Evillious ❤ My Favourite Is Capriccio Farce

im so glad ZUN is cool and not a reactionary! Massive festival should be thrown

alright. people on bluesky are getting upset that ZUN apparently AI-generated a Background for the latest Touhou game. I'm officially on the "Oh my god who cares" side of the "AI" debate

good dissection

"Among the loose social crowd of online artists and creative hustlers, the reaction to this new technology has been short-sighted at best. While there are legitimate grounds to criticize the way this technology fits into systems of exploitation, the arguments from the self-identified artists tend to follow a few distinct lines of thinking:

the ontological difference of human creativity / the artist's superior mind (the mild version of this take compares it to "the stupid machine", the explicitly exceptionalist and dehumanizing version compares it to other, less intelligent/imaginative humans and lazy parasites)

An ideology of arts that posits artists as uniquely more human than the masses; or that posits "creativity" as a universal right but doesn't stop to ask why only some people are allowed to make it their life's purpose, as opposed to a hobby they have limited time for.

the unalienable right for the artist to hold onto their creative output as private property, to be protected from "theft" (which in the case of AI art becomes even prospective theft, like an extension of protections against plagiarism shifting into an unconditional protection against replacement by other artists with more productive tools)

An ideology of arts that relies on the frameworks of private property and copyright, without a clear understanding of how these frameworks came to be and how much of a danger they are to both individual artists themselves and culture at large.

the displacement by more efficient AI methods of the artists' conditions of economic existence; the erosion of their market share, client pool, contract opportunities, etc. This argument is legitimate, but answers to it tend to fall back into the above reactionary pitfalls that will eventually turn against the artists that promote them, as we'll get into.

These criticisms focus entirely on the effect of the AI image generators on artists and don't really understand how they work, which is why they focus on the AI models' output and gathering of images and not on the more seedy aspects of the whole deal, which concern the labelling of the massive amounts of data they require."

Every time I read a different translation of Senbonzakura I feel less confident as to what it's talking about.

The imagery is also confusing, with lines like "pacifist nation" mixed into what sound like nationalist propaganda, or mention of science fiction weaponry... but I think the language might be too complicated for anyone who isn't a fluent Japanese speaker to understand, especially since no professional translation seems to exist

I'm suspicious of the narrative that it's just propaganda, though, because that seems kind of too literal and unimaginative

𝕊𝕖𝕟𝕓𝕠𝕟𝕫𝕒𝕜𝕦𝕣𝕒 𝕞𝕠𝕠𝕕𝕓𝕠𝕒𝕣𝕕

the quality is very low hope to fix that later

Coherence

A pattern I notice in 'writing advice' is that the ideal that gets promoted is to restrain and tightly organize every element in order to produce a single overall effect.

It is not so good that this is commonplace. Writing needs space to be incoherent and disjointed. This is what will allow writing to be truly alive. In a functional aesthetic world, there will not be a need to sever 'useless' growths from the body.

I learned about it through Undertale. When Undertale was popular, I was part of the fanbase and wanted to discover similar games, so I researched its influences. This lead to discovering Uboa, and etc.

it was illuminating to be in Japan and see how this side of Ghibli is much more prominent over there.

I don't hate their creative works, but I hate how they are held on a pedestal above other anime, and seen as superior, more 'wholesome...'

I hope other things become more popular

I feel as if studio ghibli films being reduced to their 'cozyness' would be tragic if not for the fact that it is a deliberate branding thing for them. from the ghibli museum to the revolving door of hot topic collabs, miyazaki and/or the people he puts in charge of these things are aware of how desirable the worlds within ghibli films are. even at that, how meaningful is the politics of howl's moving castle being motivated by miyazaki's outrage at the 2003 iraq invasion when you examine it alongside the actual text of the wind rises? what does the environmentalism of ponyo mean when faced with the massive amounts of waste generated by ghibli merch you can get at wal mart? i'm straying from the point here but

this was an officially licensed product that was released to promote grave of fireflies

venetian miku ! by marshoworld

Kubinashi ouryou to shikyou amanojaku

Kubi-oke kaese, hai, hai, hai, HAI!　

首無しおうりょうと死凶天邪鬼、くびおけかえせ！はい、はい、はい、ハイ！

theyre letting me crawl out of the grave tomorrow

Maurice Chédel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This picture of a 'shanty town' in Peru looks quite similar to the Barracks Settlement in Yume Nikki! Especially how it is located in a desert. This lines up with the other Peruvian references in Yume Nikki, namely the Paracas style art and the Inca motif on Madotsuki's character design.

It's very rare that being so invested in a character's personality that you want to imagine them in a relationship is a bad thing that makes it harder to appreciate the work

It's also cool when people ship in a spirit that goes against the work's themes because it's like emotional graffiti in a positive sense, taking the characters and mixing them into a new context

I don't believe such a thing as 'not like other girls ism' exists, but nonetheless

it's absolutely true that some folks take Shipping too far and can't engage in Fandom without it, but the way others shit on it tends to reek of misogyny and not-like-the-other-girls-ism