Category: Art

The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 2

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Hyperdrive Media The model which defines the corporate period could not function without two important factors. First, the model requires the ability to legally collectivize resources and use them as if they belonged to a single person. This is the concept of the corporation, with “corporate” meaning body, as in the company acts like a person and can own property like a person without being “a” person. The other critical ingredient is mass media, which allows the distribution of a media product to large numbers of people while maintaining a low cost to the end consumer. The technological revolutions of…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 1

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The origins of corporate art If you’ve ever taken an art history or music history course, or surveys of architecture or literature, it’s likely you have seen various styles and trends in the arts cordoned off into various “periods” beginning and ending at certain dates. For instance in music the Classical period is generally said to begin in 1750 (the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque) and end in the early 19th century, about 1820, at which time the Romantic period begins. Today, I’d like to introduce a recently ended artistic period: The Corporate Period. But before…

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Why World of Warcraft’s Writing is So Bad

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“Because the writers suck.” That’s the simplest answer. It’s a correct answer, in my opinion, but even a great writer would have a hard time working within the framework of modern WoW to produce a good story, much less good dialogue, quest text, etc. World of Warcraft was never known for having exceptional writing, but the past versions of the game were quite sharp and effective, producing long-lasting memories of characters, places, and events, while newer expansions have produced a grey blur of forgettable babble from interchangeable blobs of characters. But why? The emphasis on how the game is played,…

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Overcoming AI limitations in design.

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In my first articles and videos on using AI art for book covers, I pointed out some of the real limitations of the current AI, which many laymen are going to miss: They are bad at composition, that is, mixing forms, scenery, etc. at different planes in one image They are bad at certain details, specifically hands, eyes, and noses. So, how can we overcome these issues? Well, if you are willing to do a little extra work, it’s easy. Instead of trying to fit every element you want in a picture into the AI prompt, you can make several…

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Using AI images for book covers

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Today on my weekly Livestream, I designed a cover for an upcoming book using an image generated by “AI”—Midjourney, to be specific. The first hour has the cover design: There are several of these programs around with the idea that they can render images based on word prompts. Here are a few examples I made with the prompt “elven fantasy white castle towers on fire with apocalyptic purple sky and stormy ocean“ Here are the “final 2” images I came up with after upscaling and redrawing them: And here is the cover (note: in the video you will find out…

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Invoking Mammon to Spite Moloch

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“Get woke, go broke.” It’s pure cope. But more than that, it’s evoking a vice (greed) as some counter, or some consequence, to the ideological propagation of the greater death cult. You need to take your arguments to a higher level, specifically the spiritual and moral level, because the “woke cult” is ultimately a moral vision, and to defeat a moral vision, you need a superior moral vision. As a practical matter, virtually no individual suffers any kind of consequence, especially financial, for participating in woke ideology. In fact, they receive benefits from it, usually financial, even when their ideological…

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High School, Forever

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Seems a little odd that brands (D&D and MTG) built on escapist fantasy would circle back around high school, doesn’t it? When I look up on Twitter the people who create such things, one of the thoughts that doesn’t pop into my mind is, “This looks like a person who was happy and socially successful in high school.” Besides the nerd brands, we have a vast swath of similar Harry Potter fans who are in their 30s, yet still write fan fiction about a wizard high school. What I’ve realized from interacting with these sections of millennial fandom is that…

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“If you don’t push, you’re lazy.”

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Around 15 years ago, I sat in on a little talk with Apostolos Paraskevas, a Greek composer and guitarist (among other things) working at Berklee College of Music (in Boston). I got to spend a couple of days hanging out with the guy, but the best thing he said came in that little informal talk with some composition students. One of the college students asked, “How do you compose music?” Apostolos got this odd look on his face, then he smiled slightly and said, “Asking a man how he composes music is like asking a woman how she gives birth.”…

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“Acceptance” and the Death Cult

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Fat acceptance. Tattoo acceptance. Queer/trans/gay/poly/etc. acceptance. These things are actually tools of the death cult. Remember that the death cult doesn’t just want you dead, it wants your culture, your people, and your religion dead. It often offers nominal life to you as an individual in return. Acceptance movements in general operate along three common layers to the death cult: A seeming appeal to the good A usually tacit appeal to the self A result that furthers the goals of the death cult (see above) Let’s take “Fat Acceptance” as an example. We should accept fat people. It’s what’s inside…

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Auto-Allegory, or how Starfire is a Terrible Mother

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I don’t like to give publicity to garbage like this, but it’s such an instructive moment for writing and understanding people I can’t help myself: Basically, this is about DC superhero Starfire’s daughter (Raven, I think), who is an angsty 90s-2000s goth girl who is also obese and a lesbian, and of course resents her beautiful mother. The surface level complain is obvious – this is bad fan fiction and denigrates established characters, pushes a gratuitous woke agenda at the expense of a good story, and is generally low-quality writing and art. Add to that the fact that it will…

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