Signals and Light

Really enjoying the combat of Stellar Blade and feeling weird about it. Maybe I should've waited for it to be on PC to mod in a character that makes it less bizarre to watch. My roommate and I are just sarcastically shouting "time to goon" half the time, so perhaps that irony is making it easier to tolerate this protagonist. But the combat animations and boss designs are just... Soooooo cool. And that's why I play an action game, so... Ouagh.

like yes i obviously know why this philosophy exists and why people say it so much, and yes, there is validity to it. but it only makes sense as a way to confront one specific situation: the neophyte artist who first put paint on canvas two weeks to a year ago, finds their work unsatisfying (insert entire ira glass "killer taste" quote here) and has come to people they consider Better Artists to ask "am I using the wrong brushes?"

yes, it's valid to reply to that person by saying that, you know, da vinky could still have painted the mona lisa with a house painting brush dipped in cowshit. that's true and poignant, but people love to throw this phrase around the same way forum nerds use "RTFM", as a shutdown to any and all questioning about technique and tools, and that's where it becomes insulting, dismissive, and often just wrong.

i cannot tell you how many times i've seen someone reply "RTFM" to a question that is not answered in the manual. and I cannot tell you how many times i've seen someone ask about technique or tools and get told "just try harder sweety :)" tools matter beyond an objective measure of quality.

yes, two paintbrushes may be "basically the same", two pencils might be "basically the same", and a skilled artist can notionally produce anything they like with dollar store versions of either one. but a brush with a particular texture lends itself to specific kinds of results, and even as an extremely inexperienced artist I can tell you that there is a massive difference between shading with a #2 Ticonderoga and doing the same thing with a Blackwing. they are "the same", but they aren't the same.

but that's not even the sort of thing i'm talking about. i'm talking about people insisting that DSLRs and smartphones can readily take the same pictures, or acting like "what guitar do i need to make speed metal" is somehow not a valid question (it's an ibanez RG, you want an ibanez RG.) or even worse, people suggesting that music or art software is all interchangeable.

christ. christ almighty

an artist COULD make the same picture in photoshop and krita, but if they aren't straining as hard as they can to consciously make that specific image, the software is going to heavily influence the result. a musician COULD make the same song in ableton or FL studio or reason, but if they are starting from scratch and working organically it is very likely that that won't happen. and that's only considering the physical structure of the various UIs and how they push the creator towards specific ways of making and using patterns and automation, not even considering the likelihood that they're using a completely different set of tone generator plugins. nobody would say that a trumpeter would still be a trumpeter if they bought a clarinet instead of a trumpet.

my videos wouldn't even look the way they do if I was still using goddamn Adobe Premiere, because while they're both notionally NLEs, the visual effects that are readily craftable in Resolve are very different than in Premiere. and like... canon cameras shoot redder than nikon. yeah, you're gonna swim against that current, you're going to recolor everything in lightroom anyway, but the fact that every one of your pictures is just warmer than the same picture shot on another brand of camera, and in ways that are not fully and automatically corrected by dragging the color temp slider, fucking matters. don't get me started on film stock. art is inseparable from the tools used to make it.

and i mean... all of this is also ignoring the simple fact that it's often nicer to use better tools, and if someone asks "what's the best tool," you could just... tell them? and let them waste their money on it and learn a valuable lesson in the process? answering a question with a brand and model is literally easier than replying with a scolding, every single time. it's free.

It's really funny seeing the outrageously negative takes on this. I've numerically scored a game by various aspects to clarify my stance on different elements of it, as much for me as anyone else. Do I think this scorecard is a little overdone? Sure. Do I care? Does it affect me in literally any way that someone feels like doing this? Does it matter at all?

People trashing someone for enjoying art in this way is supremely ironic. This exercise comes down to "this is how this person likes to think about things," and at no point did they make fun of anyone or call anyone wrong for feeling differently from them (they do say "other people should use this," which, sure, disagree with that, I disagree with that, that's fine). If this doesn't do anything for you, COOL, move on? It's so incredibly weird the types of people who evangelize subjectivity and personal expression in engaging in media and then make such a hobby out of making fun of other people -- the obvious hypocrisy is outrageous.

And I'm complaining about this because I've seen it so many times in the last 2 years of trying to engage with people who try to have deeper and more nuanced conversations about media. As someone who thinks about art in formal ways, likes to break down the formal properties of how art is made, and enjoys art because of deeply intricate combinations of formal elements, it's honestly exhausting to talk to people who have built their entire online personas around being simultaneously holier than thou about the nature of art while also being some of the most unnecessarily passive aggressive or fully aggressive assholes possible in a discourse on media.

Success on places like twitter (and cohost and bluesky and tumblr and blah blah blah) is predicated so much on how "good" people are at dunking on people and writing one-liners. The moral and emotional and subjective positions people claim to take while also almost professionally focusing on finding every edge to shit on and insult other people is comical. There is no moral or existential threat to this type of engaging with media, literally, it's as personal and subjective as any other approach. Nothing bad is going to happen because someone wanted to write this way.