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.
Can’t decide what’s funnier- Benoit Blanc meeting his husband during a high stakes murder mystery or Benoit Blanc meeting his husband at like, the grocery store
“May I hold you?” you ask Jing Yuan one afternoon as you lie sun-warmed in his garden.
You almost think he is asleep until he invites, “Please,” carrying a smile in his voice.
With ginger movements, you reach over and place your hands on either side of his face. It begins as mere holding, but soon you find your touch roaming. You smooth your fingers over his eyebrows and trace down to each side of his jaw. From here your hands climb up again, and once more back down, mapping out each crevice and dip of his face, his skin, his bone, until you are certain there is no part of him remaining that you do not know better than you know yourself.
You play this game with yourself, sometimes. You imagine people not as people, but as planets. After all, what is a person anyway, if not a world of their own? You trace the ridge of his nose, and imagine there lies a mountain range. Around his eyes you find oceans. Where his cheeks dip, there are valleys, and a river runs between his lips.
“What are you doing?” Jing Yuan asks. There is an element of amusement to his question, but his voice is primarily gentle. Endeared.
You still your hands. They rest on his cheeks while your thumbs brush back and forth over his skin, holding him. Though the world melts back into the familiar shapes of his face, there is still an assured sturdiness to his features which is grounding; a gravity which draws you towards him, as if you were the moon to his planet. Small, perhaps, and bare, but casting light on him wherever you can.
You answer, “I think I’m holding the world in my hands.”
You feel Jing Yuan’s smile through the way his cheeks press into your palms. Two hands cover yours, large and calloused, but gentle, and hold yours securely in place against his face. There is the tender press of lips to your skin as he turns his head enough to kiss the inside of your palm.
You hear Jing Yuan’s smile through the way his words come warm and bright and filled with adoration. You wonder why you thought him a planet, when he is so clearly the sun.
Thinking about how Leo says he uses his jokes to cope and y’know, thinking harder on it I think it may very well be because of what else uses one-liners and puns and that type of humor.
Specifically, 80’s action movies and campy sci-fi. Even more specifically, the protagonists of these.
So I can imagine why, exactly, Leo leans toward this brand of humor. It’s directly linked to things he loves! But even more than that is why I think it’s used as a coping mechanism.
In these genres, these quips tend to be said by the winner - or, if not a winner, then someone who will stay alive. So there’s a confidence behind them, an assurance, almost, that even if things go wrong, things aren’t ever too serious. There’s no bad endings here! It’s all good fun, even if the stakes seem high.
Leo canonically has been known to steer his brothers away from the more brutal villains and toward more fun, lighthearted activities and not-so-dangerous criminals. So for Leo, these jokes definitely make things less heavy, make the situations they find themselves in less intense.
It’s kinda not just coping, but also can be seen as a form of escapism. A safety blanket. A way for Leo to defuse the tension of knowing just how dangerous their lives are and replace that with a levity which implies that things will be okay.
Unfortunately, levity alone does not alter reality.
not to be serious or whatever but i think nov 5th went down like. That. bc of a few things: one the pandemic and the inherent derangedness of waking up and watching “unprecedented times” happen around you daily for the past nine months. two the election and the multi day pressure cooker of stress of constantly refreshing election news tabs and trying to keep your normal life (school work etc) going while the fate of american politics pretty much hangs in the balance and trump throws a fit on twitter. three the 15 year buildup of the cw’s hit show supernatural to the final season + the 11 of those years spent queerbaiting while tumblr did backflips through discourse circus rings about destiel + this show and ship being so big that everyone knew about it not just the fans. all of this leading up to the airing of 15x18 and the confession scene. castiel in love with dean. castiel goes to superhell. it just set everything off like a bomb. then the vine boom after vine boom of domino train information we kept getting. putin resigning. georgia goes blue. trump sues multiple states. supernatural trending over the election. people learning major political news via destiel screenshots. nevada. a whole bunch of other insane fandom news + rumors that started flying like dashcon 2.0 and the secret sherlock season (putin resigning also turned out to be a rumor but we thought it was real for a soild several hours). i think the internet just had no idea how to react that we collectively reached the next dimension. it was the most indescribable, hysterical outpouring of hilarity and togetherness ive ever experienced. when we say new emotions were invented that night we mean it. i miss it every single day
anon is mad because i talk about my interests and people reblog my posts and i’m double majoring in human biology and astrophysics and i post spotify links and read dostoevsky and i live alone and i visit the beach sometimes umm
Ya think for a while after Berserk, after having to speak with a French accent for over a year, Alvin ever tried to talk and instinctively used the accent?
Cause im just imagining him doing it with Excellinor and her being like 'What the actual fuck are you doing'
something that kind of bothers me about modern feelings toward the epic of gilgamesh is how it's been COMPLETELY watered down to being "gay". Bear with me as I explain.
this is more of an extreme example, but I see this take all the time (not the yaoi part. the gay lover part). it's boiled down to the fact that it's gay over literally anything else in the epic. Gilgamesh's lament to Urshanabi about Enkidu's loss is overshadowed by the fact that Gilgamesh is mourning his gay lover. Gilgamesh is on a journey because he lost his gay lover. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were gay.
Now I understand that with a modern lens, people tend to lock on to how unabashedly Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu, because it's gay and because it's the oldest written epic in human history. People feel deeply connected to the idea that people like them have been around since the dawn of literature. But placing exclusive focus on the nature of the relationship as gay, rather than why the relationship or its loss was important, erases the story the epic is trying to tell.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story about love, yes, but it is not a love story. It's about the fear of death, coping with loss, and desperation to stave off the inevitable. It's about the bonds of friendship, about hardship, coming to terms personal change and losing pieces of yourself as you learn and grow. It is about consequences, arrogance, death, second chances, mourning, yearning, loving and LIVING. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about the entire human experience and one man's struggle to accept it. What does it mean to have lived? What does it mean to have loved, and lost? What does it mean to die, and to be remembered? What does it mean to be human?
It is perfectly okay to find appreciation for the Epic because of Gilgamesh and Enkidu's relationship. But also understand that the world's oldest story is not about two gay men who loved each other. It is a story about being alive.
starting off my february starstruck dee ship-a-ganza with the big one. they do seem like... the obvious answer, huh...?
they have far and away the most development together and the strongest personal relationship, both in what i've posted, and in her story overall! would kill or die for each other in a heartbeat. i would be absolutely lying if i said i'd never thought about it, but i'm not 100% convinced my thoughts lead me to romance specifically...
they're already pretty insane about each other! starstruck in particular is madly in love with bandee in every way it's possible to be. loves him the way he loves kirby, i think (pretty sure he does not know this. might be shocked to learn it.)
however she's daft as bricks, so he'd have to initiate, and i can't really imagine anything in their relationship would change.... so he'd have to mostly want The Title or the Performance one way or another, and i'm not super sure he would!
Thanks! I'm what happens when two people who spin words for a living spawn, and then that larva spends the majority of her developmental years unattended in a library instead of properly socializing! It might make for fun reading but this is how I actually talk pretty much always, and I have nothing but pity for the unfortunate innocents who get stuck in conversation with me. My average sentence starts with too many syllables and then gets sidetracked into a deranged cacophony of mangled similes and malaphor.
And if it's a nightmare to spit out a digestible sentence when I'm sober, it is far worse when I'm drunk. You can tell I've had a few too many because I start talking like I'm really reaching for that scrabble high score.
The problem is that some corner of my brain decided that It Is Forbidden To Use An Important Word Twice In The Same Paragraph and now I just wind up using increasingly contrived synonyms because my mind will try to backspace out if I don't. I cannot stop myself, I can only hoard increasingly esoteric vocabulary until nothing I say makes any sense at all.
I hope you are having fun. Thank you for the compliment.