my issue with the argument that "disliking ai art is inherently reactionary" is that it acts like pro-ai art people are somehow less reactionary on their views on art, when like the majority of defense's of ai art as like a higher form art are indistinguishable from the arguments people use to defend the art of like. hitler
like the logic is that hitler was actually a great artist, entirely hinges on the belief that "objectively good art" is just art that looks detailed if you've never drawn before, which like why ai artists who want to prove their actual artists will just make a pretty looking building or lady, cause it's all about aesthetics i guess
like i'm not saying your a nazi if you like ai art, i just think it's silly when people act like anti-ai artist's are just hysterical luddites, and that ai artists are the ONLY people who actually care about art, when 99 percent of ai artists on twitter only care about art that's "beautiful" on an extremely superficial level.
Jacob Geller dissected the intersection of Fascism and modern art in 2020, sadly before the AI art boom, and goes into better detail than I can about how abstraction is a threat to fascist ideals. I also want to draw attention to possibly my favorite commentary on modernism.
Comic by Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter, who's made multiple comics about art and perception.
AI slop only bring repetition and lack of original idea to the table. it's an advanced form of stolen art collage. It seeks only to trace and multiply without provoking. It's the anthesis of art.
The way I explained it to my young cousin was like this:
Back before cameras, paintings were just recording reality, and that's why painters tried to be as realistic as they could, and only paint things that could exist in the world around them--objects, and people, and animals. Sometimes they did paint things from their imagination, but only to illustrate stories, like stories from their religion.
Then, cameras came along, and painters were free to paint things cameras couldn't see--things like the artist's feelings, or ideas, or thoughts, or lots of things. Some artists tried to see if they could paint from every angle at once, and we call that Cubism. Some artists tried to paint very quickly, as quickly as they could, so they could capture one single moment of the daylight, or their impression of a moment, with all the feelings light gives, and that's why we call them Impressionists. Some artists were more interested in the process of painting, like Mr Rothko; or in finding the most intense versions of a colour, like Mr Klein. Some were more interested in the spaces between things, like Mr Mondrian. But art, after cameras, could suddenly SAY something, say something by itself! And art, as it turns out, has a lot to say!
"I can do that too! I can do that!" You can, little friend! We all can!
My little cousin didn't get mad looking at modern art; she was excited, and asked her parents if she could have fancy grown-up paints, because she didn't know Art could be something she could do, could be something about expressing her feelings and ideas. This is a child who can't yet write very well, and not nearly as fast or as well as she speaks, so you have to understand something clicked for her, that she could express the complex human things inside herself with colour and shapes and images, instead of struggling to learn how to spell "melancholy" or "excited" or conjugate verbs to a degree that could encompass it.
Because words take TIME to master as an art form--I should know, I've been practising using them to express MY ideas and feelings artistically for 36-and-a-half years! Paint, however, doesn't require such mastery in order to begin expressing the artist; certainly it helps to know skills, but it isn't as required as it is with words. You can just scream and yell with paint, you can experiment more purely with images than with sounds, which after all are regimented into languages before we can begin to use them at all, let alone for the art words make.
And honestly, why are whole-ass adults not understanding that "I could make that!" should be exciting, should inspire you to go and make that! Why are you so mad? "I could make that!" Yes you can! And you get to! And you're an adult, you don't have to ask your parents to buy you paint and canvas and brushes, you can go and do that yourself and be expressing your own feelings this very afternoon! Nothing is stopping you! You don't NEED that plagiarism machine, you can do better art yourself! And nobody else in the whole world, now or in the past or in the future, is EVER going to be able to make the art YOU can make, the art YOU have inside you! So go make it!
Speaking of porn logistics, another personal favourite bit of fuckery is when an artist draws a picture containing multiple dicks, then produces a separate alt for every possible ejaculatory configuration, like there are four dicks and sixteen alts such that there's a version where only dick A is jizzing, a version where only dick B is jizzing, a version where dicks A and B but not C are jizzing, and so forth. I'm imagining some high-class dick connoisseur with exquisitely rarefied tastes out there like "yes, I want to see this character getting jizzed on, but only by the dick on the far left – the other dicks can wait their turn".
Some day I'm going to write a spy thriller where it turns out that the conspirators are sending coded messages via those E-Hentai galleries full of endless microscopically differing jizz alts, where each image contains four dicks and each dick serves as a one-bit component of a hexadecimal encoding.
Brb gotta encode national secrets into my hentai art
Hey fun facts that are fun together :
* as a reverse engineer, I have worked on extracting these sorts of arts from hentai games.
* the game art does this sort of thing so that the story can toggle between different versions. Maybe you didn't get enough Friendship Points with Tgirl Jessica, so she's not ejaculating in this picture.
* the games are often smarter about this than the galleries: instead of storing every combination of ejaculating/not-ejaculating, they store 1 base image, then separate per-dick ejaculatory overlays. So if you've got 4 dicks, this means they have 5 images instead of all 16 possibilities. But this makes no sense in an image gallery, so you have to compose the images together. You'd think all-off and all-on are the only options you need, but some people are content maximalists. (it's possible site policies regarding quotas and stuff is encouraging this behavior).
* around the same time I was working on tools to extract images from hentai games, I also was working on tools to steganographically hide files inside images, in several ways. This was in part because I was working with 4chan at the time and helping them catch files hidden inside images, because channers were turning 4chan into an arbitrary file sharing site (is it a jpeg or a neutral milk hotel album? It's both!), using it to bypass filtering/moderation (you put an image inside an image and now you can't see the internal image unless you extract it. Maybe it breaks the rules. Breaking the rules on /b/ is very bad), or hiding viruses in there (viruses that then post themselves back to 4chan and the cycle continues!)
* This is also when I worked for the US government
So all those facts put together, I'll just say that IF it turns out secret government agents were hiding confidential information encoded into the images of hentai game ejaculations galleries, then... it was me, and I did it back in 2009.
Foone Turing, the trans Ian Fleming for the digital age.
the rapid disintegration of rainbow capitalism pretty much encapsulates the problem with rainbow capitalism in the first place: it is and always was performative fair-weather allyship that evaporated in the face of any real political pressure
Problem? It was never a problem, unless you had unrealistic expectations for what it meant. It was a symptom, and a good one. — Be strategic and think about this deeper for a minute.
It was absolutely performative fair-weather allyship. But it was a bellwether that the pink dollar was worth taking over any hypothetical backlash a business might face for supporting the queers. For some, and at some times in the past, it was a reassurance that they would do business with you even if they knew you were gay, and that was a huge issue if you eg. wanted to buy a house or a car. And it helped make queerness both more visible and more normalised in society, instead of trying to sweep teh gays back into the closet.
You’re not going to get rid of cynical cash grabs so long as capitalism is around, so you might as well be clear-eyed about it and recognise that while rainbow merch is totally unreliable for actual support, it was a sign that the smart money was betting in your favour.
You can always trust a business to find a sort of middle space that's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and sit there avoiding all controversy in the absolute most craven and soulless way possible.
This means that a business is in fact a very good indicator of what's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and what counts as controversy.
Don't think of them as allies. They aren't people. They can't be. Think of them as a barometer. If the barometer is up, you've probably got sunny skies. When the barometer starts dropping, prepare for heavy weather moving in.
It’s that typical story all over again: you are a princess. You get kidnapped, some random guy saves you, and then your father gets you married to him. No. Not this Time. You have watched a million versions of the same random guy beat a demon and become your husband even though you don’t love him, so this time, you kill the demon. You kill your father, the king. It doesn’t matter to you… After all, he’s only a program in the video game that is your life.
You will stop at nothing to break this game.
Funnily enough, it’s not the kidnapping that breaks Phaedra. Oh, it’s terrifying every time–the sound of breaking glass in the dark of her bedroom, the feeling of vulnerability as blades tear into the curtain around her bed, the terror as she’s struck and thrown and tumbled over her assailant’s shoulder–but it’s not what keeps her shivering long past the story has ended.
The attack always goes quickly. The demon screams past her guards and takes her in claws and wings and flees out the window. Her captivity sometimes goes quickly, sometimes takes a while longer, sometimes lasts forever. Sometimes the demon makes her cook and clean for him. Sometimes he tries to make her fall in love with him (as if this were that type of story). Sometimes he hurts her, badly, over and over and over again.
She’s no longer afraid of pain. She’s no longer afraid of mind tricks. She’s no longer afraid of him.
She hates being saved. She hates going home. And she’s always so afraid of the moment her father announces her hand belongs to her savior.
can u see me? just checking,,
wow, for some reason, less than 4 months after she made her account, my girlfriend got silently banned off Tumblr! thats crazy!
i wonder what my black trans girlfriend did to get herself banned! oh well im sure there was a really good reason for it
enough people wrote at the staff angrily, and they actually fixed their Blatant Error! terrific!
I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently
Some types of unreliable narrator:
The Watson: is present for the event but does not have the same level of perception as protagonist
The Lemony Snicket: isn't present for the event, reconstructs the facts based on later research, can get things wrong or incomplete
The Ted Moseby: is present for the event but has romanticised and embellished their memory of it through nostalgia to an extent that you cannot fully believe it; is also prone to misremembering or outright forgetting details.
The Katniss Everdeen: is present for the event, is the protagonist, but is completely foreign to the world and out of their depth so they don't quite understand a lot of what is going on.
The Rose Quartz: is present for the event, but due to their personal agenda or feelings of shame hides and embellishes what actually happened in favour of a version that paints them in a better light.
The Big Brother: overwrites what actually happened in favour of propaganda.
The Jonathan Harker: is absolutely clueless about what is going on around them and the genre they're in so their perception of events is tinted by their own naivety.
The Goob: the narrator's own emotional bias clouds their judgement of what really happened.
The Tyler Durden: the narrator is suffering from hallucinations and doesn't realise it.
The Pi: the narrator has survived a traumatic experience and copes with it by turning it into a wonderful tale.
Any list of unreliable narrators is incomplete without mentioning Humbert Humbert, the obvious antagonist of the story whose telling of events shows how their self-serving behavior was justified in their own mind.
"Two researchers in the US and Australia have discovered important mechanisms that prevent B cells from attacking the body’s own tissues in autoimmune diseases like arthritis, lupus, and multiple sclerosis—and in the process have won a prestigious prize.
Normally, the body’s immune system protects us from viruses, bacteria, and foreign substances. However, in autoimmune diseases, the immune system starts attacking tissues in the body instead.
Researchers had long tried to discover the cause of autoimmune diseases. But, Christopher Goodnow and David Nemazee, independently of each other, adopted a new approach.
They asked why we do not all develop these diseases. Their focus was on B cells which, together with white blood cells and T cells, are the building blocks of our complex immune system.
“They have given us a new and detailed understanding of the mechanisms that normally prevent faulty B cells from attacking tissues in the body, explaining why most of us are not affected by autoimmune diseases,” says Olle Kämpe, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and chair of the Crafoord Prize committee that awarded the pair 6 million Swedish kronor ($600,000).
In recent years, physicians have started to experiment by using existing drugs to neutralize B cells for patients with severe autoimmune diseases, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, which has proven to be very effective at improving their quality of life.
Thanks to this year’s Crafoord Prize Laureates, we have gained fundamental new knowledge about what is happening in the immune system during autoimmune disease attacks.
“This also paves the way for development of new forms of therapies that eventually can cure these diseases—or might prevent them in the future,” said one professor of clinical immunology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences...
More details from the video, since the article glosses over the particulars:
"The laureates discovered what is now called B cell tolerance.
When B cells develop in the bone marrow, not all of them are perfect. To remove the faulty ones, a mechanism starts, in which defective cells are programmed to destroy themself through apoptosis.
The laureates discovered two new mechanisms that are used if some of the bad cells are left. Re-editing, where the immune system alters the combination of receptors, and anergy, that silences B cells with self-reactive receptors.
The laureates were able to demonstrate that these mechanisms sometimes fail. This means that faulty B cells can cause an attack on the body's own tissues – leading to autoimmune diseases.
Thanks to the laureate’s discoveries, doctors like Anders Bengtsson soon felt able to start treating patients with lupus, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and many other autoimmune diseases, with medicines that eradicated B cells.
Anders Bengtsson: "I'm very happy that B cells has gotten so much attention because of the laureates. I have seen my patients getting so much better and getting a better life."
Autoimmune patient: "Today, I feel very good. I really have hope in the research that it will revolutionise things and perhaps even cure it all. That’s what I want, hope for, and believe in.""
-Article via Good News Network, April 6, 2025. Video via The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, January 29, 2025.
The fact that kids nowadays want ao3 to be censored— guys. Guys. Where is your sense of adventure? When I was 12, and homeschooled, and had unlimited internet access on my second hand laptop, all I felt upon discovering ao3 was unmitigated joy. A whole platform where people can be fucking weird and post toe-curling novel-length diatribes about ANYTHING. How beautiful is that?
And then you, the reader, can just jump in and post your own weird shit? And people might comment just to say “nice job!” Or “where the fuck is the next chapter” on your 20k coffee shop FNAF AU? Bro. Them’s the little things that make the internet worth anything.
Ao3 is so beautiful. I love scrolling past indescribably disturbing descriptions. I love knowing they have a place to be posted. I love knowing that, should I feel the urge to indulge, I can do so with no repercussions.
Mi familia. Mis amigos. Por favor. Take a step back and be grateful that not every facet of creativity has been locked behind an algorithm.
quite literally me when i am lying
transcript:
woman: why are the heard and mcdonald islands, which don't export to the united states, and are quite literally inhabited by penguins -- why do they face 10% tariffs? did you use AI to generate this?
man: [extremely nervous and suspicious laughter] ehehehe..... no.....
