at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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why does it always gotta be "oh im a communist but not like those marxists leninists-" we had this debate. in the 1800s. in fact marx AND lenin wrote about it: you are either for some nebulous idea of communal living that gets you nowhere OR you realize that you have to start from the current material conditions, and organize, and the organization has to be centralized for it to work and you have to study a lot and also act in group because going to protests on your own is just perpetuating an individualist ideology. they were saying marx was outdated in 1915!! guess what happened two years later. like you can incorporate all you want from feminism and queer theory and even anarchy but at the end of it all. only one line of action can bring about revolution, has revolution as its objective and has in fact done so before. it's marxism leninism. you have just been conditioned to think it's outdated so you wouldn't use the only weapon that actually works! people cant afford to eat and the west's quest to maintain economic hegemony is pushing us into ww3 and you will not use the concepts of plusvalue, imperialism, and political party, why? because the ruling class told you identity politics are more modern?
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Everyday I fight the urge of writing a destiel fic where everything is the same but Dean has a baby girl (the mother didn't want to be involved cause they were both young, like 24 maybe.) So Dean is like "well I guess I'm gonna parent this child now" and yeah he raised Sam and he did the best job he could with the circumstances they were given, but something about this little girl makes Dean wanna cry everytime he looks at her and thinks how he doesn't know how to give her a better life.
Anyway she would be two at the first season and Dean would put her hair up in silly hairstyles and Sam just has to reset himself when he enters the impala during the first episode and there is just baby stuff on the back seat.
When Cas shows up the baby gets attached to him really fast and Cas, who has never interacted with a baby before, holds her by the back of her clothes like she is a kitten.
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"You never told me where you got it - where you got all my favourite dresses."
Rhys arched a dark brow. "You never figured it out?"
I shook my head.
For a moment, he said nothing, his head dipping to study the dress.
"My mother made them."
(...)
I gazed a reverant hand down my sleeve. "I- I had no idea."
His eyes were star bright. "Long ago when I was still a boy, she made them - all your gowns. A trousseau for my future bride." His throat bobbed. "Every piece... Every piece I have ever given you to wear, she made them. For you"
Sometimes you just read something and can't help but think about the implications.
"aww how sweet his mom made all her favourite gowns how wholesome" nonono EVERY. PIECE. Ma'am please he's still a baby boy you're making a lot of assumptions about his future preferences.
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the way mrs westenra says lucy is so much better now and then proceeds to take credit for it and then van helsing and jack walk into lucy's room and she's actively looking like a corpse. woman your perception checks cannot be this bad are you wilfully ignoring the evidence of your own mistakes or are you lying to keep the doctors out.
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