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
IMO vampire can mean anyone and everyone who doesn't fit into the ideology of work and employment, which includes both feudal nobility and ppl begging for money at opposite ends of the spectrum, it can be exploited or exploiters, whats important is that they do not contribute to the homogenized social order (which is basically good even for the nobility)
I know vampirism is often used as a metaphor for the drain of the aristocracy but I think it would be fun to have more vampire characters who were just some guy before they got turned. You seek out the most ancient vampire in existence and find out he was a 40 year old wheat farmer in ancient Mesopotamia when he was turned 7,000 years ago and he hasn’t been doing much since then.
Think about the difference between a classical Greco-Roman statue and a roughly carved wooden mask. The Greco-Roman statue is both realistic and idealizing, rational, and dreamlike. Apollonian. The mask is rough and emotive, messy, affecting us on some level other than our rational mind... Dionysian. Statue = Euripides, Mask = Sophocles
listened to medea today and i gotta say. nietzsche's beef with euripides is truly crazy. like. i mean antigone was a good play but medea was a really good play. seems unambiguously to be an advancement of the art form. also idk, is it really meaningfully more apollonian and less dionysian than previous works. like. i means it not clear what he means by those words basically at all (i see this everywhere glossed as like "order" vs "chaos" and.... maybe that's part of what he means? it's clearly not all of what he means. well actually what he means is "of the nature of the narrative section of the play" and "of the nature of the chorus section of the play" but what that nature is...). medea is calculating but she's clearly passionate, and i feel like the way she takes everything from everyone has a very dionysian feel, the...abandonment of care, the willfullness. idk if this is anything. the chorus IS much more pedestrian and less spooky. so. he's right there
ANYWAY i think the most parsimonious explanation is "nietzsche hates slaves, and doesnt like that theyre portrated as people in this play" (he specifically mentions the centering of slaves as a bad thing! because he thinks it makes the play more pedestrian, i guess? but idk, it throw medea's otherworldliness into sharp relief! if the volume of eveyry character is turned up, you cant hear them in the din)
It's really hard to understand what is and isn't bodily autonomy when it comes to social pressures. Do people want to alter their bodies or are they being pressured into it... but really, there is no such thing as an authentic individual self that can make these decisions free of pressure. We are social pressure, it's part of us just like our bodies
that high end literary critic who was like 'we're sorry readers! we were too elitist and have denied the value of writing with a strong PLOT' is such a sell-out mediocrity. Literary criticism and its separate aesthetic values are supposed to create a space where market standards and popularity are replaced with alternative values, and you're just going to say, 'we need to homogenize with what's popular"? Please have a little imagination and don't betray the writers who can only exist in this space!
The Paracas culture made the best art in the universe
(they are also the inspiration for a lot of the imagery in Yume Nikki)
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
another potential aesthetic source of Yume Nikki: some of the stuff in graffiti world kind of resembles paintings by Taro Okamoto