Prompt:

It’s not that Jason forgot, per se.

But between smuggling a toddler out of the League of Assassins, trekking halfway across the world, and finding a suitable hiding place that’s also child friendly… well, it kind of slipped his mind that he’s supposed to be… dead.

Something that comes back to bite him in the ass when he takes Dami out for some ice cream and just so happens to run into non other than Brucie-fucking-Wayne

enough stories about how someone learns to truely be happy through love. i want a story where someone is desperately seeking out love thinking it's the only way to be happy only for them to learn by the end that happiness is what they make of it and they don't need love at all to make it.

the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.

My toxic trait: sometimes (frequently) when Brennan Lee Mulligan says a bird fact, I think "that's not a very good bird fact literally everyone knows that."

And then I remember that I have duck-based Christmas traditions. So my experiences are not universal.

I still think the chickens-swallow-rocks thing is common knowledge tho so! A poll:

EVIL MARK, EVIL MARK, EVIL MARK!!! I want to be coherent about this season but please picture me foaming at the mouth and running on the walls. S2 being what if Mark's just like his Dad? Insanity. I love this show. Anyways, AU where an Evil!Mark tries to make Our!Mark worse, and Our!Mark tries to make the other better. Something something confronting your idea of the worst version of oneself. Plus, tweaked black and yellow costume because I saw it and immediately went murder hornet lookin' ass and knew I had to draw it. Evil ass Mark. Horrible. I think he should be dragged kicking and screaming into redemption.

two genres of laura kinney fanart

anime faced sex bomb, midriff showing, huge boobs, either tight leather pants + bra or painted on yellow suit, weirdly uncomfortably shiny skin optional, either looking neutral or doing a little (sexy) scowl if you're feeling spicy

the biggest fucking lesbian youve ever seen in your life

Sulking in the corner.

My name is [BRUTUS] and my name means [HEAVY] so with a [HEAVY] heart I'll guide this dagger Into the heart of my enemy

Something about having absolutely no choice in who you marry. About being literally forced by the law to spill blood - to accept this stranger as your husband over a man you truly care for or accept the fact that the man you love might die because you put him in danger. Something about risking becoming the wife of a man you've never even seen before a few minutes prior because you know anything would be better than putting your beloved in harm's way. Something about the trust inherent in that decision and in the way she speaks of it after. Truthfully, T'Pring doesn't know the captain and she doesn't know Spock. Either one of them could have taken her as their wife but she does know Stonn. She knows that Stonn will remain by her side no matter what. They made a plan together. They have an agreement which T'Pring believes will be upheld even though the plan changed with the arrival of Kirk. Stonn will always be there, always, and Stonn will be hers. Something about the language used around T'Pring: Ownership, subservience, non-personhood. T'Pring is an object that Spock can win. She cannot reject him, she has no say in the matter other than having Stonn 'claim' her instead. Even when Spock leaves after being very clearly rejected by T'Pring he says "Stonn, she is yours." as if despite her clear rejection he still owns her and is must formally 'give' her to Stonn. But the language T'Pring uses around Stonn is a break from that: "There was Stonn who wanted very much to be my consort, and I wanted him." Stonn who wanted very much to be HER consort and she WANTED him. The language here is very particular - It's not, for example: "Stonn wanted me to be his wife" - he is HERS. And she WANTS him. There's a mutual affection there and a strong trust - a trust which seems to be well founded since Stonn (though silent) stands by her side at the end of the episode. <- That might seem small but if Spock would reject her for 'daring to challenge' (again, the language is not 'because I don't want you' but more of an implied disgust at her having the AUDACITY to reject him) then it's not a stretch to assume that it'd be considered an insult in the TOS Vulcan society to NOT choose Stonn as her champion after a prior agreement. Anyway T'Pring was a woman in an impossible situation within a society which saw her as more of an object than a person and she wanted Stonn and Stonn wanted to be hers and she trusted that he would understand if she had to publicly pick someone else to ensure his life would be spared and he did understand.

I know that the Gaiman "word of God" on Dream of the Endless's romantic history is, "He has had many more lovers than the ones we see" with regards to Killalla, Alianora, Nada, Calliope, and Thessaly (ugh) and as someone who will absolutely incorporate word-of-god canon , it's the height of hypocrisy to just dismiss this.

And I will accept that probably Dream has had some sexual encounters outside those five canonical relationships, like the implied Lucifer and Titania flings.

But I just can't escape the sense that the whole, "Oh yeah, he's had tons of other lovers like, just loads of them, believe me, the dude is definitely not billions of years old and only had a half dozen romantic encounters all of which ended in tears, that would be crazy, right??" is just more... something a dude would say about their super cool dude character?

Because I personally like to, in this one instance, rigidly stick to canon as we see it on the page. And that canon is: Dream was deeply lonely and never even officially hit a half-dozen long-term lovers in his life and he only married once. He is a divorcee and he is sad and he is lonely and he would love to find someone to be with and be in a relationship and just continuously eluded him. And our evidence for this? The Wake.

We have some of Dream's past lovers show up at the Wake. Bastet specifically notes that they could have been lovers, probably should have been, but it never happened. Titania implies a relationship but won't say anything more and obviously it was not long-lasting romantically speaking, whatever it was.

But basically, if we take the Wake as an on-the-page canonical account of the living beings who were Dream's lovers and who had enough of a connection to actually show up, it's still a depressingly small number for so long a life, for a character who is defined by his romanticism and loneliness. Even if we say, give or take, there might have been a few more, none of those after Nada could be mortal, so we can't just say they're all dead. That means the other immortal lovers either didn't show up or didn't bother to speak. And sure, if there's other immortals in the mix, sure, we could "Doylist" say the comic just doesn't have room for them all but really, to me, the more compelling take is... there just weren't that many for Dream, and that it's deeply sad. Some of it was, yes, his own fault, probably a lot of it. But it's still sad.

And more importantly, it's a more interesting character. Anyone can say their stupidly powerful godlike character who is beautiful and magical and can craft dreams and stories and is this Byronic hero of poetry and darkness is also someone who had a bunch of romantic partners and can definitely hook up with anyone he wants, psshh, obviously but... a character who is all those things and can't get this one major part of their life together to the extent that he's demonstrated to want a loving partner which he is repeatedly shown to want, is just... it's a certain kind of unique for that character and I'm here for it.

I love chosen one characters and I love characters that are overpowered as all shit. I love characters with one-of-a-kind powers and I love characters who seem like they’re Just Some Guy until they do something that should be impossible and you’re struck with the realization that. oh. I don’t think this character is human. I love characters so strong they’re basically untouchable and I love characters who are slowly crumpling under the weight of being the only person who can keep the world safe but can never show it and I love characters who spend years hiding who they truly are until circumstances force them to reveal themselves and now they can never go back to who they were before. I love characters who don’t even know exactly how much they’re capable of and aren’t sure they want to find out. How powerful can you become before you stop being a person?

I think it’s interesting that you get to see all three chosen’s living spaces and like for all their bravado they live empty, pathetic lives and the game goes out of it’s way to instill the idea that they’re all desperate to please their gods in ways that are dark mirrors, or at least narratively parallel to our companions. We are a hair away from being our dark other, brother

Except for karlach.

You could say that I have strong feelings about this ongoing debate

i found one of my old middle school sketch books while cleaning up today and saw there was A Good Deal of ghost trick art in it, so i decided to spend some time paying tribute to the ghost detective that fundamentally changed my brain chemistry in 2011 w

old ghost trick art under the cut—minor spoilers in the dialogue whoops👇

reading tftsa is always an emotional experience especially when you get the short stories focused around the Blackthorns because the absence of Mark just bleeds out. like when you read about Julian being Helen's suggenes and Simon being the witness to Julian's parabatai ceremony you are just burdened with the knowledge that that's not who they would have picked if the circumstances were different. in a different life it was Mark.

THE number one most irritating thing about life is deciding when you're meant to speak or make eye contact and when you're not, and for how long and how many phrases you're meant to say at a time