#source: myspace

[tayfabe75]

Hi :-) I'm 18-- and a half. I'm the girl who is best friends with a guitar and writes songs about everything and everyone that happens to me. Names included. ;-) Class of 2008. In my spare time, I like to conduct random baking experiments in my kitchen and write letters to people. I really love people who like my music. They're number 1 on my favorite things list. I'm not a big deal. At all. I love people who are nice to me, I've never been one to say things like "All you people think you know me, well you don't". Because I'm not that complicated. My complications come out in my songs. All you need to do to be my friend is like me. My middle name is Alison. And I'm extremely tall. Like, I'm that really tall person that is blocking your view at a concert. On behalf of all of us, we're sorry. My ideal outfit is a sun dress and cowboy boots. I love surprises and hardwood floors. I like people who are excitable. I think it's endearing when people cry when they're happy. I'm pretty excitable too. I've never been the kind of girl who needs a boyfriend. Plus, guys don't ask me out because they know I'll write songs about them. But I'm also the girl who still believes prince charming exists somewhere out there-- fully equipped with great hair and an immature sense of humor. I wear too many bracelets and I can't concentrate on the conversation if the TV's on. I grew up on a Christmas tree farm. Seriously. I'm fascinated by black and white pictures, I have them hung up everywhere. I like people who can be sarcastic and laugh about tense situations. I never assume someone's not being honest with me. I like to read up on weird medical problems, so if one of my friends ever complains of a headache or stomach ache, I'm probably going to spout off 12 different things that could be wrong with them. Because I'm way paranoid. I think Keri Russell and Ellen DeGeneres are the coolest celebrities ever. I don't like making decisions when I don't have to. So right now my toenails are painted 5 different colors. I will never straighten my hair to impress a guy ever again. There's never going to be a time when I'm annoyed by compliments about my music. I need everything to be organized. All the time. I think little kids are awesome. I'm a thinker and an over-analyzer. I'm not jaded. I'm a fan of fans. You are absolutely wonderful to me. I've got your back, just like you've had mine. To anyone who has gone out and bought my CD, or come to a show, or even turned my song up when it came on the radio, all I can say is thank you. Oh yeah.. My name's Taylor.

July 26, 2008: Snapshot of Taylor Swift's archived Myspace profile, highlighting what she looks for in a partner. (source 1, 2)

[aquatic-wasteland]

Cool Clothing 🖤☠️🖤

[artdcnaldson]

Good morning

[projectdivaar]

js found out this band i like that disbanded in like 2009 and i know abosoulety nthn abt bc theres like. no info abt them online has a wholeass ALBUMMM that i didnt kno abt?? that i found on their defunct myspace page??? dude

[rockweiler-again]

Asking Alexandria, 01/27/09.

[delightfullyatomicfest]

https://x.com/mccartneyproj/status/1752632662982823990?s=46&t=FH5Qe-o0k4TlgkbUWmMx1w

[fivestoriesfallingg]

genuinely do you think it would be possible to source the gabilliam kiss pic

iiiiii do not know it definitely was not taken during a concert which makes it like. immediately a thousand times harder to source and also it’s been reposted by everyone and their mom everywhere so. it would be difficult i feel . but im a glutton for punishment so i will genuinely add it to the list i will try my best lmao

[mx-time-bunny]

Source: Pinterest

[thornsnvultures]

I hate updating masterlists. I'd make a separate page and link it on my desktop page but I feel like most people use the app, especially for reading fics (and you wouldn't be able to see links on the app anyway because tumblr hates them and likes to break mine)

[angelskysposts]

Everybody has a chance to change for the good or for the worse.....but it's up to you where you want your path to be .

It's all about choices that you make 🌹

[liluglydudefromdetroit]

On the flip side of this Twitter limit bullshit, I'm only there for titty Tuesday and gambling tips so I don't think I've ever hit 600 tweets in a day🤣.

But no, this is actually good! It's not like there are no other mediums to go to if you need to be on your phone, but it might help people break that endless scroll thing we're hooked on. I deleted TikTok and surprisingly didn't miss it after a couple days. Out of sight out of mind. Facebook too, after the constant censoring over AAVE and lack of understanding for how black people talk to each other I let that app go too. Tumblr is the only place that loves us because it really dgaf about us😅

[tayfabe75]

December 23, 2008: Snapshot of Drive Like I Do's archived Myspace page. (source)

[xx-k1tsun3-k1d-xx]

!! DO NOT SIGN UP FOR NOSPACE/NEW MYSPACE APP !!

okay so I did some digging into that MySpace app called nospace and turns out it’s acctually just some new social media set up by crypto/nft ppl hoping to get more people into thier bullshit by specifically marketing to gen z >__> so whilst they’re *probably* not going to like directly steal ur card info or smthn they’re still trying to drag ppl into tech bro pyramid schemes so I’d absolutely stay away

sources:

[xenosagaepisodeone]

I don't want to harp on about the ai art thing but it's absolutely deranged how calcified the kneejerk and regressive critique of the 'nature' of ai art has become just because its what the worst people with 0 class consciousness who work for nintendo and blizzard spew while the actual issues with how ai art is employed in actual work settings are a side note (unless its pretending that the technology is Literally Alive and not a tool being used by your bosses and managers...who are the Actual issue here). there is someone with a piece of rei ayanami fan art that has been edited so she has darker skin trying to wax about not promoting stolen work in my notes. people doing back and forth about permission while their blogs are literally filled with art book scans, club/rave/concert photos of strangers skimmed from probably myspace/deviantart/photobucket, stim/mood boards full of uncredited images and clipped videos, transparent .pngs with no source, cropped/edited manga panels (smaller publishers sometimes outright discourage this lol but you'd never know since youre reading it illegally to begin with), fanart of fan fiction (bro thats twice the derivative) littering their blogs. someone straight up saying that feeling inspired to draw because of a piece of ai generated artwork is bad because your connection to the source is "severed" like making art is inherently some religious activity. I tend to think of a lot of ai art as slop that bloats search results but the overton window has been skewed so painfully in some bizarrely un-self aware direction that the neutral option is reminding people how they literally interact with the internet.

[clownfettis]

Happy late birthday spm, this is my love letter to this damn game asdhdjgk

Screenshots from here and source here

Notes and easter eggs list below

Mario and Luigi's usernames are the only one that use _

Timpani and Blumiere are the only username that use -

Luvbi's name is "The Pure of Heart" in elizabeth English

For Jaydes, Asphodel Meadows is one of the greek mythology afterlife, specifically the one the underwhere is based on

Merlon's numbers are because there's canonicaly multiple Merlon, so they're seperating each others' accounts with numbers. The number are spm's release date

Tiptron was brave enough to publicly take the username "Tippi" because it's not like Timpani"s gonna use it again. So she pretty much went "it's free real estate"

Peach is keeping her names serious due to her status. Bowser does not care lmao

Blumiere's mouth and eye are blue like how when he was defeated, rather than when he was hateful and corrupted

Timpani's hair band mimics butterfly antennas, her colours are from me putting a sepia filter on her pixl form

Mimi is wearing her post game outfit. The form she shape-shifted into is also important and related to her backstory, though I'm not sharing that just yet : 3c

Nassy's design is based on Swoops, which is what i hc she was before she ate Bleck's dreams, and transformed into a Swoop/Human/Tribe of darkness mix from Bleck's dreams of Timpani, in the hope on getting him to love her if she looked more similar to them. Her eye colour is from the square effect when she uses her mind control power. She's not wearing her glasses due to it being postgame, and thus the start of her development into accepting herself and hiding away less, they're not reading glasses but sunglasses due to being sensitive to light (and also hiding some of her face and facial expressions)

Peach and O'Chunks know how to cook/bake, so they're the one commenting on how she made it/how Peach couldn't replicate it despite being a master baker

Luvbi, Grambi and Jaydes are here because, if the witches have tv, then they must also have internet access, and it is canon in my post game that they keep up with what the gang is up to online, since it's not everyday they meet people that can come and go from the afterlife and who they owe their life to. Though obviously it would be from myspace rather than tiktok since they have 2007 technology. Jaydes and Grambi wouldn't post or comment anything, but Luvbi is actively making friends. Also the idea of god himself coming to your comment section to go "what the hell" at your cooking skills is too funny

Nassy is in Saffron's kitchen and wearing an appron designed like hers, since the post game shows she lives in Flopside now. I decided on Sweet Smile rather than Hot Fraun because i thought Dyllis' temperament might scare away Nassy since she's never cooked before, and Saffron would be more supportive

And, well, you saw one of her first attempts GSXGDHI Do not let her in da kitchen

She clearly got the role of secretary just because of how attached she was to Bleck and wanted to be useful. But the whole point is that's she's living for someone else (him), while also trying to be someone else (timpani)

So her not being the "perfect girlfriend" is important to me

Bad at encouragement, bad at team spirit, bad at cooking, bad at comforting, bad at advice

Just, take the cliche of the nurturing perfect mom-friend, and make it the opposite

She's trying to get on Timpani's level, when she doesn't even really want to or enjoy any of this new persona she'd need to use. Because she's not Timpani, and faking who you are to get someone to date you is such a bad move that will crash in the long run

ALSO ALSO TIPTRON SAYING SHE'S ALSO TIPPI, YET TIMPANI REPLIED WITH SASS AND SARCASM, WHILE SHE MADE A JOKE CONNECTED TO ANALYTICAL KNOWLEDGE

TIPTRON IS MORE ANALYTICAL PIXL THAN SASSY TIMPANI

@ooftale @jester--addict get yall's butts over here fqhdhfjf

[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

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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