#existence box

[kari-go]

I will do this every time I finish a box, the kwami swaps will be pretty random. Weapons will be included unless I forget but I don't think I will.

I don't have any names for them, but how could I not give Rose the unicorn.

Edit: Rose's name is Unicute, by @hades-999 and Juleka's is Forêt Brune

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[mobius-m-mobius]

(i n / s p)

[blue-mood-blue]

I can pinpoint the moment that destroyed my life today:

It’s been a handful of weeks since Murderbot came within inches of having a new, organic governor module implanted in its head via infection - do you think, maybe, that’s also been hiding behind the redacted? Not the way everything else is, just as a deep-seated reminder of what it can’t afford to lose?

What a way to be told “I love you” - to be told “I will not lose you, I will not let go, I will do the hard part of holding on even if you don’t want me to”

[isjasz]

[Day 310]

May 15th special getting it done early. It's ma birthday I get to do MEMES >:D

[bat-kidsarebi-kids]

I love you transfems I love you tall transfems I love you short transfems I love you fat transfems I love you thin transfems I love you hairy transfems I love you transfems who shave I love you butch transfems I love you femme transfems I love you it/its transfems I love you transfems who don’t use she/her I love you transfems who exclusively use she/her I love you transfems who pass I love you transfems who don’t pass I love you transfems who don’t want to pass I love you transfems who are on HRT I love you transfems who aren’t on HRT I love you transfems who don’t want to transition I love you transfems who are still closeted I love you if you have a penis I love you if you have a vagina i love you if you are intersex you are not a sex object you do not exist for other people to use you up you are worthy of love regardless of your relationship to sex & you deserve to be backed by your community 100% of the time. transfems you are always safe on my blogs. i see you transfems I love you transfems you are more than enough exactly as you are transfems

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Toy Box

[fridgefanatic]

What if Donald and Goofy adopted an anime boy in clown shoes. Wild concept I know. Wait until you meet his 43682i0+ other selves and forms

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Cultivator and Lawyer, Elle Woods (& Her spiritual dog Bruiser)!

Part 2 (soon)

[txttletale]

[pouring myself a drink from a fancy pitcher] so like it’s simplifying to the point of uselessness to say ‘reading comprehension’ is why people say shit like ‘lolita is problematic!’ because clearly the salient points to consider what aren’t they comprehending and why? and i think it probably lies in an unwillingness to approach critically the cultural understanding of ‘the child predator’ as someone that exists wholly outside society, someone who is an obviously deviant Other that enters from the fringes in order to commit terrible crimes--and so when nabokov puts those crimes into the person of a well-spoken, well-read, ‘respectable’ family man, they respond by saying ’well, this must be a favorable portrayal of child abuse, putting its justifications in the mouth of someone so authoritative and respectable is obviously apologetics’--because they’re unable or unwilling to critically confront the actual idea presented here, that ‘the child predator’ exists within society and is in fact often enabled and abetted by society.

humbert anchoring his attraction to children in the mythology and literature of the Western Canon says, ‘this is embedded in our culture, these are not the acts of an Otherized interloper’--but if you cannot put yourself at a critical distance and dispel the myth of that interloper of course you will read that and say ‘well since all these things are self-evidently good and cannot be the sites of violence, tying humbert to them is nabokov inviting this deviant external evil into the fold of what’s good and accepted’. when of course the call has been coming from inside the house! the entire time!

[i take a sip of my drink--fruity, airy, with hints of earth] so yeah ig to talk seriously about the dynamics of abuse we need to divorce ourselves entirely from the discursive fiction of the ‘child abuser’ as a marginal figure so that we can honestly assess how abuse can be reproduced in the key pillars of our culture and society. but that’s hard so let’s all keep arguing about a vague notion of ‘reading comprehension’ until the earth explodes amen brother [i pour you a drikn from my pitcher and it’s just room temperature coca cola]

[mblue-art]

hhappy pocky day 11/11!! here's some self-indulgence ft oreo man///

[kari-go]

Discarded concept

Deed, the stick bug of Realization

he/it/they

Existence box

Miraculous: ear cuff

Weapon: water searching stick

Transformation:

Reality check!

Lose touch.

Favorite food: salt

Deed is a level-headed kwami and thinks a lot about what happened, is happening, and will happen. It tries to be neutral about these thoughts but can’t help itself and be pessimistic. Sometimes they get overwhelmed, but Imaa is always there to pull them back into reality.

Powers:

True Colors- Ability to see through illusions and magical objects. Its usage is shown by a yellow glowing ring around the holder's eyes.

Debug- Reverts a person to their original form and rids the effects of subjection-based magic.

Resin- Covers an area in a dome where magic cannot be cast.

Hark Bark- The Cure

Extra:

He calls his holders twigs.

It is visible without a miraculous.

Thanks @hades-999 for the idea!

[clownsuu]

*woop woop woop*

GUESS WHO JUST MOVED INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD MOFOS

Any sus or horny behavior will get you bonked and sent right to horny jail!! Right away!!

(and yes I know there's crime/entire mob syndicate in the neighborhood but I'm here to stop the sus!! The horny!!)

AYYYYY WOOP WOOP MY M A N S S S S

[theshinysnivy1]

[dnptheinfinity]

at this point if i wasn't able to look at the picture on phil's instagram i would fully believe that phlonde phil was just an incredibly powerful phannie dream we all collectively had

[sea-buns]

Never did I expect myself to be mourning the absence of english essays and writing exams and theatre class critiques. Do you understand how fucking amazing of a grade I could get on an analysis of trauma in Critical Role? On Lou Wilson and Emily Axford's finesse in portraying the heavy expectations and double standards placed on children? On Ylfa Snorgelsson's relationship to death? On the journey of a man's relationship to violence? On an analysis of grief in Dimension 20? On the pitfalls of youth? On the dynamic between humanity and religion? On the journey of self-discovery and acceptance? On love in all its forms? On the nature of choice? On everything Brennan Lee Mulligan has to say about capitalism? On the tragedy of im/mortality? On Gerard and Elody's divorce? On the unfeeling and aimless happenstance of the universe? On the role of fate and destiny? I'm not saying it would be easy. I'm saying can you imagine how fucking cool it would have been to turn in 5 pages about a dnd show, feeling good about it?