Romanticism (the Art Movement) Is The Enemy

I'm sure it was because of volcano activity, people saw fire emerging from the earth and so always had a vague idea that beneath the surface, it was hot. The Phlegraean fields, Vesuvius, Etna etc.

btw does the characterisation of christian hell being hot and underground predate modern knowledge about earth's core and magma layers? was it because people dug deep enough to notice it was hotter? did people directly attribute the eruption of volcanos to something exiting from inside the earth and therefore hell? i haven't read dante's inferno feel like that might have some answers.

We should base our aesthetics on this rather than making them conform to standards

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

The idea that gameplay is all that matters for games has been a disease on our aesthetic worldview. Mixed media is undervalued and infinitely powerful. The full potential of video games is to create maximalist sensory-rich stories and world. Please continue to make long cutscenes.

this makes me want to play the game more actually

Drini, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Coyolxāuhqui

I don't believe that cultures can be better than each other, but I think it can be good to have a past culture for modern ones to organize themselves around and to inspire them

dismantling these unspoken rules and their associated values is the most important task for online artists right now and while I have posted a lot about the AI/IP aspect I think the Constant Self-Improvement aspect is particularly damaging. People are being told they're getting 'better' but really they're just becoming homogenized into realism/specific varieties of illusionism and it's hard to break that mental restraint once you've been indoctrinated with it. The internet should be the place to dismantle these standards not recycle them

at the end of the day i think the online digital artist community has for a very long time operated on a set of like unspoken handshake rules generally enforced by social pressure which (despite being positioned on a moral & pseudolegal plane) have very little overlap with what is legal or illegal (de facto or de jure) but which have Everything to do with figuring The Artist as a universal would-be petit bourgeois auteur, reflected through these rules' emphasis on (1) the moral necessity of The Artist's unwavering & eternal power over their own art (& its reception) as articulated via informal pseudo-IP mechanisms (no reposting, dont tag as me/kin/id, dont use as your pfp, dont draw my oc), (2) the moral mandate toward Constant Self-Improvement (generally meaning adopting more of the conventional signifiers of "Good Art" eg realism) (admonition of "tracing" even for practice, artists who do things that are "not conducive to improvement" being fair game for mockery), & (3) attempting to induce in observers (often through guilt) a social pressure to further the ambitions of such artists ("you need to reblog/share, not just like", "you MUST commission 1 million artists immediately", "it's rude to express anything other than praise for any piece of art")

like these all (in tandem with SEO etc) boil down to attempting to lay the groundwork for an imagined future state of self-employment emanating out of one's (semi-)hobbyist artistry (& to obstruct anything perceived as interfering with that fantasy or its actuation). it's sort of like hiring a team of accountants on the assumption that youre going to win the lottery someday, like if it were in another context we'd effortlessly recognize it for the meritocratic grindset shit that it is. & none of this is even remotely conducive to the production of good art lmao

new Touhou game title idea

texture of ultradimensional sin

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

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 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

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