can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

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.

REPLICA PLAYLIST

MUSIC UNDER CUT

I have been receiving requests for any songs that inspired Replica, so here, have my personal playlist. Sorry it’s not Spotify/Soundcloud but they don’t have some of these songs available so uh… guess you’re stuck with YouTube vids. For fun I'll include my personal titles for them (which might give a few hints of what to expect in the future/end).

Replica Main Theme - “Die for You” by Grabbitz Like Father Like Son Like Brother (Omega and Shelldon) - "As Above So Below" by Alistair Lindsay Mikey's Theme / The 1st Vision - "Suzume no Tojimari" by Nanoka Hara Military (Mad) Dogs / Central Park Colony - "Imperium" by Madeon Shanghai - "Icarus" by Madeon Boom Goes the Donnie-mite (Mikey/Donnie vs the Sweeper) - "The Red Zone" by Mitsuoto Suzuki The Day the Sky Bled Red - "7 Seconds Till the End" by Nobuo Uematsu Going Out Like a Boss (Raph and Leo) - "Agape" by Nicholas Britell Remembering the Right Way (Mikey and Leo) - "The Souls of Many" - by Alistair Lindsay Mystic Hands / The 2nd Vision - "Am I Dreaming" by Metro Boomin x A$AP Book 2 Trailer - "Sea Dragon" by Covet 7 Years Later - "Iron" by Woodkid Leo's Theme / Attack on the Labor Camp - "Ego Death" by Polyphia Omega's Theme - "Touch" by Daft Punk Flat Lines (Omega Alone) - "Die Toteninsel Emptiness" by 1000 Eyes Spear - "Monsters" by Tommee Profitt Final Protocol - "The Kraken" by Katie Dey Rise / Epilogue - "Close in the Distance" by Masayoshi Soken & Tom Mills

I will admit, it's a little embarrassing since you can easily see the patterns of what I've been listening to for the past year or two. I swear I listen to more than just videogame OSTs, these songs just jive well with the story and I often find lyrics distracting when brainstorming scenes. Regardless, the music I listen to is such an important part of my creative process and some of these songs really defined the scenes I now have locked in my head. So I figured it was only fair to give them the credit they're due.

I will continue to add to this playlist, and will note in comic updates when one of these songs is applicable!

don't think I'm not still deep in the episode 7 brainrot. because OH BOY AM I

(also one more extremely, obnoxiously self-referential thing, I'm -- I'm so sorry)

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut

i feel like people are sleeping on the occam's razor situation of how buckwild it is to outright accuse a guy of being a clone of your friend even if you DO have a lot of circumstantial evidence. there's other options is what im saying. they could just be like. a guy. that's a sensible deduction. you should explore that deduction. ignore my shirt that reads I <3 RED HERRINGS.

i still think odile has the correct theory on lock but she's smart enough to know it needs like... a real smoking gun to be able to bring it up without sounding insane.

anyway. (mirabelle voice) i know its rude to speculate but has anyone else noticed the grieving? they seem to be grieving. does anyone have any thoughts on the grieving? i have some thoughts on the grieving.

hold on I'll make this my personality for 3 months

ᯓ★

I fear that "fire bending didn't come easy to zuko" and "zuko isn't a prodigy" (both true) has somehow snowballed into "zuko is a bad or at best average fire bender".... which simply isn't true, especially by the end of book 3

I think what I want to get into with the "Anyone can do harm." thing that I keep beating yall over the head with is that literally anyone, anyone at all can do harm it's not "in your DNA" to be an abuser or written in the stars that you'll be a predator. Whatever image you have of an abuser in your head, drop it and replace it with your favorite person in the world and you'll probably be closer to the truth than you realize. It's easy to address harm when it's coming from someone you already hate. I see it happen all the time. Someone you couldn't stand for no real reason does something heinous then all of a sudden here comes the avalanche of "I always knew they were a fucked up individual." No, you didn't. There is no possible way you could have known, you just already didn't fuck with them before they started doing something you could use to justify your hatred of them. I'm guilty of it too! I'm petty, mean, vindictive, and yes! I'm way quicker to believe something bad about someone I hate versus someone I love because I'm human. Still, y all gotta learn to move past that initial "Well, they were always nice to me!" gut feeling and understand that nobody truly knows anyone and anyone can be capable of anything. Even victims. Even you.

squeaky_toy_sound_effect.mp4

sometimes I think of all the on-the-surface warm, well-meaning but deeply ineffectual advice and attention john gives harrow through harrow the ninth (make some soup and get some sleep! get a hobby! don't be so hard on yourself! self care harrow! as long as I need take no actual responsibility in this relationship whatsoever I would have loved to be your dad!) set up against the stark truth that with his other hand he has been staging her attempted horrific murder again and again and again like a living nightmare on the logic that it will 'put her down or fix her'. and then I find that I wish there is a hell. a special hell where twitch streamers turned necromantic death emperors go

no sense of personal space

did you know that in one of dorm epel's voicelines he mentions he once got lost in pomefiore and ended up in a creepy basement. it's never mentioned again or given any clarification and i think about it every day

that comes up a couple of times actually! there's just like...a weird creepy dungeon slash old alchemy lab that the Pomefiore castle was built on top of. I think Vil might use it sometimes? but really it serves absolutely no purpose beyond the characters every once in a while being like "oh yeah, there's that secret underground laboratory we all apparently know about" and then never elaborating on it at all.

(I know it's a movie reference, but it's still pretty wild to just. in-universe have a not-so-secret basement alchemy dungeon that never has any relevance beyond a couple of throwaway lines. what other buckwild secrets does NRC hold that the characters just never talk about for some reason)

Just a few more

Plus the ref from race to the edge