Latest Posts by tragictaleofshikyou - Page 2

I'm the Daijou-Daijin of cringe

make ugly art. NOWWWW

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor

Romanticism (the art movement) is the enemy

The food post reminded me of when I was watching a stream that fredrik knudsen was on and he was talking about the juicero and then went on this rant about how the tech CEOs want to take the humanity out of your life but used making food as an example and how tech CEOs didn't understand the joy of making your own food and how only "tech bros" would enjoy the concept of instant meal pills and it felt like I was listening to a space alien talk. I dunno maybe if you're a youtube essayist who sets your own schedule you take joy in making your own meals but when you're coming home tired from work at 8PM sometimes gas station hot bar food is what you go for rather than making your own meal. Like hell yeah sometimes I would in fact like a pill that could act as every meal. Baffling 'to toil is to be human' moment!

i hate to tell people this but i would love instant meal pills. and i'm a very talented home chef and i love cooking (it's the only thing i will suffer through my arthritis to force myself to do nowadays).

it's perfect

yoru

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.

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

hmm

I wonder

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

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."

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.

another universe with different laws of physics

precure deep fried

I haven;t seen the show so I dont have an opinion on the tierlist, but it looks aesthetic doesn't it?

the interview with Mamoru Oshii about his attempt to work with Miyazaki and Takahata is quite illuminating, and it even contextualizes their personalities/politics with the anpo protests

genuinely starting to feel myself getting angry at people constantly invoking the miyazaki "i feel as if it is an insult to life itself" quote because if you watch the context of that video he's actually (as he usually is) just being a horrifically misanthropic asshole to his underlings and putting them down while they are trying to show him their procedural animation project that they are excited about the progress on.

we really do not need to hand it to hayao miyazaki, like, ever. he is a horrifically bad person. if you want to blackpill yourself go read about his relationship with his son if you don't know already. we really do not need to put this guy on a pedestal, go elevate the opinions of the other ghibli animators in the credits instead of him.

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...

it's time to research whether or not finding out that a transphobic person liked one of your posts and then failing to respond by blocking them will cause you to be infected by their spiritual contamination/miasma, ultimately resulting in you being sent to the preta realm where all the rivers flow with sewage

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!

Tokyo Babylon 3. Those three girls saying corrupted mantras through the phone line... It was a good story, but I think the way they said 'I'm special' was too contrived, just for the sake of making them seem more absurd.

From a strictly ethical perspective, I think Seishiro's speech about the significance of everyday life is repulsive and evil. Maybe there were societies where an ordinary life was good, but in our times, ordinary life is not good and celebrating it means you celebrate rot and moral corruption

chuunibyou belief has a pure, radiant core even if it sometimes manifests badly

only 70s era Tadanori Yokoo can hit the same feel as Gustave Moreau

realistic,* technically demanding art styles have so much cultural clout over other styles that many people feel compelled to get good at them even when there's no reason to do so. I don't think you need to be good at such things to produce powerful stylized art

*maybe 'illusionistic' would be a better term

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

:heart: decaying messy apartment blocks

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

I learned about it through Undertale. When Undertale was popular, I was part of the fanbase and wanted to discover similar games, so I researched its influences. This lead to discovering Uboa, and etc.

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."

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!

worst popular statement about art is 'disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed' because that basically means 'art is a weapon to dominate my enemies and help people I like" which is truly evil

the disturbing aspect of art should be something everybody experiences but which turns out to be a good thing as well as a bad thing. Let's all get struck by it like ragdolls!

I thought it over and I now think this is very unlikely to be the reason the person said nao instead of nou

obviously a lot of ink has been spilled on how prefacing statements with "I'm not even gonna TRY to pronounce that!" is way worse than just. trying and getting it wrong

but what really bothers me is when people mispronounce something very badly even though it's written using a phonetic alphabet

This is weird, but "Tong Nao" is actually a pretty accurate Chinese pronunciation of the name. The game is called "Tonnou" in Japanese, and the characters would be read as "Dongnao" in Mandarin. It seems like the publishers of this game picked a strange hybrid romanization meant to look as exotic as possible, that mixes aspects of Japanese and Chinese. I don't blame this person for trying to pronounce it as if it was Chinese.

obviously a lot of ink has been spilled on how prefacing statements with "I'm not even gonna TRY to pronounce that!" is way worse than just. trying and getting it wrong

but what really bothers me is when people mispronounce something very badly even though it's written using a phonetic alphabet

this implies that the redditor in question thinks only the Bach-style wigs are stupid and the Mozart-style wigs are actually cool

later i saw a post on reddit that said “the difference between baroque and classical music is whether it was composed by someone wearing a stupid wig”