Realistic,* Technically Demanding Art Styles Have So Much Cultural Clout Over Other Styles That Many

A lot of people perceived her as being cringe for political reasons, but they didn't realize that all British classicists are cringe

like how Armand d'Angour did good work reconstructing Ancient Greek music, but his poetry is truly repulsive

the emily wilson odyssey discourse happening is so funny because. yeah. if you actually sit down and try to do a strict translation of most ~epic poems~ they don't sound ~epic~ at all. sometimes they sound flat out stupid, even after you're done fixing the syntax for english. this is true of pretty much every Ancient Text.

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.

Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper-development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood.

Irina Dumitrescu, "Swan, Late: The unexpected joys of adult beginner ballet."

there's something unique about Aztec images ❤ They are full of life yet schematic and precise, I want to immerse myself in this world forever

Variety of depictions of Xolotl!

one of my favourite chara designs fr all the danganronpa related games (like made by the same ppl etc) its so perfect, it has painted scary teeth and a dripping eye and a giant pin ❣

HOLY SHIT YES. MY GIRL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SHE'S SO CUTE!

:heart: decaying messy apartment blocks

This map is probably 90% done but I'm very tired of working on it

Drini, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Coyolxāuhqui

I don't believe that cultures can be better than each other, but I think it can be good to have a past culture for modern ones to organize themselves around and to inspire them

due to current circumstances the idea of art having a 'soul' and using 'soulless' as a pejorative has increased. Is it a good idea to tie creative value to this kind of mystical aura? It's not, and I don't mean that because it's supernatural but because it is exclusive and narrow.

In Ancient Egypt, they apparently believed in more than three 'souls.' Which one is blessing your art?

Will expand in a future post on the bio-essentialist and exclusionary core of the soul/soulless conflict

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."

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