Gotterdammerung.glitch.social.ap.brid.gy
Graphic Novelist / blogs at http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia / Get Pantheon at https://www.amazon.com/Pantheon-Heterotopia-1-Awet-Moges/dp/1944854045/
[bridged from https://glitch.social/@Gotterdammerung on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
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Art destroys the middlemen. Slop is curated by the same tech overlords who profit from its spread. Grit belongs to the creators, not the platforms. Take it back. Own your work. Print it paint it build it perform it in a basement if you have to. But don't let them own it.
Art resists the […]
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Art earns the audience. Slop is thrown at you whether you want it or not. Pushed into feeds, forcefed through recommendation algorithms. Grit demands that people seek it out, that it matters enough to be found.
Art lets it be ugly (in the right way). Slop is hollow, a cheap imitation of real […]
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Art makes it harder, not easier. Slop removes barriers, erases effort. Grit thrives on limits. On the constraint that forces innovation. Wanna make real art? Throw away the crutches. No endless undo buttons. No auto-generation. No safety net.
Art rejects the Factory. Slop comes from the […]
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#GritManifesto
Art requires skin in the game. Slop is created at zero cost. No risk, no investment, no soul. Grit costs something. Energy, time, sanity. It is an act of will, not some algo accident.
Art embraces the struggle. Slop is the aesthetic of surrender, allowing the machines decide […]
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Hands in clay, paint-stained fingers, backs hunched over desks at 2am, rewriting a single damn sentence until it hurts.
Slop is an inside joke between billionaires & their bots.
Grit is a fist through the screen. A rejection of their digital landfill.
Slop is cowardly, afraid of depth […]
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Not the blind automation of Ai vomiting up content but the deliberate, agonizing struggle of an artist wrestling something true into existence.
Slop is mass produced kitsch. Its absurdity amplified by the obscene sums spent to manufacture it. Grit is dirt cheap but priceless. Born from […]
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If Slop is the product of machines, cynicism, & cultural garbage disposals set to infinite churn, then its opposite isn't nostalgia for a purer past. Nor is it delicate craftmanship or old-world artistry. The antidote to Slop isn't fragile.
It's bruta. It's #Grit.
Grit is human.
Messy […]
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Sketch things I never dared. Throw characters in strange contexts. Take commissions that challenge my instincts. Anything to keep my mind flexible, multidimensional, seeing reality from angles others miss. Stagnation is the enemy. The sketchbooks are waiting. Time to crack them open & break […]
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I'd hit that fever pitch of mastery. Ideas weren't just coming to me. They were hunting me down. In the shower, on walks, in my sleep. The work was consuming me & I was consuming it right back.
Now with all 3 volumes out (2018, 2020 & 2024) I had six years of lead time to pivot to the sequel […]
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That was my hacker path. No straight rails leading to a mental stagnation. Someday I may pivot from graphic novels to video games, breathe life into the world of Pantheon. The door is open because I never stopped stockpiling skills to walk through it.
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The act of cutting away, of refusing to be a mere echo gave me the space to develop my own language, my own theothanatology - the blood & bones of the gods of Pantheon. It's the same ruthless evolution Nietzsche took with Schopenhauer, or how Walt Simonson & John Byrne stood on Kirby's […]
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What about Dump & Elmo? They're not old school enough for patrimonialism. They gotta at least pretend to care about legacy. But they embody kleptokakistocracy with a solid dose of kakokleptocracy. An empire of grift where idiocy isn't just tolerated, it's required. Throw in #neofeudalism […]
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Kleptokakistocracy is the mutant offspring. Rule by the corrupt & the grotesquely unqualified. Pretends to be a modern state but underneath the bureaucratic jargon it's a rigged casino where the house always wins.
Kakokleptocracy is kleptokakistocracy without even the pretense of order. It […]
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Loyalty is everything. The system selects for sycophants, ensuring the unqualified stay in power while the competent flee or are purged.
The difference?
Patrimonialism is monarchy w/o the crown. Old-school kings, chieftains, & mafiosi ruling by personal loyalty. The state is their household […]
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They're all different flavors of the same rancid stew: power as a personal possession, government as a looting ground & leadership as an exercise in unapologetic failure. They all share 3 core elements:
Personalized power: the state isn't an institution but an extension of the ruler's whims […]
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@ai6yr Ever since science became a "liberal agenda," suddenly keeping your kid alive is a political statement.
Congratulations, Texas!
Measles is back on the menu!
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By the third volume, the confidence was there, the lines sure, the storytelling sharpened by repetition & failure.
Now I stand at another threshold, about to start a new project completely detached from Pantheon. And once again, I don't feel ready. New lessons to learn, new ground to break […]
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I wasn't ready to draw sequential art. I wasn't ready to render a body in 3-d space. I wasn't ready to develop characters with depth, writer distinctive dialogue or plot layered storylines. But I dove in anyway. No floaties, no gradual descent. Just the cold plunge into the deep end. And yeah […]
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Instead of progress, we get hyper-fragmentation where every group has its own truth, its own morality, & its own cultlike devotion to whatever keeps them outraged.
Yeah, its a paradigm shift. Just not the liberating kind. More like watching civilization eat itself in High Definition.
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Here I was explaining the seismic shifts in education & my class was reacting to "Paradigm Shift" like I just spoke in Klingon.
This is no esoteric jargon. It's fundamental, the language of critical thought. But why would they wrestle with concepts when they can let the Almighty Algorithm […]
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The moment a circle started feeling too familiar, I was already developing the next one. Comfortable is just another word for stuck.
I move, I question, I absorb, & discard at will. Loyalty is for dogs & cultists, & I am neither. The mind is meant to be wild, feral, untamed. I cultivate that […]
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Becoming the best student at school was child's play. I had to invent my own metrics, my own standards just to keep things interesting.
Books weren't just entertainment. They were weapons. Doors. Maps. Every new idea detonated inside me, breaking open wider perspectives, feeding an appetite […]
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To truly learn from the greats, you don't worship them. You consume them, break them down to raw nutrients, & rebuild something new. Their essence remains, but the structure is mine. What began as mimicry mutated into something unmistakably mine, the way a body takes in iron & turns it into […]
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Write/Draw today. Pages, not plans.
Declare my deadline publicly. Accountability makes it real.
Kill a major comfort. This week. No debate.
The Choice is advance or rot. Create or decay. Stay in Death Ground. It's where my best work is forged.
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Find the book, the creative, the movement that threatens to overshadow me. If no rival exists, I will invent one. Frame it as a battle: who is rising while I hesitate?
Step five: invoke the Younger Me. The broke kid with no credibility? He was closer to the abyss. And he was hungry.
Keep a […]
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Step three, turn mortality into fuel. My friend's death wasn't just an event. It was a deadline stamped on my soul. Each incomplete page is an act of cowardice. A mockery of the time I still have.
Set a death clock. If I had 5 years left, what must I finish?
If I had 2?
Work like someone who […]
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Shrink my world to the work. Cut the noise, the distraction, the pointless obligations.
Set brutal deadlines. Announce them. Public shame is a powerful motivator.
Kill excess. Find a barren uncomfortable creative space. Luxury breeds inertia.
Seek hostile environments. Where I'm not admired […]
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The only answer is a voluntary Death Ground. Step one:
Burn the mental bridges to comfort. The biggest lie is that I've arrived. That mountain is climbed. No. The only way forward is to see Pantheon as a prologue. The Heterodyssey isn't a sequel. It's an executioner's blade. And it better be […]
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Yes I fell into the same trap everyone does: mistaking charisma for competence, vision for execution. Lesson learned. Repeatedly. Built a Deaf Writers' group to get my work shredded before the public could. Showed my art in galleries before it ever hit print, just to carve out some name […]
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Same gimmick, different era.
These labels aren't natural laws. They're just bookkeeping. A system to help consumers find something familiar.
A movie doesn't belong to a genre. It gets assigned to one. Sometimes arbitrarily.
Tarantino mashes genre like a chef tossing leftovers into a stew […]
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Sure I'll test out new tools but I won't fool myself into thinking they'll do the work for me. The only thing that delivers is time, sweat & the relentless refusal to quit.
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You stare down the blank page, the empty canvas & if you're not willing to make a mess you're not willing to make anything. So I learned to take the hits. To flinch but not retreat. To see the flaws the missteps & instead of erasing them, use them as stepping stones.
Bit by bit I outgrew the […]
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Social Justice. You name it. We're linguistic necromancers, summoning the divine with every well-ordered sentence.
And good old Fritz smirks from the abyss:
"You think you've outgrown fairy tales? Look at your syntax. You're still praying."