A Work in Egress

Jasmine Vine, lead programmer of Hollow Knight & Silksong just transitioned!! I'm so happy for her!❤️🏳️‍⚧️

Bros lets make summer an unforgettable ero guro adventure together

something that i find interesting about independent animation nowadays is that if you don't have studio/streamer backing, you have to release your work yourself on the internet, but you have to do it for free on the internet because virtually nobody is going to be willing to accept a paywall just for one original show, so what you have to do in order to make any money off of it is make all of your money from merchandising, but then this means that you show must be merchandisable and have very toyetic character designs that translate easily to plushies and whatnot, but then you also need to cater your show to people who are disproportionately inclined to buy merchandise like that in the first place so that your sales can be enough to sustain you, which means that even if you want to communicate complex or difficult ideas in your work, your independent animation project must attract (at least on a first impression) and retain viewers who are both very consumerist and very capable of rabid passion, which unfortunately has a single-circle shaped venn diagram with a lot of the most toxic fandom tendencies known to man, and this explains a lot of things about independent animation and its fandoms nowadays I think

something that i find interesting about independent animation nowadays is that if you don't have studio/streamer backing, you have to release your work yourself on the internet, but you have to do it for free on the internet because virtually nobody is going to be willing to accept a paywall just for one original show, so what you have to do in order to make any money off of it is make all of your money from merchandising, but then this means that you show must be merchandisable and have very toyetic character designs that translate easily to plushies and whatnot, but then you also need to cater your show to people who are disproportionately inclined to buy merchandise like that in the first place so that your sales can be enough to sustain you, which means that even if you want to communicate complex or difficult ideas in your work, your independent animation project must attract (at least on a first impression) and retain viewers who are both very consumerist and very capable of rabid passion, which unfortunately has a single-circle shaped venn diagram with a lot of the most toxic fandom tendencies known to man, and this explains a lot of things about independent animation and its fandoms nowadays I think

It bothers me so much how most AI discourse singles out AI art as a particularly bad thing when that's one of the least harmful uses of AI. If you're going to be talking about how AI is terrible at least talk about the actually harmful things it could be used for like mass surveillance or layoffs or something instead of "it makes bad art"

I keep seeing people act as though the solution to these problems is to just harass anyone who uses AI until it magically goes away, and that isn't going to work. Sending death threats towards random hobbyists (and don't pretend this doesn't happen, I have seen it happen with my own two eyes) is not going to help anyone and does not address any of the actual problems with AI. The actual problems with AI have nothing to do with consumers and acting as though shaming people for using it is going to fix any of those problems is misguided at best.

I will not call myself or other people "gooners" or "npcs" or "larpers". i will not call things i dont like "slop". i will not use terms like "-oids". i dont like how common language is slowly becoming more focused on shorthand terms for hate and apathy

I have to say by far the most annoying people are the ones who see this and go "well actually slop is fine" because i dared to forget tonspecift "xyz-slop".