#it doesn’t matter whether it’s art or not what matters is the impact it’s having

[loverboydotcom]

like yeah dude it’s really cool that you used AI to complete an art piece that was purposefully left unfinished because the artist was dying of AIDS as the government ignored the mass loss of life and health. all you really did was show that technology can bring an art piece into the modern age but why? why do we need to do that? what does it say about us if we feel that a piece needs to be ‘completed’? how are we viewing completion?? can seeing an ai generated “completion” of unfinished have the same effect of seeing the parts haring left blank and the parts where the art drips into the blank? does it aid the narrative of it in any way? can AI understand the levels at which artists used their pieces about AIDS as a form of protest? of begging to be seen? how can it when an AI’s concept of ‘completing’ the piece is just guesswork of what the colours and shapes would look like to match what haring made which is nowhere near the same level of intention that came from him? you said you ‘completed’ the piece with ai because his story is so sad but does that mean we should try to rectify sadness by getting rid of the representation of it? should we not continue to sit in the sadness and discomfort that unfinished and other AIDS inspired art asks us to do because those feelings are only a fraction of what the people who died and lost felt, is that not the least we can do for them? and what good does any of this actually do when we can use technology to ‘complete’ a purposefully unfinished art piece about an artist’s untimely death from AIDS but we can never bring keith haring or any other person who died of AIDS back to life? where does haring, the person whose illness and death lives in those blanks, come into your self fulfilling ai generated completion of his work?

[vigilskeep]

mairyn is my idea of a hawke who was really defined by the horrors of ostagar. even as the warden, up in the tower, we never quite experience what it was like down in the mud when the banners started going down and the battle rush turned to panic

she was one of the first to desert when the tide began to turn, blindly shooting down anyone—darkspawn or fellow soldier—who tried to stand between her and getting her brother and getting out. her commanding officer had been a gruff but honourable nobleman, a mentor figure who’d taken a chance on a scoundrel with a tongue too sharp for her own good. she doesn’t know what happened to him, whether if in his final moments he had been thankful she’d fled or cursed her for abandoning him. all she knows is that in the days between ostagar and lothering, his old mabari found her, and has limped along in her shadow since

her life is definitely cleanly cut down the middle between ‘before’ and ‘after’. i like the absence of ostagar in what we see, because i like the idea that the one thing mairyn would make varric promise is to cut ostagar and carver’s death from the story, as he does in the exaggerated intro. one story she won’t tell, like his bianca

she’s evenly weighted purple/red, restless and resentful, saying whatever will cut the deepest or spark the most laughter, anything to have an impact, start a fight, dodge the personal. she’s definitely rushing through life, going for everything that’s exciting and dangerous and fun, quick to leave baggage behind. she’s still running from ostagar. the only time she stopped was to drag carver to safety, and it was for nothing, just to lose him anyway. she won’t make the same mistake again. she loves her family, sure, on the days she doesn’t want to strangle them, but no matter what her father asked her to do—play the third parent and always be a protector for her siblings, like she would never have her own life, like she didn’t matter—she’s going to live for what she wants. running has to be the right answer, the only thing anyone can do, because if it isn’t, she’ll have to face what she did that night at ostagar

pretty unfortunate that she’s about to fall in love with a lot of people who can’t be truly saved, but need you to stop and try anyway!

also her entire aesthetic in my head is based on this one hawke concept art:

wet cat of a woman. horrible kirkwall ghoul. you should never be completely sure somebody didn’t fish her out of the docks this morning

[the-kaedageist]

I used to be a lurker. I was painfully shy online, and I spent 20 years being changed fundamentally as a person by fics and not saying anything to the authors. It was such a deeply private thing, and I was terrified to leave comments or interact in any way, so I just carried these offerings around in myself. 

Discovering how to become healthily active and involved in fandom - and learning how to overcome my fear of online interaction - has been incredible. I’ve made so many friends and built an amazing community over the last six years. But this post isn’t about that.

There are days I have to remind myself - I have no idea how many readers like my former self are out there. You will never truly know how your creative work - whether it be writing, art, crafts, etc - touches most people who stumble across it. You will never know how many people utterly loved your creation and were too shy to say anything.

This post is not shaming lurkers - nothing you could have said to me at the time would have changed me, and shame and guilt from knowing I should be leaving feedback and not doing so just fed my fear. It didn’t have anything to do with not wanting to participate in fandom or share my experiences with authors so they’d know they made an impact - it was a block in myself that I had to work through and overcome.

Because I was one once, I know they’re out there. I know they’re reading my stories, having their lives changed by them, and not saying anything. Just because they didn’t leave feedback doesn’t mean they loved my writing any less than someone who did. I will never know how many people I’ve touched with my writing, but because I put it out there, I know I have touched them. 

I want all creators to take that with them when they’re feeling tired or unappreciated or like nothing they create matters. You put something incredible out into the world, made from your beautiful, creative human brain. Every comment is the tip of the iceberg. Yes, this post is about you. If you’re a popular artist or a prolific writer with tons of comments and kudos, or if you’ve written one short fic for a small fandom and received two comments: they’re out there, loving your work. You’ve touched someone, and this is what it means to create and be human.

[steveyockey]

Some would rebut that “Oppenheimer,” being a Hollywood blockbuster with serious global reach (whether it will play Japanese theaters remains uncertain), will be many audiences’ only exposure to the events in question and thus might “create a limit on public consciousness and concern,” as the poet, writer and professor Brandon Shimoda told The Times. A corollary of this argument: The crimes committed against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so unspeakable, so outsized in their impact, that Oppenheimer’s perspective does and should dwindle into insignificance by comparison. For Nolan to focus so exclusively on an American physicist’s story, some insist, ultimately diminishes history and humanity, even as it reinforces the Hollywood hegemony of the great-man biopic and of white men’s narratives in general.

I get those complaints. I also think they betray an inherent disrespect for the audience’s intelligence and curiosity, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how movies operate. It’s telling that few of these criticisms of perspective were leveled at “American Prometheus” when it was published in 2005, that no one begrudged Bird and Sherwin for offering a meticulously researched, morally ambivalent portrait of their subject’s life and consigning the destruction of two Japanese cities to a few pages. That’s because books are books, the argument goes, and movies are movies — and this perceived difference, it must be said, reveals a pernicious double standard.

Because they seldom achieve the narrative penetration and richness of detail of, say, a 700-page biography, movies, especially those about history, often are hailed as achievements of breadth over depth, emotion over intellect. They are assumed to be fundamentally shallow experiences, distillations of real life rather than sharply angled explorations of it, propelled by broad brushstrokes and easy expository shortcuts, and beholden to the audience’s presumably voracious appetite for thrilling, traumatizing spectacle. And because movies offer a visual immediacy and narrative immersion that books don’t, they are expected to be sweeping if not omniscient in their narrative scope, to reach for a comprehensive, even definitive vantage.

Movies that attempt something different, that recognize that less can indeed be more, are thus easily taken to task. “It’s so subjective!” and “It omits a crucial P.O.V.!” are assumed to be substantive criticisms rather than essentially value-neutral statements. We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure. But because viewers of course cannot be trusted to know any history or muster any empathy on their own — and if anything unites those who criticize “Oppenheimer” on representational grounds, it’s their reflexive assumption of the audience’s stupidity — anything that isn’t explicitly shown onscreen is denigrated as a dodge or an oversight, rather than a carefully considered decision.

A film like “Oppenheimer” offers a welcome challenge to these assumptions. Like nearly all Nolan’s movies, from “Memento” to “Dunkirk,” it’s a crafty exercise in radical subjectivity and narrative misdirection, in which the most significant subjects — lost memories, lost time, lost loves — often are invisible and all the more powerful for it. We can certainly imagine a version of “Oppenheimer” that tossed in a few startling but desultory minutes of Japanese destruction footage. Such a version might have flirted with kitsch, but it might well have satisfied the representational completists in the audience. It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence.

That’s true even in one of the movie’s most powerful and contested sequences. Not long after news of Hiroshima’s destruction arrives, Oppenheimer gives a would-be-triumphant speech to a euphoric Los Alamos crowd, only for his words to turn to dust in his mouth. For a moment, Nolan abandons realism altogether — but not, crucially, Oppenheimer’s perspective — to embrace a hallucinatory horror-movie expressionism. A piercing scream erupts in the crowd; a woman’s face crumples and flutters, like a paper mask about to disintegrate. The crowd is there and then suddenly, with much sonic rumbling, image blurring and an obliterating flash of white light, it is not.

For “Oppenheimer’s” detractors, this sequence constitutes its most grievous act of erasure: Even in the movie’s one evocation of nuclear disaster, the true victims have been obscured and whitewashed. The absence of Japanese faces and bodies in these visions is indeed striking. It’s also consistent with Nolan’s strict representational parameters, and it produces a tension, even a contradiction, that the movie wants us to recognize and wrestle with. Is Oppenheimer trying (and failing) to imagine the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered by the weapon he devised? Or is he envisioning some hypothetical doomsday scenario still to come?

I think the answer is a blur of both, and also something more: In this moment, one of the movie’s most abstract, Nolan advances a longer view of his protagonist’s history and his future. Oppenheimer’s blindness to Japanese victims and survivors foreshadows his own stubborn inability to confront the consequences of his actions in years to come. He will speak out against nuclear weaponry, but he will never apologize for the atomic bombings of Japan — not even when he visits Tokyo and Osaka in 1960 and is questioned by a reporter about his perspective now. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he will respond. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.”

Talk about compartmentalization. That episode, by the way, doesn’t find its way into “Oppenheimer,” which knows better than to offer itself up as the last word on anything. To the end, Nolan trusts us to seek out and think about history for ourselves. If we elect not to, that’s on us.

[daydreamalley]

A Ramble about Phase 19 of the Fifteen Manga Ft. Storm Bringer spoilers

Just absolutely cannot get over the 15 manga. I love the light novel so much, but this manga adaptation is so ridiculously amazing. Dazai and Chuuya’s proximity/touching has been amazing of course. I adore the way Hoshikawa draws Dazai and Chuuya as well (my baby boys, especially Chuuya). But these last two chapters with Rimbaud and Verlaine. Like, fuck. The whole “At least, one of them felt that way,” part just hits so much harder in the manga for me, with the art and page placement. And this whole most recent chapter. Like firstly, you don’t have to end every chapter with like Chuuya getting stabbed okay, help me out here.

Comparing the last page of phase 18 with Verlaine and the first page of phase 19 with Chuuya makes it so obvious that Rimbaud is seeing the similarities between them with just that parallel, which is confirmed later with Rimbaud quite literally seeing Verlaine standing behind Chuuya. 

Not to mention in phase 18 the “That’s right Paul, I remember you,” in conjunction with him seeing Verlaine in Chuuya.

Then that flashback with Verlaine carrying Chuuya and Chuuya’s just so small I could cry.

Like, I knew he was small, but he's just so young, I can't. People were experimenting on him. Like, how??

The way Rimbaud wants to ask Chuuya something and Chuuya crouches down to him. Which leads to Rimbaud putting a hand around Chuuya as he tells him to live. How close and personal they are when Rimbaud says all of this just make it feel so much more impactful for Chuuya. Kinda love too that Chuuya isn't just standing over Rimbaud. He's making it obvious he's open to listening.

Rimbaud says a lot of shitty things to Chuuya up to this point, even complaining that he has to kill a kid while only referring to Dazai, completely not acknowledging Chuuya as anything more than Arahabaki. But once he fully remembers what happened with Verlaine, I feel like that’s when Rimbaud remembers what he truly believed about Verlaine and his humanity and how that extends to Chuuya’s humanity. Because Rimbaud’s whole final speech is most definitely things he’d also thought of or told Verlaine before (as I think is confirmed in SB). I think those are Rimbaud’s true thoughts and beliefs on the matter, it just took that long for him to remember the full story and how he felt about it all. Rimbaud saw Verlaine’s struggles with humanity, and now he also remembers why Verlaine betrayed him. And so he tells Chuuya to live, just as Verlaine wanted him to back then, live without the burden of worrying about your humanity or where you came from, because “you are you.” It doesn’t matter if Chuuya (and Verlaine) “are but a pattern etched on the surface of raw power.” In Rimbaud’s mind, and honestly where we eventually end up at the end of SB, is that it really doesn’t matter what your origins are, whether someone is an artificial personality (aka pattern) etched onto raw power, because really everything is some version of a pattern upon the world. And in a word with abilities, a lot of people are a pattern connected to a power. Just as in SB Chuuya decides that even though Adam isn’t human and he knows it, it doesn’t take away from Adam’s actions, his sacrifices, or his dreams. Same goes for Chuuya and Verlaine. Their origins don't affect how human they truly are. Their humanity is significant no matter what. It just took a bit more convincing for Chuuya to get there, a little more than what Rimbaud could offer on his (almost) deathbed.

Anyway, Chuuya holding Rimbaud’s hand as he dies just does things to me. Like, the book described that “Both Chuuya and Dazai quietly listened as if there was something in what Randou (Rimbaud) was saying that they couldn’t allow themselves to miss… Some things, however, would not return to normal: the body of a man who no longer felt the cold, and the hearts of two boys who stood rooted to the spot, staring at him. A gust of wind peered through their souls as it passed them by.”

This page just so well depicts that last line. It truly feels these boys have heard something so monumental, that they won’t ever forget. Standing in the aftermath of their first fight together, hearing these words about humanity that both mean so much to both of them. Dazai’s expressions really convey this to me in the manga, and convey it just so beautifully. And Chuuya being so close to Rimbaud when he speak those words just makes it feel like those words truly are so monumental for him. And also this means that Chuuya fought to kill a man, that to be entirely fair and clear was trying to kill him first, and then held to his hand as he dies, and there’s just something about this added detail that’s so significant to me in portraying the weight of it on Chuuya. Chuuya's connection to Rimbaud is a complicated but important one. But really these words are important for both boys, because let’s not forget that Dazai also struggles with his humanity. Even if he doesn’t have a physical reason to doubt his humanity, like Chuuya, there are many other reasons that he does doubt it. So hearing that all people and all of humanity are really just patterns within the physical world, human or not that’s true of everyone and everything, and that’s important for Dazai to hear too. I think both boys think back to Rimbaud’s final speech quite a bit, if I’m being honest or did for a while.

I am NOT getting over the detail that someone (Chuuya??) put Rimbaud’s scarf on his grave. I just… it does something to me and I love that detail so much. And cutting back to that “You are you” line while Chuuya’s talking to the grave is just so perfect in my opinion, and again just shows the significance of it so, so well. It’s like, he's talking to Rimbaud, complaining about his actions really, and then it cuts to that “you are you” and it just shows almost the contrast I guess between Chuuya feeling unrest at not finding stuff about his past that Rimbaud could’ve given him, but maybe wouldn’t have anyway, and Rimbaud’s statement that those things don’t matter because Chuuya is who he is beyond all that. Also the little dandelion blowing into the wind, to me also signifying a wish being spread.

Anyway, entirely unnecessary to end the chapter with a big knife in Chuuya’s back, thanks. Especially after Chuuya mentions how he’s still exhausted from everything. Like let’s just, stop, please.

He's just a boy, leave him alone for the sake of all things good.

[th3-0bjectivist]

Dear listener, three months ago I began posting music by recently deceased artists and long-dead bands that were, all of them, exceptional in some way. I haven’t stopped since, and with this post I hereby pronounce my quarter-year long rediscovery of dead bands to be officially complete… and lucky you, I’ve got a plump Maraschino cherry to place on top of this layered ice cream cake. Folks, crank the volume, smash play, and be placed in salivating awe at one of the most influential dead bands of all-time. Imagine a musical act that is completely mediocre in every way; just some shitty, generic modern band the likes of which you hear ad infinitum on Top-40’s radio. Now, add to that same non-specific act a lead lady vocalist that has a voice on par with Billie Holiday. Back that superb voice up with instrumentalists hungry to deliver something that sounds new and exciting to the world, subtract the pretentiousness and insincerity of modern music, and cube the equation with infinite collective creativity and genuine inspiration. What you are left with is the almighty and immortal Portishead. As English as roast beef and hailing from Bristol, this group hasn’t made an album in about fifteen years and only technically lives on through ultra-rare live performances. In just under two decades from the mid-90’s to 2008, this group managed to produce not mere music, but genuine lightning-in-a-bottle magic. The members were all very motivated by old timey film soundtrack LP’s, leaving a lot of their tracks sounding like a tune from a film noire. Whether they liked it or not, they had a major hand in popularizing trip-hop, a highly experimental genre (in the 90’s anyway) which relies heavily on hip hop tempos mixed with soul, jazz, funk, or whatever form of electronic music you want to throw into the fusion. This was also a band that just kind of burned out; despite their notoriety and mega-successful presence in the industry, the members of this collective were just fallible people at the end of the day, and apparently suffered from extreme exhaustion by way of constantly recording and touring. If you spent your time in studios cranking out some of the highest quality music available at the time, you’d be exhausted too. This is Biscuit from 1994’s Dummy, and it is merely one of many, many outstanding works from their contemplative, well-executed and downright industry-changing catalog. Truly quality music (just like any quality entertainment; movies, television, art, etc.) should reveal something true and perhaps tragic about the human condition. Portishead excelled in this area. It doesn’t matter if they were only around for a moment in time. Their music is TIMELESS.

I don’t generally post many ultra-famous acts on this page unless given a motivation. Here’s my motivation; Portishead changed music on the planet Earth forever. They’re more goth than the whole of modern goth music. They’re trippy-er than the entirety of trip-hop. And, if anything you do in your life has 1/10th the positive impact on the globe as this here musical act, you, my friend, have earned my respect for merely existing. Image source: https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-roots-of-portishead-767977

[reborrowing]

How do you actually go about making conlang?

A love of language and probably some confidence that borders on hubris.

(this is kinda long and rambly and probably points to me not being inclined to teaching but)

I think conlanging is something works best if you jump straight into it, as long as you’re willing to learn as you go. Imo, there’s not a single “right” way to make a conlang, but there’s a dozen “wrong” ways that you only really discover/understand when you try them.

Really, step one isn’t going to be making anything, so much as deciding what you want the language to do. Are you trying to create a certain aesthetic for a given race/species? Are you experimenting with how communicate works—how to express emotions, maybe, or honesty or clarity or efficiency? Are you building off of a pre-existing language? Are you playing with grammar? With sound? What you want to do with a conlang should determine where you’re going to focus (and might also point out some blind spots). You should also think at least a little bit about who’s going to speak the language but imo that has the biggest impact when creating your words.)

Like, for Kíkítok, my first page is literally:

Language used by a diminutive people/mouseworld society that exists in parallel with a fictional version of the modern day, typically in urban environments. Culture values resourcefulness, knowledge, tenacity.

Reasonably naturalistic

Possibly toy with sound symbolism and/or ideophones?

Takes loanwords from English, occasionally from Spanish

Reduplication?

And then I looked up cross-linguistic onomatopoeia for mice and searched around for what languages people perceive as “cute” and picked a lot of my sounds from there. It doesn’t have to be too serious.

The actual language creation part is easier if you already have some linguistic background, but that background isn’t necessary. I started conlanging before I studied linguistics. There’s a lot of material out there that explains language building better than I can.

I’m pretty sure I started with Biblaridion’s playlist on how to make a language when I first got into conlanging. I also enjoyed Artifexian’s conlanging videos (It looks like he’s restructured his channel so things aren’t as organized anymore tho).

Zompist’s Language Construction Kit is probably the most-referenced conlanging starter guide. The material is free on the website and also available as a book if you prefer. (If you’re buying books, I really liked David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Creation. But. Money.) It’s been awhile since I’ve been on reddit, but when I was, r/conlangs had a ton of useful references to work with.

Once you get the basics of a language down, most of your time will probably go into lexicon/dictionary building. It’s so overwhelming. I recommend keeping track of how you’re forming your words even though I’m super lazy about it. (It’s why I recommend it, I end up unhappy with some of my stuff lol). There are so many words. You will never ever have enough words. The last time I was working on mouse in the basement, I found out Kíkítok has three words for kill/cause-to-die but no words for injure or pain? Ugh.

Language is huge and majorly interconnected, so there's not really a single good entry point for starting a conlang. Especially early in the process, you end up going back and forth as other parts of the conlang evolve. You kind of have to just start somewhere, whether it’s sentence structure or a couple of words, and be open to the idea of changing things later. But! Do write everything down. It doesn’t matter how intuitive something seems when you first think it, you won’t remember your own reasoning. And it's fun to see how the language changes over time!

[tamelee]

Hello, I wondered what you think of the proshipping/anti shipping debate, and maybe where you position yourself?

From what I’ve seen, pro-shipping is usually people saying that you can ship everything you want since you have to "separate reality and fiction"… and most of the time it sounds like an excuse to create/consume incest fanfictions or child porn without guilt

On the other hand, in the anti-shipping side you have people who are treating some media as "irredeemable" for literally nothing… Like, "oh, this story is saying directly into your face that what thing one character has done is bad? So that means the story is not spreading awareness of this harmful behavior"

I think there are wrongs on both sides, but in general I disagree more with the proshipping community, because most proshippers I’ve interacted with are just people who don’t want to accept that there can be consequences to their actions, what they create, and what they consume. I’ve seen a lot of them saying that fiction has no impact on reality, which isn’t true at all. Most of the times proshippers handle sensitive and "problematic" subjects carelessly, sometimes even while spreading misplaced ideas, but don’t want people calling them out on the matter… (by calling out I don’t mean harassment of course, harassment isn’t and never will be a good solution to those problems)

The subject can be pretty complex, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about it! If you want of course, I would understand you not wanting to talk about it… And I’m sorry if expressed myself badly, since I don’t speak english very well

Take care, you’re doing amazing art pieces💙

Hi ^^ it is expressed very well, dw!  And thankyou so much 🧡!!

↓🍵;

Well, you specifically talk about shipping, which I think is completely fine. But the debate itself claims so often to be more than just that, using ‘shipping’ for something much too broad to define through these two terms which meaning is questionable. 

The debate is only interesting to me because of the whole fiction=/=reality aspect (at least I personally think that is an enjoyable debate, especially reading the arguments.) The most famous and skilled literary theorists and scholars can’t agree on this matter even today because there are too many variables and barriers like culture for example. A lot of opposites are both deemed true and false at the same time and it often lands on a slightly disappointing “it depends”. You say it yourself also. As well as you “leaning more toward one side” because it’s impossible to put a term on it unless someone would write down a bunch of guidelines to which they then commit to. But then you’re more defined by that than by your own thinking or even preferences. 

It isn’t so black and white that you can just.. idk, simply throw it all into two terms to define a preference that includes your entire life-experience and gain a Universal agreement by what it even means in the first place with everyone else on the internet, as if that’s how it works with this topic y’know? As if suddenly a shipping-filter will shame our literary masters out of any logic “because a fan/shipper wants ‘x’ to molest ‘y’ through non-con sex in fanwork’ and to say whether that’s okay or not in general depends on which of the two terms you used to define yourself in your bio and literally nothing else. And I don’t see how that logic connects when it is used like that and so often in this case. 

I know, this is an exaggeration, but I hope you know what I mean regarding the debate. This isn’t about your ask directly. The “it depends” is kinda frustrating for me too, because I’m always searching for an answer that makes sense for anything >< But what doesn’t here is as I said before, that people don’t even agree with each other either about the meaning of ‘pro/anti’-shipping’. Even the general definition is (or used to?) different and has literally nothing to do with reality/fiction just.. shipping. Whenever another popular post shows up people share that as ‘the next truth’ or even I receive it for clarification for an older post, but then another says something along the lines of “maybe that’s true for them, but to me it means....” 

So, where would I position myself? Well, “it depends” on who asks and what it means to them. Nah, I don’t think a single term about shipping can define how I think about the relationship between fiction and reality, what is right/wrong/acceptable/etc which you’re right- is very complex. At least, I refuse to do that if I can help it. I’ve seen enough misunderstandings and the harassment that you’re talking about to think that this isn’t going about it the most efficient way despite some parts being interesting and definitely topics worth talking about whether it is about shipping or something much broader.

“On the other hand, in the anti-shipping side you have people who are treating some media as "irredeemable" for literally nothing… Like, "oh, this story is saying directly into your face that what thing one character has done is bad? So that means the story is not spreading awareness of this harmful behavior"

And you’re completely right about people using ‘whatever/however/whomever’ as an excuse to justify anything, but that itself is kind of common human behavior and I genuinely don’t know what to say about it. Though you bring up something that (and similar extreme views) is why I would definitely lean more towards a separation of fiction and reality. Not to justify anything, but if anything else... I’ve always rooted for the freedom of expression/creativity whether I agree with it or not because censorship has always been tricky and sometimes outright dangerous. Who's going to decide what exactly? The fact that no one will agree with each other remains regardless. (And yes, I think there are definitely things I don’t want to see either of course, but discussing all that is a whole different topic.) 

However,

“I’ve seen a lot of them saying that fiction has no impact on reality, which isn’t true at all.”

You’re right again, but to quickly note; fiction=/=reality or fiction having impact on reality isn’t the same thing. Storytelling has always shaped beliefs and perspectives all over the world. In fiction especially, morals and ethics are often explored. Almost always a story is a problem in some form or another that needs to be solved because that’s satisfying, but how are you going to do that? And how will you write it in a way that people root for your character? And how else can you do that than involving the encouragement of a readers’ own reflection of their values and beliefs while simultaneously sharing and possibly influence them with your own? 

No one can deny this though? And if they do I wonder about the argument tbh. 

If a story can inspire it can also do the opposite. It’s not one or the other. 

Storytelling is such a powerful tool and imo it should be used wisely which means something else in every case because... aaahhh “it depends” >< 

[margaetyrell]

hi luvs! how are you?? i hope everything’s great 😊 i’m not fully back yet bc i’m on vacation atm, just came to save a long queue to keep my blog active bc it’s pretty much dead. so i’m gonna put all the boring details bellow in case you wonder about the future content of this blog and my general thoughts (if you’re up to read, follow the cut!) please drink water, protect yourselves from this insane weather and take care!! see you all soon 💜

okay so. i’m obviously still disappointed on taylor, but after everything i’ve realised it’s not worth it anymore. i’m still a fan and i cannot deny that. altho it’s true that i’ve distanced myself from her, she is and will always be a big part of my life! and i’d be lying if i said i’m not excited for 1989, bc i bloody am!! it’s one of my fave albums of all time and i really don’t have the strength anymore to let anything else ruin that for me (unless there’s a mh collab on it, then i’ll explode lmao) but the truth is that i’m just an art consumer as we all are, and she is pure art. so i’ll just keep doing my thing while she does hers. end!

that doesn’t mean i’ve erased everything from my brain or that it won’t upset me if she messes up again. but i’m choosing to stay away from drama, not just hers but fandom drama in general. the past year has been a roller coaster of emotions and i’m just tired of it. and the funny thing is that it doesn’t really matter! it doesn’t matter AT ALL. its only point is to make me bitter and out of patience, and i’m just another random person with random thoughts that won’t have any impact on her or anybody, whether i’m right or wrong, so!

in conclusion: i’m a swiftie who is not a swiftie who is a swiftie who is not part of the fandom who is a gaylor who is not an unhinged gaylor who is no one at all. hope this helps!

which brings us to the point: stfu sarah what are we going to see here. ofc taylor, but! i’m not gonna stress anymore over not missing a single post. i’ll just vibe with it and save whatever’s relevant to me from now on (i’ve saved a lot already) which are mostly graphics, fanart, lyrics and tagged posts (you can keep tagging me on everything btw, and thanks again to the few who still do lols love ya!!!) but the main content can be found on the celeb blog i run with my bestie (candyshapes), which not only focuses on taylor but she’s like 70% of it, and where my dear @jdschecter has made sure not to miss any details of the tour (thanks ems, i’d be lost without you <3) so i really recommend you follow us there !! the rest, as usual, will be a multifandom blog with special dedication to taylor and GoT.

that’s all ! if you’ve read everything, thank you SO much. i know it wasn’t necessary, but i wanted to clear that up nevertheless. first, bc i’m pretty true to my opinions and i’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure this out. and second, bc i’ve lost many of you in the process and that’s understandable. but if i’m going to be back, i need to make sure i enjoy it here and curate my experience once and for all, as you all should! also thanks again to all the people that has understood my situation and showed me support in the past. love you and miss you to bits, mwah!!

[citylawns]

i'm so sorry to be one of the ppl asking for advice on physical appearance topics, but i'm wondering if you could give me insights on how i should stay firm in my self-confidence when i'm constantly being compared to someone else. i'm grateful to have a stylish mother (who is my muse) but it does hurt that ppl always HAVE to compare us (my mom has the typical model look; i'm just 'plain') & how clothes fit on us. i use fashion as self-appreciation & expression but now i feel limited in some way.

continuing from the last question, lots of ppl have literally told me word by word that i'm "so unlucky to have not gotten my mother's genes, what a waste!". as events like this piled up over the past several years, my self-image is destroyed. went to loads of therapy but felt like i was overreacting & all of them told me 'why does that matter?'. i too just want to be respected. now i just wear things that cover my body :/ maybe i'm the problem, but just in need of contradiction or assurance

I am sorry because I think I’ve failed to get through to you every single time I’ve answered these questions before.

I’m just repeating myself now saying “stand up for yourself” and “de-centre beauty from your life through friends and art etc”. I know it’s harder than it sounds and you’re in a really bad environment if people are saying that stuff to you and your mother doesn’t defend you. that’s disgusting. As soon as you can get away from those people and get away from your mother you should do so. It’s psychological damage, I know you say she’s your muse and hopefully she’s nicer to you in other ways but lots of women like being in competition with their daughters and that’s the vibe I’m getting from your message. Or she may not even realise. So question then: does your mother ever build up your self esteem and tell you how amazing you are in other ways? Does she see how the comparison destroys you? Does she tell these people to shut the fuck up? Could you ever confide in her and be comforted?

I rarely see my mum because of the things she’s done and said to me and my siblings and it’s taken years but every second I was away from her I felt myself getting happier and healthier.

I truly keep trying to point you in the direction of people, videos, concepts, politics, advice that will help you that you can explore yourself but it’s in your hands to take action and decide what is best for you, whether this resonates and helps or not. You don’t have to listen to a word I have said but I’m answering the same question over and over and over.

I get that my advice is probably not helpful in any way because this is not something I’ve experienced. But I have endured self hatred and low self esteem, I know you can’t just brush it off like it’s not made an impact, it will do and obviously has done. So maybe you just need to keep feeling that hurt until it you can verbally stand up for yourself, make art out of the experience, write about the experience, connect with other people about the experience, and leave to find a better place where people appreciate you.

That’s what I did when I was younger, for different reasons but I was def considered the unattractive weird girl at school. after I was abused by my boyfriend and my friends turned against me in favour of him I had a mental breakdown, was cutting myself, punching myself, trying to wrap cords around my neck to end my life, I’ve struggled with self hatred so deep I’ve tried to end my life and destroy myself in so many ways because I was convinced I was bad and worthless by my mother, my ex boyfriend, all of my friends, and all the teachers and other students at my school who didn’t reach out. I barely survived but I did and things slowly got better when I left that environment and started going to gigs regularly and festivals and meeting a new group of people including the next boyfriend who I spent 4 years with.

Hopefully this is a phase of your life that you just have to survive. Hang in there ❤️

[pekasairroc]

Tagged by @sinfulauthor

1. Were you named after anyone?

My mom used to have a friend named Holly who remarked how she always loved her name. I have been repeatedly assured I was not named after Big Hol.

2. When was the last time you cried?

Christmas Day when Ed’s parrot Azul died :(

3. Do you have kids?

Nah

4. What sports do you play/have you played?

As a kiddy kid I did a lot of sports for a season or two (soccer, basketball) or several summers (softball) but I fenced foil for a few years and later on did some cross country. I would like to get back into fencing but would need to find a casual club that’s a good fit and change from a French grip to a Pistol grip due to hand hurty

5. Do you use sarcasm?

Often, but I prefer deadpan understatements.

6. What's the first thing you notice about people?

Currently it’s whether they have a flu shot badge at work and then if they’re masking (mandatory if they don’t have the shot, highly encouraged regardless). I have had to do so many audits and trying not to STARE at people’s badges and lower faces due to exposures at work.

7. What's your eye color?

Blueish gray green. Aka blue.

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

9. Any talents?

I can make myself and others stop hiccuping on command.

10. Where were you born?

Chicago suburbs

11. What are your hobbies?

Lots of art, writing, sewing, and crafting is what I usually tell people without getting into the details.

12. Do you have any pets?

No, but once I figure out the petsitting situation I would love to get two rats. I am not actively figuring out the petsitting situation.

Look, it’s one thing to ask a big group if someone could watch a cat for a weekend and it’s easy af to find a dog sitter but it’s hard to ask people to feed and clean up for two rats. It just is.

13. How tall are you?

5’8”

14. Favorite subject in school?

Latin. Languages in general.

15. Dream job?

I sit as the creative head of a production company. Is it animation? Is it comics? Video games? Doesn’t matter. I explain to the group in the room ideas for stories and they wait with bated breath to the finish. They applaud. Standing ovation is implied. They set to work on making my visions and stories and characters a reality with far more technical artistic skill than I personally have but 100% under my 100% perfect creative direction. The story is an international hit. Millions adore these stories and characters and are impacted in their life in a positive way, always remembering these little tales and being so normal about them. I live a quiet life in a cute little house drawing silly doodles when I’m not drafting the next story— and let’s be real, I don’t need to draft since it’s perfect and easy from the start— and give Q&As where no one asks dumb questions and everyone perfectly understands and respects my vision and desire to not tell certain details but listens spellbound for every tangent I go on about the history of one line or a part I thought was funny. Everyone leaves me alone but radiates in my storytelling prowess and is inspired in turn. Me and my characters are forever remembered in the realms of history.

That's not what you meant by “dream job?” Well, I actually like my infection control job and the parts I dislike are the parts that suck for all regulatory jobs. Love 2 tell people to wash their hands.

[nicklloydnow]

“What is it about King’s writing that appeals to so many people? Clearly, King’s readers — many of whom seem to get hooked on him when they are adolescents — don’t care that the sentences he writes or the scenes he constructs are dull. There must be something in the narrative arc, or in the nature of King’s characters, that these readers can’t resist. My sense is that King appeals to the aggrieved adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adolescent, or the aggrieved nerdy adult, who believes that people can be divided into bad and good (the latter would, of course, include the aggrieved adolescent or adult), a reader who would rather not consider the proposition that we are all, each of us, nice good people awash in problems and entirely capable of evil. King coddles his readers, all nice, good, ordinary, likeable people (just like the heroes of his books), though this doesn’t completely explain why these readers are so tolerant of the bloat in these novels, why they will let King go on for a couple hundred pages about some matter that has no vital connection to the subject of the book.

(…)

Why, I wondered again, do some people in the literary business regard this extremely successful writer of genre fiction as a first-rate writer of literary fiction, a “major” contributor to American literary culture? How is it possible that a novel as bloated and mediocre as 11/22/63 is can be deemed by the New York Times Book Review as one of the five best books of fiction of the year? Do we fear being labeled “elitist” or “liberal” if we don’t reward commercial success in other ways (as if an enormous advance and a river of royalties are not reward enough)? Or do we believe that commercial success on the King scale signifies, almost by definition, quality, the way a 20,000 square-foot house supposedly signifies to passersby that the owners must be important?

(…)

By bestowing rewards on writing that is not all that good, has not the literary establishment lowered standards and pushed even further to the margins writing that is actually good and beautiful? If you ask me whether it is worth your while to read Stephen King instead of (or even in addition to) scores of other better contemporary writers you may have never read (and should hurry up and read before you die), I would say no, unless you are maybe fifteen and have made it clear to your teachers and everybody else that you aren’t going to touch that literary “David Copperfield kind of crap” with a ten-foot pole.”

“Director Daphné Baiwir gathers these guys — more than 20, it’s a convocation — and clips from their handiwork to build a monument to King’s importance. Few of these testimonies address King’s literary quality, only his cultural impact (from Cujo and Stand by Me to Needful Things, which spawned the non-King streaming series Stranger Things). Baiwir correctly begins with irony: King’s literary reputation comes from movie adaptations. “It all started with Carrie,” says Mick Garris (the TV adept who directed small-screen versions of Bag of Bones, Desperation, Sleepwalkers, The Stand, and The Shining). “The book was not well known until [Brian] De Palma’s movie came out. The movie blew me away. It was so great.” Frank Darabont concurs: “It was the movie that really brought a lot of attention to Steve’s work.”

(…)

King’s popularity straddles both film and literature and has done so for a long time. (Scott Hicks raves, “He’s like the Charles Dickens of the 20th and 21st century.”) This could be the basis for a good argument in favor of democratic art — folklore made by Maine’s most famous author — although Baiwir’s opening sequence foolishly imitates a film set in “King world,” where backwoods eccentrics drink “American Grain” whiskey, referring, I guess, to William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. It’s a stretch, and Baiwir’s strained pretense eventually snaps. No one at the convocation remembers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, or Flannery O’Connor. Instead, the most worshipful filmmakers indulge King’s own real-world politics — especially when paying tribute to The Dead Zone and Children of the Corn.

Encomiums start with “he loved common people, folksy people, he’s got that down pat.” They go on: “He doesn’t condescend to middle America, and I think that’s very important. In many ways he’s a man of the people.” But they fall for King’s junkiness: Ignoring how the warring duo of Misery resembles a feminist-revenge version of Robert Aldrich’s mature, complex What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It gets worse when The Dead Zone appeals to their current political paranoia: “Nations go insane.” They equate King’s anti-religious fantasies (It, The Stand) to George Romero’s racial zombie allegory in Night of the Living Dead. The fanboys make typical Hollywood-liberal partisan analogies, decrying Donald Trump’s populism, then hysterically anoint King as a political visionary: “Like Bob Dylan, [he] is a dreamer of America. He contains the entirety of it and sort of dreams in the language of the chaos of America.” Garris warns, “When you apply fear — paranoia, aggression happens. The veneer of civilization gets ripped away very quickly.” He praises The Stand as “a counter myth to the Rapture.” Tod Williams crowns King “prophet of the apocalypse.”

It’s silly, yet appalling, that schlockmeister King, always threatening to be taken seriously, should be seriously regarded by unserious, unthinking people. King on Screen platforms naïve fanboys who embellish their own childish superstitions.”

[eye-of-tichodroma]

“Oh but AI art is just like photography!”

EDIT: Actually I thought of a way shorter way to phrase this drawn-out essay: If using an AI to make art makes you an artist, then by the same logic commissioning a human artist makes you an artist too. After all, it was your basic idea. You told them “Draw a wolf in the forest at sunset for me”. They just did the “grunt work” of planning out the details and creating the actual picture (i.e. 99% of the work).

---

I see this argument around that AI generated stuff is to both digital and traditional art like 100 years ago photography was to paintings: a recent technological invention that will automate certain procedures that were traditionally done by humans. Cue outrage by people who were left behind by history. Bummer. I suppose the argument has some truth to it - you don’t need the technical skills of drawing anymore and can still “create” a nice image - and as someone who does photomanipulations I can’t disagree with the idea that using computers to help you create art is legitimate, but there is still the huge difference that all human-created art - including photography, at least the more artistic stuff, as I will explain below - is created from scratch in accordance with an artistic vision and AI stuff generally isn’t.

To me, if your prompt to an AI is a 300 word description of the precise thing you imagine in your mind’s eye, down to the details, the colours, the image composition, and then the computer generates that for you, I would actually be open to calling that “art”. You still have the moral/legal issue of image scraping and copyright of course (though there could be an AI that only uses open domain pictures and other pictures where the artist has given consent), but that doesn’t impact whether it’s art, just whether it’s moral/legal to make art this way. If the problem you are solving with AI is that you lack the technical skills to make your ideas a reality, I would be fine with that. But if you just enter a general twenty word description into a prompt window (at worst including the name of an artist or a word like “beautiful” or “trending”) and sort through the results, that’s a very different matter, and to me that is not art.

I looked up how “prompt engineers” craft their prompts currently, and they’re much closer to 7 than to 300 words, not big on details, and use words like “magnificent” or “trendy” - which means that the computer does the actual thinking and decides how to achieve the wished-for effect. (Disclaimer: There might be AI systems that actually use 300 word prompts and artists who already use the level of control that I’m citing as a pre-requisite for “real art”. If so, please direct me to it, because I haven’t seen it.) An artist thinks “An eagle is magnificent, I will add an eagle to make the viewer think my image looks magnificent”. That’s creativity. These prompts say “Put in something that is magnificent”. See the difference? But even when the prompts are more concrete, they’re still leaving out most details. They say: Generate a wolf in a forest. What does the forest look like? The machine decides. Is that creativity? I don’t think so. Clearly a birch forest in spring evokes different emotions than a fir forest in winter. A fir forest in winter at dusk vs. at dawn evokes different emotions. Are the needles brown or green? Different emotions. Is there snow on the branches? Is the forest on a slope or on a plain? Are there branches only high on the trees or do they extend to the ground? Different emotions. An artist has to make dozens or thousands of decisions, depending on the complexity of their project, or there will not be an image.

I recognize that books have been written on the question of “What is art?” and everyone has a different answer to it. Maybe all of them are self-serving to a certain degree. Maybe I would have a different definition of the word, one that doesn’t put the concept of “vision” in a central place, if my own work hadn’t in the past been praised (if and when it was) most often for its “originality”. Maybe if the predominant praise had been that was “beautiful”, I would criticize AI stuff for being “tacky” instead. All those fake little details that look intricate but are really just swirls! And it takes its cues from so many different artists that there’s no visual coherence to it! But if “what is art?” is a question that has had thousands of answers in (probably) thousands of years, I might be forgiven for having my own. Creativity and self-expression matters for art.

Also this “AI is like photography” argument implies that nowadays everyone sees photography as equivalent to a painting/drawing, which is entirely not true. There are plenty of art websites that don’t accept photo submissions, and photography has to generally live up to a higher standard to be seen as art because of a general awareness that, in principle, every moron with a hand (or a nose) can press a shutter release. No one claims an idle snapshot has the same artistic merit as a painting that took 30 hours to complete. Serious, “artistic” photographers do a lot more than just take snapshots, there’s plenty of planning involved. You have to know about the effects of different lenses, lighting, make-up if you’re dealing with a human model, just the general staging of the scene. Serious photographers are generally able to edit an image after pressing the button as well, again in accordance with their plans, or “vision”, for the photo.

And also, photographers generally don’t pretend to be painters. It’s its own category. In analogy to that, if you autogenerate a landscape painting based on an open domain collection of Romantic era paintings, that is of course an entirely different matter than if you can replicate the style with your painting skills. Again, I make photomanipulations. If I pretended to be a painter, I’d get undeserved praise for how photorealistic my work is. But of course it’s photorealistic because there are, say, 30 different photos involved in the picture you see. Also, to return to the moral implications of AI image generation again, in general all the photos I use will be stock that is legitimate for me to use and I will link to each and every one of those if I didn’t take them myself. Because it’s the decent thing to do and because the DA photomanip groups I’m in wouldn’t even accept my submissions if I didn’t use and credit legit stock sources exclusively. Contrast that with how AI “art” is made.

So, in conclusion: I, personally, would see AI generated images as legitimate art if they are (1) planned out by humans, (2) based on willing/open domain source material, and (3) clearly marked as AI-generated. And currently, for the vast majority of AI-generated images I’ve seen, none of these criteria, or one at most (usually number 3) apply. And perhaps over time there will be more regulation that will make point 2 and 3 more common. I don’t think number 1, the point I consider the most important for the question whether it’s art or not, will become more common. In my best case scenario, in a year AI art uploads will have captions that begin with words like:

Created with Open Domain AI DreamBurst using the following prompt: ...

People who make fractals already write captions like this, so it’s not like it’s impossible. I think a lot of it will be up to how much of a “community” solidifies around AI image generation, and what the values of that community are. There are, after all, different types of people everywhere. But considering how much art theft there was on the internet even before AI images, I’m not holding my breath for it to become very common among people who use AI to generate images.

[mesillusionssousecstasy]

THE IDOL 1x03: Review

For me the best thing from this episode was the new (or unreleased) song from the Weeknd: “Take Me Back”. The lyrics are so powerful and so truthful to this episode. At least, Abel is good at something. So please, stick to the music and stop acting (even if it was a little be better this time because you were mostly wearing sunglasses). Did you notice that so far he doesn’t appear in the short behind the episode. 

Also, again, some shots were amazing, especially the one from the pool. 

I will not comment on the “sex scenes”, because honestly I couldn’t care less, and someone told me they are just not realistic at all (position, fonctionnement, ...). I will not look at the fitting rooms the same way. 

The hairbrush during Jocelyn and Chloé’s scene should have told us a clue about the revelation we’ve got at the end of the episode. But I don’t understand Chloé’s role in all of this. 

Honestly congratulations to Lily-Rose for playing in front someone so bad (as Abel). There is nothing left in his eyes and his glance have really something bovine in them. Il n’y a plus rien dans ses yeux. And his face is all bloated.

Even Tedros’ name is stupid. 

So, we just learned that Jocelyn’s label wants her to be portrayed as a “bad girl”, it’s not her wishes. Like they did to Britney Spears? 

Honestly, the cover album with cum on her face as a success? 

As all the cocaïne in LA will have inside it Fentanyl? 

Jocelyn smoking to mirror a French girl? 

Tedros’ family gives me more and more Manson’s cult vibes (who killed Sharon Tate). From the club to the house. 

Can someone explain to me who are Head (the guy with the tattoo) and Ramsey (The new girl with black hair)? It’s like they appear out of thin air. 

Finally, the girl from Vanity Fair is not present. 

But Nikki is replacing step by step Jocelyn by Dyanne. The music industry will keep chugging along with or without you and that they don’t care about your individual Voice or Vision as an artist what matters most at the end of the day is how they can turn a profit and it doesn’t matter who they use to do that.

At least in Euphoria, the make up was amazing. 

Every intervention of Leia is kind of dumb. 

The conversation between Izaak (which’s still gay) and Jocelyn raises the question of whether or not embracing pain can lead life changing art that is truly impactful? I must agree with it, because it’s bring something so powerful after it, that’s completely addictive. 

We just learned that Jocelyn is on her third album only and her last hit was “Daybreak” on her second album.

The diner scene was truly amazing! But question: who cooked? Knowing that Andrés, the chef has been fired. haha.  At least, this time Tedros was asking the good questions. He is a fucking good narcissistic parasite. He becomes in control of almost every aspect of Jocelyn’s life. 

Whether it’s the music industry or Tedros’ manipulation, it’s so so fucked up to use Jocelyn like this, knowing the state of her mind. 

Her team’s concern is hypocritical. They couldn’t save or help her from her mother, so how could they save her from the grip of Tedros. 

Finally, the real villain is the music industry that preys on those seeking fame and fortune, and they’ll pit women against each other in the process as long as you play by their rules you will get the career you want but it comes at the cost of your own voice as an artist, this further the undeniable parallels between Tedros’ cult and the music industry, both groups are attempting to exploit and profit off of the artist through any means necessary however they have vastly different approaches to doing so but what are these differences. Well the music industry and record label Executives believe that proven data tired clichés and previous methods of success can be repackaged and resold to the masses. They think the general public will listen to or watch anything that is put in front of them because of this they’re more likely to keep all the pieces that work and swap out old artists for new ones that are willing to do their bidding ultimately it is about business over the individual person. As on the other hand, Tedros represents the complete opposite. He encourages being as unique and individualistic as possible because your personal experiences shape your art in a distinct way. Tedros believes in taking risks rather than calculated bets he goes so far as to encourage Jocelyn to lean into publish the leaked intimate photo being used for her own personal gain rather than letting the world paint a picture of who she is without her input it could work or fail but at least she would have tried something new rather than stick with the old such as the music industry typically does although both groups are extremely exploitative and harmful to the artist the series showcases how both sides push Jocelyn into making a difficult decision exploit yourself or be exploited. 

Jocelyn inevitably chooses to exploit herself her pain and her trauma as this will allow her to be the artist she always dreamed of becoming but what is that trauma she has yet to tap into and why hasn’t she done so before you see the reason I found the opening sequence to be ironic and the concern of her team to be hypocritical is because of what we learn about Jocelyn’s mother and their involvement or lack thereof she was physically mentally and emotionally abusive toward Jocelyn and she controlled almost every aspect of her life we get hints of this unprocessed trauma in previous episodes when Jocelyn would spend a significant amount of time in front of a mirror brushing her hair it was with this hairbrush; being the perfect daughter and pop star the physical and emotional scars from that abuse were evident to her team but Tedros points out that no one stepped in to stop what was happening because they were all profiting off of Jocelyn at the time. Tedros sees this as an opening to fully indoctrinate Jocelyn into his cult by convincing her to embrace her pain in order to create music that is authentic and comes from somewhere deep within her earlier in the episode. 

The next day Jocelyn thanks Tedros for taking care of her symbolizing her falling back into the cycle of abuse she was familiar with in the past will result in Justin becoming crazy relatively unstuck 

Overall it was a tough episode to stomach as there were many uncomfortable and provocative questions being raised about Jocelyn’s experience in the industry to me it’s clear that the series is highlighting the similarities amongst the music industry, Tedros’ cult and Jocelyn’s family as they all claim to be looking out for her best interests but that they all are only comfortable with her exploitation as long as they profit from it or have something to gain even Leia who is positioned as someone seemingly innocent and genuinely worried about Jocelyn’s well-being is only okay with exploitation if she is under her management team’s guidance we have to remember that while she’s Jocelyn’s best friend she is also her employee whose livelihood is dependent on Jocelyn’s success as a pop idol.

Honestly, I don’t think that the show is glamorizing these difficult topics just for the sake of being shocking it is trying to make a point about how Fame and the spotlight dehumanized the person behind the music and ultimately turns them into a profit generating machine that commodify is their own trauma.

Dream is never easy and oftentimes it is filled with wolves in sheep’s clothing. 

[softlyapocalytpic]

Having lots of thoughts on Steelheart at the moment and decided to share some here-

I’ve really struggled a long time with posting any of my work onto the internet. For a lot of reasons, but one of them being that the stories I wanna write and tell for Fallout specifically are ones I know that very few will be interested in.

I work in social media at the moment and just being in fandom as a writer and looking at the numbers means that I know ahead of time what will “do well” on tungle dot hell or on ao3. I know what’s popular!

If I wrote Steelheart from Butch’s perspective and focused on their romance and made it more about him I know it would be at least slightly more popular- and its made me really insecure. Is the story I’m writing worth writing? Is it interesting? Would it be better to do just that?

(Please note that I do love stories that do all that as well, and this by no means a critique or shitting on them. If anything, the fact I love them so much makes me more insecure about my own writing choices.)

But, Steelheart isn’t Butch’s story. He’s the love interest, and won’t even become a perspective character until the latter half. He’s so important to the story and it wouldn’t be the same without him! But this is Amy’s story. It always has been, but I struggle constantly with whether or not it’s worth telling.

And I have to remind myself constantly of why I’m writing it. Amy’s story is just a piece of a bigger hole. Her story sets up Leo, gives context for his existence, because down the line he’s going to become a major character with entirely his own plot and story! Her story sets up Sunshine, in ways that I’ve been cagey about, but would be remarkably obvious (I think???) if anyone just. Looked at the random shit I’ve posted about them both.

And I COULD’VE told her story through flashbacks, through the stories that other people tell about her. In some ways, thematically, that would’ve been more impactful. The Lone Wanderer is a myth, a legend, a hero who very few truly knew and understood, but her story is already so heartbreaking and tragic. The hand she gets dealt is so DUMB unfair and it felt... bad? To make her just a footnote? Just a stepping stone to other heroes rise?

Because she means a lot to me- she’s the character whom is probably most reflective of my internal feelings. She’s a protector, a caretaker, even if she isn’t the same kind I am, and she struggles with feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. When I’m in a bad spot writing out Amy’s own bad internal feelings lets me vent it out, and I have the knowledge that she always gets better. Even if her fate is ultimately a tragedy, it’s always been one that’s supposed to be marked by hope.

And yeah, numbers shouldn’t matter. Working in social media has made me almost too aware of how to get the good numbers and I hate it. I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could just write my stories because they make me happy, but it just... isn’t the reality.

Because writing and art doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! If no one stops to go “hey this is neat” it fucking hurts! And I don’t really blame people it’s just-

It hurts and is frustrating. Because I know what would make people pay attention, but I refuse to compromise my vision! I’ve been working on this world and these characters stories since fucking summer of 2017. Steelheart is one part in at least a four part series that explores so much of the world of Fallout because I ADORE this world. I have barely stopped thinking about since I got into the fandom and I just hope-

I just hope one day my love for these stories gets reflected back at me? I’ll probably have to learn to live without that but. It’d be neat. It’d be cool. It’d be chill.

I recognize that this might sound whiney or “hey come look at my fanfic because you pity me” but its really not supposed to. I kinda just, wanna voice this on my blog because its my own space. I don’t wanna just hold my thoughts to myself just because other people would take a lot of this in the wrong way.

TLDR; I really love Steelheart being fromy Amy's perspective and focusing on her journey as a person, but I'm super insecure about it because I think everyone would rather just here about her love story with Butch!! Which is super important to her growth as her person (and I really love romance as well), but I also I hope people like the other parts of it too ;;

[lilyisatiger]

Guuuys so what if the Lalaloopsies had their own powers but they used it as a part of their everyday lives

(AKA I force you all to read a concept from my AU /lh)

So just an important note: not all Lalaloopsies have powers. They don’t know why, but it doesn’t impact how others see them generally.

Lalas tend to realize their powers at around 5 years old.

Pillow: She can influence other’s dreams, like what they see and whether or not it’s a good dream or a nightmare, but only in her own sleep. If you see chamomile flowers in your dream spreading a lavender pollen (and if you’re allergic, you’re not sneezing), Pillow is influencing it. She uses this to help others sleep in peace, so those who have trouble sleeping approach her.

Crumbs: Any food that she prepares can grant a temporary boost to those who consume it. She usually prefers to make cookies. She figured out it only works when she’s in a calm state of mind and following the recipe faithfully, if it’s under or over cooked it won’t work. They’re a lot like potions in a way. It’s usually small grants like “stay awake”, “maintain inspiration”, “keep calm” and “2-hour good luck (she’s working on the whole day version”.

Mittens: (This is actually taken from her webisode) She can make her own blizzard… hypothetically. She can create snow clouds and ice crystals and manipulate them to her will. It is reliant on how “cold” she is, so she maintains a warm body temperature to balance it. She only uses it for the purpose of weekly snowball fights and to ski anywhere, no matter the location or time.

Peanut: Straightforwardly, she has super strength. She can lift anything, even if it seems impossible to lift. The catch is, that’s the only power she has when it comes to her performances. She has to train herself for flexibility, contortion and balance. Balance is especially important, since the power only means she can lift things and not exactly carry it.

Spot: Another straightforward one! She can control objects with her mind. She can’t control living things (not just because she’s not interested in it, she actually can’t do that). Spot generally uses this power to paint and sculpt multiple things at once and move around art supplies. She can hypothetically use this power to also reorganize her studio… but that’s boring.

Bea: A bit of a predictable one, she can remember anything exactly. Anything she witnesses, she can recall to uncanny detail. This helps her remember the contents of books, the emotions she felt reading them, and the lessons/thoughts she got from them so it’s handy for a librarian. It’s also handy for being a teacher because she can catch who actually completes their work and who might need some assistance in solving questions. And on that note, what they need help on.

Dot and Jewel are the two of the Original Eight who don’t have powers. They’re not the only ones, there isn’t an exact ratio.