GriffGuts Weekend Day 2 Prompt: Warmth

This is a companion piece to @bthump's entry, here, so you should go read that first to get the context! She wrote a lovely fic and I wanted to illustrate a moment from it <3 it's AMAZING seeing so many griffguts fics and pics today :')

@griffgutsweekend | @ofdemonsandangels

doing this with anything is an awful hit, but god, there are so many youtube accounts that serve as the last existing records of so many dead people's voices. feels especially perverse

When is this suppose to happen???

the policy takes effect now, the deletions begin december

Signal boosting... :/

Hello everyone, and welcome to the official Berserk Pride Fest blog! The Berserk community is filled with so many wonderful ships and queer creators that deserve a spotlight, so what better way to give them that than with a whole day of celebration during such a joyous month!

Date:

June 1, 2023

What's Allowed:

All queer ships and headcanons are on the table! Everyone is encouraged to create something that celebrates queerness through Berserk! Fanart, fanfiction, edits, cosplays, and playlists are all welcomed! NSFW works are allowed but please be sure to tag them appropriately!

Posting:

You can post your works to any site that you like! This blog will be the main posting site for any Pride Fest related content so if you're using a different platform to post your works, be sure to send them through direct messaging to this blog or @ofdemonsandangels. In addition, please use the tag your content with #berserkpridefest2023 or @ us directly for your work to be reblogged!

Questions:

Don't be afraid to drop a question in the ask box of this blog if you're curious about something or need any clarification!

Also huge thank you to @sabigawa for making the graphics for this event, your work is extremely appreciated! We'll catch all of you strugglers soon!

ppl pulling the 'just let people enjoy Wizard Game' are often met with 'JKR funds anti-trans groups!' and that's. entirely true. but doesn't actually go far enough.

like if you're on team Let People Enjoy Wizard Game hey. did you know. that in my city RIGHT NOW JKR is sole funder and key board member of an unregulated private agab-policed rape crisis shelter set up specifically to Own The Transes

and which now sits on several gendered violence prevention boards alongside representatives from the (publicly funded and accountable) existing Rape Crisis Centre, against the staff of which her friends and followers have been involved in a years-long harassment campaign purely and explicitly because they run trans-inclusive support services and bc their CEO is a trans woman of colour.

(my friend works there and the pure volume of transphobic harassment has caused several long standing members of staff to quit. which I'm really fucking angry about bc I would not be here today if the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre hadn't been there to help me)

and that on those boards they're known for supporting increased police harassment and approaches that disproportionately criminalise trans people, unhoused people and sex workers and provably don't positively impact the issue of gendered violence.

what I'm saying is that yes JKR funds anti-trans groups but she is also pretty directly involved in materials worsening conditions for vulnerable people at a local and personal level too!!!! she's running an unregulated crisis shelter out of spite and using that to legitimise her political lobbying!!!!!! fuck you!

btw I don't actually give a shit about Wizard Game beyond the fact that you're pretty obviously no ally to trans or Jewish people if you put playing ANY game over their direct wellbeing

but this isn't actually a post about Wizard Game despite the framing. I'm not mad about people playing a video game, I'm mad that JKR is working in my home city to use extremely vulnerable people that she pretends to care about as pawns in her escalating moves to fuck over another group of extremely vulnerable people. and in the process providing cover for legislative pushes that will fuck shit up for all survivors of gendered violence, trans or cis, and negatively affect support and funding for inclusive crisis services. that's what she's doing personally and materially as well as rhetorically. I'd guess she's sunk at least a couple of million into getting this set up (property in the centre of Edinburgh ain't cheap) and it is very directly causing harm.

(if I wanted to take this off JKR specifically and onto the movement she's part of, I would point out the recent push to frame feminist organisations like Rape Crisis Scotland and Women's Aid Scotland and Engender as Paid Shills For The Government's Trans Agenda because they supported gender recognition reform and, unrelatedly, recieve Scottish Government funding. I would point out that in December, when Beira's Place launched, this specifically looked like pundits framing almost all the big gendered violence prevention and abuse support organisations in Scotland as corrupt and evil and unworthy of funding bc they supported increasing trans people's access to basic rights. I don't want this to be the focus bc I think it's important to separate out 'things that the movement JKR associates with have done' from 'things that JKR individually and personally has done' but I do think. It's significant context.)

anyway this isn't about a video game. one way or another. Wizard Game isn't the point, it's just a touchstone of whether or not any of this matters enough to you for you to make minor changes to how you behave. like. not buying Wizard Game won't stop her doing this, she's already richer than god. I recognise I brought up Wizard Game but Wizard Game is so much not the point. the actual material harm is the point. shut up about the game we're talking about the spending-millions-to-materially-harm-vulnerable-people bit.

Royalties from the game do very much fund those materially harmful things, I'm given to understand, and frankly I do not consider anybody who paid for the game a trans ally.

Yeah they obviously do but also she's got enough money that boycotting the game isn't actually gonna prevent this. like I already said yeah if you still wanna play the game you evidently value the people she's attacking way less than your ability to play Video Garm and that's not allyship.

but also I'm getting real frustrated with the notes of this post filling up with people arguing about whether or not people should buy or pirate or refuse to play a video game when like. the video game is at most a litmus test for whether you're willing to put anything at all on the line to push back against this.

JKR already has the money to buy her own rape crisis shelter to push her personal agenda, and to fund anti-trans groups, and to pay for legislative lobbying. She already has the platform to give voice and performed legitimacy to reactionary shit like "the death eaters represent the trans lobby!!!!" That doesn't come from Hogwarts Legacy and even if nobody had bought, played or talked about Hogwarts Legacy she'd still have that from the books and the films and the events and the walking tours and the billions of tons of useless tat with Harry Potter branding slapped on it that sells every year (did you know Le Creuset, the fancy cookware company, brought out a range of Harry Potter themed iron casseroles???? clown world.)

Hogwarts Legacy isn't the make-or-break product, but what it is is a collective touchpoint where anyone still buying into the JKR brand had the opportunity to break with Harry Potter. like to look at the extent and depth of the fucked up things she is doing to rhetorically and materially attack marginalised people, think about what it means to continue supporting that, and use Hogwarts Legacy as an opportunity to divest from the brand that's giving her that power. and in all fairness a lot of people HAVE got more aware of the need to divest from Harry Potter as a result of the chat around Hogwarts Legacy. A lot more haven't, but have had to acknowledge it and justify it in a way they didn't when it looked more like 'buying a Primark snitch onesie'

but like. the video game isn't the point? The video game was never the point? (except in a couple of instances which are about the video game, to whit making the antisemitic subtext around the goblins very much text) The video game is emblematic of the whole structure of corporate-led Harry Potter fandom which keeps merch on shelves, money going into JKR's pocket, and a veneer of legitimacy on JKR's bullshit.

if you can't drop the video game, you're fully bought into this. if 'don't play a video game' is too high a price for you to pay to stand against genocidal rhetoric and exploitation and abuse of vulnerable people then your politics aren't really grounded in anything. but that doesn't mean the video game is the point, or that without the video game she couldn't do any of this.

and it's really tiring that instead of using the video game as a jumping off point to talk about why we need to push back on JKR's power and actions, instead people keep coming back to the game itself (which, like a month after release, is kinda of diminishing relevance, unlike Rowling herself who continues to do outsize harm).

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

Artists, speak out against this predatory practice! Our art should not be exploited without our consent, and we deserve to be compensated when our art is exploited for commercial use. 

"tumblr doesn't have an algorithm so likes are WORTHLESS they do NOTHING" well actually likes tell me that people liked my post. they have worth because they show me people saw my post and enjoyed it. that's still interaction even if it doesn't give an extra boost to make Number Go Up even more. yeah I generally get more out of written feedback in tags/replies but likes are still Something, they aren't people telling me "fuck you I'm not sharing your post" they're people telling me "hehe I give your post little a like as a treat."