"It resembled nothing so much as a star-shaped blob of transparent jelly that shimmered and changed color like an opal. It appeared to be some lower form of animal, one-celled, not large, only about a foot in circumference when it stretched those feelers out to full length. It oozed along over the sand like a snail, groping its way with those star-points—and it hummed!"
"It was nauseating to watch, and yet beautiful, too, with all those iridescent colors gleaming against that setting of dead-black stone."
"Instead, I took off my flying-helmet and tossed the goggles directly in the path of the creature. It did not pause or turn aside, but merely reached out one of those sickening feelers and brushed the goggles very lightly. “And they turned to stone!"
"It took me about three days to trap the thing, although it gave me no more actual resistance, of course, than a larger snail."
"He had prodded this jelly-like Thing with his automatic, and it had turned (him—and everything in contact with him —into shiny dark stone."
"I saw horror—a jelly-like, opalescent thing like a five-pointed star. It pulsed and quivered for an instant, and the room fairly rocked to the unmuffled sound of that vibrant humming."
Mary Elizabeth Counselman, The Black Stone Statue
Read Scott's essay about The Black Stone Statue here
This was a really fun one. The "opalescent thing" is described as a small jellyish blob with "star points" for locomotion. I chose to make it look like a starfish with a snail's texture. 
While Virgil Finlay's illustration for this story is gorgeous, it is inaccurate. The creature looks more like one of Lovecraft's moon-beasts than the monster in Counselman's story. It has a frog body with a cluster of polyps at the top. She very specifically says "five-pointed" and talks about how it fits in a small box. Finlay also did the cover for this issue Weird Tales.
Clockwise from top left: Mystery Of the Wax Museum, House Of Wax, Waxwork, The Mill Of Stone Women
While the colonial adventurer side of the story is interesting to grapple with, I was interested in the tortured artist aspect. An artist that gains access to a shortcut to make work quickly and slickly. It's an idea that has shown up in The Mill Of Stone Women, Mystery Of the Wax Museum & it's remake House Of Wax are all about real bodies being passed off as waxwork creations. Waxwork is the same basic story but with magic. Even movies like Bucket Of Blood (an artist can't create the perfect shade of red so he uses human blood) & Color Me Blood Red (a murderer covers his victims in clay & sells them to a gallery to hide the evidence) have a similar theme. You could even make the argument that Pickman's Model is a variation on the theme. The artist creates gruesome works only to have it revealed that he's been using models from life, not his imagination. 
Top to bottom: Bucket Of Blood, Color Me Blood Red
In this hellscape that is late-stage American capitalism, artists are pushed to churn out maximum content for minimum pay. This results in artists "photobashing" and bending over backwards to justify their use of AI. Both AI & the opalescent thing are dumb, environmentally destructive tools used to churn out soulless artwork. In Counselman's story the narrator's looking for recognition, in our world people are using AI to undercut other freelancers for half of a paycheck.
Fuck AI. We'll be back with another series of Stories From the Borderland unless we all drown from the excessive heat caused by oligarchs & their toys.
Now that you mention the whole quip about soulless art, I am 100% certain that "animated" sitcoms are solely made to devalue and run the animation landscape into the ground, thus fitting very well into that term. Why? Allow me to point out its sins. Also, I apologize for going on this following rant tangent that I wanted to say for a very, VERY long time.
ReplyDelete1! Don't be fooled by what "premise" is being smeared on your eyes. It is the same cardboard cutout plot with a very dysfunctional family going through situations that don't pertain to them, but instead that they have to get involved because they have Main Character Syndrome.
2! The "jokes" are dated, offensive, and stale to the point that not even rats, silverfishes, and cockroaches would risk getting food poisoning from.
3! The "art", if it can be called as such, is too flat and generic, and the colors tend to clash with one another, creating a sense of nausea that can last for a week.
4! The "animation" is wooden, stiff, and not once do any character from any "animated" sitcom have any facial expression than the ones they usually wear throughout each and every episode.
5! By far the worst aspect of "animated" sitcoms is that they come from far-right outlets (if the Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Family Guy being aired on F-X is any proof), and if not that, then they use subliminal messages to force viewers into far-right politics. I don't need to point out how South Park has ruined 3/4 of a generation, as Dana Schwartz indicated.
All those points I made can also be applied to CocoMelon, PinkFong, Design Max Pro, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Hunger Games, Caleb and Sophia, and Skibidi Toilet.
With all that said and done, let's look at real animations. Hellaverse, Steven Universe, The Amazing Digital Circus, Godzilla Singular Point, High Guardian Spice, Lackadaisy, Bluey, Onyx Equinox, OK KO Let's Be Heroes, Infinity Train, Legend of Korra, We Bare Bears, Regular Show, Teen Titans, Emesis Blue, Happy Tree Friends, Primal, Unicorn Wars, Madness Combat, No Evil, Bluehilda, Killer Bean, Aachi and Ssipak, Godzilla the Series, Salad Fingers, Long Gone Gulch, Bunny Kill, Cuphead, Bunny Maloney, Alphabet Lore, Skitzo the Bear, Pretty Blood, Spawn, Hell Girl, CliffSide, Murder Drones, Double King, Mystery Skulls, Talon, Alien Stage, Gregory Horror Show, Dinosaucers, Biker Mice From Mars, ReBoot, Beast Wars, Transformers Armada, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Extreme Dinosaurs, Street Sharks, Far-Fetched, The Owl House, Amphibia, Gravity Falls, Randy Cunningham, Cleopatra in Space, Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts, Hilda, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Transformers One, Voltron, Nimona, In A Heartbeat, Schism, Acorn Princess, Backwater Gospel, 9, and one too many animations that the far-right is obsessed with censoring.
See how alive, organic, and realistic those shows come off as, compared to the Clutch Cargo level of "production" any and all "animated" sitcoms have, if they even bother to put any effort, that is.
It does NOT matter if you agree or disagree, but at the end of the day, it is about, in your own words, "artists are pushed to churn out maximum content for minimum pay."
Think about it: why is the Simpsons getting a new season, but the Owl House is forever pushed to the margin? Why has Cartoon Network bend over and allowed it to be flooded with "animated" sitcom slop? If everyone stopped working for folks who make these "animated" sitcoms, we would experience a Second Golden Age of animation.
There is no lore to any "animated" sitcom, the "characters" are just archetypal stereotypes that would have been funny in the 1940s, the "scenario/themes" are intangible within the heavy reliance on overused jokes, and the "art" and "animation" can be easily surpassed by a preschooler.
One has to wonder why make such "content" if the demographic for sitcoms does not exist anymore.
Layman's summary: "animated" sitcoms are as bad as YouTube brain-rot content farms.