The Hidden Aspect Of This (and Something I Feel This Analysis Doesn't Get) Is That There's Something

so that I don't forget

THE LESSON OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS, OF GREEK TRAGEDY, AND ULTIMATELY, OF ALL RELIGIONS, IS THAT THERE IS AN INSTINCTIVE TENDENCY TOWARDS DIVINE INTOXICATION WHICH THE RATIONAL WORLD OF CALCULATION CANNOT BEAR.* IF YOURE LISTENING!! IF YOU EVEN CARE!!!!

*Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

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.

from the wikipedia page of Guarino Guarini. I like how in that era, their culture was about being a polymath and intellectuals were expected to speculate on so many different topics. It would be interesting if it were like that today. Athanasius Kircher must be the ultimate example of this.

Maybe 'living life as art' is a reincarnation of this ideal.

is that a Higanbana?

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

while the fact they advertized them as 'dire wolves' is inaccurate and misleading, it's not good that so many people are treating the new wolves as some kind of horrible thing due to the process by which they came into being.

I love genetically engineered species and I hope infinite numbers of them arise in the future

There is no purity in nature

Beginning sentences with "And" is a reference to Biblical Hebrew. It was used by the translators of the King James Bible because they wanted to preserve Hebrew grammatical patterns. It is unlike Latin-based grammatical rules. There's no reason not to begin sentences like this. After all, the King James Bible is very beautiful writing.

I wonder if any English-speakers began sentences with "and" before the influence of Bible translations?

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

I like to ignore the 'didacticism' of Undertale because it doesn't actually make any sense as real ethics or as an integration of ethics into the game. The genocide run's preachiness is better interpreted as campy atmospheric decoration

like, im not gonna fault you if your prerogative is making the rpg equivalent of, like, a walking simulator or whatever--that's a perfectly viable ambition. but if youre willing & able to compose a genuine challenge for that game, i think it's strange & inadvisable to limit it to (what great effort is taken to remind the player is) the Worst Route. the eclectic didacticism of that route is at odds with its actual contents--like, if you're trying to make the (agreeable!) assertion that the completionist max-stats overleveling approach trivializes & monotonizes gameplay & challenge, you probably dont then want to lock the best parts of your game behind doing that, right??

it's cool how they have a reference just for Fukiko's hair... not exactly a braid, but the component of her hair that's somewhat analogous to one. So elegant...

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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

People have noticed! My uninformed guess is that whoever is writing these is trying to like, emulate some kind of Chinese prose style that has lots of four-character phrases/proverbial allusions or something? And is using English figures of speech as an equivalent? But I can't read or speak any kind of Chinese so I don't know if that's a real feature of Chinese prose writing. It's just a vibe I get that this is a translation of something that hit different in the source language

flipping back and forth between the document i’m editing for work and the wikipedia page for cantonese opera like a kid hiding a comic book inside their textbook