being a manager sucks balls half the time but the cashier kids im in charge of trust me enough to dick around in front of me so ive been keeping a running list of the shit they say that makes me laugh randomly:
-"guys, is it cheating if you play fortnite with your ex" [4 seperate others, immediately]: "YES"
-"there must be like… infinite sentences"
-"bro what bro what the fuck bro what's that mean bro why'd you say that bro what" <distraught response to a girl randomly greeting him with 'hey there big boy' in an old timey transatlantic news reporter accent
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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.
you create because you're greedy.
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I truly, TRULY do not know how to say this, because the fact that I have to say it makes me feel like I am losing my grip on reality. But no, in the post-capitalistic anarchist utopia, I will not be relying on “autistic minecraft girlies” to be building inspectors because - and this may shock you - one of those occupations takes years of education in how to read and interpret hundreds of thousands of lines of regulations based on complicated math and physics that were the result of decades of tragedy and death, and the other one involves playing a children’s video game.
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Tumblr skews young, so let me just share this.
The worst thing you can do in a job is not be bad at something. It's to say you are great at something while being bad at something. If you need to improve and you're upfront that you're not the best, people will probably help or teach or explain. They will sympathize when you get put on a task you're not qualified for.
If you claim to be awesome at something when you demonstrably suck at it, all of that good will and sympathy is gone and it will not come back.
Confident is good. Stand up for yourself, know your skills.
But the other side of this is to Know your Faults.
This message brought to you by the 23yo who bragged about how he was great at X and had the best program for it, and I spent the weekend doing his job for him because he is so so bad at it, and only about 5% of what he did is salvageable.
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was rewatching fabian’s baron moment on account of it being the most delicious piece of pvp in my recent memory and ally beardsley’s growth as a player just shone through so brightly and with such clarity. after dusting off their shock they immediately asked about the nemesis ward, had enough knowledge about fellow pcs stocked to remember adaine’s ac with such like frustrated confidence and certainty, suggested to siobhan to dimension door out of adaine’s room, like. they came into this making a character with 4 dex. and now the dice deity offered to roll a check to sense if adaine was in danger. making decisions, asking questions, getting invested in the story, trying so hard with the tools they have to save characters from danger; ally beardsley is an incredible d&d player.
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