We Should Base Our Aesthetics On This Rather Than Making Them Conform To Standards

is that a Higanbana?

I like the... pixellated? look of the textures esp on the kimono

hmm

I wonder

I think the pop culture image of fascism owes more to orientalism than actual anti fascism, like it's all focused on portraying an excessively cruel world with bizarre pageantry and weird uniforms, and never talks about how normal fascism was for the time, how nazism saw itself as the successor to the American old west or British rule in India

I’m always amazed by YA fictions ability to evoke fascist imagery for their villains to signify they are the baddies while maintaining the most fascist eugenicist politics as the entire thesis of the plot the entire time

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."

suspicious of how hololive fans convince themselves that every graduation is caused by idiosyncratic personal reasons of the vtuber in question and that the corporation doesn't have any responsibility

it's just an endless cycle of evil and malice against alienated ppl

We gotta put "not like other girls" up on a shelf until people can stop using it to disparage people expressing genuine social alienation I'm so fucking serious

Nightmarish

Wikipedia: Gheorghe Chițu

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

attr. Sang Schichuan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple

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!