This refers to something so convenient as to be unlikely, like a duck bringing its own onions to cook it with, and you may also recognize this as the basis of the Pokemon “Farfetch’d”, which is why it’s called that :v
“no matter how badly you think you’re doing it, someone else has done it a lot worse and been fine” is applicable to a wide, wide range of things and i say it to myself all the time
“bigger idiots than me have done it” is a phrase I live by
If you happen to stumble upon an ad that looks like this, DO NOT SCROLL DOWN.
The rest of the ad is a very tall GIF of strobing red light that can potentially cause seizures. You cannot scroll past this ad quickly enough to avoid seeing it.
There seems to be no way to report the ad, so the next best thing is to use an adblocker (if you haven’t already) or even stay off the mobile app.
there’s a debate that pops up sometimes where people get bothered about artists using fancy digital brushes or 3d models as “shortcuts”.
the argument is usually that it’s “lazy”, but I’m not sure that’s actually what’s pinging them. I think maybe it’s more about intentionality, as in consciously making choices about your art: where do I put this line, how do I draw it, what am I expressing, why am I doing this, etc.
people don’t always know how to recognize a lack of intentionality in art drawn “the hard way”–as in, a technically competent drawing of a character’s bedroom that tells you nothing about them–but it’s much easier for them to register when it stands out the way useful pattern brushes and 3d models sometimes do. but those things CAN ALSO be used intentionally and seamlessly, much like any tool! they are not Morally Bad Methods that Make Bad Art.
I do think it makes sense that people are more impressed when they know someone drew a chicken than when they know someone used a chicken stamp, but Being Technically Impressive is not actually the be-all end-all of what makes art “good”. it depends on WHAT you want to draw and WHICH choices you have the energy/passion/experience to make. it depends on the audience’s perception.
it’s okay to not want to draw chickens. it’s not a game you can win or lose.
***this is not a post about AI images, where the only intentional human choices made are in the request for the generated image. regardless of how specific the instructions are, requesting a piece of art does not make one an artist.
here’s my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I’m 22 years old)
The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it’s the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent’s car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be “What if I get kidnapped” or “My parents are just trying to keep me safe”
This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don’t have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents’ knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they’re on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were “tee hee we could get in trouble isn’t this so fun and daring” in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are “If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent’s car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks.”
Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that’s how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn’t uncommon. It’s wrong, but it’s not uncommon.
Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.
Nobody my age is voting republican. Let’s be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We’re all afraid of dying of thirst because there’s no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they’re trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.
This liberalism and party affiliation doesn’t preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is… Well
No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they’re immune to conservative logic but they’re still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn’t have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can’t avoid it you’re a sex addict. That’s a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist
If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can’t understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it’s because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent’s nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We’re dumb about drugs. We’re dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We’re so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don’t know how to organize because we’re raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.
They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than “young people vote republican and watch Fox news”
i gotta say i agree that exposing children to algorithmic content feeds is going to make them grow up with one billion new kinds of mental illnesses and it’s a serious societal problem that urgently needs addressing but it makes me v. v. v. uneasy when i see posts going around that identify this issue and come to the conclusion ‘this is why it’s important for parents to know what their kid is doing online’ and uh girls there are a lot of kids out there who would be dead if their parents knew what they were doing online
“yeah this aspect of capitalism is extremely alienating and traumatizing” and im nodding and smiling and then they add “which is why we must retreat to the safety of the family” and i start abruptly high-pitched screaming like a fire alarm
