kradeelav | Entries tagged with awareness

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

- (part of the) Serenity Prayer

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971

"Itoi: The colors for MOTHER were actually a proposal from my designer. He came to me and said, "I've got this option and that option," so I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" and he told me, "Personally, I think this one is the best."

That's generally how I work. I ask the person doing the job. On the surface, it may look like I'm trying to be even-handed or something, but I definitely play favorites. But the thing is, if the person actually doing the work says that's the one!, I can usually get behind it.

You see, someone on the outside looking in might have all kinds of different opinions. Maybe they dislike muted colors, who knows. But when someone actually involved in the project—that is, the designer himself—says they want to do something with a certain level of passion, there's always a reason for it. A deep, fundamental reason. Just like rolling over in your sleep.

—Rolling over?

Itoi: Yeah. I've been making the point lately that rolling over in your sleep isn't a random action; there's a real, fundamental reason behind it.

Itou: Really?

Itoi: Take the way I'm sitting right now… even this pose is a kind of "rolling over in your sleep."

Itou: Ah, I see what you mean.

Itoi: In other words, I'm sitting like this because my body has an actual necessity to be in this posture. It's the result of a struggle between two things: the fact that I'm being watched by others, and my own internal necessity. I believe the future of "creative work" lies in how much we can tap into and breathe life into that kind of raw instinct."

https://shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/

(Putting this here since I do not trust the critical thinking and literacy skills on the other platforms I generally post art in.)

( discussion of current events and difficult artwork topics under the cut )

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

- aral balkan (mastodon)
(bolding mine)

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.

"Gilles Deleuze proposed in the 1990s that discipline, formerly the dominant mode of power in Western societies, had been modified and to some degree overtaken by a logic of “control” that worked not by confinement or restriction of movement, but by the regulation of continuous, mobile flows— of capital, information, bodies, and affects. Unlike the punitive subjection of discipline, control does not require a subject as such; nor does it seek to produce or manage one. As we have seen, casino design follows what one leading firm calls the “immersion paradigm,” holding players in a desubjectified state of uninterrupted motion so as to galvanize, channel, and profit from what the academic consultants quoted earlier called “experiential affect.” If, as philosophers and anthropologists of affect contend, contemporary capitalism is distinguished by strategic attempts to mobilize and derive value from consumers’ affective capacities, then commercial casino design would appear to be a case in point."

-Addiction by Design

"Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games.

Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just one ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win two keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these gigantic teddybears."

Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if that dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat.

Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything (pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/). That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces where similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears."

(x)

Cool bit in a Spencer Wan animation text interview that stood out to me for a certain trend in US animation....

> original interview source

( Read more... )

"I think often about Go Nagai. His early works were hounded by censors, pulled apart and condemned. It wasn’t new, and it wasn’t unique to him in particular, either, though it echoed through the time I was living in, when the internet felt like it was being boxed in by the same “protective” hand. I was a queer teenager, living in a just-built suburb on the edge of an industrial sprawl. My computer allowed me to live anywhere, as I often put it, wedged into a corner, lit by the faint blue glow of the monitor long past midnight. It was there where I downloaded scans of Ashen Victor (nee Haisha), a Yukito Kishiro manga that hasn’t seen a proper translation since VIZ briefly serialized it. I remember the thrill of saving those pages, like I was helping preserve something fragile and important, even if I didn’t know exactly why.

Those late nights led me somewhere. They taught me to look deeper, to keep records, to research not just out of curiosity but out of a sense of duty to self and to others. Now, when I see the same debates resurface on who gets to control culture, who decides what survives, I can’t help but feel I’ve been watching the same play for years, just with new scenery."

- https://retroanimechris.blogspot.com/2025/08/climbing-spiral-staircase-queer.html

Art is for opening little portholes to a subject we’re all familiar with in some way and saying “let me teach you how I see this thing, let me show you how to get emotional about it the way I get emotional about it” ‪@coelasquid.bsky.social‬

Anonymous asked:

How did you get so good at art? Any particular practices or studies? I had tried to look for previous asks, if there was any similar, but couldn't find any. I view improvement, or skill, in art, to be the ability to communicate ones ideas; your art has such a strong ability to communicate! I love the way you set up abstract enviroments and designs, grounded in reality, to create this inviting world of your own vision. I've thought about DMing you about this too, but felt that may be a bit much, haha. Really inspired by your work!

thefaiao answered:

Thank you very much. I spend a lot of my time drawing, which is a necessity, but beyond that, I believe in improving your art by observing the world. I think you should always be curious and look at the world around you, both online and offline. There's an incredible richness that you have to look for, and try your best to understand it. Whenever you come across something, try your best to understand why it exists, the circumstances of its creation. All art is a communication of our world, so only by improving your understanding of our world will you make a more believable one in your art.

And it's not about realism. Games like Final Fantasy 6 are not at all realistic, but they convey a rich world by reflecting so effectively the feelings of our world. It's something you simply come to *know* the more you live and observe. I believe in living for your art, though in a way, that is living in the real world. Do not lose your life for your art, because if you do you will not be able to *know* this world, and create new things. You must fight for your right to draw and live a healthy life in every way you can, because it's your desire to observe this world through the drawings and through these drawings understand what parts that are still unclear to you. Beyond that I also believe art is about communication beyond anything else. The shared experience of creating is what it is about to me. The internet facilitates it and also destroys it in some ways. It tries to make it into something with meaningless scores. It's a very useful place we must not let go of, but try to share this art through other means if possible. It will help you improve, and no create unhealthy habits based on said scores. And please try to make friends and take care of the people you love who understand you. Try to understand them even if they don't. It will only make you better at drawing and living, which is what we want, right?

finding out that bob gurr (disney imagineer) is another skunk works / kelly johnson project manager nerd has got to be the weirdest combination of exact shared special interests with me. dude was THERE at the blackbird farewell fly-over for kelly. i'm jealous.

i'm choosing to believe weird curious-about-the-world engineer/doodle gremlins are just inherently drawn to well designed shit.

anyway, another interesting anecdote from his book:

what's new is old is new.

( edit: have an extra quote i lol'd at. )

"To start with, on the cultural side, the main difference is that Japanese animation comes out of a completely different tradition of representation in art and performance. Western classicism is based on the strict adherence to realism, rendering the artist (and the process) invisible in order to elevate the subject. Classicist painting values the creation of an illusion. A painting should make the viewer forget he is looking at oil on canvas, and reveal its subject as if through a window on reality. Brush strokes must be blended so no trace of the artist's toil is evident. Western theatrical performance is likewise realist, defining a character through individuality, unique traits specific to period and setting. Japanese theatre and art, on the other hand, would fit the definition of "modernist" in Western culture. Asian painting is stylized, impressionistic (and expressionistic), concerned entirley with displaying the brush stroke and the flat, graphic nature of the picture plane. Japanese performance-- kabuki, noh, bunraku-- is similarly stylized, and more focused on capturing a distillation of character than emotional versimilitude."

- (long essay on differences of eastern vs western animation by the creator of Aeon Flux)

( (edit: shoot, copypasting the whole thing in the readmore here, since reddit doesn't strike me as the most stable source.) )

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

― Martha Graham (via

queenlua )

"Many parents, in fact, report that the worst-case scenario is not when your whole family is ill but when the adults are miserable and the under-six cohort feels just fine.

Old hands at this situation have plenty of advice for first-timers, all of which boils down to this: lower your standards as far as possible without inviting a visit from Child Protective Services. Lock the doors, unplug the appliances, and leave the children to their own devices—a phrase that didn’t used to have technological overtones, but if there were ever a time to waive your no-screens policy, along with all your other policies, this is it. Your six-year-old wants to watch “Night of the Living Dead”? Go for it. Your four-year-old wants to eat ice cream on a hotdog bun? Sure thing. Together they want to finger-paint the toddler? Have fun. As for you: keep an ear out for genuine screams and excessive silence. Change dirty diapers and intervene in activities that would result in calling 911. Otherwise, divide and conquer with any available grownup and rest as much as you can."

- welcome to the preschool plague years

hilarious, real, and endearing article. i currently work at a place with a disproportionate number of parents to young kids/focus on toddlers, and ohmigod this is so true.

"Along with specialization and delimitation of skills, we would tend to say that the two other practitioners of Bruno's magic, the actual magician and the prophet, have now vanished. More probably, however, they have simply been camouflaged in sober and legal guises, the analyst being one of them and, after all, not the most important. Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic."
- Eros and Magic

(dope thesis even if the book almost requires you to read it in a fever dream haze lol)

It was clear that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.
I remembered something that my Bilderberg deep throat had said to me on the telephone one Sunday evening shortly before I set off for the Grove. He said that far from being fed up with hearing wild conspiracy theories about themselves, many of the Bilderbergers actually thoroughly enjoy it.
He also said that, in all honesty, neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to. The current members are getting older and older, and the prospective newcomers – the world leaders of tomorrow – don’t seem all that interested in getting involved.
“Let’s face it,” my deep throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”
“Maybe,” I said, “that’s why you Bilderbergers love to hear the conspiracy theories. So you can pretend to yourselves that you do still rule the world.”
- Them: Adventures with Extremists

"We may sometimes assume that a translation provides a window onto the original, but just as often, as Derek Walcott says, “to translate is to betray.” An old Italian pun—traduttore, traditore / translator, traitor—reminds us that the translator who connects two people always stands between them."
"Translation, divination, sacrifice, theft, and more: these are the connecting /not-connecting arts, and each is therefore well figured as the artus that is a flexible joint or the boundary that is a permeable membrane. To say this is, in a sense, merely to restate the old idea that tricksters and their actions embody ambivalence, but it restates it in a language that makes it clear why we may call the tricksters who practice these things artists in an ancient sense and their creations works of art."

- Trickster Makes the World

"So now it is urgent to defend love’s subversive, heterogeneous relationship to the law. At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. Reactionaries are always suspicious of difference in the name of identity; that’s their general philosophical starting-point. If we, on the contrary, want to open ourselves up to difference and its implications, so the collective can become the whole world, then the defence of love becomes one point individuals have to practise. The identity cult of repetition must be challenged by love of what is different, is unique, is unrepeatable, unstable and foreign."

In Praise of Love

"Of course [technical skills in art] matter. You need appropriate technical skills.That's why I'm saying good enough is good enough. I was explaining this during the break that, you know, I just want to make sure everybody gets a chance to see it. You start out here [at the bottom] right? You struggle through learning, you get here and now you're good enough at - say what I've been talking about today. You're good enough. It doesn't mean there isn't somebody better than you, somebody on- on Instagram you admire, somebody in history that you love, somebody blah blah blah. That's irrelevant.

Good enough is good enough. It doesn't mean you're the best. The best has nothing to do with it. It's a red herring. As soon as you're good enough and good enough by the way, is pretty good - you want to diversify. So you're going to [branch out] from here and you go OK, character design, environmental design, narrative structures, composition, color theory, stylization, etc. What learning how to draw gets you is the chance to do all of that. Well, provided you have the wit to realize you're now good enough. You don't have to be the best, right?

But you do have to try to learn something new."

- Will Weston

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