Whenever I’m in the mood to do some art but I don’t have any specific concept or subject in mind, I draw a fish. This one’s name is Orlo, he’s done in wax pastels

This conversation that showed up in my feed on Bluesky shows what I've been trying to get creatives to understand since the AI Art thing lifted its ugly head out of the Big Tech Fever Swamp;

1. The tech will improve vastly and quickly.

2. It will become normalized.

3. The public still won't give a shit about artists. They only care about their entertainment. Pointing out how the AI cobbles together its results means nothing. It didn't even figure into the conversation above and I find they're the norm.

In the internet era artists have been relying on a collection of fickle kidults to keep the rent money coming in. To think they won't be abandoned when something faster and easier comes along is delusional.

Something faster and easier came along. So long.

While I'm at it, there has been a lot of noise in the Geek-o-Sphere about the failure of recent Marvel movies and of the comics market crashing hard.

A lot of dummies have been trying to make it their latest culture war pistol. But they're dummies and barely worth mentioning beyond as a warning to others. Yet even the sane folks can't seem to fathom why the most recent 19 page Spider-Man story or MCU flick didn't sell well.

I'll tell yah why: It wasn't formatted for a phone screen.

Something like 80 ~ 90 percent of their markets use smartphones for every single aspect of their lives. Especially for their entertainment. The smartphone was an extinction level event for traditional media the same way it was for camera companies like Nikon and Canon. Bad box office and shuttering comic shops are only the beginning.

But let's argue about "woke" with some dummies instead.

Let me go
(drawn with colored pencils over the course of several days without any sort of real plan)

fake screenshot thing (i forgot i left this in my drafts for like 3 months)