#the point of art is to create stuff

[esteebarnes94]

I never really got the whole complaining about something being made that's already been done a bunch of times. Like, tropes and themes and aesthetics and all that. Because as long as it's being done respectfully and whatnot, what's the problem? Like, yeah, you're under no obligation to like, like, a 1980s-set slasher film or whatever, but I don't get all the mocking and stuff.

[sunlit-mess]

Not sure if you needed to hear this but you're a super underrated artist. Your style is incredibly snazzy and professional!

I mean... I don't really draw for prominence. Rather, I draw to create, so I don't really care much about my reputation.

BUT

That word really struck me-

[blaithnne]

This little pumpkin has been floating around my blog for a while, but she’s never had a formal introduction. So, meet Gail VanderQuack! Despite her Granny’s ruthless training, she’s a firm pacifist who refuses to fight, believing that all problems can be solved with words! She’s a sweetheart, deeply empathetic and good at making connections with others, but also a bit of a scaredy cat, and not cut out for the hardcore adventuring the rest of her family excel at.

Beakley’s always said the two girls were twin sisters, and they’ve never had any reason to beleive otherwise. But as they uncover more of FOWL’s secrets, they catch wind of a decade old secret that’s been kept from them — one of them is Beakley’s biological granddaughter, and the other is a super soldier created by FOWL. The only question remaining, is which one is which?

[thefirstknife]

Hi Bel,

I keep seeing comments about people complaining about the quality of destiny’s writing and story in the last few weeks. I haven’t really engaged with destiny since season of defiance, what’s currently gotten everyone so riled up? I thought that people were enjoying Season of the Deep/Witch in terms of narrative, why is Season of the Wish causing people to deride the destiny writing staff again?

I don't know!

Deep and Witch have been absolute bangers in every aspect to me. I've been enjoying all interactions and lore tabs we've received. A lot of them are stuff that we've never had before, a lot of reunions and closures, a lot of development and interactions between characters who you wouldn't really think would have much in common.

Sloane's return and healing from what she's been through has been fantastic, Drifter opening up with her to help her because he also got help from others was fantastic, Sloane reuniting with Aisha and Shayura brought me to tears (Shayura's descent into madness was triggered by immense trauma of Sloane staying on Titan and Titan disappearing), everything with Sloane and Zavala...

Witch was just incredible in every single way; the focus on Eris, the amount of Eris and Ikora content!!!!! Everything about Xivu and Savathun and their interactions together!! Eris finally fulfilling her goal she promised Savathun YEARS ago, getting that closure.

Wish so far has been equally great to me. All the new stuff about Ahamkara is amazing, finally giving us proof for long-standing speculation about Ahamkara and how they aren't universally evil creatures and expanding on them as a species. I love all interactions we've had so far; finally we have Petra back, Mara's singleminded focus on figuring out how to defeat the Witness and her continuous work to improve as a person, ALL SJUR MENTIONS!!!!! I won't talk about the "leak" because we have no context for it so I will wait for the full story to be revealed before I can pass judgment; something that I think should be a lesson to learn from this entire year. Maybe wait for the story to finish before judging the story.

Literally everything this past year that involves Osiris, but especially this season now that he's back in his element with the Vex. And of course every little detail we get of him and Saint. Osiris honestly shaped this year for me with everything that he's done to uncover the biggest mysteries. I think a big reason is that a lot of people just don't like Osiris, which I consider a massive skill issue.

Other than that, I don't know what are the issues people have besides just not being interested in any of these storylines and attributing it to a nebulous "bad writing" claim. I also genuinely believe that way too many people get wrapped up too much in fandom, imagine storylines they want to see and then get disappointed when the actual story doesn't go there. Almost like people forget that this isn't their story and these aren't their characters. A lot of it is also fandom completely warping characters into not what they actually are and then feeling like the canon story is the one that's wrong.

Whatever is the reason, I guess everyone is entitled to their perspective of the story and everyone is free to explore the story in different ways through fanfics and AUs and whatever. I do that too!

But I would definitely ask people to be normal with how they engage in criticism, especially in the current state of affairs. Writers are developers; they experience a ton of harassment and negativity from the community and also from inside the company. And they are online: they can see what we're saying. It's been documented that community commentary has been used to harass writers:

Imprint this into your brain and never forget what these people had to go through. Let's not forget also the way people treated Seth Dickinson on social media when he was active with Destiny fans. "Fans" were actively arguing with him about his own work (telling him that HE is wrong) and were utterly disgusting towards him when he tried explaining what he wrote. His works are now hailed as the best writing in Destiny and people want him back. If I were him, I wouldn't want to come back ngl, not with how he was treated and not with how fans are still treating writers (and hey, Seth wrote LF Collector's Edition! So he was back, technically, this year!). Let's not forget that a lot of writers are members of various marginalised groups. And I'd definitely not want to go back with zero support from leadership.

Which is also an important aspect for all developers, including writers: sometimes they have orders they may not like, but can't argue against. They do the best they can with what they're given, the time they have and directions they receive. And with that in mind, I am enjoying everything we've gotten this year, obviously with some specific complaints about things I didn't particularly enjoy (like the universally mid reception of Defiance; I've spoken about my gripes with it before, a big one being the shafting of Suraya who should've at least been mentioned in a lore tab).

I can tell that there is passion in their work, even if maybe they would prefer to do more with it, but can't. Maybe even if they want to take different routes, but can't. But from what we got, I can feel that they care about this world and these characters. I can tell that someone lovingly wrote about Sloane and her friendships with two grieving women. I can tell that they deeply cared about Sloane's friendship with Zavala and that they loved showing us Saint and Drifter caring about a fellow trauma survivor.

I can tell that the writers are immensely careful and loving towards Eris; everything she went through was crafted with love and passion from both writers and her VA. Eris' story is such a fundamental aspect of Destiny and I can tell that this was important to the writing team and that they gave her everything they could to do justice to her character and her arc and her healing and her release from the cycle she was trapped in for so long.

I can tell that there are writers who care a lot about Osiris and Saint and their relationship. I can tell that someone cared a lot about expanding on Ahamkara and giving them more personalities. I can tell that someone cared DEEPLY about Sjur and Mara and that her repeated mentions are the passionate work of writers who want us to remember her.

I could go on. And I know that not everyone sees it this way, which is fine; we all have different ways of perceiving stories. I enjoy discussing things we in the fandom disagree on and I enjoy hearing different perspectives! Unfortunately, this has recently become rarer and rarer. And for the love of god, please try and treat writers with some respect, especially now, especially those who are still working and doing their best with the shitty situation they're in. None of the cries of "poor devs" ring true to me unless the same is given to writers, instead of treating them like punching bags.

[mildcicada]

[alaraxia]

pose ref practice with vesper

[batwynn]

I’m happy to share that Sticker Club AND Honorary Sticker Club on Patreon will include special Pride-themed button pins this coming month! These are a few of the designs that will be available to vote on soon! (plus a bird watching one just for fun!🪶♥️) A reminded: Pride month means stickers and cards for every tier level! You can join now for $1 and get vote for what ships/fandoms you’d like to see an art card of for June. (Some non-pride themed options are available.)

*Sticker Club is a $15+ a month tier, that includes two stickers and a card every month, sometimes with special bonuses on celebratory months like Pride Month 👀. Honorary Sticker Club is a $10 a month tier that includes one sticker and a card every month (also with bonuses on random months!)

Link to Patreon in my pinned post!

[boopshoops]

So deadass right after i said I prolly shouldnt start another comic about TCOAV Yuu,,,, i did it. I blame the little adhd creature running on a hamster wheel in my noggin.

(Don't worry to the remaining individuals who made requests, I didn't forget about you and they're still being worked on LOL)

Uhhhh WIP???? 😳

[sweetandglovelyart]

I’m going to try and post the next page of Knightfall in Dream Land at some point this weekend, sorry again for taking so long to post comic pages but fortunately this next one is almost done! I only have like two panels left to finish for it.

I also wanted to let everybody know that comic updates might become a little more infrequent than they already are over the next few months. I’m about to start my (hopefully) final year of grad school, so I’ve got to lock in and focus on finishing and successfully defending my dissertation so I can get my PhD by next summer. I’ll still be posting and I’ll still be coming on here, I just might not be as active because I’ll be working on my dissertation, going to conferences, and also searching for jobs so I’ll have something to do when I graduate. Thank you for being patient with my slow comic updates!

[basofy]

i feel a little bad remembering how in my mother days there was this rly common perception of thinking 'well lucas would be so pessimistic after what happened and he would hate flint cuz he sucks and he would hate everything!!' and i would believe it just cuz i was still relearning a lot of things i didnt know if that was what i was supposed to think but it always felt like people who saw things this way wanted to force others to do too

[doodle17]

Can someone help me try to figure out a way to explain to my parents that 1: the chances of me getting copywrited for making fanart is pretty low, 2: that if I just make original content/oc stuff I'm probably NEVER going to get as popular as I would like and never receive ANY attention

[cryptidwithacopiccollection]

He won the poll so here u go

[bigsnorp]

imo the recent wave of "ai art is valid actually" discourse often misses the point of the reaction against ai art. And I think the reaction is often reacting against the wrong thing too.

The end product is not the problem. Like it or not, AI generated art is now a valid subset of art. It makes something that wasn't there before, usually has some purpose or intent in the process, and it makes people feel something. Hating it is still something.

El problema, como siempre, es el capitalismo. Just like that old man said.

Creating an AI model always involves training it on a dataset. The bigger the better, every single time. How do you do that? You write a program to scrape everything from whatever you point it at, and run it through various levels of processing until your AI reliably spits out something you want to see.

This is hard to do, so there is a lot of monetary value in creating one, hosting it, and offering it to others. At no point do you have to create anything of value, you just have to take what other people made and extract surplus value from it. And you do this while interacting as little as possible with the art you've used for this massive dataset, or god forbid with the artists that made it.

In return these artists get nothing, usually. Not so much as a note of acknowledgement in the readme.

Human artists can and do steal from, plagiarise, and piss off other artists all the time. But they cannot do it at the scale of AI art, nor can they completely divorce the original art from its context. Even when this is done for financial gain, it's on an entirely different level, with entirely different stakes. I'm not talking about copyright law or intellectual property, I'm talking about large scale labour devaluation and deskilling for the sake of corporate capitalism which is an inherent part of most of the AI generative art tools that are used by people today.

There's a lot of cool possibilities and interesting thought-provoking questions that have become immediately obvious with AI art and it's not in any rush to go away. I think spending hours debating the artistic merit of the end product of AI generated art is the wrong thing to focus on right now. Humans also make art that is uninspired or derivative or mass-produced and it can still be artistically valuable. Look at Duchamp's fountain, literally mass produced and likely plagiarised from another artist, and one of the most valuable pieces of modern art history we have.

It's about the scale. The decontextualisation. The capital gain for a generally uninterested company seeking to extract surplus value from the unconsenting labour. The picture that gets generated at the end is kind of the least interesting part of the discussion.

[fisheito]

hey kids! time to explain!

[lyril]

i feel like not enough people use writing fanfiction as a way to like... study and learn? outside of it being more practice and things. like sure, this is for entertainment first and foremost, but for me keeping the writing tone and characterization as accurate as i can to then transform it more into a writing style to create something good just ends up in me like, intensely studying the source material. i don't ever go off of memory i fucking break that shit down, study dialogue patterns and write down literally everything the characters i'm writing for say, observe the structure and themes and tone of whatever i'm looking at, watch and analyze things until i'm sick of them and come out a better writer because of that hands-on observation and because i simply fucking hate when other people go off of memory while writing characters i like ❤️

[pigeonstab]

By the way!!! Here's something helpful:

This video is like my bible lmao. I'm joking but a lot of the techniques they explain are ones I use in basically all my art, it's like twenty minutes long and definitely worth a watch.

(of course everything is to be taken with a grain of salt, but these guys are professional animators!! In any case it's a good resource for those who want it)