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- yuekit6
- Hello. You've reached the winter of our discontent.prophetone
- Non-ironocally.palimpsest
- In the words of The Lucksmiths: It’s the winter of our discount tent! Great band! Clever.sab
- Think anyone got rich designing this poster? Because some of you think this was made in the golden era of design . Lulz.nb
- lol...wasn't the film itself about people in the creative industry struggling to find a job?yuekit
- microkorg11
- haha good for themhans_glib
- i like thisCalderone2000
- YEAHHH!!OBBTKN
- Follow the money! https://www.youtube.…SlashPeckham
- go on brent!stoplying
- prophetone7
THE GEN X CAREER MELTDOWN
This is a similar feeling when Flash creative boom ended overnight.
Only instead of a firecracker and losing a finger... we just unknowingly walked three steps beyond the cliff edge while holding the comically-large 50s ACME ball bomb with the lit wick (looks at camera before the drop)
- i'm more tech based than many but i've had several career wipes. very lucky in any professional field to be doing the same thing for a decadekingsteven
- Continuity3
80's-90's MEMORIES
"Do well in school, go to university, and a lifelong career will fall in your lap," they said.
- heli kohl?neverscared
- nobody:kingsteven
- Don’t remember anyone saying anything remotely like thisnb
- ...And it's getting very hard to stay
And we're living here in Allentown.bezoar - @nb my teachers did. All. The. Time.
Fucking boomers.Continuity - I remember it phrased differently. “Do well in school, go to college, because if you don’t you’re guaranteed fucked”nb
- BonSeff6
THE GEN X CAREER MELTDOWN
I read the article, then I thought about godzilla
- Godzilla doesn’t want this for any of usprophetone
- ^ lolNairn
- Nairn3
FUCK ADOBE!
^ I've literally just done the annual 'i'm going to quit' theatre with them to keep the reduced monthly rateI've been paying for years now. This year though, they've built it straight into the 'Cancel Plan' pathway, so I didn't have to spend an hour on some bullshit chat thing with them as I have the last few years.
- Ah I need to cancel too, bumping me from 29.99 to 55.80, awww hell no
Hope they do offer the option to continue at my ratespl33nidoru - They do, just pretend to cancel after they tell you you have to pay cancellation fees and you'll see the option there.palimpsest
- Thanks!spl33nidoru
- The same here, the fucktards make us do the same "quiet quit" every year.utopian
- They won't let me keep my current rate, $4 increase, better than nothing I guessspl33nidoru
- They're playing hardball more these days. I imagine creative cloud is losing a ton of seats given the state of the industry, and the new competition from AI.monNom
- good i hope they fucking choke on all their ill-gotten gains.hans_glib
- Ah I need to cancel too, bumping me from 29.99 to 55.80, awww hell no
- utopian3
- There is a god!nb
- April Fool's!Continuity
- The Simpsons predicted his death for April 12 2025.ApeRobot
- In the 90s, The Simpsons predicted his presidency so, you never know...CyBrainX
- Continuity2
THE GEN X CAREER MELTDOWN
Yeah, I read this article a couple of days ago, too. Fucking depressing.
- #TraumaTuesdayspalimpsest
- #MardisDeMerdepalimpsest
- flol @ #MardisDeMerdeContinuity
- dittomonospaced
- mantrakid14
making beats
My ambient album dropped today!
"Echo Chamber Made"
The album is all about my journey with anxiety and my experience medicating it the past couple years, I dont think i could have written this the way it is without seeing what its like to have NO anxiety for once in my life.
Stream it here: https://ghost.ffm.to/echochamber…
ps Shouts out to @cruddlebub whose ambient mastery was a huge inspiration in the back of my mind while writing a lot of this stuff!
- Listening on Spotify. So wonderful. Huge congrats to you! I'm working away on an album I've been trying to really focus on for a few years now, andmg33
- seeing people put out new music is inspiriting and motivating.mg33
- I wish I knew how to think through ambient tracks like this. My stuff is more instrumental and I've poured so much time into that over the years, butmg33
- hoping that after it's done I can move in a more ambient direction.mg33
- I love the first track Summer. It feels reflective, calming, meditative.mg33
- mg33 - i LOVE your stuff dude, every time youve postedmantrakid
- sessions that i can then find the best parts and clip them out, or combine with other parts, etc.mantrakid
- Hell yeah dude. And your cover is dope tootoemaas
- like it mantrakid! Congratulations! I liked 'Nostalgia', nostalgia being one of the most depressing feeling someone can had, the track is right on. Felt it!HAL9001
- huge love you guys!mantrakid
- _niko12
- noooice!
see? we're bragging about openAI and there's fucking phones taking ludicrous shots like this... all is goodmaquito - Re: Nikonmaquito
- Jesus Christ, that's apocalyptic.
Also ... where in Greece was this shot? That architecture's a dead giveaway!Continuity - :) indeed, it was in a little town 20km from Delphi_niko
- As you slowly scroll the pic upward, it looks like the back of a curvy woman, and then "BAM" it's just a cloud, no ass. :(Akagiyama
- Apollo speaksGnash
- Well NIKO, why are you sharing this in; Show YOUR latest pics?milfhunter
- ^ Uh-oh!Continuity
- Don't be a Thessalonikid!palimpsest
- I know, I know, milf, but I did the honourable thing, and trust me, you don’t want him on here! :)_niko
- Are you challenging us?
Can you get him on Discord, at least?palimpsest - haha, he was actually on here briefly during the newstoday days, didn't survive the cuntiness of this place :)_niko
- noooice!
- autoflavour4
FUCK ADOBE!
lol. opened email this morning to find Adobe quietly announcing they are increasing the monthly subscription by $10 ..
nope, fuck youdie and burn
- zingAQUTE
- Are you paying full price?palimpsest
- Nope, cancelled.autoflavour
- palimpsest9
blog
If a monkey can do better work than you, it’s not on the monkey, it’s on you.
Bouncing off Horp’s thoughts about Jagara’s thoughts on AI and commercial illustration. This isn’t just about the rise of the AI-powered Etsy entrepreneur, it’s about the quiet admission that the monkey wins. Her success is measured by commercial results, but her work by artistic standards, as if she’s breaking some unwritten rule. But there are no rules in nature. She’s doing exactly what the system rewards: speed, adaptability, orchestration. That’s not nothing, that’s fluency.
The real tension isn’t about AI, or even art. It’s about conceding that the terrain has shifted, and that effort, skill, and uniqueness no longer anchor value the way they used to. If the monkey wins under new conditions, blaming the monkey misses the point. The question isn’t whether she should be allowed to play, it’s whether you’re still playing the right game. And whether you should be playing that game in the first place.
- Or as Iverson might say: we’re talking about practice. Not the game. Practice.palimpsest
- The complete disregard for IP is appalling though.monospaced
- @pali yes, unfortunately, but yes.skinny_puppy
- IP is about ownership as a proxy for authorship. People will give more credit to a paint-by-numbers kit than to a well-constructed AI prompt.palimpsest
- One follows the rules. The other builds them.The disregard for IP is only appalling if you believe execution is more meaningful than conception.palimpsest
- Hmmmmmonospaced
- It's not on the monkey or you, it's on a broken system that incentivizes cutting every corner to separate labour from wealth.i_monk
- there are no rules in nature ? ever heard of law of thermodynamics...or gravity... + there are rules in culture ... its called regulation.. and copyright...neverscared
- thats what sets civilisation about from nature... otherwise monkey with kinves...neverscared
- I remember when I got a speeding ticket for falling too fast. Gaia wasn't happy.palimpsest
- Everything that can happen will happen, eventually.palimpsest
- gaia was happy.. because your fast driving caused higher co2 emissions and u got punished...neverscared
- when the lion is hungry he eats... thats the lawneverscared
- Can't argue with that!palimpsest
- Lions fail to catch their prey more often than not, to say nothing of all the adaptations that have evolved to evade/defend against them.i_monk
- Banding together to resist predation is a universal constant...i_monk
- If nature proposed a law of Universal Basic Prey I would totally be for it.
Another thing to ponder, do the laws of nature go against lions eating a Whopper?palimpsest - the cyborg lion needs only electricity...neverscared
- @paly AI, actually had a point. That interview was hours after a heated argument about running it back for the Finals, and Larry Brown finally relented..garbage
- ..set up a conference about him coming back, and all he was getting was questions about practice. Add to that, AI's best friend was just murdered.garbage
- Imagine a shouting match with your AD, you're almost fired, then not fired, everyone heard it in the hallway, an all-hands is called to clear the air..garbage
- ..and all anybody wants to talk about is your creative process. Oh my god we're mixing Philly metaphors, I'm out.garbage
- nicely stated.utopian
- Pretty sure this was all covered in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"yuekit
- https://asinomasimpl…palimpsest
- DaveO7
blog
Adding on to the AI discourse above, i saw this article this morning:
https://www.nytimes.com/interact…
Quite an interesting read with the examples of very Gen X careers (Rock & Roll music journalist was the clearest). Weirdly it reminded me of everyones obsession with learning flash and code in the late 90s. It definitely struck me to read things like 'graphic design / photography' in the lead, but its the same story where successive generations have a different landscape to the previous, and the winners adapt.
My wife used to work on music videos as a stylist in the mid 2000s and they had seemingly infinite money. 10 years later that industry as a fraction of what it was, and then another 10 later and its barely an industry. She is in a corpirate creative director role now, as the styling fell off very sharply after 2012
I am constantly hearing older colleagues talk about how different it was back then when they had real money to do shoots, how they shot for a week and came back with amazing 10 stills but that's pretty anachronistic now, and the skill is how you adapt to working with what you have (tools and budget).
I use AI to generate storyboards and style frames, but then i still also get an artist to draw up frames for me when its specific, so its a combination of bot. I feel glad to be able to support a traditional creative skill in some way.
Someone once told me that 'AI won't replace you, but someone using it might'
FWIW – that girl mentioned about sounds like a great business person, but ultimately selling something pretty disposable – and thats been around since the dawn of capitalism.
- Thank you.monospaced
- My wife sent that to me too! New tools that will only get better each day. We either can adapt and fall under or ride the waves. My 2¢misterhow
- The only ones whining about AI are the creatives it exposed as painfully average on their best day.utopian
- true... tarantino is painfully average...neverscared
- i see a great career in visual arts for trump.. he cant wrap his head around of an UI or brush and colors like bush... but he has the best words.. which makesneverscared
- the nr.1 prompts..neverscared
- “Everyone is an artist”
j.beuysneverscared
- PhanLo3
- Saw this in my feed and refused to click on it. I can just imagine the nonsense and insanity from the anti-vaxxers I'd like to keep what brain-cells I have left_niko
- America is beyond fucked.utopian
- Luckily there are 340,000,000 people in the U.S. It's this guys job to find the most outrageous 20 so you will click and he gets paid.toemaas
- And 160,000,000 of them, subscribe to MAGA ideology and conspiracy theories.utopian
- And some of them are now running the health system.yuekit
- webazoot6
Logo of the Day
Exeter's unassuming Co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the Logos'
https://www.devonlive.com/whats-…
- canoe7
blog
"Welcome to Europe bro lol... We got wines and mountains and clear waters and shit"
- graficianNot my first time. I lived in Barcelona, visited family in France and went to my sister's engagement party in Ireland. (And lived in Argentina and Peru where of course they don't have any wine, clean water and mountains, especially not in the Andes)
But what I find hilarious about your comment is that I live less than a quarter mile from a Great Lake on a peninsula where we have 20+ vineyards, with rolling hill backdrops covered in apple and cherry orchards with rivers and streams cutting through everything, not to mention a national park 25 minutes away on miles and miles of beaches that run into ski resorts.
But go ahead and keep telling us about your SAT tests that you'd ace while doing shots of whatever Romanians like to drink to get over their inferiority complex.
- nobody nothing
canoe wait I remembered something graf said that time
¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯grafician - Good for you bro, live that beautiful life!grafician
- Are you bragging about a Great Lake? Aren’t they a bit toxicnb
- Only if you’re a misinformed neckbeardmonospaced
- First, I'm not bragging, I'm defending myself against "grafician bullshit" assuming there's no wine, clean water and mountains in the United States.canoe
- 2nd, Lake Eerie can get some bad algal blooms, and I'm sure there's toxicity around certain industrial areas, but in general no, we eat whitefish, walleye, etc.canoe
- A lot of people don’t grasp how vast and beautiful and pristine a lot of the USA is, because they only hear about the big cities and suburbs.monospaced
- https://www.google.c…canoe
- nobody nothing
- Horp6
blog
Bouncing off Jagara's thoughts about ai and commercial illustration in a previous post below...
I think it's already over. It's already killed that industry. It's tangential but feels relevant to say that I've fairly recently got to know somebody with *absolutely zero* experiemce in art, illustration, creative industries (literally not from any relatable world to image making) but she now uses ai to prompt up artwork that she sells as drop shipped items via Etsy and many ither places.
She's gone from knowing nothing at all but being curious, to creating ranges of prints, clothing brands, homeware brands, soft furnishing brands, and setting up online retail, retaining a team of helpers around the world to do her marketing, her social media, and to create websites with all the shopper stuff to order and pay.
She's been doing it for just two years as a side hustle but is now looking to quit her job to focus on it full time.
Everything is copyright free, and she doesn't need to know how to create any of the images. She just picks a theme, describes the vibe, and then chooses what she wants to add to her retail points.
I can look at it all and be sniffy, saying she isn't the actual artist, but that's pointless at this point now. After her day of work, with almost zero effort, she can generate 30 artworks and have them shown on product and available to order in a matter of a few hours.
To create just 1 artwork would take me 1 day, and it might not be any good, and people might not like it, and they might say "can that part be red and could that say something else?" and I'd have to it all again to comply.
This new situation re-separates art from commerce once more; a distinction blurred when Pear's Soap first commissioned an artist to paint them a portrait for use as an advertisement.
Now there is commercial image, made with appropriate economy for the task in hand, and there is art... valuable for being human made and one of a kind and purchased because it appeals to the buyer.
I can't help thinking that's okay, and is what has always happened.
Sure, I feel sad for all the commercial illustrators no longer able to rely on that as a career; but I saw the writing on the wall back in 2008 and got out. Sometimes it's necessary to accept that a career line has closed down and to seek out a new one.
My friend who I mentioned at the start of this post received a production sample of a range of kitchen glassware she's decided to do when I was at her house. It arrived Saturday lunchtime.
She had prompted up the designs a week earlier, sourced a factory to produce them, and then they sent her a vintage looking glass sippy cup with etched and coloured graphics on it. For free. Less than two weeks after she submitted her range design. It's exactly as per her visual. The product design, and the graphical branding/illustration.
It's immaculate. She's not spent a single penny getting to that point, and as of now 24 hours later that range is on Etsy and other places, and she's taking orders. The factory produce what she needs and send it out directly with her branding and packaging.
She does nothing.
How is anybody going to compete with that? With your quality? With your uniqueness? With your skill? With your training?
- It's all about ideation now. That's it. We can still own that domain, should we choose to. But we don't, because it's Wrong.Nairn
- Inspiring storynb
- I agree it's not inspiring for the creative community, but it's happening. It's am economic and commercial reality. Very little has true value in this paradigm.Horp
- My friend literally conjures up entire ranges, and factories around the world can produce them on demand. It's not just the creative community...Horp
- facing oblivion, it's mass production, marketing, retail, trade, distribution, mamagement... the labour market, the working class, the middle class...Horp
- all of it facing redundancy and oblivion. But if you want to start selling kites or light fittings or watches or pet accessories or vases, you can, instantly.Horp
- So AI slop goes irl mainstreamgrafician
- < this story is most probably an exception, no proof this will be the norm going forward, so can we chill?grafician
- This girl's real talent seems to be hustle and drive. Hope success comes to anyone putting in effort.BonSeff
- I think there are actually a lot of people like this if you look on sites like Etsy. The quality of the stuff is not that great but they are just reallyyuekit
- dedicated to marketing like BonSeff said. But there are so many different things people need design and illustration for and I'm not convinced everyone is goingyuekit
- to be using the same AI image generators.yuekit
- Thing is, even this is not safe. Soon you'll be able to ask an AI agent to all this for you. At that point why would anyone pay for a sippy cup on Etsy, ...skinny_puppy
- When they can get something even more personalized generated and produced by a team of agents. The only one winning in that world is the factory.skinny_puppy
- There will be likely be a backlash at some point and some people will come to value hand made things that cannot be produced in a factory.skinny_puppy
- its about about stylisation.. how can u bring the a.i to a point that it doesnt look like all the other a.i stuffneverscared
- i agree the factory will be even more superior... and that will create and anti-market for most...neverscared
- It seems to me that so is a step change in efficiency for an illustrator. The same illustrator that did one piece will now be expected to do 10 or 20 or 100.monNom
- He’ll be able to do it with the so tool. Guiding the style and the content and thinking. The end user will get a richer experience, and in more places.monNom
- Case in point, I stumbled into a documentary about a canal in Canada. - very niche. It featured what looked like ai map art. Animation. Historical illustrationsmonNom
- The production quality was far in excess of what would make sense for that content a few years ago. AI makes it possible for a small crew to make big things.monNom
- Curious to see her shop. But I disagree with you in that she does put in tons of work in managing marketing and production plus don’t forget the biggest_niko
- Thing which is her taste, she’s obviously able to create things in a style that is appealing and sells which is the biggest hurtle and her real talent._niko
- Exactly.
"with almost zero effort"
"She does nothing"
Her effort and work are elsewhere as are her rewards.palimpsest - She merits her success by the parameters you are judging success on.palimpsest
- One way to look at this is if you just dove in and used AI to the maximal extent possible, what could you achieve?yuekit
- In the words of Ivan Drago: "If we die, we die".palimpsest
