Somehow, It Looks Like A Beautiful World, All Those Thin Landforms Surrounded By Sea

Nightmarish

Wikipedia: Gheorghe Chițu

while I don't have a total solution for this kind of thing, I believe that bad working practices are usually tied to aspects of the final work that I don't care much about -- visual polish, technical achievement, etc. so I feel optimistic that there is no contradiction between what is truly good and what is good for the creators' work lives

I think when collaborating, a small number of people can go to extreme effort and push at the boundaries of what is possible, but this is not a workplace and shouldn't be done when money and power is corrupting everything

don't care to comment on the AI controversy du jour except to briefly remark on labour practices in Studio Ghibli, so far as I know about them - it's complicated lol. they are infamously demanding employers (c.f. Oshii's Kremlin quote) and it's quite likely the workload at the studio during Princess Mononoke and Takahata's abusive treatment killed Yoshifumi Kondō before he could direct a movie, but also so far as I understand they're moderately less bad on the 'ludicrously shit pay and no job security' norm of the rest of the anime industry, traditionally keeping mostly permanent employees rather than relying on freelancers.

they also do tend to attract some of the absolute best people in the industry on a technical level, and notably they've been a recurring home for brilliant idiosyncratic artists like Shinya Ohira whose work wouldn't easily fit into the standard pipeline. there's a reason a lot of animators see working at ghibli as a high aspiration and it's not just the fame of miyazaki's work. of course, Ghibli as experienced by famous animators like Yoshinori Kanada or Shinya Ohira might be a different experience than Ghibli as experienced at the lower rungs.

still, I think animation at large, as a heavily passion-driven creative industry, has a really warped relationship with overwork - there's a kind of 'that sucks but also you gotta respect the results tho' sentiment that goes way, way beyond ghibli or even the anime industry. it's sacrifice logic. to claim you sacrificed x hundred hours on a piece is to claim that piece was worth more than anything else you would have done for those x hundred hours, and to claim the role of the madly passionate artist who puts it all into their work. notably the myth of Miyazaki himself focuses on how intensely he works on his projects, from the thousands of pieces he did at university right through to his elaborate storyboards and micromanaging style as a director.

don't quite know the way through that, tbh. I'm no more immune to that romance than the next sakubuta.

Kubinashi ouryou to shikyou amanojaku

Kubi-oke kaese, hai, hai, hai, HAI!　

首無しおうりょうと死凶天邪鬼、くびおけかえせ！はい、はい、はい、ハイ！

theyre letting me crawl out of the grave tomorrow

hmm

I wonder

❣Malice Mizer❣

the hazy sepia, like another world...

Thinking about how a lot of the cultural-political worldbuilding in His Dark Materials might not even be true because it's filtered through the perspectives of biased characters. Things like, do the Northern Tartars actually form a distinct group, or is it just an abstract term the European characters use for a collection of peoples they don't fully understand? It doesn't seem like the Yenisei Pakhtars are connected at all to the Tartars attacking Muscovy. I feel the same way about the description of the insect automata as "Afric." The worldbuilding is full of ironic exoticism and we are never given a 100% objective look at how things work

IMO vampire can mean anyone and everyone who doesn't fit into the ideology of work and employment, which includes both feudal nobility and ppl begging for money at opposite ends of the spectrum, it can be exploited or exploiters, whats important is that they do not contribute to the homogenized social order (which is basically good even for the nobility)

I know vampirism is often used as a metaphor for the drain of the aristocracy but I think it would be fun to have more vampire characters who were just some guy before they got turned. You seek out the most ancient vampire in existence and find out he was a 40 year old wheat farmer in ancient Mesopotamia when he was turned 7,000 years ago and he hasn’t been doing much since then.

Always be sus of ideas that confuse the value of art with technical skill, talent, or hard work. There's a reason people used to think of it as 'divine inspiration' -- artistic success, is mysterious, arbitrary, and about getting possessed by supernatural organisms

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.

people who try to turn being 'weird' into just another way of being virtuous don't really understand what they're doing. Being a social outcast will always mean being in a category that includes perpetrators of evil.