I've been reading Exodus lately and I've just gotten to the portions where God gives the first commands to the people via Moses (twice), and then goes on to give detailed instructions about the tabernacle and how it should be built, and I'm just... we think art is unimportant?? we think things only mean as much as their functionality?? we so easily fall into the trap of believing that beauty means nothing, that it's cheap and only worth whatever mindless distraction it brings, that it's barely more than a cheap sensual thrill, that buildings should just be practical and plain and cheap, that everything should be functional but ultimately disposable, that paintings and dresses and mugs and curtains and carpets are just pretty but have no real value, that beauty is fleeting and vain and therefore shouldn't be thought about too much, if even looked for at all... we fall into these traps so easily, and we forget that there are chapters upon chapters of painstakingly detailed plans to build one portable worship tent, and those plans have been handed down through thousands of years of human history, because beauty and art and skill in craft is important
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Creators I love you but it's time to wake up
Among rumors about our tumblr user data being sold off to Midjourney/Generative AI, recent Extremely transphobic events (that have been ongoing) coming to a head, another extremely concerning internet censorship bill being pushed in upper levels of government, and a general air of frustration over how the site belongs to and is operated by perhaps the second stupidest CEO (second only to twitters own) of our age, I'm very done with the last few vestiges of what the old internet held for artists.
And if you're reading this, you probably are too.
I know we're tired. We are all tired. It is not always viable to pack up shop and move, again and again and again.
From tumblr to twitter to anywhere else we've ever grown up posting, things no longer work. Our audiences are kneecapped by aggressive and hostile algorithms, our reach is abysmal - if we aren't shadow-banned or silenced for one (transphobic) reason or another, we're thrust into an ever growing pit of hostility where the only thing that drives clicks is fighting and contention.
We're tired. We're so fucking tired. We aren't businesses, we aren't content mills, we cannot keep this pace that modern social media has set for us, to wring every ounce of creativity out of us to profit from and leave us rotting.
The key to staying afloat here, and I cannot stress this enough, is to stay connected to your peers.
Pack up and move as units if you must. Exodus from the sites that are killing us. Push your entire friend group of artists to move from one site to the next that promises you a kinder experience.
Art drives movements, it drives change, it is all that encompasses being human. If you take that away from the shitty places, they will be left with nothing but a cesspit of inhumanity and the people who follow you will be more incentivized than ever to move with you.
Yes, this is terrifying. There are no guarantees. There never was, and never are, and never will be.
But stay connected. Stay human.
Support each other and be willing to hold hands and jump when we all - as a group - need to jump from the flames we're all trying to convince ourselves wont kill us before rescue comes.
Rescue isn't coming, rescue will be found hand in hand with each other. I'm offering you my hand, please take it. There's always a new start, there are always helping hands reaching for you. You have to look up from the doom-scroll long enough to see and take them.
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Just had the sleep-deprived idea of combining my Cryptid Batfam Au with @phoenixcatch7 's Possessed Doll Au into a combo au, some distant timeline where the two combine and meld into one thing.
Honestly would be slightly body horror probably, maybe with Bruce starting with building wings and then it... escalates. There's a reason that people don't go down in the caves under Gotham, and Bruce is incredibly lucky that It welcomes him.
Perhaps welcomes him too much, what with it seeming to build him another body each time he gets injured, even if it's just bruising. Not to mention that another is forming when he takes Dick in, and then another when Barbara joins them.
There's something not quite the same the first time he wakes up in a body that is his but not, something organic but not. Testing on it is fine, small tests that is, anything larger and his head starts to pound and ring.
It's easier to just accept the shadows' gifts than question it.
Honestly I like to think the body is something between inorganic and organic, like veins of flesh and fur wrapped around bones and metal. Like a flesh puppet of sorts, starts all skeletal and mostly metal and wood but the veins of black and red start to grow over time as the whispers about the Bat spread.
Honestly I also like to think it's more animalistic than the original possessed doll au, the wood easily mistaken for things like chitin, especially with the segmentations.
Combine the chest cavity with the harness that the kids cling to, and you have a back cavity lol. The 'Spine' seemingly splitting open to hide things inside.
Bruce probably does have clothing for the body, but I wanted to figure out the general body first lol.
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REMINDER: Please tag your discourse! If you have an opinion post that embodies the >:/ emoji towards meta or fandom, tag it as #discourse
if you have an opinion post that embodies the >:/ towards a character, tag it as #[character] neg
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something magical about fics written while a story is still in progress. i love u fics written during hiatuses. fix-it fics set after a season finale before the next one is announced. codas for episodes right after they air. fics with the knowledge of one book but none of the future ones that got released. fics continuing the story where it left off that either got it so wrong or surprisingly close to what happens in canon when it starts up again. mwah.
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I know that I've mentioned several times how I had to go through a period of relearning once I got out of the religious environment in which I'd been raised, and like... A lot of the things I had to research and learn about all over again were fairly obvious, like climate change. My parents and teachers told me that man-made climate change wasn't real, so I believed them. Once I got to college, I realized that I'd been misled, and I had to relearn the whole topic.
But not all of these things were obvious! I went through this period where I didn't even know what part of my education I should be questioning. Like... what do I even research?? Do I actually understand weather? What about history?
One of the reasons I bring up history is because one of the things my parents told me wasn't real was radiocarbon dating. And I don't just mean "well, these are estimations, can't be used for precise dates, and might be somewhat off due to atmospheric conditions." I got the whole "well, this is unprovable* and goes against the history the Bible gives us so you shouldn't trust carbon dating at all."
(*I was taught that anything that wasn't like... observable in real-time was not provable.)
Let's just say... a lot of my childhood was adults around me hedging their bets like "I'm not saying this is fake, I'm just saying it can't be proven and they're asking us to take this hypothesis as fact! I'm just saying you should question things! And not believe those liberal scientists!"
(carbon dating, evolution, the big bang/quantum physics, whether humans and dinosaurs coexisted, climate change, how hiv works, etc.)
And uhhh I went into archaeology (among other things) when I first started college, so you can imagine how this impeded my studies. lmao
idk, I guess I'm not going anywhere in particular with this. I was just listening to a podcast that's currently talking about the paleolithic period and I still had a gut instinctual reaction of "well, you don't know these things are that old" that I had to squash like a fucking bug.
I definitely understand exactly how the "it's good to be curious and read sources critically" to "question everyone, especially experts" to "those liberal scientists are trying to trick you" to "fake news!!" pipeline comes about. ;;
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