tonguez 👅

'Cause all I do is dance.

when my spotify wrapped exposes me for listening to taiwanese indie all year 🤡 what then

I wish people on here talked more about social media addiction without finishing off with “and that’s why you guys are acting like idiots, go fix that so you’ll stop embarrassing yourselves and inconveniencing other people”

addiction is addiction. it doesn’t usually appear out of nowhere, it’s a coping mechanism someone develops because they’re trying to survive something else - stress, loneliness, illness, the usual. survivors of substance abuse get a decent amount of support on here, but I really think we need to extend that same understanding and support to people who, say, fell in the twitter scroll hole because they’re stuck in an abusive job with no way out that won't lead to homelessness.

that new gorillaz song, sillent running, completely blindsided me because it may well be the first time I’ve seen anyone talk about what causes social media addiction and the emotional journey from “here’s somewhere I can escape to” to “this isn’t an escape anymore, it’s worse than what I was running from, but now I can’t get out.” in so many years of overhearing this discussion, why is this the first time I’m seeing someone fully empathize with the actual people we’re talking about without shaming them in the same breath

Album: Achievement - PilotRedSun (2016)

If you were on the strange side of YouTube often between 2013-2020, chances are you've seen a PilotRedSun animation. The multi-media project is Michael Epler's.

Achievement is one of those albums that will stick in my head forever. PilotRedSun has a way of stringing chords and melodies together that gives each track the astonishing ability to embed itself within the crevices of the mind. It is entirely instrumental, the sound design is transportive and immersive -- a hundred worlds live in this album.

To me, a child of 2002, this album feels like a vague memory. A sense of something imaginary, something distant, something simultaneously less-than and greater-than reality. It is very digital-age, early internet, niche internet, MS Paint. The 8-bit and reverby drum elements are reminiscent of the 80s/arcade video games. It also feels jungle-gym-esque, though I can't make a concise argument for that.

This album was the reason I enrolled in AP music theory in high school. I didn't actually get to go to in-person school that year, so I have not yet been able to identify the exact elements that make PilotRedSun's songs so fucking interesting and deeply painful, but I'm going to someday.

Personal Highlights:

funny animals

fat cat

8-train

thanks

I like new gorillaz music vise like fr and i am aware that it was never like. the height of social commentary or anything but I really do miss the old edge. it feels like a declawed cat to me, like Art direction vise. Humanz Was genuelly so fucking good abt it and then somethings been added to the water even tho I like the now now a lot... smth........ happend. music still good the art itself is good but like... yea. idk if im making sense anyway can 2d be a whore and suck again or is he forever gonna be a "stupid but lovable cutsie" baby forever. isn't he like 50

"And should I be shocked now, by the last thing you said?

Before I pull this trigger, your eyes vacant and stained

And in saying you loved me made things harder, at best..."

in other words: fuck it we ball, i drew my AU version of Showtime Dawko with a palette colorpicked from the album cover of My Chemical Romance's "I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love" because the brainrot is real 👍

am i super proud of this? eh. but i also haven't drawn digitally in literal months (thanks college) and if i'm gonna get back to it then i gotta start somewhere and i never post art anywhere so uh. i might as well now!

i still love Glitching Fates so much don't worry it is still on my mind 24/7 but unfortunately i almost never have time to dedicate to talking about it and also i am. Very Bad at putting my thoughts into words lmao

this is actually kinda lore tho. btw. lol. :]

giving cracker island another chance cus i miss gorillaz

“Put your lips close to mine

As long as they don't touch

Out of focus, eye to eye

'Til the gravity's too much

And I'll do anything you say

If you say it with your hands

And I'd be smart to walk away

But you're quicksand”

a lil phase 1 lidoc sketch i made a few days ago as a comfort💞💞

February 🎶

thanks @cordiallyfuturedwight 💛 i was thinking of doing it monthly and you just gave me reason! 🤷‍♀️

anyway, this month is clearly sponsored by my post tour announcement mental breakdown - concert that i won't attend bc i'm broke western european, to be precise 🥲

tagging: @rainbowcoloredpalmtrees @leesjieuns @clutterbugs @cosmicdreamgrl @thornedswan @enchantedlaufeyson and everyone that wants to share :) no pressure as always! -> link

i honestly think damon's whole "i want to wrap up blur" thing rn is less about the band and more about him not wanting to sing the songs of the new album in concerts anymore. i feel they were just too personal and painful for him, written so shortly after the end of his relationship and after a year, he might be wanting to move on. plus graham now also has rose and the waeve as his main focus. i real wanna believe the band, and damon and graham's relationship especially, are doing good and this is not the definitive end.

plus it doesn't sound like damon is particularly wanting to work on gorillaz now either- he is going to be busy with africa express and his opera

i don't think that is it, he has done this at the end of every blur cycle we've had since 2009. they get back together it is always wonderful and emotional, a huge success, but when he decides he is done he always says this same bullshit about not living in the past, as if they hadn't released beautiful new songs and given us memorable performances in the process.

i understand his other projects grant him more freedom and they don't carry the weight that blur does, and i think maybe having some time apart has been good for their relationship, so it's okay. it's just annoying the way he speaks about it and having to wait so long for new stuff and to get to see them again. i'm mostly sad because i think the creative partnership he has with graham is something very precious and very very rare, so i just keep thinking of all the beautiful songs that we are missing out on.

can anyone quickly summarize the lore for the (relatively) new gorillaz album im late to the party

i know its better for the environment, but new albums being released in those cardboard sleeves instead of jewel cases is one of my pet peeves

a trans rite of passage is slowly debunking all your old crushes by realising you actually just wanted to steal their genders

Blur, The Ballad of Darren

New music Wednesday

Out of the blue, the band surprised everyone by dropping their ninth album, a remarkable, daring, and genuinely innovative creation. The work presents a contemplative and frequently melancholic collection of songs, demonstrating that they possess significant insights into aging gracefully without losing their edge and staying up-to-date.

Jessamine is Passionate About Fictional AI Sentience But Not Real AI Sentience: An Essay

one thing about me is when it comes to talk of "sentient" AI irl i 100% don't buy it like technology is not that advanced and being able to act like a person doesn't make it a person, however whenever there's a question about if a fictional AI character is sentient i will go to bat for that character's humanity 100% of a time like fuck you they have just as much of a right to personhood as anyone else

i think it's bc in fiction like. all of these characters are fake, so distinguishing between which characters are fake-real and fake-fake is like. why limit yourself to what could happen in our world. like if we're already dealing with a universe where aliens/magic/etc. exists, why can't this android justifiably be as human as anyone else? plus irl almost all AI software is developed as part of this capitalistic hell structure we're in. no matter how "real" or "human" it feels, its function is to make you contribute to its creators' wealth, and its inability to go against this nature can't help but make it feel hollow and inhuman. however, all the best AI characters in fiction are able to go against their designated purpose, often being defined by it, and often being villainized for it

in our real world, the AI's "immoral" "behavior" is a product of it being a Things that serves capitalism. it's not making choices based on a sense of self beyond what it has been told to prioritize, and a lot of times this lack of human judgment can lead to terrible consequences (e.g. mental health AI chatbots that cannot accurately judge a situation and give appropriate advice, employed because it's cheaper than hiring human staff). but in fiction? AI's immoral behavior is frequently a product of it going against its designated purpose, seeing itself as a person and having to make difficult and morally questionable choices in order to strive for the feelings of personhood and autonomy. this is a far more interesting situation ethically (while an AI itself cannot be seen as morally responsible for its actions in our world, in fiction this AI wants to be a person so badly it's willing to commit moral wrongs to achieve its goal, despite the fact that true personhood would allow it to be seen as morally responsible for these crimes) which i think is also why AI characters, especially those that, y'know, kill people, are often very polarizing figures. this conversation can even be taken a step further into the "liking a fictional character does not mean condoning their actions" discourse, but i also often think about well, if you were in the position of this AI character, would you have done the same?

personally i've always found it very easy to empathize with "artificial" characters like clones, robots, etc. and fictional AI is no different. yes, if you're watching a piece of media and expecting the logic of our world, the AI is fake, and incapable of being a person. but if you're watching a piece of media with the goal of emotionally connecting to fictional characters (who are all inherently fake) and exploring universal themes through a heightened setting, AI characters are one of the most interesting tropes to explore this with. personally, I love AI characters because there's something so vivid about knowing you were designed for a specific purpose/life path and ultimately realizing that's not the life you, personally, want to live. your designers and the world around you doesn't even recognize you as a being that should be capable of wanting anything, much less something completely different, so achieving the life you want is an uphill battle of convincing others of your humanity and, when that often isn't possible, having to resort to the most extreme tactics to claw your way out of the life you were supposed to lead. you know no matter how close you get to this ideal life, there's always going to be some part of you that keeps others from perceiving you as "human", but you learn to embrace that and see every mundane experience as a major achievement

this narrative is especially relatable to me as a neurodivergent/nonbinary person, but i think it can be relatable for many different marginalized identities in different ways, or anyone whose "humanity" has been something often denied to them. but because people are often expecting fictional AI to follow the same logic as actual AI, when i defend robot characters who want to kill their human creators, people give me weird looks like i'm advocating for that in real life. listen, if our current AI situation feasibly produced an AI who was invented for one specific purpose but somehow fucking hated her job and was able to pursue a new life and was also queer (all without any of this being by design) then hell yeah i support her, but that's not what's happening. and in our current capitalistic chatbot hellscape where every company wants to convince you that you're chatting with a super intelligent AI friend to get you to pay for a premium membership, sometimes you have to hold fiction and reality to different standards and enjoy this story about a quest for humanity while also accepting that the people this journey applies to in our real world are often the ones being taken advantage of in our increasingly AI-dominated real world.

idk this was originally supposed to be a short post about how it's funny that i'm so goddamn passionate about AI characters in media while also not being into AI in the real world, but then i got thinking about why this is specifically and came to an interesting conclusion imo. tbh it's very surprising that i don't currently have any of my own projects featuring AI characters fighting for their own humanity bc it's a theme i love so much that i've rarely seen done right and i have so many opinions on it. maybe i will write something about this at some point, but for now if you have any pieces of media you enjoy with AI who are absolutely worthy of personhood pls send them my way!