Way Down, Tumble Town

your favorite youtubers and content creators are about to be offered some tantalizing tv/streaming deals so we're all about to find out who the real working class allys are

someone's gonna get cancelled doing this and they're gonna cry crocodile tears over how difficult it is to make a living as a content creator and i'm telling you right now we are NOT going to buy it, got it? scabs deserve no sympathy

It is hard making a living being a quote unquote "content creator" still not an excuse to be a scab

This.

Trying to make a living from YouTube is like constantly running along the edge of a knife in clogs, it is incredibly stressful, it is mentally destructive and you do a truly obscene amount of work for genuinely very little compensation relative to the hours put in.

A big one-time payout from a streaming deal from some desperate studio jackoff could be life-changing, but it does not come for fucking free. The money they are offering you is money they have ripped directly from the hands and mouths of other creatives.

If you saw someone rip food out of someone else's hands and then offer it to you, you wouldn't fucking take it, would you? If you have a shred of decency you'll tell the guy to give the fucking food back and go get fucked. And if you were the one getting food ripped out of your hands, you'd reasonably expect the people around you to have that same solidarity with you and not accept it.

The industry will try to abstract this as much as possible - they're doing it in the press right now, "oh it's just a bunch of rich, selfish Hollywood elites making a play for more money!" is EXPLICITLY an attempt to get you to see the union members as something other than your fellow workers - and they'll try to pull shit like "oh the strike has nothing to do with you, you're not a member of the union and you won't see the benefits so why should you sacrifice this opportunity for them" and so on.

They're trying to make the issue more distant and abstract, to alienate you from your fellow human beings. And in response we must make it closer and more concrete.

The money they offer to a scab is taken from the hands of a union member. They are offering you a union member's student loan payments, their rent, their food budget, their kids' college funds.

Do not take it. It is not and can never be worth it.

illustrations continued:

One of my favorite genres of post

Hey, can y’all rb this if it’s okay to send you messages asking about your ocs, cause on god I wanna interact with y’all but I am terrified of being annoying lol

Why is this heat so hot 😩

It’s the heat

Source?

"Doomed by the narrative" is sexy and all but i think the narrative wanting to save a character who is utterly set on dooming themselves isnt as much of a thing and it's so good as a concept

@i-m-p-a-v-i-d-u-s

Thank god for Russian dash cams to bring us wonders like this

they’re saying it’s 3am and they’re so tired and lets just drive and get out of here and then it happens and they’re like ‘well that woke me up”

This video has given youtubers permanent strikes on their account for violent content. Reblog violent content on your dash TODAY

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.

literary analysis being posited as this boring grueling penance that only miserable people insist on is very dumb as an idea but its even more dumb to me, the guy who gets so excited about it that he has to clap and pound his fists against the ground and walk in circles at a dizzying speed unbeknownst to man

Angelo Barabino (1883-1950, Italian) ~ Untitled (Figures at Rest), n/d

[Source: doyle.com]

100% Disagree

It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.

The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.

But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.

It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.

(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)

It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.

Bluntly: Standards.

Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.

But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.

All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap. 

Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.

(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)

It's been a little bit since we had an impcycle snippet so HERE