Tumgik
#andy serkis is amazing
sincericida · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
ANDREW GARFIELD
went to see "American Ullster" last week.
17 notes · View notes
frmulcahy · 9 months
Text
So I watched Little Dorrit the other day and whilst the entire cast was excellent and absolutely Stacked I gotta say Andy Serkis puts his whole pussy into every role of his. The man said I’m going to play the most villain to ever villain with his fantastic hair and lil earring and insane French accent.
16 notes · View notes
flourmelon · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
03.03.2024
🌋💍🧝‍♂️🗡️🏞️
3 notes · View notes
starwarstrack23 · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
42 notes · View notes
Text
OKAY, so I just posted the masterlist for "Bringin' Home the Rain". 😬
I'm planning on posting the first chapter tonight (I had wanted to post it last night but I was, and still am, dealing with STUPID CAR issues, so that didn't end up happening) .
It also has now gone from four to five chapters, because chapter one was getting a bit unwieldy and I didn't want to the throw out a wall of text for the first chapter of the first fic I've written in *counts on fingers* 18 years?? 🙃 And since I'm not sure how the long the rest of the chapters will end up being, I figured I'd ease into it.
As mentioned we start off smut-free, but don't worry, we'll get there. 😉 I will hopefully have chapter two up this weekend, and then after that, uhhhh, we'll see!
My brain realizing that I'm actually doing this:
Tumblr media
7 notes · View notes
infinitemovielist · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
14 notes · View notes
themonopolyhat · 1 year
Text
broke: kelleran beq/jar jar binks (v.a. ship)
woke: snoke/jar jar binks (mocap ship)
bespoke: kelleran beq/kino loy (nocap ship)
bedazzled: lando calrissian/kelleran beq (cape ship)
0 notes
mementomoreeyes · 2 years
Text
this is ur guyss warning before i start acting real normal abt the batman 2022
0 notes
icallhimjoey · 10 months
Text
panel things!
coming into the series as a newbie and into the fandom was extraordinary and insane, changed his life
he finds himself in situations now that leave him overwhelmed
when asked about the physicality of her performance, joe joked grace broke her arms for real as chrissy
joe wasnt given any homework from the duffers for his part, said he maybe pulled some 80s inspo from the breakfast club
he doesnt play dnd, only played it once because he had to for the netflix thing and had to pretend to know what he was doing
joe doesn't know what animal crossing is
he hasnt really played guitar since the show
doesnt have much time for hobbies, said he still cooks
grace said she binge watches indian matchmaking on netflix and joe joked that he was going to watch that too now
he said a lot has changed for him but at the same time not much has changed at all, is glad he gets to travel and work more
joked he was furious when he found out eddie was gonna die
grace said she liked dying because she'd never done it before, then gave joe a look (bc he fucking dies in everything)
said the kas theory sounds amazing and that he doesnt know if its gonna happen
when asked if he could play any person in history, who would he pick, he let the audience decide because he didnt know - they went with RDJ or Heath Ledger
if he could be a magician in a movie, he'd be david blaine
he said it’s moving to hear how these characters have changed peoples lives
if joe could talk to his future self, he'd ask how it's all going
if joe could talk to his 16 year-old self, he'd tell him to go to bed and do his homework
in the ST5 scripts, it was always master of puppets (never another song), like his death, no discussion
joe talked about hanging out with his cast-members and mason coming up with fun things to do, like going to the aquarium together
joe was asked 'american or european dr pepper' and he said ?? there's a difference?
joe met andy serkis and had sushi with him, said he’s great, no big deal
grace said joe would be a great paul newman - joe said, no he wouldnt
he kept rubbing the mic on his mouth
joe's not a starwars nerd
but he met darth vader and thought that was cool
first piece of media that inspired joe is disney's animated alice in wonderland, said he loved that film when he was younger
(xoxo to @jo-harrington once more who fed me live updates all throughout the full panel!)
324 notes · View notes
sincericida · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
ANDREW GARFIELD, Claire Foy & Andy Serkis - Hollywood Reporter Portrait Studio at TIFF17 | September 2017.
43 notes · View notes
dancerinthestorm · 7 months
Text
Fic Recs: "Didn't see that one coming" edition...
I've been wanting to start collecting my all time favorite stories in ages but never knew where to start, there are just too many talented souls out there. A lazy day of re-reading favorites makes me want to finally give it a try though.
Featuring today: stories that defy my usual hunting patterns but still became all time favourites against all odds. Stories leaving me utterly gobsmacked thinking "That was so, soo awsome... but how on earth did I end up in this fandom / character / trope tag of all places?".
@messy-insomniac-bookgirl Let's be honest: this writer is the spirit animal of this specific selection. Never heard of the fandom? Dislike the protagonist with a passion? Doesn't matter: she writes it, I devour and love it. The reason? Dense and hugely rewarding story-telling, perfect pacing, side characters you want to adopt on the spot, delicious slow burns with sooo much yearning. And, most importantly, the awesome female OCs. I am in love with each and every one of them, regardless who they share a screen with. It's almost impossible to select just one story for this list but let's go for "Keep Calm and Buckle Up" (AO3) for suddenly making me feel things when Steve Rogers entered the stage in "Infinity War". Steve Rogers x OFC, James "Bucky" Barnes x OFC, Steve x Bucky x OFC. Action, slow burn, emotional roller coaster rides. Rated E.
@batsingotham "Written in the stars" (AO3) I don't do Soul Mate AUs. I don't do Robert Pattinson characters. For me the best things about "The Batman" were Andy Serkis' Alfred and 3 hours of Niravana in a loop. But the undisputed goddess queen of slow burn domestic fluff overruled all of that. Bruce Wayne/Reader. Soulmate AU. Dorks in love. Bruce needs a hug and Alfred has the patience of a saint. Rated M.
"Sweet Conversations" by @glassgulls Lord of the Rings has been living in my head rent free ever since I was a teenager but I simply don't do Elves. Period. Yes, Glorfindel is very cool and Lee Pace's Thranduil is an absolute vision (the costumes, the voice and the make up, mind you, don't get me started on any other aspect of the Hobbit movies though...) but otherwise? Thanks but no thanks. Nevertheless: the award for best fictional kiss I’ve come across in ages goes to this gem. Amazing scene setting and character work for something so short. Leaves you weak-kneed and high as a kite on serotonin for the rest of the day. Haldir/Reader. One-shot. Rated M.
„Ownership of Mine“ by @amywritesthings . Okay, lets be honest, peeps: Prison settings for a romance story? Seriously? Who in their right mind would be able to think about romance and seduction when all of your freedom is taken away, you are crammed into a small and dark space with people of questionable character and put under constant surveilance. Well… apparently I can… with this story. Even if that tag is a big red NO GO sign for me otherwise. Amazingly dense story telling and atmosphere building in just 3 short chapters. Kino Loy/Reader. Rated E.
„Directions“ by @zinzinina . Probably a sure sign that I am getting too old for all of this but tags about age gaps, first love or first times usually make me run for the hills. Add a character like Poe Dameron (I mean: come on! Howww…?!) to the mix and there is not enough willing suspension of disbelieve in the world to get me immersed in the plot. Or so I thought. Unwisely. Until this beauty came along. Poe Dameron/Reader. Rated E.
48 notes · View notes
a-reader-and-a-writer · 5 months
Note
Yes to that comic version of Bruce! 👏 (what did you think of the bale batman and battinson?) Jensen is a bloody good actor but I just can't process him as the bat I look at him and my brain just says 💗soft💗 I liked the bale batman- although I can't see him as batdad but I can somehow see battinson trying to parent lol Jon Bernthal would make a killer batman for sure. I find it soo hard to fancast and I always end up changing my mind
Who is your Alfred? I love Michael Caine Alfred and I quite liked the Alfred from the Gotham TV series
I can't unsee Brenton Thwaites as Nightwing like in my mind the way Hugh Jackman shall forever be Wolverine and Ian McKellen is forever Gandalf, Brenton Thwaites is now my forever Nightwing. I really really want a Nightwing movie so bad. Have you seen the YouTube Nightwing series?
I've never heard of Tanner Buchanan before, but yo the green eyes sealed the deal there 💚 I find Jason the hardest to cast tbh
Griffin Gluck!! Have you seen locke and key? that's the only thing I've seen him in, Felix Mallard was in it too, I can sometimes envision Felix as Jason sometimes not, I've not seen a fancast before that has made me be like yes that is 100% Jason, I liked the hbo titans version of Jason but only as the hbo titans Jason if that even makes sense, little dude did so good in that role 👏 but anyways sorry for the Jason tangent lol !Griffin Gluck Tim Drake hell yeah! This is partly crack partly not but mostly crack but I can somewhat see Rebal D as Tim Drake the energy in his YouTube videos is at times very Tim to me
I wish dc would even just make a short mini movie, like 15 mins long, about Bruce trying to be a responsible father and damian just being damian 🤣
I know the ages for this arent right but oh well lol, I think I'd fancast Chance Perdomo as Duke, Emma Stone as Steph and Violet Orlandi as Cass, for the life of me I can't come up with anyone for Babara? (I love Violet as Cass, she's not even an actress but she could sooo do it)
Thanks for giving your fancast!! And 10 000% yes to the Wayne Family Adventures it's so perfect, I need to start reading that again. But yeah if you have anymore casting ideas for the batfam or villians etc I'd looovee to hear!
Hi anon!!! This is an AMAZING ask!!! Thank you so incredibly much for taking the time to send it! 🥰
This answer is going to be a bit lengthy so I'm going to put it under the break. And I am planning on doing another post of fancasting like this one for the extended Batfam members so I might not address all your points here, but they will be coming very soon! 😘
First of all, I am a big fan of both Bale and Pattinson's portrayals. I have a hard time picking a favorite because their approaches to the character are so different and yet both valid. I am VERY interested to see what they do with Battinson moving forward since this first movie is still early in his time wearing the cowl where he is still figuring out what Batman should be. And I would LOVE to see him get a Robin in the sequel (preferably sticking with Dick like the canon) but we shall see!
I'm not sure if you've seen The Boys, but Jensen's portrayal of Soldier Boy is all the proof to me that he could nail portraying Batman. And his range in Supernatural (from being a gruff and heartless hunter one minute to breaking down in a softer, protective emotional side the next) solidifies for me that he could switch between Batman to Batdad when needed. And he's charming as hell so Bruce wouldn't be a problem 😂
I'll have my new fancast of Alfred on my next post, but from previous ones, Michael Caine is always my Alfred. I think Andy Serkis is a great version of Alfred for Battinson and is what that Bruce needs (and his performance is great as always) and I enjoyed Sean Pertwee in Gotham (once again, a great interpretation for what *that* Bruce needed). However, Michael Caine was my first live-action Alfred and he was SO PERFECT, I don't think he will ever be topped as my favorite.
To be fair, I think Brenton Thwaites had the look for Dick and I think he could have been a good choice if the show was different, but for me, I can't get over how much Titans tone and interpretation of the characters/stories rubbed me the wrong way. None of the characters felt accurate to me based on their comic counterparts and the studio just tried to be too edgy and dark. The perfect example is the "Fuck Batman" moment. It was all over the trailers and just seemed like something they wanted to push to be like "this ain't your parent's Robin" but they pushed things so far it didn't even feel grounded in the characters I love. (don't even get me started on the Red Hood plot line).
I have seen the Nightwing youtube series and they do a really good job with it! My hope for this new direction of the DC movies and the fact The Brave and the Bold will focus on Bruce and Damian's relationship is that it means they'll include Nightwing and maybe mention Tim now working with the Titans (you don't want to include too many characters in the first movie which is the problem a lot of superhero movies have made lately). And I also want a mention of Jason but not have him returned as Red Hood yet which would be its own movie later.
Speaking of Jason.... While Dick is my first Robin and will always have a very special place in my heart because of that, Jason is my favorite. I just love how complex and rich his character development and story is. I also find casting him really difficult because of that. However, I do think Tanner Buchanan has a good potential. I've seen him in a few smaller roles, but I know he is a main character in Cobra Kai so he does have experience with fighting he could bring to the role (I haven't seen the show but I did watch clips on youtube). And as you pointed out, those green eyes are a big plus!
I think Curran Walters does a good job in Titans for what the show wants of him, but once again, it's just not my Jason and I rage quit season 3 😂 (though I watched clips of key Red Hood moments from later in the season)
Tim is always the hardest member of the main Batfam for me to write or cast just because he is the one I have the least knowledge or experience with outside of fanfics. However, I still really like him as a character and think he has a lot of potential in a movie or show. And I haven't seen Locke and Key (though it is on my list because I LOVE Aaron Ashmore)
I am excited with the prospect of having Bruce and Damian together in The Brave and the Bold, but I am also very nervous about how they will characterize them. All the Batman projects since Batman Begins have skewed very dark and I don't think that works well if you bring in the whole Batfam (if they just want to add Dick with Battinson, I think that could work but not expanding it to the whole gang). But James Gunn's comments about making the new Superman movie more about kindness feels like it will be a brighter, lighter version (more like the Christopher Reeve movies than the Henry Cavill ones) which I feel is more accurate to most comics, so I am cautiously optimistic for the Batfam in these movies. However, the canon and fanon versions of the Batfam don't always match (neither does the canon version between comic writers), but I am still hopeful for the more loving version we want, and is portrayed fairly well in the DC Animated movies.
As for Duke, Cass, Steph, and Barbara, I'm going to include them in my next post so you will have to wait a little to get my thoughts on them as well as a few others😉
Though because you brought up ages I will mention that all of my castings are based on if I were making a movie or show today. There are a lot of different people I would have loved to have in these roles in the past that are unfortunately just too old at this point.
And just another shout-out to Wayne Family Adventures because it is everything I ever wanted from a Batfam comic/story!!! Plus, the art is so perfect! Yes, the comic is a lot of fan service, but it is really funny while also being deep and emotional at times. It never loses the heart of the characters and you can tell there is so much love in the project and for these characters. If we could get a show or even a web series of this version of the Batfam, it would be a dream come true!
21 notes · View notes
tarabyte3 · 6 months
Text
I'm finally home from 10 days of traveling so I can post that
Dallas Fan Festival was last weekend!!
It was so much fun! 😭 I got to see Andy Serkis again and hangout with some of my dear friends (who are also some of my beloved mutuals 💕🥰). We all got autographs and to torment each other in line—some of us (me) more than others. 😇😈 We also got a group photo with him, which I absolutely adore! It's one of my favorite photos ever. He was SO excited when we all swarmed him! We all look so cute and he has a massive grin on his face.
(During the photo, I also rested my hand directly between his flexed shoulder blades and THE MUSCLES ON THAT MAN, DEAR FUCKING GOD, Y'ALL 🥵 trying to MURDER me)
Here are some photos I took of him in the autograph line
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
I had him sign the covers to Pandaemonium and The Accused 😍🥺 He was thrilled about Pandaemonium and said he really liked that movie. I told him I have a degree in English Literature and Poetry (which he seemed very impressed by 😎 My degree finally came in handy lol), so I really liked it as well. That it meant a lot to me to have a movie actually about poets—even moreso because he was in it. AND I finally got his signature next to Liam Black 🫠 There isn't a lot of open space on the cover so he wasn't sure where to sign it. I said, "We might have to sacrifice Sean Bean's head." He chuckled and, in a fake serious voice, said, "Sorry, Sean." HE'S ALWAYS SO SWEET AND LOVELY AND WONDERFUL 😭🥹
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Sunday we went to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas because they were playing Blue Whales: Return of the Giants. Which is a documentary on blue whales...narrated by Andy 😂 The lady checking our tickets said she liked our shirts because of course we rolled in there representing. (The documentary opened with him going, "Can you hear that? Can you feel that?" And we were all Very Normal 😌)
Tumblr media
The panel was really good. I know there are people that don't like that actors can't talk about their projects with the SAG-AFTRA strike going on, but I LOVE that we get to hear him talk about himself. He talked about his acting and performance capture, theater, mountain climbing, his love of jazz, and his photography, which he doesn't talk about a lot and was very exciting!! The interviewer was fantastic and asked a lot of fun "this or that" questions (he picked art museums over history museums, vampires over werewolves, but struggled with plays vs musicals lol). Here's a link to the panel if you want to watch it yourself!
I got a Caesar Funko, a Snoke figure, and an OG Cornelius figure. We also ""acquired"" some of the photos you could get signed if you didn't have anything special for him to sign, so I ended up with a David Robey and a Caesar print 🫠😌🥵. (Bless you and your taste for crime, H. I love you.)
Tumblr media
Overall, it was such a great convention and an amazing weekend. I loved Dallas. Huge thanks to @communism-bitches, @csboz, @the-eyes-of-andyserkis, and @tarrenterror25 for making the weekend extra fantastic and for being so lovely. 🥹 I love and appreciate you all so much. We're absolutely doing this again soon, hopefully with the rest of TNBF crew to make it EVEN better! 😍💖 Andy Con 2024!
23 notes · View notes
talenlee · 29 days
Text
Game Pile: The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda
The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda
Watch this video on YouTube
This is a rebuild and expansion of my article on The Beginner’s Guide from back in 2018, with a newly developed thesis about authenticity and access to artists.
And below is the script I worked from!
The Beginner’s Guide
The Beginner’s Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden’s follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.
The game is narrated by Wreden and takes the user through a number of incomplete and abstract game creations made by a developer named Coda. Wreden challenges the player to try to come to understand the type of person Coda is from exploring these spaces in a first-person perspective. Wreden has stated the game is open to interpretation: some have seen the game as general commentary on the nature of the relationship between game developers and players, while others have taken it as an allegory to Wreden’s own personal struggles with success resulting from The Stanley Parable. When the game sold, a reviewer – at least one, but I can’t find records of more than that – made a bit of a stir by suggesting that the fiction presented in the game is true, and that therefore, the game was built out of stolen material, and gamers buying it could hypothetically, get it refunded if they felt that were in any kind of moral quandrary.
This is, as best I understand it, the ‘story’ of The Beginner’s Guide, the entity in media, the confluence of reporting and reactions to a game. And now, in that same disjointed way of The Beginner’s Guide, I want to tell you about s1m0ne.
S1M0NE, stylised however you wanna, is a 2002 Al Pacino movie about a dude who creates a virtual actress. That’s not even how the movie goes in full, it’s way more involved than that and it includes bestiality, and it has this nasty kind of undercurrent about the fundamentally exploitable nature of women in media spaces. It’s an interesting film.
I didn’t say good.
Anyway, the thing is S1M0NE’s central premise is the virtual actress, Simone. In-movie, she doesn’t exist. To reinforce this, she isn’t credited as having an actress. The movie does do an extensive cgi sequence, showing Simone being constructed digitally, but it was… let’s say it’s very 2002, and leave it at that. Anyway, a bunch of people including representatives from the Screen Actors Guild believed it and they started a fuss about it. I think. It’s hard to find sources about it now, but I remember a fuss.
I mean it stands to reason, if you’re a union you want to oppose things that hurt the interest of your members, and that’s a perfectly valid concern to be worried about around about now with things like deep learning technology allowing us to transplant faces and details across multiple media works and the complex relationship between motion capture and voice actor and fully integrated action – like, if you weren’t aware, motion captured faces are not a 1:1 acting thing, they’re a structure for animators to work from. Gollum is not ‘Andy Serkis is amazing,’ they’re Andy Serkis and the fifty people doing all the rest of the work are amazing, and yes, Andy’s ability to disappear into the role and do the physical acting element is impressive. That’s a real conversation.
But it’s not the conversation they were having in 2002.
There were some people, in late 2002, who genuinely thought that an Al Pacino movie with Winona Ryder and a budget of $10 Million had successfully replicated the human form with complete authenticity, and that the much cheaper and easier tack of using an actor wasn’t more likely. Then they thought it’d involve, y’know, pig-doinking.
Simone was played by a Canadian actress, and the movie otherwise glanced over its very interesting questions of identity and artificiality and technology to instead tell a story about a dude who was very, very anxious about his inability to control women. The real story of the movie, then, is less about what the movie wanted to talk about and much more about the fact some people couldn’t tell where the movie was fiction and where it was fact. The boundary of the diegesis confused people, and there were some critics who were genuinely unsure of how confident they could be about dismissing the fears of people who thought the end of actors had come.
This comparison is because, yeah, it’s kinda stupid that videogame criticism was duped into believing that maybe an author stole all their work and then recorded themselves having a nervous breakdown then edited that nervous breakdown and cleaned up the audio and packaged it up and sold it on Steam without at any point considering that the art was stolen, it’s not like videogames are unique in this regard. We have a history of people not knowing the boundary between art and real and sometimes, when people play with that, especially in areas of new technology, people make mistakes. But also, like, yeah, we are now living in a time when the idea of ‘someone tried to sell entirely stolen assets on steam for $15’ isn’t even a joke or punchline, it might just be a fact of a thing that happens regularly.
As a game experience, The Beginner’s Guide is fine. I like it as a game because it needs the medium of games to make sense, complete with the idea of incomplete games and the way games are made not from a coherent single point but a sort of constantly exploding set of interconnected steps. Like, you couldn’t make this as a book because this isn’t how a book would look when you’re exploring its dismantled bits. The Beginner’s Guide, if it were a book about books and making books, would look like collected pieces of paper in different hands, with a sort of formalising hand over it all.
Funnily enough it’d look a bit like the book of Genesis.
(There’s a long reach of an academic poke)
It’s a perfectly interesting work about imposter syndrome and emotional boundaries and creative processes and a lot of other things you can see in your own inkblots. It’s an artistic piece that tells you a narrative in a really blunt way, but it uses its framing to create a blurred diegesis. It uses real world markers to confuse you about the actuality of its narrative, or it did at the time.
There’s a forking challenge here; on the one hand, I want to berate videogames, as a culture, for being so woefully ill-equipped to deal with meta art as to be convinced that the narrative presented in The Beginner’s Guide was actually real and have at least one actual journalist be so unsure of the reality of the presented narrative as to hedge their bets and mention seemingly unironically that refunds for this game were an option. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re drowning in meta-aware fiction and a cultural discourse that can treat this kind of thing seriously. Since the Stanley Parable and then Beginner’s Guide, the most recent big ‘oh everyone talks about it’ meta-game in my space has been Undertale, and I hate that.
Since the Beginner’s Guide’s original appearance, things have moved on a bit, and particularly, the word ‘parasocial’ has fallen to the common voice. People with platforms use the term to describe the behaviour of people who don’t have platforms, and the people without platforms follow their word, and now ‘parasocial’ has a sort of loose use around it, the idea that it’s pretty much just anything that annoys you about other people on the internet, especially if they’re talking about media. Then we got ‘plagiarism,’ which is, I understand, ‘mostly vibes.’
I want to compare Davey Wreden to Fred Gallagher, the author of Megatokyo. Megatokyo if you’re not familiar with it, is a webcomic that started in August 2000 and has never officially stopped updating since. It’s updated twice this year, which puts it ahead of the same time last year. What Megatokyo is about is not important here, what is is that Megatokyo was enormously succesful, incredibly popular, and has never once had an update schedule its authors were happy with.
I wrote a lot about Megatokyo last year and I still think that article is worth restructuring and presenting in some kind of long form read way. In the end my conclusion about it is that I don’t think ill of Fred Gallagher as a creative, as much as I think that he got to suffer a unique kind of problem that only capitalism can cause, where you can be too successful to handle your own success. That is, both Wreden and Gallagher made something that led to people having assumptions and expectations that don’t make any sense, because the value of what they created was associated with capital, which is to say, money, and rent, and food.
There’s this idea we’re all circling around right now on a platform that is probably by now mostly procedurally generated – not just the stuff made in the past few years by tools like Chatgpt and the midjourney thumbnails and all, but rather that the algorithm of youtube made a lot of people make media in a way that shaved the non-formulaic parts off it, until there was nothing but hash tag con tent. The stuff you like is a small egg floating on a vast and turbulent sea of piss. It’s now that people care a lot about a kind of authenticity from work which separates it from what I’m going to call Generative Media, and which other people are going to insist on calling ‘AI.’
The conversation around generative art is a real struggle sometimes because it feels like sometimes when people are talking about ‘ai art bros’ they’re dealing with a small pool of obnoxious people, and sometimes I can even tell the specific dickhead they mean. It’s Shad, it’s Shad, so often they mean Shad, and yeah sure, Shad sucks. But the conversation around generative media is so often structured in these really weird ways that seems to imply low-quality images don’t exist until generative media gets involved. That nobody cranks out bullshit, or that art is a transferrable property of a human agent, or that in the great days of the internet, nobody’s using pictures they didn’t draw to illustrate articles they wrote. In this very video I’m using gameplay footage from a game I don’t own, and the reason you’re not seeing the footage from S1m0ne to reinforce that point is because a robot would get mad at me and block the video if I did.
I’m even in defensive crouch saying this stuff here. Look: I think generative media tools have applications, particularly in zero-value situations. Nobody in the world is having their pocket picked if I copy art of Rin Matsuoka and use that for my D&D character. Similarly, someone with less image editing skill than mine using generative media to generate pictures of things they weren’t going to pay for in the first place are not hurting anyone unless you believe in a literal cosmic value of these things. In that case, you’re basically just like the generative media people who are functionally, praying to chat gpt. If you’re rapid prototyping, if you’re making a game and need temporary assets to give yourself tools to build around, if you need a powerpoint presentation for class, all of this stuff represents no lost value. This is a perfect place to put generative media. I’m sure purists will disagree, and I just do not care. But there’s my stance: Generative media is an interesting toy that should be used as such, and if it can replace your job, your job probably sucks and you should be doing something cooler and better that people value more. That’s a problem with jobs, and how we give people money to feed themselves, not the software that generates anime tiddy on demand.
Now, here is where things get tangled up.
It seems to me that generative media is being attacked right now by people I generally like and agree with on most things, because of very high concept, seemingly contradictory positions. People who dislike copyright law busting it out to attack midjourney, and people who hate Disney praying for them to fight Google. Ideas about the inherent nobility of art and stick figure illustrations being better than generative media on websites dedicated to sharing unsourced artworks of definitely not stick figures. People don’t have reasons that make a lot of sense for why these things should not be tolerated, but they are very real about their emotional hatred of them. Which, you know, given the people who defend generative media, makes sense, a lot of those people suck and are incredibly obnoxious. Particularly it seems a lot of them are the losers of the NFT wave who are trying to get in ground level as ‘prompt engineers’ as if the ecosystem they’re entering will value them at all.
One of the most sterling arguments against generative media, and one I personally like, is the idea that these tools represent potential precarity for artists who are already struggling to pay for things like, again, rent and food. Potential, in that, largely commission-based artistic survival under capitalism seems to be a bit of a dice roll as it is. My solution to this is not to shame people who weren’t going to pay for art for failing to be able to support a commission economy they weren’t partaking in in the first place, though, it’s things like massive overhauls of income inequality and universal basic income, but also I can understand how my idea is hard and yelling at strangers in hyperbolic language is really easy.
The pressure that created the Beginner’s Guide is also the pressure that meant someone talking about an artistic work of anxiety media couched it in terms of fucking refunds so people didn’t feel they’d ethically mis-stepped by buying fiction about exploitation, a thing that nobody otherwise does, and it’s the same pressure that means ‘someone is making cheap bad art with an exploitative method’ is a threat to the livelihood of a small number of people who have managed to make an extremely precarious living doing art in the first place. As if money is why artists make art, as if we aren’t all struggling in exploitative systems, as if the existence of bland corporate art pumped out in huge troves to pad resume drawers isn’t
Since these past few years, writing academically, a habit I’ve gotten into is always trying to attribute where I get ideas for. Sentences that are referring to someone else’s idea, with the little note of ‘hey, this is that person, at this date.’ It’s a thing that can create the habit of also starting sentences with ‘Wreden says this’ or ‘Gallagher’s work shows this,’ which creates in casual conversation an impression of a very specific kind of authorial access. Certainly here on Youtube, I don’t want to give you the impression because I’m pointing to their work that I can tell you what they think or feel. The idea that I can connect to these authors through a particularly big brained reading of their work is similar to how Christians think they can read god’s mind because they read the book of Daniel, and like, Fred Gallagher exists.
I don’t know what Davey Wreden was thinking about the Beginner’s Guide when he made it. Even if I asked him now, I won’t get an answer, I’ll get the answer of what he remembers of what he was thinking, which may be the same thing but can’t necessarily. I can try, and that’s a way to get at this authenticity, but it’s not a way to guarantee it.
The Beginner’s Guide is still an interesting game to me, because the conversation around it, and around ownership of work, and of unsourced material and exploiting artists hasn’t changed that much but all the people engaging in it have gotten new things to have to try and fit into their models. We are no closer to Coda.
Those opening paragraphs of this article are from from wikipedia.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
14 notes · View notes
Text
One year ago I had been itching for somewhere to spread some appreciation for - and maybe get a little thirsty about - Andy Serkis, and having been reminded that Tumblr was a thing I decided to give it a shot! I had created this account almost ten years before but never used it, and I wasn't really sure how things would go since it's a bit different from the usual social media sites (aka: actually social!).
Almost immediately after my first post I got a few followers, and when I recogized some of the amazing fic writers I had come across I was so surprised and excited! Right away I felt welcome and I was so happy to know there were others out there also losing their mind over this man. 😂 Whether it's being unwell about his chest hair or melting over his smile, I love to see the solidarity!
Now it's a year later and I can't believe how much has happened! I met Andy twice and finally got to tell him how much I admire him, which already feels insane, but then the second time I also got to meet some of my beautiful moots, after traveling to Dallas and flying on my own for the first time!
On top of that, I started writing fanfiction again after close to two decades (which seems like it might actually be pretty good) and my posted word count just cracked 50,000 words at the very end of 2023. (What?? 😳). And I can absolutely say that that's only because of the wonderful, kind, thoughtful and incredibly talented people who've encouraged me, even (or especially when) I was having hard days.
So it might seem silly to say, but everyone who has liked, commented or reblogged my posts (your tags give me *life*), along with the wonderful people I've met through this little fan blog that I started on a whim, really have made my days so much brighter. 💕
Here's to another year of getting weird about that old man!
P.S. Give us the sparring scenes, Matthew 😏
P.P.S. I couldn't leave you without some Andy tax 😘
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
21 notes · View notes
fuckyeahelijahwoodfan · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Wonderful Hobbits Elijah wood and Andy Serkis at Scotland comic con ♥️
Andrew Morris photography on Instagram took these amazing shots and shared with us . Thanks so much
25 notes · View notes