Untitled

You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.

It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.

“How much?”

The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.

You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.

“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”

There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.

You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”

“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”

HC that local birds beef with Hawks for control of the airspace and they all gang up on him

They stole his breakfast too

body terror // touya todoroki

the single wish from the devil feared by all devils, the mighty scourge that all evil ran away from, the force of nature makima idealized as stoic, unfeeling, unstoppable, lonely, and unmatched…

And now tech bros are out to plunder that wealth of artistry we've come to enjoy through brute force statistical modelling so they can cut the artists out of the business of selling art. Why would a company bother employing rosters of artists to produce for them when they can hire a handful of people to run the models and tweak the outputs to suit their needs?

There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It's about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that's Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?

This is the end result of the commodification of art. The artistry of the works do not matter, only that they can be sold and generate profit. Capitalism has always been existed in opposition to art, Capital requires steady growth of returns and regular output, art demands innovation and risky endeavours to push the boundaries. Art is of use to capital only in so far as it is able to generate direct sales and intellectual property that can then itself be turned into a commodity. The moment Capital is able to cut artistry and artists out of the equation so that it can further maximize it's profits, it will. And what's worse, the art it produces will be stale and recycled.

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks... that website still lives on

Noting Rowling’s vast financial success, Barker felt that Rowling’s newfound position of fame ought to exclude her from discussing trans rights. He added, “It really just seems redundant for a woman as successful, as validated in the world, as Ms Rowling, to be negative, to be disruptive if you will, to a very beaten up subculture. These are human beings. She has no right to opine, I think, upon the lives of human beings that she does not know.”

“I feel very protective of people who are on the edge of our culture as gay people still are,” Barker continued. “And certainly transgender people are on the edge of our culture. And here you have one of the most successful people in the frigging world – Ms Rowling. Going after a very emotionally vulnerable portion of our culture. It just seems unnecessary and unfair.”