Down with seasonal anime down with overconsumption down with every series regardless of how complex needing to be boiled down to fit into 12 episodes
there’s just too many shows
too many shows and they’re coming out at such an unprecedented rate that we can’t even fully appreciate them. and I KNOW that people are slaving away in unethical work conditions to make them, all so that nobody can even remember them, no matter how lovingly crafted or beautiful they really are
film in other countries continuing as usual, but those actors/writers are NOT crossing picket lines! other countries unions often have rules where they can’t strike in solidarity with american unions.
new indie movies separate from hollywood studios. indie movies can continue as usual too, and may even use union actors if they follow certain guidelines and/or get permission from the union.
awards shows, although they might look different and may be postponed. if there are award shows during the strike, there’s a chance they will just be live conferences announcing winners with no celebrations attached.
celebrities will not be promoting their work during this time— that WOULD be crossing the picket line! yes, this includes social media. they can still post on social media, as long as it doesn’t pertain to their work.
a lot more reality tv. this happened the last time there was a writers strike, and it will certainly happen again.
actors will also not be able to campaign for awards. this awards season is going to be a strange one.
propaganda from hollywood. they are already trying to flip the narrative by claiming they can break the unions, but they can’t. the strikers have the power. stand with them for however long this takes!
the commodification of friendship is the most annoying thing to come out of the internet in ages. like actually i love to break this to you but you’re supposed to help your friends move even if it’s hard work. or stay up with them when they’re sad even if you’re gonna lose sleep. you’re supposed to listen to their fears and sorrows even if it means your own mind takes on a little bit of that weight. that’s how you know that you care. they will drive you to the airport and then you will make them soup when they’re sick. you’re supposed to make small sacrifices for them and they are supposed to do that for you. and there’s actually gonna be rough patches for both of you where the balance will be uneven and you will still be friends and it will not be unhealthy and they will not be abusive. life is not meant to be an endless prioritization of our own comfort if it was we would literally never get anywhere ever. jesus.
as my region of the united states marches forward into trans genocide, the only thing i’m more afraid of than living out my life closeted and surrounded by people who want me dead is the idea of northern or west coast liberals abandoning me because they think red states deserve this.
please don’t make us fight alone. please don’t pretend that we wanted this just so you can feel superior to us. we are suffering and scared and our governments are corrupt and undemocratic. we are gerrymandered to hell and back, and voter suppression and intimidation is rampant in many places.
i am a human being. trans people in the south are human beings. please don’t forget about us. please don’t tell us our only hope is to leave or else we deserve our suffering. we deserve to live here too.
landlords arent bad because theyre “lazy” or “parasites”, theyre bad because they take advantage of poverty and manipulate housing availability for financial gain. you people have GOT to stop framing your critiques of the bourgeoise the same way eugenicists talk about the disabled
I was going to sneakily reply to this with “but they’re also parasites” but
I did some introspection and you’re right. While landlords do suck up value without giving any back, the idea that every individual needs to “contribute something” to capital is an inherently manufactured take.
What should be criticized is the coercive nature of the transaction between rentiers and their tenants; the artificial scarcity employed to maintain the power imbalance between the landed and those without; an ideal world is not one where we retributively attack the gentry but find a way to make them irrelevant.
Framing landlords as “they’re bad bc they’re lazy parasites” actually opens you up to further attacks! Several are in fact not lazy, they sometimes do stuff like act as professional middlepeople (“something is broken, it is their job to find someone else who will fix it”). And so they might say “actually, managing property is quite a bit of work therefore landlords aren’t all useless, just the bad ones, therefore we deserve to exist, ha!”
But that’s not the point! The point is that they manipulate a massively necessary need (housing) for their own gain, raising prices while threatening people with homelessness! That’s what’s bad, not the fact that they’re “lazy”. You could have the most hardworking landlord in the world, and it would still contribute to harm.
i don’t know what else to say except that AI art is no longer simply a source of creativity or a wonder of human creation. it has become actively hostile and destructive toward the very thing it pretends to uplift and celebrate. it is void of any human element, any soul or ounce of emotion or self-expression. continuing to use AI art knowing that it comes from theft and robbing artists of their livelihood is disgusting. we need your support now more than ever. stop giving these thieves your money and admiration.
We’ve spent the past 20-30 years enjoying a brief time where artists were able to share their art with the world for little to no cost to themselves to audiences who never would have been able to see their works before. Artistic talent and creativity have exploded thanks to the web, with people are to share techniques and tools that would have been kept behind financial and academic barriers and create audiences in entirely new ways.
And now tech bros are out to plunder that wealth of artistry we’ve come to enjoy through brute force statistical modelling so they can cut the artists out of the business of selling art. Why would a company bother employing rosters of artists to produce for them when they can hire a handful of people to run the models and tweak the outputs to suit their needs?
There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It’s about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that’s Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?
This is the end result of the commodification of art. The artistry of the works do not matter, only that they can be sold and generate profit. Capitalism has always been existed in opposition to art, Capital requires steady growth of returns and regular output, art demands innovation and risky endeavours to push the boundaries. Art is of use to capital only in so far as it is able to generate direct sales and intellectual property that can then itself be turned into a commodity. The moment Capital is able to cut artistry and artists out of the equation so that it can further maximize it’s profits, it will. And what’s worse, the art it produces will be stale and recycled.
Brute force statistical modelling by it’s very nature is recycling, it will continue reusing old ideas and old techniques in new configurations. It is an artistic ouroboros, incapable of anything but accidental innovation through sheer volume of output, that will then be re-consumed and reconstituted all over again.
Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn’t really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.
This is what’s so faulty with our short sighted coverage of scientific discoveries. You hear politicians question why we spend money on science studying insect wings and then decades later that research gets used by NASA for the most efficient way to fold/unfold solar panels on spacecraft. All of science is connected and useful because it enhances our understanding of the universe
When lasers were discovered they were called “a solution without a problem”, noone had any idea what to use them for. Since then they’re revolutionised communications and SO many parts of technology. CDs, DVDs, printing, fast internet, laser etching for making computer chips, laser eye surgery, spectroscopy, LIDAR measurements of weather patterns, barcode scanners, cooling atomic clocks, nuclear fusion, microscopy, LED technology and materials research. I’m probably not even scratching the surface here.
Fund theory and fundamental science research.
It’s actually kind of heartening, lasers; because before they were invented, their only real antecedents in science fiction were things like rayguns and heatrays and what not. But it actually turns out that their usefulness as a weapon is extremely limited, whereas their usefulness for just about everything else is incredible. It’s one of the occasions where we flipped the “Dual Use” coin and it landed very solidly on the good side.
