#i mean i'm here for it but

[egophiliac]

just thinking about hair and faces

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[volumina-vetustiora]

what the fuck

saxo cere comminuit brum

what the actual fuck

[sentientsky]

crowley and aziraphale negotiating child support payments in s3

[demaparbat-hp]

Little Zuzu for an incoming project 🔥

[pyralart]

In which Luz gets isekai-ed another way

First part >> Next Part

Remember folks, look both ways before crossing the road or this might happen to YOU! This was an advert from the Road Safety Agency (it's not).

Oops, I just dropped the angst! I can reveal that it's inspired by this original post, although I'll put my own spin on it so don't think you know what's gonna happen!

[yrsonpurpose]

Alex has been learning for a while Henry isn’t what he thought, but it’s something else to feel it this close up, the quiet burn in him, the pent-up person under the perfect veneer who tries and pushes and wants.

[brujahinaskirt]

arthur is rude to that one sex worker because the guys are fucking around as they oughtn't be and he actively wants the source of their distraction to go away. that is how he operates through the entire game: deliberate, utilitarian intimidation and strategic unpleasantness to achieve a goal. it is an early game commentary on arthur meant to position him as a big dog that barks. it is not a commentary on his views about women which are clarified many times afterward. you guys realize that right

[stedesmoth]

[seance]

PICTURES TAKEN THREE HOURS BEFORE DISASTER.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

No time to play. You are being sent away.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

[jojolightningfingers]

i truly truly will never stop being tickled by how law's braincell count just plummets into the negatives whenever he's around luffy and kid SPECIFICALLY at the same time. like if it's one or the other he copes more or less just fine. kid's a shit-starter but he's predictable and easy (and fun) to rile up. luffy runs on baffling logic but he's fundamentally easy to get along with so long as you maintain your zen and understand that he usually doesn't MEAN to get under anybody's skin. separately they aggravate law in different ways. but when they're together kid's penchant for starting dickswinging contests (or inability to not take the bait of one) collides with luffy unhesitatingly answering with a one-up that no sane person would conceive of and what the hell is law supposed to do against THAT fuckin wombo combo. get left behind and called a bitch for it? not goddamn LIKELY!!

[tapakah0]

[beif0ngs]

LUFFY’S DREAM

Huh? Have I never mentioned this to any of you before...? I guess I only told Shanks, Ace and Sabo then.

[lgbtlunaverse]

the wangxian + a-yuan "dads with an adopted son" thing is fine and enjoyable in fanfics honestly but I think we as a fandom are really not utilizing the idea of all of them in unconventional familial structures enough. Like, canonically it wasn't so much that wwx was a-yuan's guardian as that a-yuan was being raised collectively by the wens and wwx was adopted INTO the larger wen family. And lwj got attached to him through that. A-yuan just has these very attached weird uncles/older cousin figures that aren't related to him by blood at all but keep sticking around.

Just think of a modern AU with a lot less death where lwj does as he does in canon and keeps showering a-yuan in gifts as much as he can and when wwx is like "aiyah lan zhan you're gonna spoil him. Not everyone is as rich as you! What's his family supposed to say if they can't buy him all the stuff you do?" lwj just goes "Hm". And from then on out every year once a-yuan's birthday is near the extended Wen family members (well. the ones that are invited that is. No one wants wen chao at a birthday party) wakes up to a wechat payment from lwj.

Random wen cousin number 6 texts granny like

cousin 6: i just got 400 yuan????

granny: oh that's just wangji

cousin 6: i've never met this guy in my life???

granny: he wants you to buy a-yuan a nice birthday present!

cousin 6: how does he know my bank account???