*watches the movie*

im not saying that people cant sell their art, artists should be able to afford to live comfortably, and selling art is a way to do that.

what i am saying is that i think the second you start seeing your art as a product to be sold, you've lost the magic.

look at the big blockbuster movies rn, theyre not telling a good compelling story, theyre selling theatre tickets.

look at AI "artists", theyre not even creating art, theyre trying to make money by having a computer produce a product for them.

look at current popular music, theyre not creating a song, theyre creating a tiktok sound bite to try and go viral and get money from it.

look at all those "booktok" books, theyre not telling a story that they loving created because they were passionate about it, theyre creating a product based upon whatever trope buzzwords will get them the most sales.

its no longer, "im going to create these videos that i love to make and post them on youtube so others can enjoy it too", its "i need to create and post x amount of videos this week if i want to avoid being shadow banned by the algorithm"

every day i am seeing art slowly be destroyed by capitalism, and i understand why, people need to eat and pay bills and right now the best way to do this is to Make A Product.

pre-ordered a product... kept asking for updates they kept going 'no information yet'. finally after a YEAR they go 'yea so that product is never going to exist we will give you a refund'. and its like okay fantastic...

refund doesnt show up- i give it at least a week before reaching out and going hey refund hasnt gone through. they claim paypal has blocked the refund and that they will go forward with a manual refund after i refused store credit...

manual refund doesnt show up and i reach back out after a couple more weeks. they push for the store credit again, and ignore me after i say no to the store credit again.

after a few more weeks i get fed up. i head to paypal to get to the bottom of this, the ai bot files a dispute that i didnt ask it to because i know its been too long. but a dispute is filed and denied. i reach out to a person at paypal and they tell me to reach back out to the seller to get it solved.

the seller then tells me that because the dispute at paypal "escalated", they can never give me a refund and paypal is holding the funds so i have to take store credit. no i fucking dont.

reach out to paypal, either they will confirm they cant ever refund me or they will give me the evidence to prove what i have thought all along, that these fuckers are trying to drag this out so i accept store credit but i refuse.

paypal provides vindication, explicitly tells me that if the seller really wanted to refund me they can still do so with no issues dispute or not. that the seller very much has the funds and paypal cant hold it after the transaction successfully went through a year ago. i screen shot that shit and sent it to the seller, demanding my refund or i will go to the credit card company. i will not accept your store credit, especially not after confirming that you have been lying to me about your ability to give a refund. fuck you.

i will now stew in anger for the next couple days as its the weekend and they probably wont get back to me.