I Think If You Clear Away All The Cultural Bias/normalization Caused By Living Under Copyright You Can

forget stuff like Good Flag Bad Flag and all that discourse, the world's best flags are those banners carried by Chinese lineage/support associations that have fringed edges and writing

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

there's something unique about Aztec images ❤ They are full of life yet schematic and precise, I want to immerse myself in this world forever

Variety of depictions of Xolotl!

also, this kind of tautology prevents you from being able to have insight or perceive new aspects of the world. "art is what they put in galleries" is directly limiting you to your own cultural preconceptions and refusing to imagine them being totally wrong. If you have this attitude, you can't say stuff like 'wild bee hives/termite mounds are art because they have secret aspects that are not for practical use' (I just made that up) because they aren't in galleries or made by artists

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

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

the thing I actually hate abt AI art is not that it has no creative intent behind it (that's not necessary for art imo) or that it trains on ppls stuff (I don't like intellectual property) but that it has a tendency to homogenize everything and present us with what we already expect, reinforce really stupid stereotypes etc. This can be illustrated with how in Minecraft AI it never lets you get to an interesting new world like the Nether and always takes you back to the familiar overworld

If only there was a technology that wasn't predictive, but actively hostile and gave us the opposite of what we expected...

A lot of people perceived her as being cringe for political reasons, but they didn't realize that all British classicists are cringe

like how Armand d'Angour did good work reconstructing Ancient Greek music, but his poetry is truly repulsive

the emily wilson odyssey discourse happening is so funny because. yeah. if you actually sit down and try to do a strict translation of most ~epic poems~ they don't sound ~epic~ at all. sometimes they sound flat out stupid, even after you're done fixing the syntax for english. this is true of pretty much every Ancient Text.

My opinion: Yukio Mishima doesn't fit into the "Dai-Nippon Gothic" aesthetic. Mishima's writing is suffused by sunlight and healthy, powerful bodies, symbolic opposites of what "gothic" makes us feel. Mishima's writing is the sea under blue skies and the Ise Grand Shrine. Gothic is disease, frail bodies, lightless spaces.

The difference is that Mishima was actually a fascist and believed it was beautiful, while the Dai-Nippon gothic aesthetic uses imperialist imagery as a form of grotesque violence, mixed up with disease and perversion. Mishima's view on death can shade into this but there's a disconnect because in the gothic aesthetic, it's an outsider's perspective on fascism. Fascism as excessive violence, extravagant criminality, a heterotopia where everyday morality is reversed.

It would be wrong to reduce "Dai-Nippon Gothic" to the restrictive label 'antifascist' but I don't think real fascism can mix coherently with the aesthetic.

Writers who the "Dai-Nippon" aesthetic would do well to appropriate --- Ranpo, Yumeno Kyūsaku, maybe Izumi Kyōka, definitely much of the work of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

Of course, recontextualized images of Mishima can be appropriated but it's good to remember they're being twisted away from their original meaning

make ugly art. NOWWWW