#it's a different medium with different strengths

[despair-tea]

Man who has not even considered reading a book this year: Why would I want to read a VISUAL novel? I don't need the pictures! I'll just read a regular book The girl who is desperately trying to crack his egg because "she'd be so fuckable you don't understand":

[jackklinemybeloved]

[…]

Percy’s warning to fellow half-bloods in the audience, across different mediums.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (2005) The Lighting Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical (2017) Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series Teaser (2023)

[juney-blues]

can we stop putting motion blur in video games forever please

it never looks good, and all it ever really accomplishes is needlessly obfuscating the game state.

like who the fuck says "oh gee this game is great, but i wish every time i moved the camera it would become 10 times fucking harder to tell what the hell is even going on"

[averlym]

litany of the martyrs (click for better resolution!)

[vaguely-concerned]

*fully sweating bullets and thousand yard staring into space as the king of hearts starts to talk about losing the person you love and what you'd be willing to do to get them back* this better not be fUCKING thematic foreshadowing for what this story is meant to head towards eventually (I say, with little hope and great trepidation). we're just going to be thematically microdosing on that in the main krew right folks. no one's going to be lost forever. right??!?!

(though I must admit that the idea of some of them dying and being brough back because that is someone else's heart's desire -- because 'what would even be the point of being given anything else, if you aren't here with me' -- would render me fully incapable of being normal ever again and forever goodnight)

[keii]

JoRo sketch dump, but also just realizing that with each new iteration of Jowa, he just keeps getting bigger.

[elexuscal]

whenever i see someone say something like "video games are superior to movies" or "books are better than tv", i consider it about as nonsensical a statement as "music is superior to cooking!"

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Full Tech Day One pic today from kiko laureano (denizen of skid row / ensemble) & video (that's four seconds of "ya never know" playing over the static image) from & ft. marcia milgrom dodge (director / choreographer) double captioning "there might be puppets in this musical ;)" & "Well Shake my hand! Come see LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS @guthrietheater featuring @actually_will_roland's hand!"

[silverjirachi]

uh oh sisters! new avatar adaptation is looking like its gonna suck again

[jumping-jackalope]

water, fire, & light theory (click for better resolution)

[anonymouspuzzler]

Have you ever had any thoughts about designing a video game of your own?

oh for sure! lots of little ideas I've jotted down or rotated in my mind over the years. nothing that feels feasible or inspiring enough to actually pursue, mind, especially for someone who knows next to nothing about coding and doesn't have the money to hire a programmer. I've thought more seriously about project management in video game spaces if I could ever learn more about Da Biz, though, I like to think I'm got at helping run along projects and keep track of logistics and things like that

[swordince]

lays down,,     thinking once again & forever how one of the most highlighted things about adam in pretty much every single iteration of motu is just... how massive his heart is, how unconditionally kind to everyone & everything he is, how willing to give every benefit of the doubt & every second + third + fourth + umpteenth chance he can.     of course he saves the villain’s life even if he’s kicking himself while he does it because to him a life is a life, no matter how evil.     of course he tries everything in his power to help a villain on the verge of dying because he couldn’t live with himself if they died & he’d done nothing to try & stop that from happening because he feels it’d be as bad as killing them himself.     of course he wants to rescue the dragon stuck in a cave-in because he can’t just leave a living creature like that.     of course he asks to put aside differences when facing a threat that’d affect both parties in favor of working together.     of course he grants power to his enemy so that they may help & feel what it’s like to be on the side of good & justice for once.     of course he’s kind without asking anything in return, even when knowing the one he’s helping wouldn’t do the same if their places were switched, even when knowing they won’t learn anything from it.     of course he just helps, because it’s what he knows, it’s what he does.

[yusuke-of-valla]

Actually now that I'm thinking about it.

We say "the medium is the message" a lot but I think it's gotta actually pretty hard for an ENTIRE MEDIUM to be inherently flawed because the medium is a way of conveying a story? Any issue can be worked out with a different story

Like my mom (bitch) was surprised when she saw West Side Story because "all musicals have happy endings" (she literally took us to see Les Mis as kids but why would I expect my mother to remeber anything we did together or anything about my interests) but like. There's nothing ABOUT the actual medium of "telling a story through song" that requires it to be happy. Songs aren't always happy?

Obviously every medium has conventions and limitations that have to be worked around but just as many people like that as dislike it generally so. Idk

Basically what I'm saying is if your instinct is to go "this entire medium/genre is inherently flawed" it's probably NOT, you just don't personally like something about it? And that's fine? But it's not a flaw of the medium.

[goldammerchen]

show but dont tell to an extreme becomes a poorly made movie or tv script. if it is not a visual story yes i would like to know what the characters are thinking and feeling, yes i want to heard about their inner worlds thanks

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Leaving aside the whole debate about the ethics of AI art and copyright, I think one of my biggest gripes with the AI art industry is that generative AI art has this natural tendency towards producing weird and surreal imagery that I actually think DOES have a lot of artistic merit and potential if explored and leaned into as one of the unique strengths of the medium.

Like, when AI image generators were at the stage imbetween the vaguely recognizable imagery produced by neuralblender and the type of generators we're seeing today, they were producing really fascinating imagery that I'd argue had value as a contribution to the art landscape that was entirely unique to AI, since the weird surreal quality of the images was the result of Machine Learning programs interpreting words and images in a fundamentally different way than humans do.

Like i'd argue shit like this indisputably has a place as its own artistic style/medium, it's surreal and weird in ways which are completely distinct from what a human artist could produce because its unique strengths come from details that are inscrutable, ambiguous, and hard to parse to the human mind, which a human artist would have an extremely hard time mentally visializing, let alone translatong into an art piece.

But since the main selling point of AI art for both the people making these generators and the teach aficinados who are a little too into them is that AI art can serve as a cheaper/faster replacement and/or alternative for the work of human artists, progress is measured not in terms of how well they can use and explore the distincly non-human quality of AI art, but instead in terms of how well they can supress it to make it more closely mimic the work of human artists. So all advancement in the tech is geared towards progressively getting rid of the things I find artistically interesting about the medium instead of towards leaning into them as strengths that give it a unique, artistically worthwile style.

Like, I don't think AI art is inherently "soulless" or devoid of artistic merit, but I do think the focus on trying to make it increasingly indistinguishable from art produced by humans strips away the things that gave it artistic merit to me. This thing can produce imagery that is weird and wild and hard for us to even conceive but the profit motive's tendency towards rewarding homogenization has neutered that to turn it into a factory of increasingly bland, generic, serviceable imagery.

[vasquez-rocks]

i do get why people critique star trek for having not very 'alien' aliens but i also think it's based on a kinda narrow understanding of what makes an interesting alien character. two lil thoughts. a) trek, as a tv show reliant on mostly practical effects, is not going to be able to do what, say, animation can do with character design. every medium has strengths and weaknesses and it seems a lil silly to not take that into account b) more importantly, i'm less interested in characters that LOOK alien than characters who FEEL alien, that is, who have points of view and experiences that are fundamentally different from humans. odo and jadzia, for example, look a lot less alien than, say, hemmer from snw, and i do like hemmer, but except for his rarely-mentioned psychic abilities, what makes his experience of the world different from any of the human characters? meanwhile, odo and jadzia come from species with different understandings of individuality and consciousness, who can experience things their human counterparts can't (and vice versa in odo's case), and this constantly influences their storylines, choices, and perspectives on the world. even in tos, you have one-off aliens like the horta and medusans that are about as far from humans as you can get on a '60s tv budget. the prophets, even as they sometimes appear as humans, are never really 'humanized' (except maybe a tiny bit at the very end) tl;dr i don't really care if trek aliens are visually alien so much as if they're conceptually alien, and I think you can do that even when your alien is just a human with funky ears or whatever!