Amarna Forum

The purpose of this thread is to share and discuss creative figures we consider to be inspirational or exceptional in some positive way, even if they may have other flaws. I want to talk about a number of people but it seems like a bit much effort to write a whole thread about some semi-obscure person, especially when I don't have that much to say about each one. I use the term creative instead of artist to allow a broad category of creation that some may not consider art. I have a bias towards modern independent artists because what they create tends to be a part of their identities, and I find the sacrifices they make for the sake of their work interesting and sometimes tragic, but feel free to discuss professional, famous, or dead artists if you like.

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Wildbow/John McCrae:
Breathed life into the heavy carcass of the superhero genre by writing his epic Worm, which was published serially from 2011-2013 on his blog. Not only does he write at an astounding pace that makes novelists considered to be prolific look lazy, while compromising very little in the way of quality (some typos fixed after publishing and occasional repetitive phrasing), he also evidently must do a lot of planning behind the scenes to develop his realistic worlds with immense casts of hundreds of characters, each with fleshed out personalities and motivations. He managed to repeat this feat by writing two more stories and two sequels of equivalent length and quality (the sequels are bad, albeit) set in other elaborate original worlds that depart entirely from capeshit. Worm's characters and setting are compelling enough that a person who thinks they hates capeshit such as myself can easily enjoy it (although it's a harder ask to commit to reading something so long). Worm was his first major work and was intended as something experimental, before it started receiving attention. The way a web serial is published is similar to a fanfic, and there was nothing special to begin with about a superhero setting, so only Wildbow's talent and discipline could have been the distinguishing factor that elevated Worm above AO3 fanfiction. I think Wildbow created something great simply by being very good at core writing fundamentals and trying very hard, I couldn't point to any single plot decision or trait of the story that is especially innovative or amazing without the surrounding context, and I suppose that is just how writing works.

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Pseudolonewolf/Tobias Cornwall:
Released the Flash game MARDEK RPG (Chapter 1) in 2007 at the age of 17, and over the next few years went on to release 2 more chapters (but not the 8 chapters that were originally planned). For a Flash game from that era, MARDEK was impressively polished and had a lot of content with at least 30 hours of playtime. He drew, animated, composed, wrote and programmed everything himself, and appeared to possess effortless talent in all of these domains. He programmed his own forum from scratch which went through various iterations and had some unique features. He was a very sensitive individual and consciously posted about this, developing an interest in personality typology. He at first engaged deeply with his fans and posted rambling, obsessive blog posts about his thoughts and projects. However, he ended up alienating himself from his community who he perceived to be insufficiently sensitive and "young thinky males" ("thinky" here means the "T" in the MBTI personality typology). He secretly created other forums with the intention of attracting the type of woman who would accept him after a Deviantart lesbian broke his heart, but this proved unsuccessful. For a while he only responded online to posts made by women, citing a "phobia" of men. In the more-than-a-decade since MARDEK, he made promising-looking progress on other projects, but never managed to finish anything impressive. Recent and not-so-recent posts on his blog (all forums were taken offline years ago) portray a Tobias that is as isolated, tortured and neurotic as ever. Since he may read this, I should clarify that I don't believe his struggles result from any sort of personal failing, in fact I view it as a failure of modern society that he has been reduced to this state. An artist with this much potential should have been given the resources and institutional network to achieve his creative visions, as well as social status which he could use to obtain a wife and prevent tick damage from social isolation.

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Andrew Hussie:
Wrote Homestuck, which you have probably heard of. The work began as a webcomic casually posted on a forum which took reader-submitted commands and later direct suggestions, but escalated into an elaborate and incomprehensible epic that was constrained only by Hussie's ability to continue publishing pages. His productive output was characterized by periods of intense activity followed by hiatuses. During his longest hiatus it seemed like he lacked confidence in his ability to write a satisfying conclusion to the story, and the released ending was somewhat unsatisfying. It isn't surprising that the latter half of Homestuck declines in quality given how much he attempts to pull off, but even though Homestuck does not deliver on its promise I find his ambition to create and endlessly expand the story's scope inspiring. The original premise of the story (a boy bored in his room) was Perfectly Generic, although the story incorporates a large number of references. I would argue that the fractal genre-defying mass the story became was not meaningfully derivative of other works as much as it is a product of both Hussie's passion, as well as that of the fanbase (who contributed a lot of Homestuck's art and music under his direction).

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EthosLab:
A Youtuber who started uploading Minecraft videos right around the advent of the game's beta in 2010. He has a Let's Play series which has been running since then with over 500 episodes, although this is not especially interesting on its own. What I find notable is that his videos are the opposite of clickbait: the titles are always plain and descriptive and he almost never uses thumbnails. He only uses simple editing techniques also. However this is not due to laziness, since he demonstrably puts a lot of effort into ensuring his videos' content is entertaining. He discovered the "hopper clock" which is a widely used redstone structure, and on occasion shows novel and innovative designs for farms and machines in his videos without making a big deal of this. He seems to live by some intuitive, aesthetic, ethical sense which has allowed him to resist the Molochian MrBeastifying drift of modern Youtube (and its particular sway over gaming-related videos). I think EthosLab is a serendipitous accident who can only exist because he happened to start making Minecraft videos at the exact right time before the game took off in popularity. Someone of his immaculate moral character could never have run a successful channel if he started uploading even a year later. It takes years after his first video for him to stop speaking monotonously and structure videos more efficiently. If he was not fortunate enough to collect his free Minecraft Beta following a decade ago, he would not have made the morally and aesthetically disgusting sacrifices necessary to compete with other Youtubers, and would have remained unknown. He most likely did not even plan on his videos achieving modest popularity (they took off pretty quickly), since the description of his very first video suggests that he was recording so his friends could watch. He also used the headset he mentions buying in that description for almost a decade until it fell apart.

Topdrunkee



One of the greatest gaming forum posters and internet personalities of the 2000s. Key interests were SMT and Suda51.



I've said before that I believe that the Japanese have a naive kind of taste which generally works well for them. Topdrunkee is what a comparable intelligent American naivete in taste and ideas looks like. Topdrunkee had extraordinarily good taste, not just for the time, but all time. The world is barely catching up to him now. Everything he was into in 2007 is the bleeding edge of cool now. He dressed like an anime character irl. He valued games as whole aesthetic experiences not out of some heavily developed personal art theory but just because it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to him. He'd yell at people and call them stupid for not getting it. Because it's obvious isn't it? He loves coats, guns, evil gangster overmen. His tastes, preferences, and instincts almost made the greatest indie meme game ever made before indie pc games were a thing, or meme games. Because Topdrunkee didn't think in memes, he was just so advanced a man that his instincts were things which would infect everyone else's minds 15 years later.



Look at this. It's like WarioWare crossed with SMT that plays like Fear & Hunger (he'd probably compare it to Corpse Party or something at the time). We have a lot of footage of different builds of this game, but tragically it never got finished. And like many other artists mentioned ITT Topdrunkee is kind of crazy, so probably never will. Here's a clip of him in his prime just being himself. A look at the man behind the legend.



Among many other worthy contributions to internet history, he feuded with Icycalm. A legendary encounter since communication between these two is obviously impossible if you know how they are. They're like opposites. But they're also the two most worthy peaks of people talking about video games online so far.

Has Ulillillia ever been discussed here?

Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote:

EthosLab:
A Youtuber who started uploading Minecraft videos right around the advent of the game's beta in 2010. He has a Let's Play series which has been running since then with over 500 episodes, although this is not especially interesting on its own. What I find notable is that his videos are the opposite of clickbait: the titles are always plain and descriptive and he almost never uses thumbnails. He only uses simple editing techniques also. However this is not due to laziness, since he demonstrably puts a lot of effort into ensuring his videos' content is entertaining. He discovered the "hopper clock" which is a widely used redstone structure, and on occasion shows novel and innovative designs for farms and machines in his videos without making a big deal of this. He seems to live by some intuitive, aesthetic, ethical sense which has allowed him to resist the Molochian MrBeastifying drift of modern Youtube (and its particular sway over gaming-related videos). I think EthosLab is a serendipitous accident who can only exist because he happened to start making Minecraft videos at the exact right time before the game took off in popularity. Someone of his immaculate moral character could never have run a successful channel if he started uploading even a year later. It takes years after his first video for him to stop speaking monotonously and structure videos more efficiently. If he was not fortunate enough to collect his free Minecraft Beta following a decade ago, he would not have made the morally and aesthetically disgusting sacrifices necessary to compete with other Youtubers, and would have remained unknown. He most likely did not even plan on his videos achieving modest popularity (they took off pretty quickly), since the description of his very first video suggests that he was recording so his friends could watch. He also used the headset he mentions buying in that description for almost a decade until it fell apart.

I didn't expect to see Etho mentioned here of all places, but I do agree with his inclusion. He's one of the few Minecraft youtubers actually doing something interesting with the game. I think I should post another that I found.
First though, what is Minecraft? Is it a comfy building game? A survival challenge? Maybe a way to hang out with your friends virtually? Or is it a colonization sim as certain left-wing twitter users would tell us? 
At least to me, I think the last option might be correct. You start with nothing after being dropped into a strange, hostile world. First you just build a shack to avoid being killed at night, but slowly that shack becomes a fortress as your ability to manipulate and exploit your surroundings grows and then becomes a palace/factory that's perfectly safe and provides you with everything you need automatically. You go from being at the mercy of this world to its master. This is an appeal that I've rarely seen anyone else bring up as they build a little home or speedrun the ender dragon.

PippenFTS, however, is an exception and he really takes this idea to its logical conclusion. By his own admission, after finding out about the game he was enamored with the idea that you could civilize the world. At first he wanted to make an entire Minecraft world totally safe, but after learning how impossible this was he shifted his goals to carving out a massive chunk of land from bedrock to the height limit and filling it with a perfectly safe and well-equipped mega-city, all while in survival mode.
He explains all of this himself in this video: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bVe5rbLFtA
The real discussion of this project is towards the end but the early stuff is interesting too, especially if you're familiar with this game and the scale that his basic preparations have already reached. Just look at his preliminary base and storage hall, it's far beyond what most people would ever attempt. This base alone has since spawned its own video series on his channel. You'll also notice his choice of game version and the fact that this was his old multiplayer world that his friends played on; I like the idea of expanding on one of those moments. Of course, this was just a personal project he uploaded years ago, long after he started all of this. Much like Etho, he had no intention of chasing the youtube audience with some gay-bait SMP. His channel didn't really take off until later on when this video got picked up by the algorithm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lv25Vl_LO8
5 million views out of nowhere. You can find a lot of Minecraft videos on contraptions to generate thousands of any given block or item per hour, but as far as I know Pippen is the only one who's really putting any of them to use. Everyone else seems to be a STEMfag content to leave these tools as a proof of concept and mechanical challenge and nothing more. Just listen to the scales he mentions in these videos, hundreds of millions of blocks generated and then transported across similarly large distances, all to shape the world to his vision. This is the real end-game of Minecraft in a way.

This isn't his only project though, as a few years later he stumbled onto the combo of the Cubic Chunks and Terra 1 to 1 mods. His idea? Build every major human settlement as accurately as possible on this scale recreation of Earth's terrain. This video reached triple the views of his previous breakthrough and soon lead to numerous teams tasked with building various regions of the Earth with him being an overseer and occasional participant. While this doesn't replace his previous series, it does fill the gaps in uploads as the videos for that one can take months to create.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bW3ab8YAk

Takamichiたかみち

Artist of Comic LO covers











https://archive.org/details/2008-lo-taka...love-works Link to one of his artbooks. (If you actually care you can find the rest yourself.)

He didn't do the graphic design for the covers, (because of that the artbooks don't include them at high res so I don't have nice versions of all the ones I want.) but they're too cool to not show here:








And yeah, that last cover. He depicts himself as a rodent.




I'm fascinated by how in Japan people can sit down thinking of themselves as a Rodent and create such beautiful things without having to go to war with the world. I don't get the impression of any kind of violent explosion outwards from him. He's comfortable drawing girls from beginning to end and the world (Japan) lets him. He probably made all the money he's needed for years just doing the LO covers.






Some great Japan-English from the artbooks.







This manga of his is also really cool. Reminds me of Another Code. Another pretty Blue Japanese work about a girl going to an island to find something. Obviously Swimsuits are a Lolicon essential and can't be featured too irregularly or else risk the collapse of the business, so he draws a lot of those. But he likes and is good at water and beach and sky (Blue) stuff in general to where it's probably the 2nd most prominent thing about his art (after the Lolis). And to me it's the most striking and powerful. When I look at this stuff I want to kill everything I've ever known more than ever over and over until my life is on an infinite loop of worlds like these where I can only have only perfect beautiful feelings come from wet hair on my neck. I've already posted some of his blue drawings, but here's my favorite:

Really lovely stuff.

The snowboarding one is my favorite.

Promise-Ring Wrote:

This is a great quote. Thank you for sharing.

Reminds me a bit of David Hamilton.