yafaemi

[yafaemi]

Came back to tell you something important

I love G’raha

Ok. Bye

[yafaemi]

I keep forgetting that I have a tumblr

[yafaemi]

at this stage i think its good to say, and i direct this to all of the trans women on this site:

you are loved. you are appreciated. your presence is valued.

ppl can do all they can to invalidate you, to drag you through the grime and do their best to make you nothing. and they can fucking try.

but it won't change the fact that we care about you. i care about you. and i appreciate you taking the effort to stick around in this world, especially as things turn awful.

big ass hugs for you girls.

we're still here 💙

[yafaemi]

pull HIM in closer by his waist

[yafaemi]

bury me not on the lone prairie

[yafaemi]

hang on I’m trying to see something

don’t tell me the name of your pet, just tell me in the tags the name you call them that’s got nothing to do with their actual name

[yafaemi]

People are still interacting with that g'raha post... truly I have found my target audience

[yafaemi]

I leave tumblr alone for a few days.

I come back.

7 new bots have started following me.

I block them.

I leave.

The cycle repeats.

[yafaemi]

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

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

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

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

and i'd still keep writing.

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

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

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

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

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

you create because you're greedy.

[yafaemi]

what the fuck is this godawful change to the dash

[yafaemi]

Actually I just had an idea. Why would I not just.. drop it here.

Hi hey hello did anyone here perhaps want a refer-a-friend thing for Palia? I'm kinda trying to find more people to get 5/5, so I'm trying all the places I can think of :')

Feel free to DM me here or on discord if you want a link, mutuals or not! My discord is Niniha. Just please specify that you're there from tumblr if you go the discord route, for my sake ^-^

[yafaemi]

Hi hey hello did anyone here perhaps want a refer-a-friend thing for Palia? I'm kinda trying to find more people to get 5/5, so I'm trying all the places I can think of :')

Feel free to DM me here or on discord if you want a link, mutuals or not! My discord is Niniha. Just please specify that you're there from tumblr if you go the discord route, for my sake ^-^

[yafaemi]

Mr Reth you are everything to me

[yafaemi]

The sad realisation that you're not actually a quiet person, you have just been forced and shamed into hiding your entire personality and expressing joy.

[yafaemi]

Honestly I feel like you guys get off easy. You don’t have to listen to me bitch about Nini and how difficult it is to try and fix mods for her

[yafaemi]

This just in: Local Warrior of Light spotted pspspsing at a toad, more at 11

[yafaemi]

Every time I come back here I get jumpscared by more people interacting with my little G’raha post—