This Is Weird, But "Tong Nao" Is Actually A Pretty Accurate Chinese Pronunciation Of The Name. The Game

You can trace an ideological lineage from Tezuka to Miyazaki, where both promote a kind of 'pacifism' which is at its core conservative and hostile to the idea of fighting against real evil. Thinking specifically of Tezuka's "Buddha" series here

My hot take is that I feel like “ghibli films are pro Japanese imperialism” is a lazy jab that grabs at a few soft spots in the oeuvre to make the cheapest most rhetorically damaging shot it can, and that an honest analysis would generally struggle to say even the most problematic of the movies like The Wind Rises come out of the wash with a positive opinion of imperial Japan. My hotter take is that if you rigorously pull at the threads where the nominally anti-war films thematically collapse, you’ll find the issue isn’t a support of Japanese Imperialism but a lack of a rigorous critique of industrial civilization.

Aesthetically I am on the side of 'slop' will elaborate later

the flood of sludge and corrosion, Ten Thousand Years.

When I saw that Minae Mizumura had written "Art is not democratic. Art is Sublime," I suddenly thought about how remarkable it is that such an opinion is shared by those with egalitarian political values. This does not apply to Mizumura herself, because I don't know what her specific opinions are. Still, it's common to meet liberals with humanist attitudes who have this kind of cognitive dissonance between their politics and their aesthetics.

I don't believe you can truly oppose hierarchical social relations without cultivating a deep contempt for the concept of a literary canon and the ideology of 'classics.'

Mizumura speaks of certain market trends in mass media -- which are difficult to talk to without a separate post -- as representing the opposite of true literary merit, and I agree. I hope that a popular trend based on mass participation emerges and totally vapourizes the world of literature that lingers on from the past.

Perhaps it will be one of those medieval hysteria plagues that made everyone dance...

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??

the thing I actually hate abt AI art is not that it has no creative intent behind it (that's not necessary for art imo) or that it trains on ppls stuff (I don't like intellectual property) but that it has a tendency to homogenize everything and present us with what we already expect, reinforce really stupid stereotypes etc. This can be illustrated with how in Minecraft AI it never lets you get to an interesting new world like the Nether and always takes you back to the familiar overworld

If only there was a technology that wasn't predictive, but actively hostile and gave us the opposite of what we expected...

also, this kind of tautology prevents you from being able to have insight or perceive new aspects of the world. "art is what they put in galleries" is directly limiting you to your own cultural preconceptions and refusing to imagine them being totally wrong. If you have this attitude, you can't say stuff like 'wild bee hives/termite mounds are art because they have secret aspects that are not for practical use' (I just made that up) because they aren't in galleries or made by artists

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

I'm still afraid of them

Panic

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

The Nebra Sky Disk is actually like an emote!

This was made by Ranier Zenz for Wikimedia

suspicious of how hololive fans convince themselves that every graduation is caused by idiosyncratic personal reasons of the vtuber in question and that the corporation doesn't have any responsibility