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[gabiprates04]

why do u hate t swift?

no offence, just wondering why r u so opinionated against her

none taken! i've been waiting for an opportunity to collect my thoughts on her and her brand and i thank you for providing me with one. bear with me, because this is going to be rather long under a read more.

to quote the post you're no doubt referring to here, i don't hate her. rather, i take issue with the culture that surrounds her, and i think the cult status she's been assigned by fans as an 'artistic genius' is reductive and in fact damaging to the culture as a whole.

she's the ultimate culmination of an anti-intellectual consumerist culture: she's unfathomably wealthy and uses that money to take 20 minute flights on her private jet and has earned that money by the grace of some truly strange, cultish fan behaviour that lives in denial that her work is shallow at best and downright conservative and culturally vacant at worst.

i can say this: she writes bland, decent-sounding music and i truly have enjoyed some of her songs as background music in the past. but the problem is this weird mutual delusion that she writes anything better than that! she doesn't! i really don't understand what you're all listening to. am i losing my mind here. 'touch me while your bros play grand theft auto' 'sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby' 'i'd say the 1830s but without all the racists' hello?? this last is a prime example, betraying staidly liberal if not softly conservative viewpoints. see also: her romanticisation of frontier ideology ('i forget how the West was won', from but daddy i love him; 'when they found a better planet, only the gentle survived', from i hate it here; the colonial fantasy of the wildest dreams music video).

so let's unpack some of her motifs.

take the lyric 'you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me' from who's afraid of little old me?. now, i get it, this is kind of a fun line. but the problem is that the fans for some reason perceive this kind of thing as a great line, which it isn't, if only because of the context in which it was written. she's not engaging with anything meaningful here. i guess you could bring it together with her song mad woman in the interest of formulating some dialogue about her intersection with mad studies/anti psychiatry.... which would be interesting! in that it's a recurring theme in her lyricism to address the perception of female hysteria and herself feeling/being seen as mad. but where this rubs me up the wrong way is that she's writing herself into this position of oppression in which her fans have located her (take the whole rereleasing thing — admirable aim, wanting to own your own music, but let's be clear here, it's mostly about money. you aren't contributing to women's human rights by buying a new album that sounds exactly the same as the old one and thereby putting more money in the pocket of one of the celebrity world's biggest environmental polluters) and that just Does Not Work with who she actually is. no doubt she's drawing from her own personal experiences with the hysteria metaphors but there's no getting away from the fact that she's one of the most privileged women in the world. it's very difficult to take her work seriously when she draws on motifs of structural, societally-regulated oppression to describe her own personal heartbreak. she's not writing about mental illness, she's writing about how a breakup was like mental illness. the racism is a metaphor, actually.

and it's not like this is the worst crime in the world. writing in general is entirely about comparing things to other things. but i take issue with the fact that her fans are lauding her as a lyrical genius, the best songwriter of the century, a groundbreaking artist, when her songs are all so personally involved and derivative. great literature uses intertextuality to look outwards. meanwhile tswift is out here calling matty healy dylan thomas. like idk it's blatant to me that her career is engineered towards a pretty singular goal: making as much money as possible, and maintaining a monopoly over the music industry in service of that goal. and i mean i guess girlboss? #winning? because it's working. she's selling out stadiums and breaking records and everyone is talking about her.

but when this is the end goal of your career trajectory, it's inevitable that you're going to make middle-of-the-road, generally relatable music. and i have nothing against that sort of music, really i don't, as much as i read the postmodernists and joke about being a pick-me. but i do find it concerning that mass-market material is being taken for revolutionary, transgressive art.

forgive me if i get theoretical here. but writers like brett easton ellis saturate their work with brand names and other cultural signifiers to express the decay of meaning in an ironic, consumerist world, where product and image subsume all. tswift writes 'you smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate/we declared charlie puth should be a bigger artist' and it doesn't express anything, it is that loss of meaning. it is image and sound and stadium lights. the genius page for this song decodes these lines in terms of their cultural referents: 'Matty Healy is known for smoking. The 1975 has a song called “Chocolate” and “bars” could be referring to that track as lines in a song.' tswift has made herself and her personal life the product. she isn't writing about anything other than herself, but that's fine, because it's relatable anyway, because we all know who she is and why she's heartbroken this time. her celebrity inhabits us: we do not need to see ourselves in her because she is all around us, within us. her references are signifiers only for themselves. she has no interest in examining meta-textually the implications of her art in the wider cultural landscape, only writing about her own life — which is fine when you're a fun pop singer.

but her fans have been positioning her as something more meaningful than that. and, consequently, she's leaning into this positioning — take the title of her album, the tortured poets department. it's clearly a reference to dead poets' society: she fancies herself a whitman or a byron or a blake. as another poster on here identified, however, it comes across strangely bureaucratic. department, not society. like someone's sitting in an office cubicle analysing algorithms and trends so they can advise this 'tortured poet' on how best to capture public obsession this time. and she’s aware of this bureaucracy: she leans into it, in fact, in the ‘summary poem’ that goes alongside the album. she addresses the album as a 'hearing', a 'debrief', a report of her findings of her own losses. but then it's also described as a trial — 'my plea here today of temporary insanity'. once again, she's invoking metaphors of madness and positioning herself as the vulnerable party in a system of authority. the tortured poets department, then, is not a colloquium, consortium, or otherwise friendly meeting of similarly tortured like minds. it is not a support group — it is a judicial, penal body.

and tswift is not tearing this body down. as the penultimate line of the poem goes, 'all’s fair in love and poetry' — not love and war, as the john lyly proverb goes. she's not here to fight for anything. 'poetry''s extra syllables change the rhythm of the line and throw it off balance, jarring the reader. perhaps this is deliberate, calling attention to it, to her own deliberate choice to set herself out as a poet, an artist, not just a pop singer. but it rather heavy-handedly serves to emphasise the whole problem here. her constant invocation of Poetry — capital P — once again serves as signifier that erases the resonance of the signified. if she tells us it's poetry enough times, surely that means people will take it as such. it doesn't matter what it's actually saying.

she sets herself out as the 'chairman' of the tortured poets department, right after marking it out as an authoritative institution from whom she pleads for a merciful sentence. this is the institution that will send her to the 'asylum' on her insanity plea — an institution she herself has founded. her oppressive cage is a cage of her own making, the hall of mirrors that is her own celebrity. and this is meaty stuff — for an essay on the cult of celebrity with anti-psychiatry, poststructuralist, post-postmodern references. throw in some foucault for good measure.

but i earnestly do not believe that she is doing any of this deliberately. her work does not stand up to sustained radical analysis because it is not designed to be radical — it coopts the aesthetics of literary movements in the drive towards profit. she has become a parody of what her fans and her marketing team claim her to be, which is a lyrical genius and an artistic savant. the tswift brand has made her into an idol of late capitalism, a vapid collection of literary symbols with no referent and nothing behind them but an atmosphere-poisoning private jet.

tldr: i wouldn't care if swifties could just be normal about her but instead they decided to deify her so now we can't have nice things

[gabiprates04]

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"

[gabiprates04]

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

[gabiprates04]

The original percy jackson series is about cycles of abuse and neglect, right. Were introduced to percy as a kid who has clearly been left behind by a school system that has given up on him, restless and unengaged and self-defetist because hes been given nothing that works for him and no one even tries to meet him where he is. Then hes told no, listen, your neurodivergence is amazing and you just need to be given something that actually utilizes your unique palatte. And thats obviously the uplifting idea rick wanted for his kids, right. But once we get to know chb the same cycles are happening there too. There are kids "left behind" there too for one reason or another, because their parents dont want to claim them, because their parents werent important enough to get a cabin. Do you get it, all the kids who dont fit the most common neurotypes get shoved into the same closet. Kids are being left in a cruel world to fend for themselves without the tools they need. Theyre dying because no one bothered to accommodate them. Its such an obvious parallel that the first chapter introduces a teacher whos written to be especially hard on percys disability and she turns out to literally be one of these monsters trying to kill him. Meanwhile sally jackson tells him she named him after Perseus because she wanted a redemption for a hero whos story ended in tragedy. Meanwhile every book in the series replicates a greek myth step for step until the moment they break the cycle. Annabeth, playing Odysseus, is talked down from her hubris and grounded by her friends. Percy, playing Heracles, meets someone wronged by the original Heracles and rights his wrongs by refusing to go down the same selfish path as him. Monsters are reborn because they are--as the books explicitly call them--achetypes. These kids are stuck inside the cyclical nature of mythology because thats what happens to mythology, it gets retold over and over again. But these are the kids who have to live it. The series ends with percy being offered immortality and he rejects it because he wants to use his godly favor to force them to break their cycle of neglecting their kids. The series ends with a declaration that we cant keep letting this happen. The very first book offees the same choice. It ends with percy refusing to keep the head of medusa as a spoil of war, refusing his heroic reward. He lets his mother have the head and use it to kill gabe. Isnt that fucking crazy for a kids book? Gabe wasnt a Monster. He wasnt going to Turn to Dust and Disappear in a narratively convenient way. He was a living breathing mortal dude and percy and his mom killed him without remorse. Break the cycle of abuse!!!! Dont let this happen again!!! Anyway thats why the original percy jackson series is Hey where are you going with our breadsticks

[gabiprates04]

i think your love would be too much

[gabiprates04]

imagine being SO old you forget youre polyamorous. it’s real and it happened to my friend betty cooper.

[gabiprates04]

JUGHEAD felt weirdly absent from the finale except for the conversation at the cemetery. Like I never got the sense that either Angel Jughead or Flashback Jughead were really Jughead (excluding maybe then). And they weren’t the same guy, since Angel J continued narration outside Pops while Flashback Jughead who had done nothing all episode sat in the diner.

I know there are multiple Jugs, (three, maybe more) so perhaps it was just Narrator Jughead and Original Flavor Jughead. But it still doesn’t scan for me, really.

Why would Angel/Narrator/God?/Archangel Raphael Jughead be able to look back on 1950’s Jughead’s Days of Futures Past with heartfelt emotion? Unless, of course, he was that Jughead. He was all the Jugheads, a singularity of Jugheads. A Jugularity.

I think in merging the timelines, Tabitha also blended the Jugs. Because of this, Jughead transceded the narrative, and, much like Tabith, became trapped in the cosmic edges surrounding the story. Neither of them can continue to participate in the construct they forever changed themselves to build.

Which leaves the question of who the Jughead at Pops was. If jughead is denied entrance into heaven, what serpent would wear his face in the garden? Riverdale is incomplete without Jughead. His friends and loved ones are incomplete without Jughead. So, Angel Tabitha and Godhead needed to create a new Jughead, outside the Jugularity. A false Jughead, perhaps. An illusion, a mirage. Their heaven, their very polycule, is incomplete, imperfect, and will forever remain so because it lacks Jughead. It lacks Tabitha. And most importantly? It lacks Baby Anthony.

[gabiprates04]

Exercises for all the homies who want to have a long career drawing.

The true problem with being an artist and drawing all day (as I wanted my whole life) is that human backs are not designed to hold that position, so it is very common for artists and designers to have really stiff shoulder blades, creating a chain of muscle strain towards the arm AND the back… and a lot of pain.

These are some physical exercises for artists and honestly anyone who works at a desk.

(all credit to my physiotherapist)

[gabiprates04]

I'm like if a chill girl had the need to control everything around her

[gabiprates04]

I think that, in a way, symbols like Barbie are important to be able to reflect back the enoughness of just being a girl, being a woman, being a person. And I think that's what I wanted to sort of explore in this movie, because Barbie's for so long been a symbol of the thing you could never be.

[gabiprates04]

I just resently finished BBC's Merlin and I really wanted to talk about the show with someone, look at art and share my art, so I downloaded Tumblr

I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'll hopefully learn soon enough

So here are some portraits I did of Arthur and Merlin, hope y'all like them

[gabiprates04]

this slaps honestly

[gabiprates04]

[gabiprates04]

Does anyone wanna lend me a PSN account to play tw3 pleaaaase

[gabiprates04]

whenever i complete chores i get an achievement banner pop up in my head dark souls style

[gabiprates04]

Hey I'm gonna start something that'll maybe go nowhere let's go

[gabiprates04]

My grandfather died…