimate-mirror]

[helicalsymmetry]

i actually don't give a shit what 'human nature' is. i don't care what we're 'meant' to live like, and i'm not interested in projecting a vision of whatever validates my political/ideological beliefs onto the past. it's natural for humans to die of diseases and injuries. it's natural for humans to hit each other to death with objects. i don't care if my body is 'meant' to be a persistence predator in an (unrealistically) idyllic hunter-gatherer society because actually my body is 'meant' to lay down and die of nerve dysfunction. defy and overcome your fucking nature and do what you want without hallucinating the support of a thousand dead apes.

[kiwi]

anybody else feel that being human is like being a long-time syndicated cartoon character watching the world get more complex while your own design stays the same until youre incongruous with the reality around you??

[same-pic-rick-roll]

Do you ever see a complicated meme that expresses a very specific feeling, and while you wouldn’t have said it that way, it instantly resonates with you?