Bask in the spotlight and burn, baby, burn!!!! 🔥

I feel like it's really easy to discuss your fiction work online as like, a replacement for actually working on the fiction. You can post all day about who a character is, and how they might react to stuff. But you have to actually make the character good in the book first.

This is also true of designing TTRPGs. You can talk a lot about what you're working on, the ideas for mechanics and the kinds of stories they'll tell. But you have to actually write the goddamn rules to some degree to play it.

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

Mouse Armor by Jeff De Boer

I love his stated intention behind these projects, ‘Confuse historians’.

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

made me think of this

[id: x/twitter qrt from user styloshka that says "I read a forum post about art once, that it's a product of the dialectic between the effort of the artist and the friction of the medium. You push on the thing and the thing pushes back on you, it has its own voice. The weight of a piano key, the tension of a guitar string." original post from user colleen_daves says "Don't you want to skip over the mindless drudgery that is making art?" I do six stand embroidery and break like 10 needles a day, would I prefer that activity didn't hurt my hands and make me angry? Sure. But that's what makes having the finished piece after so worth it to me."]

link

Love the you you become when you're making stuff.

You need to draw and make art or else all the images will stay in your head and you'll get sick

David Shrigley

Here’s your mid-week reminder to forgive yourself if you’ve had a crappy/tired/unproductive day/week/month/year. You are doing the best you can. Look after yourself, do what you need to do. And it doesn’t matter what time of day/week/month/year it is, it’s never too late to make a fresh start. 

To add to this, generative AI isn't an assistant for disability. Something that assists you helps you complete a task. You do the task yourself, the thing assisting you just helps you manage parts that aren't possible for you. Assisted writing could be using dictation, using a screen reader, relying on a spellchecker, typing instead of writing by hand, etc.

You aren't doing the writing yourself if you use generative AI. You're offering up a single sentence and asking a machine to steal the hard work of others so you don't have to actually write anything. The hard work you steal may well belong to people who actually need assistance with writing, and absolutely will not appreciate seeing the struggles they overcame being turned into slop for others to claim as their own.

Enjoy the creative process. Be part of the creative process. Don't become reliant on AI to the point where you can't think, create or act for yourself. This is why AI isn't an assistant. It takes independence and from you, instead of helping you realise it. It convinces you that you can't do things, instead of helping you try. It tells you to just leave it all to the machines and don't bother yourself with the fun (and struggles) of creating.

If you use generative AI, fuck you.

Generative AI generates content. That means the person using it isn't doing the work themselves. And that means it isn't a tool, it's a bypass. And it's a bypass used by lazy, entitled people who are more interested in "content" than in telling a good story. People who want headpats for being "creative" when they're so unoriginal they can't even do the work themselves.

Spellcheck, voice-to-print, screen readers, etc. aren't "AI," they're tools. They are what writers use to help capture their stories that they wrote. The writer does all the real work of creating and then uses tools to assist them in getting it down properly. Folks who try to lump it all together with shit like chatgpt are deliberately arguing in bad faith so that they can their machine-generated bullshit behind real tools that actually help.

SO TRUE

To repeat an oft seen quote:

"Why should I bother reading something you didn't bother to write?"

AI isn't 'helping' you write. It isn't 'assisting' you. It isn't some tool for disabled people. You're telling it what you want, and it's stealing words from other sources to string together a story. All you're doing is slapping your name on it to post online for back pats and high fives.

Just as an art AI isn't 'creating' that picture for you, it's stealing bits and pieces from other artists to copy and paste it together in some semblance of a (kinda sorta) cohesive image.

I'm sick of this argument that AI 'helps' new writers or artists. It doesn't. It's actually stunting your ability to USE YOUR OWN BRAIN and come up with scenarios and stories on your own. And every fic or fanart that's posted using AI just clutters up the space for those of us who write and draw each line ourselves.

We're not being "ableist". Miss me with that bullshit. We--as in, those of us who actually write and draw with our own brains--are having a hard enough time getting eyeballs on our work, so having AI created slop filling our spaces makes us testy.

We work really hard on our craft. Don't demean it by claiming your computer generated content is in any way equal.

On top of all of the above, here's another thought: If you don't want to write the story/make the art yourself, maybe writing/art isn't the right hobby for you and you should find something else to do.

Fanfic and fanart are written and created for the joy and love of it, not for clout, and the sooner you get that through your head, the better.

I read a brilliant explanation that it's the clash of two world views: consent/non-consent vs approved/sinful.

For sane people, straight, gay, polyamorous, casual relationships are on one side because all the participants consent, and there's a clear line between that and bestiality, pædophilia, or marrying a toaster, because animals, children, and appliances cannot meaningfully give consent.

To the sin-based mind, gay marriage is just as Wrong as pædophilia or bestiality because they're all sins, so if you're going to sin anyway why not fuck a sheep?

The big problem is they think we think like them. They think that people who support gay marriage are okay with child sexual abuse and are just lying about it. Until they can wrap their heads around the idea that other people don't think like them, they will continue to be hateful about it. But that kind of introspection and empathy is specifically discouraged by their parody-Christian culture.

yes, and also: a lot of folks who think queer love is sinful also think it's disgusting. They're confusing "I find both queer affection and bestiality revolting" with "queer affection and bestiality are wrong for the same reason." They FEEL the same way about them, so they assume that if you are OK with one you must be OK with the other because they're the same.

If you're using your disgust reflex instead of moral reasoning you're gonna get into these kind of troubles