It's A Strange Spectacle To See How Much The Community Around Skeptical Inquirer Cares About Issues Of

Although the 3d Yume Nikki never looked interesting to me, this entity (Wrapi/Warpie) does. Maybe because it's not a reproduction of something from the original game, it can be appreciated by itself. It's good!

I'm still afraid of them

Panic

another potential aesthetic source of Yume Nikki: some of the stuff in graffiti world kind of resembles paintings by Taro Okamoto

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

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.

I think if you clear away all the cultural bias/normalization caused by living under copyright you can see that legally forcing someone to not write about other peoples' fictional characters is a violation of artistic freedom on the same level as state censorship

Post/782177006889697280/i-think-artists-not-wanting-our-work-to-be-fed-to

This is absolutely a correct statement if it was just about personal remixes, but the context here is about businesses using other people's work without permission. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're allowed to remix it yourself. If a company has the means to use someone's work in a for-profit venture, then they have the means to pay someone for the product of their labour. These companies don't even use other people's IP in a novel way that bends IP law to create something that contributes to culture; the loss of culture if sellers of Redbubble t-shirts couldn't just take pictures from the internet and sell them for 40 bucks anymore would be negligible compared to, say, losing Lasgna Cat alone would be.

its already illegal for redbubble sellers to do that though. thats already not allowed. like thats already literally a copyright violation under current copyright law and guess what: because random people posting their fanart online don't have the money to afford a corporate lawyer, it just keeps happening and will keep happening, because copyright law never has and never will defended anyone but the wealthy. like this fantasy of your art as a Small Artist being protected by copyright law is just that, a fantasy, it doesn't happen and will never happen. you are completely detached from reality!

I hate all those youtube videos called like "This book is the worst" and they have some ooc suggestive or risky quotes on the thumbnail next to an npc loser affecting a shocked expression. It's so evil.

Please don't promote the idea that weird or explicit lines are a serious flaw in books

the framing of generative ai as "theft" in popular discourse has really set us back so far like not only should we not consider copyright infringement theft we shouldn't even consider generative ai copyright infringement

This is extremely important

I can't remember what part of Homestuck deals with this though

My take: it is nevertheless okay to be afraid of sludge. Just because it's connected to life doesn't mean it's wrong to be disgusted, it's just part of the experience... don't feel bad about feeling repulsed by the universe and life itself

i feel like a lot of fiction forgets (or purposefully ignores) the fact life is intrinsically, inextricably linked to *filth*

to *garbage*

shit gets *gross* and if you clean it it will quickly get gross again regardless

the total absence of the disgusting is uncanny

don't be afraid of the sludge

(works that understand this include discworld, significant parts of 40k, blame!, and homestuck, as well as the undisputed king of grime and sludge; dorohedoro. dorohedoro *fucks* absolutely)

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.