#General and Pop Culture Tags:

[freshthoughts2020]

[cctinsleybaxter]

one thing i think people miss about lake mungo is a thing people also miss about twin peaks, which is that you limit your understanding by only seeing yourself as the dead girl; sometimes you're one of the people who knew her

[3142-redgrave-avenue]

I CANT FUCKING TAKE IT ANYMORE THEY MADE HIM TIKTOK ANIME BOY BAIT. HE IS NOT A DUMB HIMBO THAT CAN’T DO MATH. HIS PERSONALITY IS NOT ALL SMOOTH TALKING FLIRTY WHITE HAIRED GUY WITH A SMIRK. IF HE LOST TO DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION HE WOULD NOT PASS OUT FROM THE SHOCK OF LOSING. HE’D PROBABLY JUST GO: “Aw man.” OR PUNCH THE MACHINE DEPENDING ON WHERE IN THE TIMELINE THAT IS.

THEY MADE HIM INTO A MARKETABLE TIKTOK ANIME BOY AND THATS HOW PEOPLE PERCEIVE HIM

[nexility-sims]

‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎my submission for "future story snippet" 🤠

out-of-order screenshots ... i just finished a new pose for renzo carrying said luggage down her treacherous, narrow, spiral staircase (something almost euphemistic-sounding about that, but i digress); i have decided i prefer to turn pose items into buy objects rather than cas accessories ?? feels simpler idk.

plus, unrevised prose ... imagine: it's 1985, your job fucking sucks, but you get to spend every evening partying on the sunset strip at its peak. after i started writing, i also realized that donna summer's absolute bop "sunset people" came out in 1979, which coincides neatly with baby renzo arriving in hollywood. you didn't even need an id to get into the clubs and hit the bars ...

thank you for the tag (& the lovely, vivid snippets you shared) @thebramblewood ♥️ i haven't the slightest as to who's been tagged yet and who hasn't, so i picked 5 random people from the top of my activity feed, lmao: @simdolviaroyals @warwickroyals @igglemouse @the-lancasters @honeyjars-sims, & anyone who hasn't done it but wants to. tag me so i can see !

[theconjurervfx]

[rustbeltjessie]

You Might Be An Xennial If...

you don't even (whatever whatever what-ever) care that you'll never recover from the recession

Empire Records was your favorite film & like, who needs a job with a decent paycheck & benefits when you can be a tattooed gum-chewing freak forever?

damn the man!

you remember dial-up modems, AOL chat rooms, web page guestbooks

you ever made mix tapes (& later made the transition to mix CDs but some long nights you long for those days spent pressing record & play.)

you grew up playing Oregon Trail & part of you can't help but think your demise will arrive like death did in that game, driving an 8bit Conestoga, telling you: you have died of cholera, you have died of dysentery.

you have died of exhaustion.

no one wants to claim you once you were a Gen-Xer but they kicked you out & you know you're not a Millenial cuz, like, you still use soap & napkins & drink beer, & go to Applebee's once or twice a year.

New Kids on the Block was your boy band & you came of age during the heyday of third-wave ska, learned to skank at summer camp after a few sweaty rounds of spin-the-bottle & from them on got sorta turned on every time you heard

pick it up! pick it up! pick it up!

you wonder at the ways of the younger generations, so many of them eschew sex & cars, but back in your day, there was no greater insult than you're a virgin who can't drive

you heard a lot of whispered innuendo when Clinton was prez, adults snickering about what happened under that table when they thought you weren't listening like you didn't know what a blowjob was? like you'd never been asked

spit or swallow?

you gave your first blowjob at twelve bestowed the back of your throat to an older boy hoping he'd splatter his coolness back onto you; twelve was the age you developed a taste for several oral fixations—cocks & tongues, joints & cigarettes

you had a lot of firsts at twelve, like, that was the year you wrote your first zine, the year you first tried suicide, yeah there were enough things making you feel so shitty you wanted to die, even when you were twelve

the year punk broke (your heart)

you were too young to see most of the cool '90s bands live, but old enough to be devastated when their lead singers killed themselves or o.d.'d—you had your first cigarette the day Kurt died, stood huddled in mourning

outside your school with all the other weirdos with their black clothes & nicotine haloes, someone passed a cigarette to you & you smoked it while a boy you knew bloodied his knuckles on the brick wall while muttering fuck you fuck you fuck you & the world was ending

Y2K was your armageddon, you were eighteen, so full of whitehot fury you wanted to see the world all burning skies & shattering glass, but nothing happened so you shot up & passed out in your boyfriend's bed

the world has been ending ever since you were born, & you spent so many years trying to end your life in both direct & oblique ways, you never thought you'd live past twenty-one, & maybe what really defines your generation

is that self-destructive impulse, cuz your heroes were suicidal rockstars & you grew up aware of chemical warfare & species extinction & your own downward mobility & your older siblings raised you on the gospel of Gen X slackerdom, so, like, whenever an adult asked what you were going to do with your lives you responded in unison

planning for the future? ugh, as if!

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from forget the fuck away from me (Bone & Ink Press, 2019)

[heliotrope-heathen]

<•> kinda WWanna fuck around and MMake a little guy of soMMe kind, play gog and give it a soul <•>

<•> let MMi knoWW WWhat y'all think ig <•>

[britneyshakespeare]

i have so much nostalgia for femme fatale era because that was probably the first time i realized i was a britney FAN whether i wanted to be one or not. it came out when i was 12, around the time i was first able to make my own music-listening choices off of whatever was marketed to solely a preteen demographic. i had only heard of britney spears as someone immensely popular yet embarrassing to like, even though i knew a ton of her biggest hits from her whole career since i was a baby and pretty much liked-to-love all of them. so when i would hear brand new songs like hold it against me and i wanna go on the radio i was like oh shit, i'm old enough to listen to big kid music on my own now, and these are amazing?

and i couldn't help but follow the rest of the singles as they came out, and go back and listen to all of her older songs (the ones i knew and the ones i didn't) on my own and be like HOLY goddamn. like my mind just exploded. it's one thing to hear all her songs in passing because they're megapopular and you are alive, but it's another thing to binge her discography for the first time and really put together that she put out dozens and dozens of the great pop songs you've ever heard, one after another, constantly, for (at that point) over a decade, my entire life! just being shocked and in awe at the evolution of such a pop goddess. i was just so fascinated and in awe. i was like no one on this earth can ever touch the career and accomplishments of the legendary miss britney spears. no one ever will.

also, criminal. such an underrated song, it wasn't even that popular at the time. i still remember the first time i heard it when the lyric video dropped and i decided from that instant on that i was going to be a terrible person.

[bishonenspit]

international eroica fans are some of the most ungrateful fans of anything i have ever encountered i stg

[freshthoughts2020]

[gods-perfect-idiots]

Okay bear with me folks, I have some ~thoughts~ about the Vanessa/Wade relationship (or frankly lack thereof) in Deadpool & Wolverine. I should start by saying that I am analyzing this with the (likely erroneous) assumption that everything on screen is 100% intentional and mindfully written to deepen the characters and inform their arcs. For the record, I don't necessarily believe that's true - there is certainly room for mistakes, lazy writing, confusing plot elements, or in this case, sidelining a potentially strong and important character for nebulous reasons (I'm guessing scheduling conflicts + run time concerns + actor's strike complications but idk for sure). (Also thanks to @gossippool and @kendyroy for encouraging me to post my thoughts instead of just rambling in the tags in the first place, y'all are the realest)

Long rambly post below the cut fyi

Now, granted, it has been a while since I watched the original Deadpool so I am not as well-versed in their early relationship as I am in the handful of scenes Morena Baccarin has in dp3, but I do think it is pretty canon that Wade generally struggles to express his deeper worries and feelings (without filtering it heavily through crude humor, sex, and pop culture references of course), especially after the events of dp1 and the physical and mental damage he sustains, and Vanessa is frankly no exception despite how much he cares for her. The entire first movie hinges on the fact that he doesn't really believe she could love him in his post-Francis mangled state, which is pretty contrived imo given that the film has established already how bonded they are, and she doesn't strike me as being written to be so shallow as to reject him based on a physical deformity. I mean iirc she wanted to stick around through chemo despite him being literally riddled with inoperable cancer, so she clearly is in it for the long haul (at least in dp1), messiness and all.

Now, in dp2, obviously she is shot and killed early in the film, and Wade spends much of the rest of the film wallowing in his very profound grief, trauma, and guilt over losing her due directly to his violent lifestyle. He goes to prison, he basically gives up on life and seems very resigned to dying once he has the power suppressant collar on, even excited to do so so he can be reunited with her. She is mostly sidelined as a Fuzzy Dead Wife trope basically, but the important thing here is that he spends weeks if not months in the throes of despair over losing the love of his life just as they were trying to start a family, and trying to reach across the boundaries of death to be with her.

Now, my first couple times watching dp3 I was frustrated by the trite narrative presented in the interview scene towards the beginning - specifically Wade's whole "my girl is getting tired of my shtick and I need to show her I matter". It felt contrived and disingenuous, and I just brushed it off as iffy writing, a means to an end, but the more I reflect upon it the more I think it is based in an emotional reality that is just handled with a very light touch by the film in favor of fanservice and Poolverine content (NOT that I'm complaining in the slightest - I think this movie is a masterpiece in many ways, albeit a flawed one but that's beside the point here), which for the record I am not against because I think it lends it an air of realism. This is Wade's story after all, Vanessa is a part of it but it is ultimately about him and his journey.

Basically, I think the combination of what happened to him in dp1 (the brain damage, the trauma, the awareness of the fourth wall, etc) followed by the events of dp2 (Vanessa's death, his grief and the associated guilt and trauma of being the direct cause of her death) led to an unbridgeable emotional gap between the two of them that ultimately leads to their breakup.

It's important to note that I don't think Vanessa has any recollection of her own death, given that Wade goes back and saves her before she can take the bullet, and so of course she can never fully fathom what Wade went through grieving her and their life together and their potential family, for however long he spent between her death and bringing her back with Cable's device. She can try (and she clearly does in the one scene I'll talk about next) but I fear she accepts, maybe even in that scene, that she can never succeed. He is beyond her reach by this point, and vice versa, his experiences having fundamentally changed him.

The one scene we really see from their relationship between dp2 and dp3 is the one where Cassandra mind-gropes Wade in the Void and we see Vanessa struggling to reach Wade across this aforementioned gap - she wants him to open up, she wants him to share what he's going through, she wants him to be the person she initially fell in love with (not even selfishly - to her nothing has changed really, because to her no time has passed). But not only does he not understand what she's really asking for but he responds in such a way that makes me think he has unprocessed issues that are only tangentially related to what she's saying - ie the stuff about mattering, about asking her if she even wants to be with him, etc. And he's not the Wade Wilson she met back in dp1 anymore. He watched her die and grieved her and brought her back, believing it would make everything go back to normal and they could resume their life together as if nothing had changed, but he has been fundamentally changed in a way that she can't grasp, even if he WAS good at externally processing his trauma openly without the artifice of wry jokes. She didn't "come back wrong" - instead, she came back exactly the same as before, but HE'S different now. Not wrong, per se. But changed.

It's an interesting scene because it's obviously a memory, and a crucial one at that, but you can see how Wade is misunderstanding what she's saying, viewing it through the prism of his own lack of self-worth and his own hopelessness - he takes away that she thinks he doesn't matter (even though like he says she didn't actually say that, but I don't think Cassandra invented that wholecloth - I think she pulled it out of his psyche because that's what he believes deep down, hence why his fixation on mattering even though she never said those words exactly), he takes away that she doesn't want to be with him, that she thinks he's nothing. Which would be frustrating as an audience member to witness as a pretty simple misunderstanding which could potentially be solved with one conversation, but it feels believable to me that these two people who have shared a great love would be fundamentally separated by unimaginable, cosmic trauma, and the on conversation they would need to have to rectify the misunderstanding is one that is impossible for Wade to verbalize and equally impossible for Vanessa to conceive of. It was one thing when they had shared trauma like violence and SA in dp1, but what Wade has gone through in dp1 and dp2, humor aside, is unfathomably traumatic, brain-breakingly so even, and that's not even factoring in the possible mental illnesses he now struggles with (I've seen folks suggest schizophrenia, DID, depression, etc. but I won't get into armchair diagnosing a fictional character here - suffice it to say he is canonically unwell as a result of what has happened to him, and yes it manifests as quirky fourth wall breaks and cheeky one-liners, but within the universe of the movies he is undeniably profoundly mentally ill, and that includes this humorous alter ego he created to cope with his trauma).

I think off-screen Vanessa probably really tried to reach him, maybe for years (the six year gap implies to me that they didn't break up immediately, that they tried for a while to stay together), trying to get her Wade back, but that Wade is gone. He struggled to express that to her until eventually he started to feel rejected because he couldn't express his trauma or how much he has changed, because even he can't fully conceive of the gulf that has formed between them. The truth is, he WANTS to be that Wade again, for her and for himself, but that Wade died when she died. Or maybe he had already started dying when Francis got a hold of him in dp1.

Anyway, all this is to say, I think Morena Baccarin WAS criminally underutilized in dp2 and dp3, but I think there is a strong argument to be made for the believability of their breakup regardless. I think even relationships built on enormous love can crumble due to trauma, and what Wade suffers over these movies is mind-bogglingly enormous trauma. It's especially heartbreaking that he blames himself for their relationship ending, talks like she just got tired of him, thought he didn't matter, whatever. But it is a credit to him that he never seems to feel anger towards her about it. He doesn't seem to feel entitled to her, though he longs for her and what they had and what she represented (hope, love, a future, a family), but ultimately she becomes more of a symbol of what he lost when he gained his powers, because let's be super fr right now - even if they had succeeded in having a baby, not only would they have lived in fear of her or the kid getting killed, but ultimately Wade would likely outlive both of them even if they managed to die natural deaths. The moment he gained his powers he was already destined to lose her, which is heartbreaking because she was the only reason he opted for the treatment in the first place - so he could stay with her.

I think a big part of Deadpool & Wolverine is watching Wade continue to process his own motivations (vis-a-vis Vanessa but also his other friends) and how he does eventually let go of the idea of "mattering" in favor of just saving the people he cares about (*cough* and being saved right back *cough* by Wolvie, as the final line and shot implies). And in the process he finds someone new who cares about him, who thinks he matters, who tries to sacrifice himself for him and his friends after mere days of knowing him, who comes home with him at the end of the story, who breaks his own centuries-old patterns, who has also experienced unimaginable grief and trauma, who has struggled with wanting to die and being unable to, who not only matches his crazy but matches his FREAK and also not only won't die on him but CAN'T die on him - and more importantly cannot be randomly killed by a stray bullet.

Idk if any of this makes much sense but I do think if you read between the lines and consider the potency of trauma and grief, guilt and emotional damage at play here, Vanessa and Wade's off-screen breakup is actually pretty realistic, and really heart-breaking to boot.

You can tell she still cares about him in so many ways - she shows up for his birthday party, she shows up to his welcome home party at the end, she finds excuses for physical contact multiple times, her eyes get soft when she looks at him, but there is a distance there that Morena Baccarin does an incredible job of portraying. She cares about him deeply, she has mourned the loss of their potential life together, she has let him go and accepted that the Wade she fell in love with is gone, but she wants him in her life even though she's moving on because she realizes he's gone somewhere she can't follow (literally and figuratively). And she wants him to be happy which is why I fully believe she would immediately clock the Poolverine of it all and not-so-subtly encourage them to make it official.

Anyway. Poolverine forever. Nothing against Vanessa at all - I think she delivers a nuanced and beautiful performance, I think their relationship is sweet and heart-wrenching in large part due to her acting chops, especially given how little she is given to work with - but I think their relationship was sadly doomed from almost the very start, because Wade becomes this traumatized superhuman and Vanessa would always be at risk in his orbit, but also would always on the outside of his multiverse superhero experiences. I think it's weirdly beautiful, even if I am filling in a lot of gaps and giving the writers maybe undue credit.

Anyway... thoughts? Please DM me or write in the tags, I am feral about this movie and just want to talk about it with anyone haha. If you have further insight into these characters too I'd love to hear it - I am by no means an expert in these movies or characters!

[kvtnisseverdeen]

once upon a time, in like 2012ish, people used to reblog straight off of their dashboards and everyone lived happily ever after :)

however, that's not the case anymore! nowadays on tumblr it seems the only way to get notes is to tag other blogs and hope that they reblog. nothing wrong with that but that's just how things are these days. or having your work show up on the "for you" section

i do encourage y'all to reblog what you see on your dash because editors put in so much effort into making gifsets/picspams/graphics etc.

nonetheless, here is a list of some blogs and their tracked tag. a MAJOR shoutout to these people who reblog and basically uplift other editors. you are all AMAZING!!!! i'll be updating this list time to time :)

film blogs:

#userdebora

#disneyfilms *disney films only

#disneyfilmsdaily *disney films only

#filmcentral

#cinematicsource

#moviegifs

#moviehub

#userfilm

#motionpicturesource

dailyworldcinema

#filmgifs

#dailyhorrorfilms *horror films only

*general tags include: #filmedit #filmgif #movieedit #moviegif #cinemaedit

tv blogs:

#tvarchive

#smallscreensource

#televisiongifs

 #usertelevision

#dailytvwomen *only ladies of tv :)

#tvcentric

#witcherladies

#kdramadaily *korean dramas only

#dailybridgerton *bridgerton only

*general tags include: #tvedit #tvgif #televesionedit #televesiongif

film & tv blogs:

#mediagifs

#dailytvfilmgifs

#filmtvdaily

#filmtvcentral

#usertvfilm

#tvfilmsource

#cinematv

#userstream 

#dailyflicks

#dailynetflix *only netflix

#onlyperioddramas *only period dramas

#userperioddrama *only period dramas

#gifshistorical *only historical shows and films

#ghiblicentral *studio ghibli only

music:

#usermusic

#dailymusicians

#dailymusicqueens *only for the music ladiessss :)

#dailyolivia  *olivia rodrigo

#oliviarodrigonetwork *olivia rodrigo

#dovesource *dove cameron

#ladygagasource *lady gaga

female edits:

#flawlessbeautyqueens

male edits:

#dailymenedit

everything and anything (tv/film/pop culture etc.)

#cinemapix

#usercreate

#userbbelcher

#chewieblog

#dailymedia

#80sdaily *80s stuff only

misc

#usergif *gifs with effects only

#otpsource *otp's only

#bitchys *mean female characters only

#paleanimation *pale colorings on animation only

#blondessource

#brunettessource

#dailygingerheads

disney

#adisgifs *gifs only

#disneyfilms

#dailydisneysource

#disneymydear

#disneynetwork

#disneyfilmsdaily

#weeklywalt

#disneyfeverdaily

#fyeahdisney

#pixarsource

#retrodisneydaily

#disneyinc

#disneygifsdaily

#disneydailly

#nolasource *the princess and the frog only

#frozensource *frozen only

#frozensnetwork *frozen only

#cinderellaedit *cinderella only

general tags include: #disneyedit #disneygifs #disneygif

marvel

#marveledit

#mcuedit

#marvelgifs

#marveladdicts

#mcufam

#dailymarvelstudios

#yeamarvel

#usereme

##marveldaily

#dailyavengers

#userelysia

[olderthannetfic]

Ancient argument, but I still just do not get how the explanation for why mainstream source material is all about men is OBVIOUSLY because Hollywood is a misogynist culture dominated by men, so OBVIOUSLY the solution to get more stories about women is to support way more women creators, but also, OBVIOUSLY the reason why fanfiction is all about men is because fandom is primarily women creators, so OBVIOUSLY the solution is ?????

--

Well, you could start by not conflating all the arguments into a silly strawman, anon.

Do I need to put in the fucking FFN vs. Wattpad vs. AO3 shipping chart?

Don't come to the gay bookstore and act surprised about what you find.

Fandom is not all about male characters. Slash fandom is, for obvious reasons. It's just that most dumbass analysis ignores how and when female characters are popular.

For example, Darcy Lewis circa 2012 got a lot of that same little black dress OOC drivel treatment that other fannish faves do, and it was great. Did I read a bunch of badfic where she had Loki's baby or whatever? I sure did! But that wasn't good enough because whiny little babies thought boring Jane was the character everyone ought to care about. It was ~offensive~ that there was more meme-y nonsense fic for Darcy/Jensen from The Losers than for [virtuous but boring ship]. How dare, how dare, etc. (Darcy/Jensen made perfect sense! The only possible objection is that it should be a threesome with Cougar!)

Tony/Pepper was an actual ship people cared about in 2012. No, it wasn't just an over-tagged side ship in m/m fic... It's just that those het writers had no reason to switch to AO3 at the time and may never have uploaded their old work.

Despite what the haters think, plenty of those het juggernauts like Dramione or Reylo are full of fics by women who really like the female lead, not just the male one. There are whole communities of people writing OFC/blorbo and supporting the other writers who do this. I used to read all the Ardeth Bay/OFC stuff back in the day. I've never been into readerfic, but there again, plenty of people are quite into a f!reader character. Haters will mischaracterize all this stuff as a nonentity plus a hot guy, but that's not necessarily the case.

Video game fandoms are awash with f!player-centric fic.

Anything where you're making up the woman has women writing women.

Mainstream Hollywood trash with poorly-written women and/or women only in the feelings babysitter role and not the hot mess/woobie/deadpan snarker/pop culture-obsessed wisecracking geek/etc. roles doesn't always generate fanfiction because fanfiction builds on what is already there. If there is no appealing lady there, that is not what the fandom will build on.

But in general, women absolutely do write fic about female characters.

The only reason I don't have a billion more examples is that I personally tend to ship m/m for a host of reasons that you can find in all of the tedious "Why slash?" meta going back to the 1970s. I don't personally particularly like self-inserting, and I especially don't like doing it as a woman.

Don't come up to my face or the faces of other AO3y types and go "You know, the world would be better if you just gendered harder!"

Go find some women who experience more gender euphoria around their assigned gender. They're often not found in slash spaces. Maybe try the Romantasy girlies.

The fact that you can't find women writing aspirational or wish fulfillment female protagonists is because you are too stupid to live, not because it doesn't happen.

[do-you-have-a-flag]

i'm just gonna call it that we need to practice mindful tech usage and security and i don't mean screentime tracking apps and vpns or whatever i mean starting from early childhood and going into adult wellbeing culture to encourage tactile hobbies and long-form work and the understanding of online devices as commodifying the user with spyware

i'm talking throwback word processors with the same ergonomics as regular smart devices for general educational work and dedicated subjects for working with digital technologies so you have theory in practice and then applying that theory in a contemporary work context. that's where you learn applications, digital safety, and how to implement the generative tools. separately. once you've already developed the critical analysis and expressive skills first.

i have been basically addicted to the internet since i was 13, i've had ups and downs with it, but i've always had a little bit of over caution when it comes to information and identity online. i overshare what i chose to but i think the break down of privacy as a norm when it comes to personal data tracking is genuinely awful.

i like algorithms in some places but i do not think this super-customisation is worth this panopticon of tech.

have you heard about how phone locations can still be triangulated when the phone is off? this is incidentally why if you are gong to protests and you think you are in danger it might be best to leave it at home. but generally if you want to avoid audio and video being used to build a marketing profile you can just switch it off and pop it in a bag or the next room. but with fb trying to make voice command smart glasses a thing (after snapchat and google both failed to sustain the same product) it bears caution that so called wearable tech such as glasses, pendants, watches, earbuds, ect.... even outside of smart cars there's the risk of passive listening for user marketing profiles. we already have location based advertising, ads that track your useage to predict your menstrual cycle or life events, public ads that react to nearby phones

i am going off on this tangent to say that i am not naïve to the fact that we already have to constantly dig into 'dark patterns' of settings to opt out of surveillance and commodification. i'm aware that the easiest path is to do nothing and use the shortcut machines even when they don't actually help or save much time or effort beyond selling you tools that already exist with a new price tag. i'm aware that the plagiarism software with no idea what it's talking about and runs on resource wasting pollution and underpaid remote human labour that also gets slapped in every function role despite basically being fancy autofil and pixel pulp not only has all of those issues but the lay person is either unaware or does not care and companies only care that it is a new way to pretend they're innovating. i know all this just like i know that mass automation is just exploitation unless it is balanced with social structures for all that mean emancipation from the need for labour.

but while i think all tech can be used for good, facilitating human connection across physical distance, carefully trained data analysis on a rapid large scale, removing the tedium of technical drudgery where needed, just providing light entertainment. but we have gotta be better about legislating, moderating, and use culture.

use culture goes hand in hand with convenience. it's why vinyl records are still trendy, not only are they good at what they do, but there is enough cool factor that the inconvenience becomes a feature. CDs are also convenient still! but CDs do not have the cool factor so they get wiped out by the convenience of streaming. playlists in streaming have a cool factor that radio does not despite radio still being convenient. and remember no matter how much streaming claims you can pay to opt out of ads that's usually something that you get payment tiered out of eventually so the convenience facilitated by accessibility is debatable the longer time passes.

looping back to my original point, if we can encourage an understanding of digital privacy as something you shouldn't be complacent about, that you shouldn't have to pay for tools to get out of the spotlight, that it is immensely embarrassing to be too into exploitation by tech companies and make that the problem of everyone around you. user control should be synonymous with convenience. customisability/personalisation through individual control rather than passive scraping. you can still commodify decorative tech.

we gotta make slop and babying algorithm brained tech usage cringe. people don't care to hear that it's immoral so just make them feel uncool at this point. because it is embarrassing that you have the universe of resources at your fingertips and you're too scared to do anything with it other than beg it to put words in your mouth. who cares if you're chronically online or too busy irl to learn a new skill. you are like a little bird pecking at it's own reflection, that's sad. try saying something mediocre and honest. we gotta stop tap dancing into technofeudalism just because we're too complacent to actually talk to each-other.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

TONIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

One thing Myspace had going for it: it was exuberantly ugly. The decision to let users with no design training loose on a highly customizable user-interface led to a proliferation of Myspace pages that vibrated with personality.

The ugliness of Myspace wasn't just exciting in a kind of outsider/folk-art way (though it was that). Myspace's ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art-directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.

In this regard, Myspace was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate in where authentic community members could be easily distinguished between parasitic commercializers.

The immediate predecessors to Myspace's ugliness-as-a-feature were the web, and desktop publishing. Between the img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs, and the million ways that you could weird a page with tables and padding, the early web was positively bursting with individual personality. The early web balanced in an equilibrium between the plunder-friendliness of "view source" and the topsy-turvy design imperatives of web-based layout, which confounded both print designers (no fixed fonts! RGB colorspaces! dithering!) and even multimedia designers who'd cut their teeth on Hypercard and CD ROMs (no fixed layout!).

Before the web came desktop publishing, the million tractor-feed ransom notes combining Broderbund Print Shop fonts, joystick-edited pixel-art, and a cohort of enthusiasts ranging from punk zinesters to community newsletter publishers. As this work proliferated on coffee-shop counters and telephone poles, it was visibly, obviously distinct from the work produced by "real" designers – that is, designers who'd been a) trained and b) paid by a corporation to employ that training.

All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate.

I started thinking about this 25 years ago, the first time I met William Gibson. I'd been assigned by the Globe and Mail to interview him for the launch of All Tomorrow's Parties:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

One of the questions I asked was about his famous aphorism, "The street finds its own use for things." Given how quickly each post-punk tendency had been absorbed by commercial culture, couldn't we say that "Madison Avenue finds its own use for the street"? His answer started me down a quarter-century of thinking and writing about this subject:

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock all represent an incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde – not just normies and squares, but also and especially enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you, and use you to sell stuff to normies and squares.

I think this is what drove a lot of people to 4chan (remember, before 4chan was famous for incubating neofascism, it was the birthplace of Anonymous): its shock culture, combined with a strong cultural norm of anonymity, made for a difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while).

All of this brings me to AI art (or AI "art"). In his essay on the "eerieness" of AI art, Henry Farrell quotes Mark Fisher's "The Weird and the Eerie":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

"Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

When we contemplate "authentic" countercultural work – ransom-note DTP, the weird old web, seizure-inducing Myspace GIFs – it is arresting because the personality of the human entity responsible for it shines through. We might be able to recognize where that person ganked their source-viewed HTML or pixel-optimized GIF, but we can also make inferences about the emotional meaning of those choices. To see that work is to connect to a mind. That mind might not necessarily belong to someone you want to be friends with or ever meet in person, but it is unmistakably another person, and you can't help but learn something about yourself from the way that their work makes you feel.

This is why corporate work is so often called "soulless." The point of corporate art is to dress the artificial person of the corporation in the stolen skins of the humans it uses as its substrate. Corporations are potentially immortal, artificial colony organisms. They maintain the pretense of personality, but they have no mind, only action that is the crescendo of an orchestra of improvised instruments played by hundreds or thousands of employees and a handful of executives who are often working directly against one another:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

The corporation is – as Charlie Stross has it – the "slow AI" that is slowly converting our planet to the long-prophesied grey goo (or, more prosaically, wildfire ashes and boiled oceans). The real thing that is signified by CEOs' professed fears of runaway AI is runaway corporations. As Ted Chiang says, the experience of being nominally in charge of a corporation that refuses to do what you tell it to is the kind of thing that will give you nightmares about autonomous AI turning on its masters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

The job of corporate designers is to find the signifiers of authenticity and dress up the corporate entity's robotic imperatives in this stolen flesh. Everything about AI is done in service to this goal: the chatbots that replace customer service reps are meant to both perfectly mimic a real, competent corporate representative while also hewing perfectly to corporate policy, without ever betraying the real human frailties that none of us can escape.

In the same way, the shillbots that pretend to be corporate superfans online are supposed to perfectly amplify the corporate message, the slow AI's conception of its own virtues, without injecting their own off-script, potentially cringey enthusiasms.

The Hollywood writers' strike was, at root, about the studio execs' dream that they could convert the "insights" of focus groups and audience research into a perfect script, without having to go through a phalanx of lippy screenwriters who insisted on explaining why they think your idea is stupid. "Hey, nerd, make me another ET, except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars" is exactly how you prompt an AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Corporate design's job is to produce the seeming of intention without any intender. The "personality" we're meant to sense when we encounter corporate design isn't the designer's, nor the art director's, nor even the CEO's. The "personality" is meant to be the slow AI's, but a corporation doesn't have a personality.

In his 2018 short story "Noon in the antilibrary," Karl Schroeder describes an "antilibrary" as an endlessly deep anaerobic lagoon of generative botshit:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/18/104097/noon-in-the-antilibrary/

The antilibrary is a generative AI system that can produce entire librarys’-worth of fake books with fake authors, fake citations by other fake experts with their own fake books and biographies and fake social media accounts, on-demand and instantly. It was speculation in 2018; it’s possible now. Creating an antilibrary is just a matter of investing in a sufficient number of graphics cards and electricity.

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/after-the-internet

Reading Karl's reflections on the antilibrary crystallized something for me that I've been thinking about for a quarter-century, since I interviewed Gibson at the Penguin offices in north Toronto. It snapped something into place that I've trying to fit since encountering Henry's thoughts on the "eeriness" of AI work and the intent without an intender.

It made me realize why I dislike AI art so much, on a deep, aesthetic level. The point of an image generator is to buffer the intention of the prompter (which might be genuinely creative and bursting with personality) in layers of automated decision-making that flense the final product of any hint of the mind that caused its creation.

The most febrile, deeply weird and authentic prompts of the most excluded outsiders produce images that feel the same as the corporate AI illustrations that project the illusion of personality from the immortal, transhuman colony organism that is the limited liability corporation.

AI art is born coopted. Even the 4chan equivalent of AI – the deeply transgressive and immoral nonconsensual pornography – feels no different from the "official" AI porn churned out by "real" pornographers. "Shrimp Jesus" and other SEO-optimized Facebook slop is so uncanny because it is simultaneously "weird" ("that which does not belong") and yet it belongs in the same aesthetic bucket of the most anodyne Corporate Memphis ephemera:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

We call it "generative" but AI art can't generate the kind of turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil. An artform that can't be transgressive is sterile, stillborn, a dead end.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Jake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970s_fanzines_(21224199545).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[rosewiltd]

rpc trends i have lived through: a compendium

this is by no means hate to trends ( "trends" in this case being something a large majority of people have participated in at some point, whether they're good or bad - not for me to judge ) bc i am a slave to the aesthetic as much as the next person. i've just been in the trenches, is all.

no promos, no formatting, no icons, no tagging system. we live in the wild west and if you can find someone to write with? godspeed.

small text and that's it for formatting. maybe a little italics for flavour. the beginnings of "omg you're so elitist for this" surfaces.

themes by manatopia ( if you were in the anime rpc ) or octomoosey ( if you favoured the rl fcs ).

simple one-word straightforward tagging system with no fancy text or symbols. ( ie. appearance, musings, closet, etc )

more complex tagging system, with symbols and quotes/lyrics using a generated font the tumblr tagging system can't actually read

one-panel simple promos with full resumes in the description ( ie. 10+ years experience, literate, etc )

2-panel simple promos

3 and 4-panel promos of varying complexity

the signerica font

text promos with icons

big, unedited gifs of varying sizes and colorings used interchangably

smaller gifs, but same as above

no icons

simple icons with simple one-line borders and whatever the fuck that checker texture was that everyone and their grandmother used

triggers? and you tag them???? wild. never heard of. we stumble blindly through content like god intended.

follower milestone/giveaways - essentially your speech at the oscars and here's a little incentive to keep following me. usually for large milestones like 100, 500, 1k, and 3k followers. if you had more than that, you had killed god.

photoshopped replies - as in, we wrote up replies into a graphic

fancy image dividers, usually something small and ornate and centered, the precursor to the dividers we use today.

container themes, with the containers getting progressively smaller. if you didn't use agirlingrey's themes, were you even an rper? quickly followed by container themes with pop-ups. look out. don't forget the floating orbs. or the little banners on the side that told you who the blog was for and the writer's name.

which reminds me, if you weren't using the spark/fire overlay on promos/graphics/etc, you were excommunicated from the rpc and sent to the dungeons.

magic anons. usually of the sexual variety. no, my muse will not be horny for 24 hours straight and they sure won't have an orgasm every time someone says their name, thank you very much. sometimes it was fun though. your muse as a neko? like, nya.

y'all i haven't even gotten past 2015 yet.... the rest is under the cut. feel free to add your own. im sure im forgetting so much.

burn blogs. enough said.

positivity blogs to counteract the burn blogs, but ultimately became a breeding ground for jealousy because the same three people were endlessly complimented. it's the thought that counts though!

memes/sentence starters, but they were made on your own rp blog and if it garnered 20k notes, there was nothing you could do to stop it. rip your activity feed. we learned. boy, did we learn.

prompt/aesthetic sideblogs.

missing e, the predecessor to xkit.

xkit. then new xkit. then xkit rewritten. missing e let us down, but we won't let this fucker die.

url trends im lumping together: latin urls, "of___", urlisms, random 'x's tacked on before and/or after the url or in place of a vowel. 'c's tacked in place of e's and o's. numbers in place of letters. changing your url just for holidays/seasons.

graphics that were either desaturated or so vibrant they were crispy

themes by eternalworks

themes by hyruleshop, isaworks, or other major creators.

the rise of callouts, for better or worse

the rise of purity culture, for better or worse

receipt/callout blogs

purple prose

extra af formatting ( no hate ), coloured text, spacing, etc.

elaborate graphics.

mains. affiliates. people you should be following. the successor of 'follow friday' and milestone 'thank you' announcements.

dni lists, for better or worse.

multimuse blogs

rp sideblogs

the current trend of ripping a canon from their og universe and re-writing them as an oc bc shut up that's why

probably a whole heck of a lot more i cannot remember. i've blocked out the trauma.