Josh "cortex" Millard @joshmillard@mastodon.social

If you're happy
And you know it
Still we die

If you're happy
And you know it
Still we die

If you're happy
And you know
Still by age or plague
Or bullet

If you're happy
And you know it
Still we die

There's A Monster At The End Of This Series Of Logical Inferences

Ms. Jackson if you're NFT

Weird thing of the day: I did a very rough edit of Ghostbusters (1984) to cut out as much of the capital-c Comedy content I could and treat it as an accidentally campy horror drama/thriller.

300 MB .mov file here:

http://joshmillard.com/misc/ghostbusters_drama_roughcut.mov

birb site thread of notes and a few short clips here:

https://twitter.com/joshmillard/status/1382844682678378496

skate or die antwoord

*whispering* commodore sixtyniiiiiiine

In this essay, the author will take a hermeneutical approach to the source texts, and the author's dog will take a neutical approach to licking what it seems still to genuinely believe is its balls.

Pokemon Golgotha

But I think it's good for artist's sense of purpose and sense of self, and for the quality and worth of their art, and for art as a general practice, to be mindful of those motivations, and to think about where the line between "I need the money because I want to make this" and "I need to make this because I want the money" is.

Capitalism and commodification will eat up everything artists can produce and bend it to rich people's ends. It's hard to escape, but possible to resist.

I cannot cleanly separate any given artists desire to scratch out a living off their art from their desire to use art as a means to acquire wealth; most folks making and selling art will never make enough money to make it an observable distinction.

And we're living under capitalism so the need to get paid is tangled up in *everything* in a way that is hard to judge people individually on outside out outlier, high-income exceptions.

So what are the motivations to invent scarcity where the nature of a medium allows breaking away from it? They vary, but ultimately they all come down to control as value.

The value in limiting access to a work is that those who can access it gain cachet. They can have what others cannot. There may be interesting artistic reasons for that, even. But if the means by which access is limited are monetary, then art is explicitly pay-for-play and is for the richer and not the poorer.

Photography, mechanical reproduction, and more recently digital art have all interrupted to significant extent the once implicit bond between possession of an original, singular piece of visual art and popular access to that art.

Reproductions allow at least a partial experience, though an in-person experience of a physical painting can be richer because the experience is more total than just surface image.

Digital work can be distributed more completely and far more cheaply.

The fundamental core of art as commodity is that its value is in its scarcity and not in its content.

There is a secondary consideration, of making art under capitalism, where artists are motivated to sell art work to pay for food and shelter and the free time to continue making art, and that can't be easily dismissed. Art having a perceived value that justifies paying for it is a problem of this capitalist context. But that should not be conflated with art's value being in its salability.

Bart Samson

Pokemon Goethe

probably did that already when it was topical but i just got my first vax shot and I'm gonna celebrate with reckless shitposting

i mean sometimes they fuck too, but only if it illustrates a point of moral reasoning

"what are your hobbies?"

oh i like to write ethotic fan fiction

"you mean erotic"

no it's mostly depictions of all the lectures we didn't get to see Chidi give over the timeline of The Good Place

Goofy non-horrid-prank April 1 thing we did for MetaFilter: a 12-page activity book called Uncle Mefi's Big Book of Beans.

Available as PDF, individual page images, and text descriptions/transcriptions where doable.

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25808/Uncle-Mefis-Big-Book-of-Beans

Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Shirtless, Streetcar
Shouting "Stella"

literally murder and consume the flesh of the rich