always the first person awake at sleepovers
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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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Keep Him On a Leash
N) "Well done, Killer. As promised, you can spend the rest of the day with your little lover. Luckily, I ensured they were nearby and ready to receive you as soon as you finished your mission."
K) *sweetheart!
K) *(no no NO no what are you doing here? no RUN go LEAVE don't look at me no STOP)
N) "What's the matter? You should be grateful. Now they know exactly what you are. Isn't that what you wanted?"
-- Nightmare by jokublog
-- Killer by rahafwabas
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It is my sincerest and unironic belief that we must invest in preserving "old technology." The more we move to a hegemonic, easily-surveilled way of living, the worse we will find this world to be.
Letters, public phones and transport, cash, and so much more are key to ensuring both freedom of movement and information, but also to combat the surveillance state. We need to preserve the ability to both access the world but also to be untraceable. I truly hope more people start to recognize this. It isn't about nostalgia for the past. It is about ensuring that we are actually afforded freedom, from the richest person to the person who lives on the sidewalk.
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me, trying to say bitch:
autocorrect:
since this breached containment, let it be known this includes trans butches, radfems fuck off <3
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just... something I've noticed. (cw: this is about i/p and leftist activism)
so many stories are like:
villain: "there's a problem in this world that needs to be fixed, an injustice in the systems that control our life, so I shall fix it with VIOLENCE AND MURDER AND MORE VIOLENCE!"
hero: "halt, you fiend! I, a Good American Citizen™, shall stop you. scease this treachery at once!"
*proceeds to beat them up and do nothing about the issue that caused this, Happy Ending uwu everything is solved*
the purpose of these stories were propaganda, obviously, to associate fighting for justice with violence and villainy, and heroism with restoring the status quo and never questioning it.
people called bullshit, but instead of going "the source of the issue wasn't the villain, it was the system they were in. you can't just get rid of them and go about your day, you have to remove the problem from its source as well", they went "the source of the issue isn't the villain, it was the system they were in. the villain was actually completely justified in their response because of the end goal! sure their actions are bad, but the system is worse!" while completely ignoring how in most of these stories, the villains were okay with actual mass murder.
and here we are, in a post Oct. 7th world, where people look a massacre of Jews, and say the exact same thing. justifying undescribable acts of violence by saying "well these noble savages Palestinians had endured 75 years of genocide (wrong) apartheid (wrong) and ethnic cleansing (also wrong)! their response is understandable! I don't condone their violence, but something had to be done." and you get people simping for actual extremist terrorist organisations, marching around while parroting calls for genocide, and repeating words to make them sound educated on a conflict they only know about from social media posts.
yes, the systems are unfair and cruel and social justice needs to be achieved. but you can't turn a blind eye or actively condone horrific acts that are done in the name of that cause. speaking against it won't make you the "movie protagonist™", you HAVE to speak up against it if you want to work towards a peaceful future.
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