saying “i wouldn’t be a good parent” is a morally neutral statement and i’m sick of whenever i say it people replying “noo no you’d be a GREAT mother i know you would!!!” like… no! being a good parent requires a certain set of skills and traits and i know that i don’t have them and that’s a good thing!!! i think people should figure out if they would be good parents BEFORE having kids and maybe we’d have less shitty parents in the world! fuck!
recently i’ve been in the mood to change my life. I won’t be doing anything to achieve that goal but i’ll be thinking about it extensively which is the same thing
there is a huge difference between criticizing an institution and criticizing individual behavior. i can criticize the makeup industry without criticizing the 14 year old girl who uses concealer because she’s self-conscious about her acne; i can criticize the plastic surgery industry without vilifying the woman who decided to get a nose job after two decades of pointed comments and bullying. it is intellectually dishonest to respond to an institutional criticism as if it were a personal attack; on the flip side, it is cruel and unnecessary to leverage personal attacks in the name of institutional criticism
if i see one (1) more person respond to a perfectly reasonable beauty-industry-critical sentiment with “but i personally enjoy eyeshadow. why are you attacking people who like eyeshadow :(” or “exactly, all women who wear makeup are miserable and brainwashed” i am going to climb a tree and bite the top of it
Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.
No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.
We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.
Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.
And they especially are not scabs.
*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.
people love to complain about sex scenes in tv shows and violence in movies when the real danger is scenes that make you feel second hand embarrassment.
I think the best way to fight this AI shit is just to support actual creators. The cat's out of the bag with AI; our data's going to be taken and used without our consent whether we like it or not, so maybe we should put efforts into holding up those who create their own stuff. Comment/interact on people's writings and art. Make it worth them posting; make it clear that what the people are interested in isn't generated stuff, but things that people have actually done themselves. It's a drop in the ocean, but showing creators that it's them that deserve the support at least serves to cut off a tiny bit of oxygen to these AI hogs - and make a difference to creatives who are trying against hope to share with a community.
If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?
Just let that marinate for a moment.
Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.
I’m trying to remember if there is a Zukka Pacific Rim AU fanfic… I know @ash-and-starlight did a lot of incredible Zukka Pacific Rim AU art, but I don't know if a fic was made of it?
I haven’t been active in the Zukka fandom for a while, so aren’t able to rec anything written recently, sorry! 😭
I'm so glad this is an anime now and the rest of the world is enjoying literally the only time a media character represented my main interests in any way I relate to, if not possibly the only time I've ever seen a "bio nerd" ever written like we actually are, despite how many fictional settings are jam-packed with biology.