"It's you, you know? It's not the sea, it's not the sun. It's you. You are my favourite part of the summer. It has always been you."

🏖️

Even if if took me DAYS, I'm thrilled to say that I finally finished it. Thank you so much for trusting the process yet again with me, for being such patients sweet lovely little things.

Thank you so, so much.

If your almost out of requests I'll send my second allowed one! Didn't want to send a second one at first though to give other people a shot lol

Howsabout.... something something Scriabin with the vibe from the song "This is Love" by Air Traffic Controller? If vibes from songs are allowed ofc xD

Day 13 - I know wrong, I know right, I just love to pick a fight

My heart was forever trapped in your deceptive spider web.. You’ll always be my Highness

Eugene is the type of person that would pay for your whole groceries even though youre missing 50 cents or something. Anyways, this is his younger version where he's in his 20s

hes charming when hes not moody like this i promise

looking for answers

"Good evening Fortuna City, this is your Narrator speaking..."

Haven't done a lot of OC art lately, figured I'd give my boy The Narrator some updated polish!

not to be egotistical or anything but i REALLY want a poster of my sigma drawing,,,

I am so hopped up on anger i cannot sleep woo

“Why were you up so late last night?”

*Cut to me at 6:45am desperately trying to resuscitate a spider I accidentally waterboarded because I didn’t realize he was in the sink right away*

Conclusion to the dramatic story below ⬇️

He was okay!! He scurried under my cabinets and lived happily ever after

okay, so here I am half an eternity later - musicians music: I think there are two genres of musicians music, but they are actually the same, the showcase of incredible skill. Like, musicians claim to like the Paganini caprices, but if they have any honesty in their bodies, they will admit that they sound terrible. No one likes listening to a Paganini Caprice, EVEN when played by a very very skilled musician, they are not pretty music. Difficult music, interesting music, but not pretty. But it is cerebral, it's an active, thinking kind of appreciation, we like them because of the underlying context that we have the vocabulary to identify. Like puns in a foreign language or something. And maybe it can be hard to turn off the part of your brain that takes in all that analytic part of Listening To Music As A Musician, and then pop, for example, can get boring and repetetive very quickly, unless you re-learn how to just listen and appreciate how it sounds. Now, back in the olden days when we recorded on tape and studio time was almost prohibitively expensive, instead of just expensive as it is today, the most valued studio musicians were the ones who were almost supernaturally perfect at it - in time, in tune, with consistent timbre and rubato and vibrato and all the things, so they could go in and record it from the top three times, and that would be enough for the engineer to have everything they needed for a good frankentake to send to mastering. It should also, preferably, not have to much 'personality', because the studio musicians are just putting down the music the singer is going over. They were extremely skilled musicians, and a few clusters of them also had their own bands, playing their own music, where they got to headline - but most of those never got anywhere particular, because to the audience, it was Too Perfect. (Now, of course, the better the musician, the more likely there'll be mistakes in recorded materials, because the better the musician, the more likely they are to have gone in and done it from the top twice, and no more, unlike the types who'd have punched in everything eleven times over) And Too Perfect, without the context of how hecking hard that is to do, sounds bland and boring. Perfect for a singer to put some personality over. Perfect for a film soundtrack where the focus is character and dialogue. But Boring on its own. That is the second genre of musician music. I think the advent of digital recording and the digital sound processing tools we have available to us now will change the perception of this second genre of musicians music - because with digital recording you can do proper punching in, recording the song one line at a time, several times over, not just taking the best bits from a few full takes, and with digital processing tools we fix tempo and timing so that it always hits perfectly, and we pitch correct so that everything is always in tune (none of this means the musicians aren't skilled, the better the raw material the better the engineered end product, pitch correction and timing adjustments can make a good singer great, but not make a bad singer good, and using the tools themselves is part of the artform itself) will this make the General Public(tm) more habituated to (borderline) boring music without unintentional quirks, and will that mean that, if one can find the masters for those studio bands that music wouldn't read as boring anymore? I think yes, because this 'perfection' of a sort is now available to everyone recording, and not just a display of skill that only the top of the top among studio musicians can do, and a lot of what we think of as pretty or beautiful and enjoyable is a matter of habituation. You can always get an applause at a concert by playing a song the audience knows, even if it isn't a very good song, because recognition is important.

Digital recording means we aren't limited to literal tape, so ALL music we hear recorded will be punched in, have many many many many takes, will be in tune and in time. (something something the limitations of the medium is what we recognise it for 'sounds better on vinyl' my ass, but there is a character to vinyl, and it is all the ways in which is isn't good at capturing the fullness of sound)

And lastly, I will defend autotune to my dying day. Pitch correction is good, if you can hear the 'autotune' then it was done intentionally as an effect box (usually a vocoder style thing), have some fucking respect for audio engineers, they know what they're doing and can hear the same thing you can. (if I never see another shinee fan go 'why all the autotune, they don't need it' again it will still be too soon, it's AN EFFECT, you are free to not like it, but that doesn't mean it was a mistake)

-🎺

🎺 anon i was JUST thinking about you!!! thank you for finally coming in with this, this is so fascinating!!

it's really interesting how now in the age of ever perfectable digital creation, that the evidence of the error, the human is becoming more and more desirable as an aesthetic (or aural) choice. there's a quote from someone that i cannot remember for the life of me that paraphrased reads something along the lines of what we saw as inherent flaws in analogue media are now desirable as nolstalgic and aesthetic choices, in specific reference to things like film grain, crt refresh lines, and video glitches. in contemporary art circles you see a lot of people who are heavily focused on medium or concept based work that very often makes use of older analogue methods on purpose. i have two friends who both do 'slow process' photography, as in one of them shoots with a tintype camera and does only old school chemical processing, and the other does experimental chemical processing using natural materials. and maybe it's because i am an artist and have been one all my life, but the strive for perfection doesn't have the same draw for me anymore because it's now so easily accessible. i like to see the flaws, to see the evidence that it was made. and it absolutely makes sense that there would be parallels within the music field as well.

The best! The very best of skeletons! (Patreon)

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

college!au with miguel omg, hear me out. him slipping into your dorm late at night to help you study—he promised promised promised. but unfortunately, the books and papers are scattered on the floor, the only thing that could be heard in the room are your soft whimpers, his low grunts, and your bed frantically squeaking <3

Thank you for the request! I love this ask sm <3 Not my best work but I hope you like it!

NSFW below the cut

...

"Shhh," Miguel cooed, buried balls deep in your cunt, "she's gonna hear us." 

Too late. Your roommate was sure to give you an earful in the morning.

You were well past the stage of keeping quiet, your whines and mewls erupting from you as soon as Miguel slithered into your dorm around midnight with the guise of "studying." 

Your biochem textbook and endless notes were scattered across your floor,—pens and highlighters decorating your carpet when Miguel swiped them off your cheap spring bed, promising to help you study as soon as he got just a little taste of you.

Well, that was an hour and a half ago and he got much more than just a taste. You both had a midterm in two days, and all he'd done was make you come on his cock twice since he’d arrived. You'd doubted that'd be on the exam.

"M-Miguel," you moaned, tossing your head back against your pillow, your pussy throbbing as he gave a particularly hard thrust, "I-I can't anymore."

"Course you can," he breathed, pressing a kiss to your lips, swallowing the noises bubbling out of you, "just one more," he promised, "just one more and we can study for however long you want, hm? How does that sound?" 

Miguel and his stupid promises.

He was slamming into you now, holding your trembling thighs, finding the sweet spot that you so desperately craved. Your bed shook, the wooden headboard banging against the wall with every snap of his hips.

Your body seized, cunt clamping down on his cock and Miguel grunted, slowing down his movements.

"Fuck," he groaned, "you're about to cum, aren't you?" 

You didn't answer, caught in a euphoric state when his cock slammed into you just right. You sobbed, clawing at whatever you could get your hands on—your old bed sheets, a loose piece of paper under you, Miguel's toned arms. Your nails sunk into his flesh, raking down, sending him down his own euphoric path. 

He groaned loudly when he came, burying his face in your neck as he rode his high, emptying his load inside you. He pulled out a few seconds later, his lidded eyes watching his come trickle out of you and onto your sheets.

You sighed at the sensation, letting your fingers trace over your swollen pussy, your digits swirling through his spend.

Miguel always made you feel good, there was no doubt about that, but you needed to seriously start studying.

He pushed you down gently against the mattress when you tried to move, gripping his cock and slapping it over your sensitive lips.

“Miguel!” You squealed, too weak to thrash against his hold, “We need to study!” He grinned, lowering himself over you to pepper your face with kisses before sliding his length into your wet channel with ease.

“We will,” he tried to persuade you, groaning at your tight heat, “just gimme one more, and we can study, I promise.”

Butch Fairy Zine: Answering questions

What art style are we looking for? What is the estimated timeline? Will you get paid? we answer them here!

We will be answering more questions and posting them in the days leading up to the artist application form opening. So if you have questions, use our inbox, or you can fill in our interest form and leave them at the bottom. And if you have queries for the frog, you can leave them there too. He is very busy, so keep that in mind.

Find the interest form here.

Our Artist Application form will open on the 12th of January 2024.

text version under the cut

What type of artists are you looking for? And are you after a specific style or a range of styles?

We are looking for artists who can create pieces with fully rendered fairies and a background within the specified schedule. These can be digital artworks that are flat colour artworks, paintings, a mixture, or another style entirely.

We will also accept mixed media and traditional artworks, but they will need to be scanned at a minimum of 300dpi.

~

When you sign up for an artist position, are there any requirements to be a part of the team?

E-mail communication is required (discord is optional).

You must have a PayPal account to receive payment.

You must be able to communicate comfortably in English.

You must be 18 or older at the time of signing the contract by the 16th of February.

~

For artists accepted into the zine what would be the timeline for completing and submitting artwork?

Our current schedule for the artists requires concept ideas to be submitted by Feb 16th, and the final version by May 16th! Progress check-ins will be on Feb 29th, March 21st, and April 11th.

(In the image there is also a table including this information as well as the final submissions date being May 16th)

~

When the zine is for sale, where would the profits go to (charity, zine admin, etc.)?

We are aiming to hold pre-orders in June/July of 2024, with a flat fee paid to all contributors and additional proceeds split between contributors and mods.

Our priority is to make sure each contributor is paid fairly for their work. If sales do well enough, 20% will be used for future books and projects, and 80% split between taxes and fees, production costs, contributors and shipping costs.

~

Is this physical or digital and will there be prints of the art available? Got any merch ideas planned to go along with the zine?

Both physical and digital! Our goal is to make a 210 x 148 mm (A5) perfect-bound soft cover book.

We also plan to add some paper merch, including prints of some of the art from the book. Additional merch ideas include stickers, sticker sheets and bookmarks.

She’ll let him have this one 👍

+ ID by @weaver-of-fate ! Thank you!!

[ID: A digital drawing. It is a comic with two panels. The first is of Willow behind a wall, listening in to Hunter in the room behind her. She holds a potted plant. Hunter is holding a piece of paper and his whole face is red. He talks to Flapjack, who has a flower behind his ear. There are many speech bubbles with scribbles inside over Hunter. The biggest one says, “Will you go out with me?” The you is green. There is another piece of paper in front of Flapjack that has an arrow pointing to him and says Willow.

The second panel is of Gus and Willow at a table. Willow is slightly laughing as the same potted plant is on the table. There is a tag attached to the plant that says “I 💚 U” Gus is grinning. He holds up two pan flags. There’s cyan text and sparkles around him that read, “Love keeps winning!” and “So based!” There’s speech bubbles over both of them. Gus says, “So didja tell him??!” and Willow replies, “heh! Nah… I’ll wait.” End ID.]