No Idea What This Is Called But It Sounds Really Good

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."

people talk about AI 'spitting out' images that aren't exactly what the artist wants, but other media are the same. This is why drawings always look different than what we imagined before beginning - because the materiality of the pencil or paint is deeply altering and controlling the outcome. It's just that we're used to this, so we think a pencil drawing is wholly our own desire rather than a conflict between our vision and the material.

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.

it is unfortunate that English translations of her works are not more commonplace

甘い蜜の部屋　森茉莉 新潮社 装幀＝池田満寿夫

I'm staying subscribed to a repetitive anime channel that writes all its scripts with ai and recycles videos, out of spite for society

It's very rare that being so invested in a character's personality that you want to imagine them in a relationship is a bad thing that makes it harder to appreciate the work

It's also cool when people ship in a spirit that goes against the work's themes because it's like emotional graffiti in a positive sense, taking the characters and mixing them into a new context

I don't believe such a thing as 'not like other girls ism' exists, but nonetheless

it's absolutely true that some folks take Shipping too far and can't engage in Fandom without it, but the way others shit on it tends to reek of misogyny and not-like-the-other-girls-ism

The 'wishing star' one is such a good aesthetic in particular!

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It's the Da He Ding! Chinese ritual bronzes should be contemplated while reading Bataille on sacrifice

I was always amazed by the elaborate surrealism in ancient bronze. The examples are not limited to this famous Square Humanoid Ding (人面銅方鼎). My friend calls it "Shang era TV-set."

Animalistic motifs are common in household items and especially ritual items of the Shang and Zhou eras. However, such Janus-like vessels were rare even in those good old days.

Hunan Provincial Museum (湖南省博物館) collection.

Photo: ©老猪的碎碎念

palm trees are an interesting detail

Oriental Pub

Evillious ❤ my favourite is Capriccio Farce

Interesting: in the title of Capriccio Farce, the word being translated as 'farce' is 茶番 "Chaban" which referred originally to a specific kind of popular theatrical entertainment. The author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki witnessed these performances as a child, and described them in his writing as being very violent, with content taken from true crime cases or military history. They were performed at a Shinto shrine in his neighbourhood. However, it's possible that only the specific Chaban troupe Tanizaki saw performing had this particular, violent aesthetic.