The Idea That Gameplay Is All That Matters For Games Has Been A Disease On Our Aesthetic Worldview. Mixed

is that a Higanbana?

I like the... pixellated? look of the textures esp on the kimono

forget stuff like Good Flag Bad Flag and all that discourse, the world's best flags are those banners carried by Chinese lineage/support associations that have fringed edges and writing

worst popular statement about art is 'disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed' because that basically means 'art is a weapon to dominate my enemies and help people I like" which is truly evil

the disturbing aspect of art should be something everybody experiences but which turns out to be a good thing as well as a bad thing. Let's all get struck by it like ragdolls!

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor

good dissection

"Among the loose social crowd of online artists and creative hustlers, the reaction to this new technology has been short-sighted at best. While there are legitimate grounds to criticize the way this technology fits into systems of exploitation, the arguments from the self-identified artists tend to follow a few distinct lines of thinking:

the ontological difference of human creativity / the artist's superior mind (the mild version of this take compares it to "the stupid machine", the explicitly exceptionalist and dehumanizing version compares it to other, less intelligent/imaginative humans and lazy parasites)

An ideology of arts that posits artists as uniquely more human than the masses; or that posits "creativity" as a universal right but doesn't stop to ask why only some people are allowed to make it their life's purpose, as opposed to a hobby they have limited time for.

the unalienable right for the artist to hold onto their creative output as private property, to be protected from "theft" (which in the case of AI art becomes even prospective theft, like an extension of protections against plagiarism shifting into an unconditional protection against replacement by other artists with more productive tools)

An ideology of arts that relies on the frameworks of private property and copyright, without a clear understanding of how these frameworks came to be and how much of a danger they are to both individual artists themselves and culture at large.

the displacement by more efficient AI methods of the artists' conditions of economic existence; the erosion of their market share, client pool, contract opportunities, etc. This argument is legitimate, but answers to it tend to fall back into the above reactionary pitfalls that will eventually turn against the artists that promote them, as we'll get into.

These criticisms focus entirely on the effect of the AI image generators on artists and don't really understand how they work, which is why they focus on the AI models' output and gathering of images and not on the more seedy aspects of the whole deal, which concern the labelling of the massive amounts of data they require."

really interesting concept. I feel like if you grew up in the universe where daemons were commonplace, this wouldn't feel like a big deal though. It would be as natural as saying, "we have to make sure the actor has the same face as well as the same body type of the character/historical figure."

Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.

Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?

by Hiroshige III (a student of the more famous Hiroshige).

It's extra Dai-Nippon Gothich because it's an ad for a circus performing on the grounds of the Yasukuni shrine.

realistic,* technically demanding art styles have so much cultural clout over other styles that many people feel compelled to get good at them even when there's no reason to do so. I don't think you need to be good at such things to produce powerful stylized art

*maybe 'illusionistic' would be a better term

This blog is how I get recs for new UTAUs to listen to

Sakebi is really good, I hope there are more synths out there with quirky concepts like screaming

Sakebi-chan! Managed by 狼少女21号, her voice provider (according to VocaDB) is 衣川狼.

Releasing April 2nd, 2012, Sakebi-chan is a voice bank made entirely from high pitched shouts. She's a demon, she has no known age, and her favorite thing is Girls.

There's not really a lot to go off of with ol' Sakebi, at least in English, she's just a weird little guy. Her official site is still up surprisingly, and her download link (I believe, take this with a grain of salt) was updated in 2017, but I think that might've just been because the original link was broken and so the uploader fixed it. She's also no longer on the UTAU fandom wiki for some reason?

I love her a lot, even if I don't get to use her much, her voice is very situational.

Also I just learned, Sakebi was designed by Matsuda Toki. It's a small world ig.

it's too bad to have to block people just because the 'don't recommend blog' button doesn't do anything but I WILL block just to avoid having to see stuff I dislike on feed