griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice

your email has found me on the fucking brink

DOECHII & LIL NAS X
at the 36th Annual GLAAD Media Awards

suddenly in the mood to be helpful. is there any kind of art advice anyone would want me to give tips about

How do you get your head to....shut up?

I have a weird fear of failure where I struggle to start things as if there will be consequences if it's not good enough

oh that’s easy! Do Bad Art!

as long as “good enough” is your goal, you will never reach it. You can’t be “good enough” because “enough” doesn’t mean anything.

My favorite advice irt Fear of Starting is from Rebecca Sugar in this QnA, where she says just start. You can’t start over if you never start, and you can always start over.

When you think about it from a publishing perspective, an artist’s comics or animations will end up in bookstores or on tv. And OF COURSE there will be mistakes and it won’t be perfect! OF COURSE that artist is going to improve over time! But that doesn’t mean their art wasn’t worth getting published, or needs to get taken down as soon as they can do it better. Sometimes your “worse” art will be perfectly acceptable, so let it be what it is!

For complimenting (and critiques!) it's really useful to go back to art 101 and learn the Elements and Principles of art. What I think most people struggle to grasp is HOW you use the Elements & Principles is a neutral thing. There's no "right or wrong" way to do it. But they ARE useful for connecting visual aspects to your personal emotional response. Being able to say "the high contrast of lights and darks in this (describing the principle used) feels eerie and uncanny (tying it to an emotional response), and I think that's really cool! (adding your own opinion, this is where you would put your compliment, or suggest a change the artist could make if they wanted to get a different response)"

HONESTLY. this is why I always come back to tumblr. I've never had tiktok, and instagram isn't fulfilling to use. I don't care nearly as much about the numbers as I do about the comments. And frankly, I never once had "gaining traction/an audience" as a goal, and maybe that's why it worked out for me? Paying attention to the comments lets me know when my art is coming across the way I want it to or not. My art is a way to communicate, and it's a skill. Communicate in the way you want, and your audience will find you.

The other answer is to become a slave to the algorithm lol. I gained the most followers on ig when I had a backlog of two years worth of art, and posted once a day for 40 days in a row. The algorithm loved that. But it is actually unhinged to expect an artist to produce art at that rate continuously. Art is not content.

The other other answer is posting fanart helps getting more eyes on your stuff. People just... don't search tags like they used to?? But bigger, trendier fandoms will have more people sharing your stuff than only posting original content will. Once people follow you for your art, they might even follow you to the next fandom you move to, or will stick around for your original stuff!

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

Why would utility prices go up because of ai?

(I am not defending the usage of generative AI/ChatGPT/Character.ai etc etc i am very much against it - I am just curious as to the correlation between using it and utility price surge please don't come at me this is a genuine question)

Happy to help.

ChatGPT uses so much energy that the US is literally reversing course on coal and gas usage to make up for it. In Santa Clara, for example, data centers used 60% of the ENTIRE CITY'S electricity.

ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it. This is FRESH WATER, which is evaporated and eventually mostly returns to the ocean, effectively removing a lot of it from our already dwindling fresh water supply on the planet. It also consumes 17 THOUSAND TIMES more electricity than the average American home.

The AI boom wastes so much electricity that we are very immediately risking US cities having to have rolling blackouts just to keep up with the energy demands, as early as NEXT YEAR

Gen AI's water usage is projected to hit 6.6 BILLION meters cubed by 2027

More AI use = more data centers = power drain on local cities = gas, electricity, and water utility prices rise because all of our resources are being funneled into a machine that makes garbage

can I pay extra to not have a pizza commissar breathing down Sara's neck

the blueberries on his lap in the new bts pics reminded me of this clip from the jenga video 🫐 he’s so sweetie pie..

officially the best line in The Odyssey

during transitory periods of your life you may hit a 'this isn't even worth it, i'm already exhausted out of my mind from the effort of bringing this about, and losing any comforts i may have had in my life before - is it even going to be better for all of this?'. that's the hater PRINCE DIOS speaking and you have to run him over with a car

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.