Shanks:"You don't understand Benn, he makes me alcohol."
Beckman:"doesn't take a chemist to make liquor"
Shanks:"No, I know. But he daily threatens people that could kill him in a second, he's surrounded by henchmen that don't know his real, petty self, and after all that he goes in his little lab and thinks -mhhh, what fancy vegetable do I use today to get my boyfriend drunk?- and that is so sweet-"
Beckman:"fuck, are you going to cry?"
Shanks, sobbing:"He makes me LIQUORS, BECK, of course I'm going to cry"
Some quietly influential musicians end up being like that thanks to the company they keep and which gives them the legitimacy that results in many people checking you. For instance, J.D. Souther might be one of those with a lot of famous friends, including The Eagles, who actually made a comeback by covering one of his songs and some of them also worked with him on his own LPs. Why shouldn't they, he's a solid songwriter and I'm sure the scene that surrounded him give him many benefits, including a variety of chances to hone his tunes. However, I get your questions – where's his quiet influence? Well, I would say he was not the main characters of his environment, he was a supporting one, yet the places would be less without them.
I know I have very few followers, but as more of you become aware of new setting allowing AI to scrape art from blogs and reblogs, I want to make my stance on the issue extremely clear:
If I wanted to feed an artificial intelligence algorithm my art, I would have done so myself. Until the AI is fully removed from Tumblr, I will not be hosting my art here. Until the AI is fully removed from Tumblr, I will not be using the site or the app. Until the AI is removed from Tumblr, this is not a safe place for me to exist or express my ideas.
I'm sorry if this inconveniences you. I genuinely appreciate all the follows and reblogs y'all have blessed me with. I still have art available on my Patreon, Ko-Fi, Discord, and Twitch. You can find those sites in my pinned post and you can follow my Patreon for free.
I'll be restructuring my Patreon in March to allow people to access my SFW art for free, so if that's an option y'all are interested in, feel free to drop a follow there.
This is a topic I feel very seriously about. I always said that I wouldn't leave Tumblr no matter how bad things got, but I guess I'm eating my words now. To me, the ability to create art is a quantifiable aspect of the human soul and to have it stripped down and sold for corporate use like this (specifically: without the consent of the artist for data mining and ai training) is indescribably vile.
I think that AI can be used ethically, but this? This ain't it, chief.
I'm doing my darndest to get through Mr. Malcolm's List but the fact that Theo James' character has a last name that resembles the word for a resting place for bones is really sending me.