(no subject)

i have a low opinion of short form sites like bsky/twitter, but -imo, knowing what i do about private investment circles- this is an exceptional succinct thread explaining a lot of corporate stupidity right now. bolded part for emphasis.

‪@robot-bastard.bsky.social‬

> But that's the thing, in modern capitalism the "users" are not the "customers". The professionals you mention are just the income stream, but the *customers* are the ones you've got to please or they'll shut you down, and in this case the customers are the stock traders.

> "well why do we care about them" because most of these big companies are running on loans, and every year they have to roll the loans

>So if your stock price tanks because you aren't doing what the traders want, then your valuation drops, and you might not be able to get a big enough loan to pay off your current one, and that means you immediately go out of business.

> Therefore: the stock traders are your customers. The people who actually make things with Animate, they're just *users*, and maybe they'll grump and grumble but in the end they'll just switch to After Effects, so it really doesn't matter what they think...

edit: looked at adobe's stock across their whole public existence and: lol. lmao. kek even.

(no subject)

still mulling over on this line of thought for a while, and there are parts of this i won't share, but doing this zihark doujin At This Particular Time as an extension of me creating art for the Muse as an act of worship - strikes me as quietly... necessary? urgent? to be mindful of as a north star?

thoughtline influenced by: 

++ what i previously mentioned about Creating && avoiding "metrics existentialism" ages ago
+ rahaeli mentioning religion studies doing far more for T+S/moderation work than anyone thought. (likely: faith, rituals, how people craft those, instinctively or deliberately....)
+ this post about general insecurities of the new guard of selfshippers (i say 'new guard' because how all of that is worded is completely new to me even though i do recognize some of the adjacent feelings in my 20 years, even though they're not a concern to me anymore * )
+ general social media posts by art peers clearly hinting at existential angst about art not getting the views/clicks online that it used to even a few months ago (even on algorithim-less sites).
+ when a doujin circle member mentioned long ago that the people least likely to be affected by LLM existentialist fear are the ones with an internal calling for their 'outsider' art, however form that may take. (isolated selfshipping, furries and comickers creating elaborate worldbuilding for themselves offline, etc. )

mostly highlighting the 'act of worship' part since as absolutely corny as that sounds on its face, it's a protective veil in terms of ... process? that negates so much of the negative externalities of the above. - hell, maybe one of many reasons why religion/spirituality is so powerful, since it has a habit of getting in between social power structures of the day and individuals, when they choose to believe in something on a smaller scale.

( *it would have been a little mean to me to respond to that post about my personal advice of thinking of it as an active act. creating something, whether art, writing, a fanshrine, etc - as a pilgrimage of sorts. evidence for you and the fates. spirituality has a way of coming in the edges around that, when you give it a home. )

and just... it's funny.

i would be surprised at the coincidence of somehow ending up drawing this doujin precisely when existential anxiety around art was at its highest, but...  there's so many of these little "coincidences" around this Muse that have happened over the decades .... nudges, if you will. where it just fell into place that clearly I was meant to do X thing at Y time that's so blindingly obvious in retrospect.

i just don't question it, not anymore.

man, i am so relieved i'm working on this. for so, so many reasons. feels like coming home.