also i can't help but say "look. there's much worse things for the fucking yuppy kids to do than make art. they could go into real estate, or military advancements. every lucky baby ducky making art about how fucked the world is is a tiny victory. they should do more to make room for the rest of us, but they literally have so much privilege they don't know how. don't make hating them your top priority in this global system of violence"

I defy the system by making art anyway.

Never let them take it from you.

I have long thought that a UBI would generate a new renaissance.

The correct terminology is people want to be able to express themselves and explore the world without being judged. Finding a purpose in what they want to do in and with their life. After all, no one was chosen to be born.

An important parallel to this, especially for those of us who grew up in the US, is to remember that your hobbies and the things you build can be for your own enrichment. They do not need to be efficient or profitable. The effect of the process on your psyche is far more important than the new inanimate object you possess at the end. But that's not how our capitalist worker bee culture taught me to see it.

If Republicans actually gave a shit about small businesses, they would pass Medicare for All yesterday. Healthcare being tied to employment (with orgs that offer health insurance as part of compensation) is one of the biggest barriers to entrepreneurship in the United States.

I think what this alludes to is the reality that the time and resources to self-actualize are still largely the domain of the owner class.

And many to most still seem to just chase a bigger hoard rather than do that.

I don't know if it's art or just creation. Like, if I had infinite money I'd spend time on leatherworking and making little machines/programs. Both a form of creation.

This was discovered in the US shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown thanks to The Great Resignation when furloughed workers took to hobbies during lockdown and some of them found ones lucrative enough they decided to quit their (often toxic) jobs.

In fact, there's been a strong effort by both principal political parties and the ownership class to memory-hole what happened 2020-2022 in which ordinary people were given enough material support to define for themselves their societal role, rather than having it defined for them by major commercial interests (who want them as cheap labor).

This is also how an unconditional socialized or community-centered system would work. (We might even call them socialism or communism if those were not the worst of all slurs in the United States). People can couch-potato and binge-watch TV for about two weeks before cabin fever sets in and they either start fixing and building. Those of us (like me) who can couch potato for longer than that suffer from mental illness (and in my case, have been diagnosed since my early twenties). I stayed in bed for nine months, often without the capacity to literally lift a finger thanks to my avolition. No one wants to be that lazy.

No, the current system is a grift, a scam to force people to engage in menial labor for super-cheap while they suffer abuse by their superiors, hence the RTO mandates, and how crunching development teams in AAA game development is still a thing.

Yes, I'm bitter, but Trump's autocratic movement may be the last gasp of neoliberalism, and either we're going to see steps towards a new New Deal or we're going to see our Tech-Bro oligarch masters try to fascism all of the US and the reprisal will be even more revolutionary (and more violent).

My inability to draw definitely isn't related to my mortgage.

this is part of the reason why the blunt anti-AI movement pisses me off. It lets those of us who didn't get to dedicate a bunch of time to mastering visual arts to get an OK representation of an idea made. Not all of us have commission money.

The greater impact, how it's used etc are valid points of argument. But it's nice to see some interesting ideas rendered well, and it's nice to be able to put in stupid ideas and see them made. And not all of it is draining oceans and making people homeless.

it's weird, i don't think i've had this urge. i have an urge but i don't know what it is.

This is a world-building element of Heinlein’s posthumous novel, For Us the Living, where UBI allows people to do art or other low-pay trades. The UBI system in the novel enables people who don’t want to work, are tired of work, or who aren’t good at working, to live and pursue what does make them happy since their livelihood doesn’t rely on working a job. Of course, Heinlein has some libertarian nonsense to harp on in the book, but it’s wild just how long we’ve known that there is enough to take care of us all and that working to live is a detriment individually and collectively.

Only thing I've been creating lately is chaos...

Pickup a fucking crayon and draw your friends

"Rich people have it too easy" is such a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.

the money also gets them famous

The vast, vast majority of artists do it as a job to survive and not for fun though.

It can certainly be a hobby that is done for fun with no time constraints, where you can just make whatever you please, but it can also be stressful, soul-sucking necessity once money gets involved.

Whoever said this obviously doesn't have a financial backer to develop acrylic paint in easy to eat tubes (specifically in yellow)