Aesthetically I Am On The Side Of 'slop' Will Elaborate Later

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 don't actually enjoy arguing, but seeing an opinion I really disagree with in text feels sort of overpowering and makes me want to carve out a space against it. Like in a response comment. Maybe it isnt such a good idea

tech cynicism is always bad and authoritarian

let's change our species into something synthetic and genetically engineered

I am not a particularly techno-optimistic person or a futurist or singularity believer or anything like that, but I think it kinda sucks that a lot of people in reacting to the nebulous threat of “the tech bros” have let themselves be negatively polarized against pretty straightforwardly correct ideas like “bodily autonomy and assistive technology is cool” (that is, fundamentally, the spirit that motivates transhumanism) and “death is scary and tragic.” One of the oldest extant works of human literature is largely about how awful mortality is and how hard it is to come to terms with death; it is in fact an incredibly common sentiment throughout history, and just because some people you know who really suck are also scared of dying doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

in the endless battle between aesthetic reactionaries and consumer slop nobody will ever win

dismantling these unspoken rules and their associated values is the most important task for online artists right now and while I have posted a lot about the AI/IP aspect I think the Constant Self-Improvement aspect is particularly damaging. People are being told they're getting 'better' but really they're just becoming homogenized into realism/specific varieties of illusionism and it's hard to break that mental restraint once you've been indoctrinated with it. The internet should be the place to dismantle these standards not recycle them

at the end of the day i think the online digital artist community has for a very long time operated on a set of like unspoken handshake rules generally enforced by social pressure which (despite being positioned on a moral & pseudolegal plane) have very little overlap with what is legal or illegal (de facto or de jure) but which have Everything to do with figuring The Artist as a universal would-be petit bourgeois auteur, reflected through these rules' emphasis on (1) the moral necessity of The Artist's unwavering & eternal power over their own art (& its reception) as articulated via informal pseudo-IP mechanisms (no reposting, dont tag as me/kin/id, dont use as your pfp, dont draw my oc), (2) the moral mandate toward Constant Self-Improvement (generally meaning adopting more of the conventional signifiers of "Good Art" eg realism) (admonition of "tracing" even for practice, artists who do things that are "not conducive to improvement" being fair game for mockery), & (3) attempting to induce in observers (often through guilt) a social pressure to further the ambitions of such artists ("you need to reblog/share, not just like", "you MUST commission 1 million artists immediately", "it's rude to express anything other than praise for any piece of art")

like these all (in tandem with SEO etc) boil down to attempting to lay the groundwork for an imagined future state of self-employment emanating out of one's (semi-)hobbyist artistry (& to obstruct anything perceived as interfering with that fantasy or its actuation). it's sort of like hiring a team of accountants on the assumption that youre going to win the lottery someday, like if it were in another context we'd effortlessly recognize it for the meritocratic grindset shit that it is. & none of this is even remotely conducive to the production of good art lmao

it was illuminating to be in Japan and see how this side of Ghibli is much more prominent over there.

I don't hate their creative works, but I hate how they are held on a pedestal above other anime, and seen as superior, more 'wholesome...'

I hope other things become more popular

I feel as if studio ghibli films being reduced to their 'cozyness' would be tragic if not for the fact that it is a deliberate branding thing for them. from the ghibli museum to the revolving door of hot topic collabs, miyazaki and/or the people he puts in charge of these things are aware of how desirable the worlds within ghibli films are. even at that, how meaningful is the politics of howl's moving castle being motivated by miyazaki's outrage at the 2003 iraq invasion when you examine it alongside the actual text of the wind rises? what does the environmentalism of ponyo mean when faced with the massive amounts of waste generated by ghibli merch you can get at wal mart? i'm straying from the point here but

this was an officially licensed product that was released to promote grave of fireflies

It's a strange spectacle to see how much the community around skeptical inquirer cares about issues of little relevance to culture or power structures

Some people defend this kind of rationalist ideology by talking about, say, anti-superstition activists in India, but those people are admirable for the specific reason that they are undermining hierarchical power structures

A Western skeptic getting angry about Americans venerating ghosts with offerings --- that's not subversive, and it's worthy of contempt!

im so glad ZUN is cool and not a reactionary! Massive festival should be thrown

alright. people on bluesky are getting upset that ZUN apparently AI-generated a Background for the latest Touhou game. I'm officially on the "Oh my god who cares" side of the "AI" debate

A lot of people use art as a way to express emotions but I think it's important to not let emotional expression become just a new standard of authenticity. Express your feelings if you want to. You can also just make shapeless forms and that's okay too.

there's someone on Wikipedia who writes articles about Cantonese opera but constantly names paragraphs after generic figures of speech. For example, they titled a paragraph about the economic threats facing the opera as "All for Naught."

Here's an example from the article on the actor Yam Kim-fai (who is really good, btw):

I wonder if this is translated from Cantonese... maybe the original sounded very poetic