IMPORTANT: TUMBLR HAS MADE A DEAL WITH MIDJOURNEY/OPENAI.
YOUR ART AND IMAGES ON TUMBLR ARE BEING USED TO TRAIN AI MODELS.
The opt-in is automatic, but you can turn it off in settings.
Go to "Blog Settings" -> "Visibility" -> "Third-Party Sharing" and turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog]". (This post shows how to do it on browser and on mobile.) You need to do this with every sideblog. (Note: The option in settings might not appear if your app hasn't updated yet. You can still opt out via browser.)
Spread the word. Everyone on Tumblr needs to know about this.
at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
going insane thinking about the harrow and palamedes friendship. harrow, who has never met another necromancer her age forming a bizarro 3D chess rivalry while pal worries about her safety at every possible turn. harrow, who is up to her eyebrows in paranoia and secrecy, trusting the sixth house with gideon unconscious and hurt, letting them into the ninth house quarters unsupervised. if “i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” is goth for i love you, “death first to vultures and scavengers” has got to be goth for i love you (platonic). pal’s first reaction when harrow comes into his bubble in the river is to scoop her up in a hug, and at this point she doesn’t remember anything about him because cutting out all her memories of gideon is impossible without cutting out memories of the sixth, but she still makes him a skelehand to inhabit anyway. when harrow’s memories are finally whole, she tells dulcinea she couldn’t face pal knowing that his pen pal girlfriend died on her account, but the next time she “faces” him, palamades’s soul is in someone else’s body and harrow’s body is full of nona’s soul. he spends six months protecting and caring for harrow’s body (and nona obv), believing in the possibility of bringing her back to it the same way cam believed in him. “god, do you know i miss harrow terribly.” and by the time harrow comes back to her body at the very end of ntn, pal is gone forever, fully pauled. the last time harrow and palamades see each other as their complete selves is in canaan house, alive and unlyctored. two of the smartest and loneliest people in the solar system meet each other in the worst of circumstances and spend the rest of the story dancing around each other as fragments of themselves, trying to care about each other in the interim but never fully meeting like they did the first time. a friendship made almost entirely of missing the other person. “do you know i miss harrow terribly.” god. i need to lie down
"Yagami Light as a youtuber would probably plagiarise" WRONG Yagami Light is insanely intelligent and looks down on literally every single other human person, he would rather stab himself in the eye than using the works of someone else - someone who can't be anything but beneath him. Pre-Death Note youtuber!Light would make long-ass videos about Everything Wrong With Society with completely unhinged takes about how xyz small innocuous thing is responsible for gang violence with numbers* to back it up.
"Light would plagiarise" get the fuck out of here.
*numbers which he completely twists to his own bias - without even knowing it because he thinks way too highly of himself
During a press conference for the newest Justice League member, Phantom, a reporter asks him "Do you have anything to say to all the children who aspire to be like you?"
Phantom looked at the reporter puzzled before saying, "Children wanna be like me? Why? I'm a bad influence."
The maths fandom is wild. “Real” and “imaginary” numbers? I think you mean canon and non-canon. You guys seriously go “this is my number oc his name is i and he is the square root of -1” when in numbers canon lore it’s actually impossible to square root a negative but sure whatever. “Complex numbers”? I think you mean a character x oc ship. “f(x) = 3x - 5”? That is self-insert fanfiction.
I decided to redraw one of my earliest Tintin fancomics! I've been drawing Tintin fanart for a bit before I started posting online.
I can imagine Tintin having a tumultuous relationship with his editor, hardly ever being in the office and having a very low rate of writing articles. Tintin's increasingly liberal politics also clash with the newspaper's conservative values. Tintin and his editor frequently argue over this but Tintin almost always wins out, as he is aware that it is his articles that sell the paper. His editor is reluctant to let go of his golden goose.
More headcanon under the Read More! It's background stuff and things about his editor.
Tintin started his journalism career at just 14, and seeing the dangerous situations he is sent into in his early stories suggests to me that whoever hired him didn't have his best interests at heart. I can imagine his editor taking advantage of Tintin's ambition and naivety, while styling himself as a sort of father figure to the newspaper he runs. I based him off of the editor we see at the very start of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets!
His editor hires him after Tintin demonstrates remarkable skills in investigative journalism, uncovering local corruption for his school paper. He takes advantage of Tintin's naivety, sending him off to various countries to write conservative propaganda pieces for the paper. He hopes Tintin will be easy to groom into a conservative pundit, but after witnessing atrocities and coming into contact with people from different walks of life, Tintin finds himself unlearning a lot of harmful beliefs he was raised with. After he earns global recognition in Tintin in America, Tintin leverages his star power to ensure less editorial interference with his work. His journey away from conservatism is kickstarted upon befriending Chang, who directly challenges a lot of his preconceptions.
Tintin stays with the paper under the misguided belief that he can steer the publication in a better direction with his influence. Deep down he also feels he owes his editor, as it was him who gave Tintin a platform and an oppurtunity to escape his situation, being raised in an orphanage and being deeply unhappy in school. His editor also frequently points out that other papers will not be as lenient with his low turnover rate of articles, and that he's lucky he's still with them.
After Tintin gets Chang a job there as his photographer, Chang ends up befriending a lot of the staff. He's one of the few non white staff members there, which causes quite the stir. While Chang is grateful for the job, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with working for them the more he learns about the paper. He tells Tintin that by staying there, he's only legitimising the publication.
Tensions at the paper start rising as political tension rises in Europe. Tintin, Chang, and a lot of staff notice their editor acting erratically and making strange demands...
I moved recently to start a new job and part of my commute now involves one of those high capacity toll booths where a two lane road suddenly flares out into 5-7 lanes of total anarchy with no lines anywhere, and then narrows back down to two lanes again, and we're just supposed to sort ourselves out? Who designed this
anyway I dreamed up this helpful anatomical guide on the drive home
okay but like. I just had the weirdest thought about that ‘don’t look I’m naked’ comic. Which is that that’s essentially the same thing Adam and Eve did after they ate the fruit of knowledge of good&evil. So I feel like the theological implications of that could kneecap Gabe if he doesn’t think V1 is a being with free will.
yeah ok. i dunno man. is this anything
((side note. this isn’t necessarily meant to be in-character or story-accurate or take place at any particular point in time, just a way to explore some Thoughts. i was also imagining more that V1’s words aren't actually spoken, more like Gabriel’s more articulate interpretation of whatever garbled mechanical noise V1 is using to communicate. I think an angel could do that.))
“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.
“Inexplicable, Warden.”
“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”
“Indubitable, Warden.”
“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”
Today, my 15 day hunger strike is officially over. The solidarity and strength I feel is incredibly powerful and overwhelming. I can’t even properly put into words how fulfilling these past 2 weeks have been. I appreciate everyone who donated to Anera in honour of my hunger strike, and my friends who participated in solidarity.
My time off tumblr was freeing, though learning of all the hate campaigns for me and my friends and now receiving conspiracy theories about the people in my life has left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m grateful to have this platform so I can do everything in my power to help Palestine, but it’s hard for me to not become angry every time I log in to this site and there is less focus on Palestine and more focus on hate. It has become obvious there are some people who follow me because they want to learn about and help Palestine, but even more people who are only here to speculate on my personal life and view me as a fictional character.
I love and appreciate the Palestinian community I have found on tumblr, but it feels like now the site has turned into all of us having to always do everything we possibly can to get people to focus on Palestine while everyone else can use our efforts for performative reasons. It is not something I want to be a part of, and it does not make me feel good. The past 15 days have given me the clarity to see all of this for what it is, and so for the time being, I am going to continue to focus on the activism I can do in person, and more selectively use this blog to bring attention to gofundmes and resources. I hope this comes across as genuine as I feel right now, and helps some of you see how exploitative this website has become for Palestinians.
Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will