aiislove
3d ago
The Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya's art style to me is achingly precious and beautiful. The story is also profoundly moving if you're open to its message but I think many people are not. The art style I think reinforces the beauty of the story.
I am a huge fan of 60s and 70s shoujo manga and I think the artwork in Moto Hagio's and Keiko Takemiya's work from that era are sometimes profoundly beautiful. Shoujo Kakumei Utena borrows heavily from this era of anime/manga and the art style is fantastic- the sort of abstract mannerist heights the movie reaches in its art nouveau meets modernist architecture is really interesting. The character design of the Utena characters is also so odd, with weirdly overlapping physical traits and rich personalities.
I don't know how the content of Ah My Goddess holds up today but I've always found the artist Kosuke Fujishima incredibly talented- the quality of his linework is immaculate and he renders the curls and twists of hair as precisely as the intricate machinery he draws.
Not what you asked for but while I'm here, Macoto Takahashi, Yoshitaka Amano and Tomomi Kobayashi must all be mentioned as extremely good artists working in the manga/anime style.
aiislove
3d ago
Yes it's true, the richer parts of my family always got along very well with workers and employees and so on compared with the lower middle class parts. My Thai ex boyfriend who grew up very poor was shockingly rude to Thai service workers, it made me so uncomfortable. I think Americans have forgotten that "being nice to the help" as you put it is high class, we've all adopted the strange imagination that the rich are rude and seek to replicate this and feel no shame in doing so.
The most unbearable thing in American culture is that disrespect is seen as high status and respect is seen as low status.
Today, if you are in a situation where you need to be respectful, you are in a very bad place. You are either in court, in a ghetto, or in prison. In court you must pay deference to the judge (who, being very high class indeed, is often very disrespectful- “I just can’t with that history.” I wanted to jump her too.) In the ghetto you must pay deference to the top dogs, the alphas, the crime mob bosses, whoever is in charge. In prison you must be respectful of everyone else or you’re going to suffer the consequences.
Outside of these places, you are free to be as disrespectful as you please. Indeed, the dream is that the richer you are, the more disrespectful you can be toward others around you. You want to get rich so you can go make fun of expensive stuff at Louis Vuitton and Bergdorf (and then buy it, being rude to the salespeople all the while.)
Where does this concept come from? I believe it’s an inherited trait from the English. It is downstream of entitlement. I am a midwestern American but have spent a fair amount of time in France. The French seem irritated by the entitlement of Anglosphere people. It took me a long time to understand why things that work in the Anglosphere are frowned upon in France, and as I’m still an outsider I’m still not sure I fully understand, but I have a theory that seems to explain the difference.
In American and English culture, we often show up to things seeming frazzled and sad and expect those around us to take care of all of our problems. We are owed this by society, after all, we are the sad and frazzled people! In France (and in most places) this is seen as entitled and crazy. If you show up like a weird diva, in England, people will want to know what’s wrong and try to help. If you show up like a weird dive in France, people will think there’s something wrong with you and roll their eyes until you can act like a mature adult who takes care of themselves.
Americans and the English, terrified of appearing slow or dumb, interrupt constantly. In other countries, people are not so afraid of appearing slow and dumb, and let each other speak, and then respond to what has actually been spoken.
The first time I visited Vienna I took a cab from the airport to my accommodations. The cab driver was polite and respectful, and I was nervously practicing my German with him. This being 5 years ago, I was still very much in the anglosphere cultural mode of interaction. So when we approached the accommodation, I said, “Hier ist gut danke,” and he sort of softly chuckled at me, in a way that was just condescending enough for me to be confused as to what I was doing wrong. It took a while to realize that it was I who had condescended to him as if he was someone incompetent at his job, while he was a professional who knew his city and his trade well and I was a tourist who just showed up. The English, and today the Americans, travel the entire world certain that they know the new city they’ve just arrived in better than the 60 year old cab driver.
As an American I can explain why we do this- or at least the rationale that we believe is why we do this. We want to be proactive and helpful, we don’t want to be seen as dumb or lazy, we don’t want to be taken advantage of. Americans go to a coffee shop in any part of the world, order their food, and then stand around waiting for it to be presented to them, staring down the staff the entire time. In most of the world this is seen as overbearing, impatient, rude, and weird. You order your things, then go sit down, because the staff will take care of you. In America we assume the staff to be incompetent or uncaring to the degree that we will never receive the order.
It’s hard to know, but I believe the cultural traits I’ve described have persisted in the American culture for several hundred years. But another trend emerged that has exacerbated the issue. Basically, class was invented for the Americans in the 1980s, or at least class as we understand it today. From the 1940s to the 1960s, there was mass upward mobility among all classes until the stagnation of the 1970s. People were largely of the same middle class in this period, or if not they were certainly living a better life than the generation before them at any rung of the socioeconomic ladder. It is not a popular view but I see the 1970s as the most beautiful time period of the 20th century. The Brady Bunch is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The grainy quality of the beautiful young blonde and brunet people in their rusty rainbow modernist home is the sort of fever dream you could build an ethnostate off of. The 1970s are the only era of history where the mass market, every day people clothes looked better than the runway fashions. (Compare the rainbow of pristine, printed and textured knits and denim in the Sears catalogue to the drab and underwhelming runway fashions of Halston and Anne Klein.)
The 80s is where everything went wrong. Class signaling emerged and ruined the fabric of American life. Reagan didn’t help things but I’m not pinning it on him alone. Indeed, there is classism in America on both the right and the left. Neither of them are good. Classism from the left looks like the snobbery of NPR and the ivies and east coast intellectualism. Classism from the right looks like midwestern golf and country clubs and HRH in her McMansion. Classism from both sides looks down on poor whites, and when pressed both sides are willing to self-flagellate in honor of the past horrors of the treatment of blacks and other minorities, while never daring to examine the motivations for these historical situations, and never feeling bad about the open and glaring hostility toward poor white people (the occasional Appalachian apologia aside which often feels either forced at gunpoint or the result of some strange 4d chess situation.)
Anyway, I pinpoint the emergence of America’s class system to the 80s because it was truly the decade where equality was thrown out the window. Suddenly you had girls like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (who I never thought could really pass for a pretty popular girl- all the redheaded girls I grew up with were goths and poor, but this was the midwest) asserting her class superiority by eating sushi and sticking up her nose at anyone who didn’t get the vibe. 70s Marcia Brady would never resort to ridiculous class signaling like this- she didn’t need to. She was just hot. The 80s were the decade where sex became undignified, and status became the name of the game. Now you didn’t just wear Levi’s from Sears to get laid, you had to wear Yohji Yamamoto- never mind that the silhouettes made you look like a hunched over creep, or that the Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit you bought made you look like a Goomba from the Mario movie (not even the video game) and that it didn’t get you laid at all.
Please look at the films Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) directed by John Waters. I first watched these around 2010 while I was in college. I truly was very confused by the conceit of these films. Basically, they are meant to depict very “filthy” people (in the words of the director.) The filthiest people alive, even. But visually, these people look very put together and classy and elegant to me, compared to the people I see today. The Team Rocket-esque main villains in both films (see here) may have unnaturally dyed hair, but she wears crystal jewelry, draped silk blouses, secretary-looking eyeglasses, and thoughtful makeup. He wears button up shirts, well fitted trousers, and sharp blazers. It blows the mind that there was a time in America that women who looked like [this]((https://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/fsc_2553/fs_female_trouble_800.jpg) were considered trashy. Ok, the bra is showing through the sweater, but my god. Pleated plaid skirts, pencil skirts, button up blouses- who are these women, CEOs?
Today people dress very disrespectfully. Indeed, the Silicon Valley flex is that the billionaire wears flip flops and hoodies everywhere. Ugggghhhh! Sorry to mention France again, but there is something called noblesse oblige. In earlier societies, the rich gave so much to the poor. They dignified the existence of the poor by giving them something to aspire to, something to look up to, a guide for their lives and their choices. The rich today have abandoned all noblesse oblige in favor of looking worse than the filthiest people alive. They believe they owe those around them nothing.
Now, it may feel glamorous to owe those around you nothing, to disrespect the people around you, to degrade yourself and pull down everyone you see at the same time. But what it really betrays about the person who does this is that they feel so small. HRH, the strange right wing woman internet famous for ranting about eating a potato, once said that she loves to visit luxury boutiques “looking like a pile of trash.” (She meant that she goes in wearing leggings or sweatpants and flip flops, not in proper clothing.) She must feel so small about herself that she needs to grab back some power from her situation and the only way she knows how is to disrespect the people around her through disrespecting herself.
By the way, disrespect is an extremely feminine trait. When I’ve traveled in the Middle East and Greece, men are extremely respectful of each other. They never talk poorly of their local community and those around them. If you try to speak poorly of your culture, even if it is America, they see you as strange and indeed, disrespectful. They expect you to speak highly of it because they feel proud of where they are from for the most part. Of course they don’t have the luxury of being from the most powerful and richest place on earth as I happen to be from, and being in a more turbulent area prone to war and generational blood lust they have more motivation to respect themselves and their communities. Women, who American men allow to set all cultural mores and public opinion, do not have the egos to enact a sense of dignity and respect toward their community or nation.
Speaking of the wealth of America, it was a shock to me that midwestern America seems richer than even Switzerland. My nephew’s high school in the rural midwest just spent $20,000 on costumes for one play this year. An old man in the woods recently told me medicare paid for his $400,000 penis implant to correct ED. The waste and excesses of America are insane. Perhaps if we were more exposed and aware of the richness of the US compared with any other place men and women would both feel more respect toward it. The fact that we can afford absurd luxuries in the middle class but we have no appreciation for it- and even feel entitled to it- is staggering to me.
It must be noted here that respect in the US can vary widely between regions. The Northeast is by far the least respectful region in the USA. This creates a very bizarre dynamic in certain places, such as in NYC where I interned for several months in the fashion industry. The garment district is full of people who come from all over the world, mostly outside of the anglosphere, from places with very strict codes of respect. Being a midwestern transplant and an American through and through, I could tell I was pissing off every single macho Egyptian gay fabric trader and Jewish notions dealer and Korean dragon lady every time I talked to them and had no idea why. In the stress and discomfort of Midtown Manhattan I was a lost cause, I just mostly didn’t make friends there and moved on with my life. But in reflection I can only imagine they felt my bratty midwestern personality clashed with their dignified expectation of respect that I was frankly oblivious to.
Northeastern cultural norms seem to be creeping east into the midwest and the Great Lakes regions. It seems like people were a bit more patient and friendly with each other across these areas when I was growing up 20 years ago than they are today. I would blame this on people seeing the East Coast as classier and more aspirational compared with the Midwest. Appalachian people have their own codes of respect and are a bit cliquish compared with other regions of the US but I would say are somewhere between the Northeast and the Midwest in terms of the baseline expectation of respect. The south is actually very respectful and I am one of the few northerners who prefer southern people over northerners. People in the north want to paint all southerners as racist and bigoted while never examining the bigotedness of this belief. Indeed when I travel in the south I am always struck by how sweet and kind and thoughtful people are in the south compared with the mean, snappy nastiness of the northerners. I’ve spent very little time on the west coast but people seem great out there, it’s hard to be in a bad mood with such great weather and climate and beautiful scenery in California. It seems in the media like people constantly complain about crime and other issues in CA but the vast majority of those problems are so much more unbearable in the east than in the west, so I am confused by the culture and the perception.
The respect dynamic also creates problems between American people who have grown up here and more recent immigrants. If you grew up in a place where respect is expected, and are suddenly in a culture where respect is low class, you’re going to feel weird and disrespected by the locals and like you are taking a huge drop in status among the community because you don’t understand the local norms.
The low status of respect is a very strange cultural trait among the Anglosphere but also leads to certain asymmetric advantages. For example, our impatience is a natural positive when it comes to creating efficient computer programs or cutting bureaucratic bloat or refining fast production in food or manufacturing. Having no expectation for respect lets us skip formalities and focus on more important tasks or matters. Mild disrespect could raise the bar for engagement from people who don’t adopt the local norms as readily as an in-group signal.
If you are from an Anglosphere country and want to understand how we come across to other people I would recommend the YouTube channel Mikeokay ( https://youtube.com/@mikeokay ). He is a sweet and friendly guy but he is also very British, talking over people, being oblivious to social cues of respect and so on, though he does try to fit in to the extent that he can. I sometimes feel cringe at things he does that he doesn’t realize are rude but people are usually understanding enough that he is a foreigner and are forgiving even as he retains his fringe British traits.
The most insufferable result of the respect issue in America is the treatment of people who are seen as stupid. Americans believe that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. I doubt this belief. We have been brain draining Europe and a handful of other regions for decades or centuries. People respect American institutions from law and universities to science and the humanities. It seems like a very American invention, and a facile one, that we are seen as stupid outside of the US. Regardless, because of this insecurity of intelligence, we see one of the darkest impulses of the American people, which is to dogpile on people who appear dumb. The other day my mother was looking at her phone, scrolling Facebook, and read a post where someone asked a question about the weather. I forget what it was exactly, but it was seen as a dumb question, and she said that all the comments were dogpiling on this person for asking a dumb question. She was on the side of the mob. I felt so bad for the person who asked the question, and thought less of my mother for siding with the pile on. Sometimes we ask questions that are easily answered and should still be afforded the dignity of having a kind and educated response. That we jump to flaming someone seen as dumb is horrible.
This also is a terrible hypocrisy of the American people. A year or two ago, I went to a somewhat close relative’s wedding. In the ceremony there was a person related somehow to my relative’s new husband. She visibly had some mental disability, perhaps downs syndrome if I had to guess. There was a moment during the ceremony where the relative gave a sort of short speech, and it was a nice moment, but the reaction from the crowd was a massive and extended clapping that felt like a mass group guilt catharsis to forgive themselves and each other of all their other hypocrisies through one moment of kindness toward someone with a disability. These are the same people who will dog pile on a “dumb” question online, or spend decades blaming social ills on the poor, but want to feel good about clapping for a disabled person? I don’t want to be so trite as to say I felt like I was in a room full of nazis clapping for a Jew, but I at least felt like I was in a room full of people who openly dislike dumb people and spend an awful lot of time trying to signal that they are not dumb people who were all clapping for a very “dumb” person. I do believe that they would genuinely be kind to and accepting of this person if they were a close family member, or at least attempt to do so, but I’m not sure if that makes them more or less hypocritical.
Anyway, the same people who flagellate themselves nonstop over the massacre of the Native Americans or the history of slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no capacity to see the problem of being terrible toward less intelligent people or poor whites today. The hypocrisy to me is glaring and incongruent. Ideally we would take a more nuanced and understanding view of history as well as our current bigotries and prejudices, but it’s more likely that we deal with the current bigotries with the same embarrassing self flagellation as we deal with other historical grievances if we deal with them at all. Unfortunately due to the bigotry of the intelligent over the dumb, and the classism of the elite over the poor, anyone advocating on the behalf of either group is too embarrassed to speak out for their interests.
In conclusion, when I was young, my father used to give me a piece of wisdom. He would say, it’s nice to be smart, but it’s smarter to be nice. He is correct. To embrace kindness and respect would help improve public life in America today.
———
I have been meaning to write this essay for like 5 years but never tackled it until today. I will say that I think we’re past peak rudeness as exemplified by the Karen video rage of circa 2020, but there is still a fundamental energy of disrespect inherent in Anglo-American culture that I think is worth examining.
aiislove
3d ago
Are you on the redscareforgirlsandgays subreddit? It's better than the main subreddit, though half the people on there seem like leftists which completely confuse me as to what they're getting out of the podcast (though most people on there also claim never to listen to it or to have stopped listening years ago.) I guess if you're not listening to the content of their points and just distracted by the aesthetic you can be convinced or deceived into thinking they're not right wing but it's bizarre to me that people still seem unsure at this point
aiislove
7d ago
None of my gay acquaintances or friends talk about this tension as intensely
That's because it is tragic and depressing and makes homosexuals look bad. No one straight or gay has ever expressed the issue I lay out explicitly to me, but damn if I don't notice it, over and over and over, in all of my relationships and all of the relationships of gay men I have known in the past and the present. self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal. I wouldn't advise asking your gay friends about it either, really, it is better left unspoken, though it is sad that it's such a dead end situation that I've come to the conclusion that you just have to work it out on your own and accept it for how it is.
The same dynamics of power/strength/bravery play out in hetero relationships. These qualities are intrinsically good. Women may joke about being smol, but none of them brag about being cowards.
I don't know. Please expand this? It seems like the qualities men and women compete at are almost always completely different fields. A woman may be powerful and strong and brave at social relationships and keeping a house and other traditionally feminine domains but it's emasculating and weird if she's powerful and strong and brave - compared to you, a man - at traditionally masculine domains. Women may not "brag about being cowards" but if she's the one stalking around with a shotgun at the sound of an intruder at midnight while you cower under some blankets it's a weird dynamic at best if not utterly embarrassing for both of you.
aiislove
8d ago
If you can't find an app that already exists, you might be able to create your own with aistudio.google.com pretty quickly
aiislove
9d ago
Thank you, and you're welcome.
No, I've never considered that seriously. It would be very disrespectful to any woman because I know I would never love her. I am simply not attracted to women- when I see their faces or bodies I feel nothing, when I see a handsome man I feel excited. I have always had close female friends my entire life, and though my relationship with women has changed as I've grown and changed as a person, I've never been tempted or interested in pursuing any relationship beyond friendship with any of them. I don't think very highly of gay men who marry a woman either. I can understand men who want to provide their parents with grandchildren, and I am lucky enough to have older siblings who have had children of their own and so never felt pressured from my parents to reproduce, but even then I am bothered by the idea that he chose to pursue a life that runs counter to his desires and internal feelings. He deserves better, to have the dignity to pursue what he is attracted to, even as homosexuality is an imperfect arrangement, and she certainly deserves better than to devote her time and life to a man who can not return her love.
aiislove
9d ago
I am a gay man and on the one hand I find your concern and thoughtfulness toward your brother charming and thoughtful but on the other hand somewhat patronizing and broadly misunderstanding the situation of homosexuality and why it is painful to be gay. Straight people usually imagine homosexuality as being difficult because of things you pointed out- your brother teases you and society preassigns expectations for your life in heteronormative ways and because, traditionally, heterosexuality is seen as a more standard and common and productive and positive situation compared with homosexuality. And indeed, even most gay men are stuck in this mode of understanding homosexuality vs heterosexuality today. But none of these things are even particularly bothersome and all of them are facile concerns compared with the fundamental impossibility of homosexuality that is incompatible with true fulfillment in a way that heterosexuality is able to provide.
The reason heterosexual relationships are so positive for people is that a man completes a woman and a woman completes a man. Every man compares himself to those around him. He is competitive with other men. When he is with a woman, he compares himself to the woman. When he compares himself to a woman, he sees his masculinity. Hopefully, he is bigger, stronger, taller, more masculine than the woman. He is absolved of the pain of inadequacy felt when comparing himself to any other man. Finally he is more rational, more brave, more logical than the other. A woman too is liberated with a man. She no longer has to compare herself to the dreaded prettier sister or neighbor girl. She's surely smaller, prettier, more petit, softer, more feminine than her man. She is sweeter and lighter and more compassionate. Finally the couple can be secure in their own traits in comparison with one another.
In homosexuality you find no comfort in this way. If your partner is more masculine than you are, is bigger and stronger and braver, you can only see in yourself someone less masculine and less big and strong and brave. If your partner is less masculine than you are, you can see yourself as bigger stronger and braver than him, but it is at the expense of your partner's ego.
In the end I think that homosexuality best operates on a level of respect and mutual understanding. I have three ex boyfriends whom I still respect very much as men and as people and as former lovers, but I know that each relationship was doomed from the start. We can love each other and respect each other for who we are but it takes a level of maturity to understand that the partnership can only ever be so deep.
Anyway, my point is that the real tragedy of homosexuality is not what you think it is. Do not condescend to understand his pain when your view is so facile and your experiences so superficial. No amount of social engineering is ever going to change what happens between men. The left can demand a change to opinion until they turn the world inside out and insist that 2+2=5 but they can't insist their way into fixing homosexuality. And neither can you, in all your good intentions, fix anything for your brother. It's not your load to bear.
aiislove
12d ago
Yup... I don't want to specify my sources but there are a handful of Chinese suppliers (some of them have factories in the US) that do 1 MOQ POD items on a wide range of materials, any of them surely can do cotton terry DTG right now but they all only offer the polyester microfiber. I think it's a cultural difference (Chinese suppliers just want to use the cheapest possible material in any situation, unless their customer wants to foot the bill. My brother works in semi high end food chains and the Chinese won't buy from him because they want the cheapest possible produce, same mentality). Non Chinese suppliers are always more expensive and less efficient to work with and especially the past 2 years Chinese are undercutting the domestic suppliers massively to the point that I've switched anything I can to a Chinese supplier and make like 3x profits in some cases vs american suppliers
aiislove
12d ago
I can't tell you for sure whether I think your small run side gig would be profitable or not without hearing really specific details about it, so I can't really comment for sure. But as it currently stands people still love art from real people. You have to keep in mind that that is a large selling point for a large amount of people. Just because there's a machine that can create what they want doesn't mean some people wouldn't be willing to pay for art made the old fashioned way.
From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd?
Yeah, kinda. Which is why I like to keep the POD drop shipping part of my brain separate from my actual creative endeavor brain :). I do a handful of side gig stuff that I make little money from just for fun currently. Eventually I will switch back to doing something like that full time, but for now I need to make money to last me a few years and if it's at the whims of an algorithm then so be it.
aiislove
12d ago
Sure, this is why Etsy, eBay and depop all collapse the product descriptions when you shop with them. Aliexpress too. Amazon only shows you the first few lines a lot of the time and then you have to click expand. I imagine only a small fraction of buyers take the time to read every item description fully before they purchase. Haven’t you seen listings that say “read desc” or “read description” in the title heading? That’s because everyone who’s ever spent time selling online gets extraneous returns citing a problem that was clearly stated in the item description.
It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.
Uhhhh a picture is worth a thousand words, a customer can be deceived into discerning the quality or lack thereof from an accurate or inaccurate description. Have you ever sold something online before? Or bought something? I personally at least skim item descriptions whenever I’m buying something but it’s still a crapshoot much of the time whether their images and descriptions even match the item I receive in the end. I think I am better at this than the majority of people in e-commerce but there’s still room for error and miscommunication and misperception of what is being bought or sold as there is always some margin for misunderstanding as there will be as language and images are fundamentally imprecise and experiences and expectations vary between people.
aiislove
12d ago
I am genuinely oblivious as to how I could possibly more ethically attach any string of letters to anything I produce that wouldn't fit the definition of internet pollution then. I genuinely just make titles and descriptions as short as possible with as many high relevance keywords (which is often like 2 to 4 and no more!) to direct real human people to my listings. How can I do it more ethically than that? I say that only robots probably read this because it's true, everyone in ecommerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture. If I upload just the picture of my item then no one will find what I'm selling and the robots won't know the product details.
aiislove
12d ago
uhhhhh ok. If it were up to me google would just ignore all marketing copy and google would still work. But google made the choice to take the marketing copy that I used to use zero+1 thought to produce, and now use zero+0 thought to produce, and ruin their product with it. I also don't like that google doesn't work but I don't see that as my fault. The algorithm just needs keywords and phrases to show the people the relevant product. I just make little titles and brands and one or two sentence descriptions to help people find them. I'm not intentionally misleading anyone to find my product in an irrelevant way- that would be bad SEO because it would show up for irrelevant things, people wouldn't click them and they'd get de-ranked.
You asked for my forgiveness but I don't think you have a valid complaint against me or what I do so I won't grant it unless you can prove that I have poor intentions or that it's not google's fault for scraping things in a weird and counterproductive way but that it's actually my fault personally...
aiislove
12d ago
Quality control is difficult because every platform sources from multiple different suppliers/manufacturers. And then there is always liability for errors with the individuals working at the factory that day. Redbubble for example offers like a hundred different products, I have only sampled a tiny fraction of those. On most platforms if the customer is unhappy with the quality they can get a refund or return and I don't have to take care of their returns which is good for me as a designer.
There are certain categories where I can't find any good quality sources at all for, for example towels. No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates. This goes for everything from wash cloth sizes to beach towels.
aiislove
12d ago
I’m writing this post on the behest of @100ProofTollBooth who asked me to explain my industry (e-commerce) and AI’s effect on it. I apologize in advance if this is not interesting or not what you had in mind when asking, but since I’m easily flattered I’m happy to talk about myself for a bit.
So to explain how I got where I am now I need to explain my background. I have a BA in fashion design. I started a fashion line around the time that I graduated college, which was very fun and somewhat successful. I sold some of my designs at boutiques in NYC and Asia which had always been a dream of mine and that was awesome. I maintained the line for about 7 years until 2020, when a variety of factors pushed me to end the line. It was partially covid making things weird and difficult, it was partially my waning interest in the aesthetic I was working in, but most importantly I was itching to travel and leave the US for a while which would be impossible while I was chained down to a studio with a proper line. So I pivoted around 2020 to focusing on my side gigs. I had done a bit of freelance design for a few brands but I really disliked working with other people (even if one of the designers I worked with was a dream designer who I still respect a lot.) My brand I had managed entirely online through a direct to customer model (outside of the wholesale boutiques I mentioned earlier.) So I was familiar with e-commerce through that (as well as having shopped online since 3rd grade as a customer- I still have the same ebay account I opened when I was 11, I’m proud of this.)
Anyway, while I worked on my brand I also dabbled in the Print on Demand industry. The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble. (More on that later.) But anyway, as I wanted the freedom to travel and fulfill orders while making money away from a studio, I decided to pivot away from my physical brand’s business and move entirely into print on demand. This was a combination of through platforms like Redbubble and traditional marketplaces like ebay, Etsy and amazon.
Today I make over 90% of my yearly earned income from print on demand items that I design myself. Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever. All of these things are not very exciting to me so I am glad I can innovate on design and product offering as a designer rather than having to think about marketing (I hate advertising, I do not pay for ads for my products, I block every ad, I feel like dying when I see an ad irl etc etc)
Hopefully this all makes sense, I am being slightly vague in certain specifics just because it’s a highly competitive industry and I don’t want to be too helpful but I think you can get a broad sense of what I do from the above. Now to respond directly to @100ProofTollBooth’s questions, paraphrased slightly for format reasons:
A) What is my perspective on my industry?
I guess I can answer this from a few different industry perspectives. I will answer about fashion, about Print on Demand, and about e-commerce in general.
I think the fashion industry as a whole is not really terrible. I do think that the industry does drive innovation and prioritize creativity and artistry from people. In certain segments of the industry there is an attempt at conserving craft and tradition that I think is valuable. Being a female dominated industry it does have a tendency to foment woke witch hunts (John Galliano’s firing from Dior is still terrible, I suspect McQueen’s suicide probably had some degree of disillusionment from the politics of fashion for example) but people seem broadly to be over this currently and have some understanding of the cringeness of being that way.
The print on demand industry- as a designer, I value the industry a lot, as it offers me massive flexibility and a huge opportunity to make money without having to put in hardly any investment into inventory or development. I may only make a margin of 25% or less on each individual item I sell but the flexibility it offers is very good. Admittedly my switch from fully designed luxury goods under my own label to basically utilitarian POD items was a bit of a blow to my ego but the advantage of being able to get paid for very little work helps soften the blow.
Ecommerce in general. I think it’s good. It is basically a glorified Sears catalogue mail order service. It isn’t much different today from how that worked back in the 1800s. Amazon’s 2 day shipping is great when it’s available. Aliexpress and temu are really crazy, it reminds me of markets I shopped at in Thailand, where everything is incredibly cheap and abundant, of course giving those sellers access to the US market who are willing to pay American prices for their goods is a huge trade imbalance that benefits both third world middlemen and low and middle income Americans. Many Asia based drop shippers infringe designs that I’ve made and sell them on platforms like walmart.com. It is so ubiquitous that I have stopped looking and issuing takedown requests. I am not a fan and wish they would not do that.
B) AI’s effect on my industry
I suspect AI is changing a lot of things behind the scenes in fashion companies in ways that are not visible in their marketing, product offering or brand messaging. I have noticed a lot of shorts on YouTube are using obviously AI generated market copy which I think is glaring and tacky. I noticed this from brands like Sotheby’s and Balmain who should know better. I know there’s a somewhat trollish brand that is using AI generated imagery in their designs but I can’t remember the brand name (it’s similar to Praying but it isn’t that brand. Praying may use ai generated imagery too but I’m not sure.) Certain brands that are “edgy” can get away with using AI generation, a handful of other brands are getting screeched at by their social media followers for using gen AI, it just depends on the customer’s opinion when it comes to high end brands.
The first casualty of AI in print on demand was Redbubble. They had already been slowly tapering off the payouts and royalties given to artists but as soon as generative AI came out they clamped down hard, introducing a weird tier system. I had like 7 RB accounts at the time and they put 6 of my accounts in the crappy/low royalty tier, and one account in the high royalty tier. The one they put in the higher tier had like 12 rather bad, early gen AI designs, so if they were trying to put all the AI accounts on the lower tier, they failed. Naturally I only uploaded designs to the high tier moving forward, which they then deranked to the low royalty tier a few weeks later. They introduced a terrible system where the higher you price your items, the greater the take that RB takes from you, de-incentivizing artists to come up with designs that people are willing to pay more for. I have not uploaded anything to RB in quite some time as a protest to their system.
I will interject here and say that I do use gen AI for a small portion of my print on demand work. I would probably estimate that only about 10% of my yearly income comes from anything that AI has touched creatively in any way. This is partially because I have thousands of designs I generated before gen AI was even a thing that continue to earn me the bulk of my income, and partially because scaling gen AI is still quite slow and slower than scaling non-AI designs.
AI’s effect on e-commerce. Again I believe most of the innovation is behind the scenes here. I have used gen AI to generate product images on Etsy. These images look really good, in my opinion, but they have not increased my sales at all. In fact many of them are off-putting to people. The ones that do work are ones that look like casual iPhone photos. I can generate beautiful high end imagery of things and the crappy fake iPhone photo will outperform the beautiful one every time. It is just what the customer trusts, is used to, and attracted to. I don’t really relate but it’s not really up to me.
So, generative AI is still proving to be relatively ineffective for design generation, and for marketing purposes. But what I do use it for: brainstorming relevant terms and keywords, writing marketing copy (with good SEO. Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.) I built an app in Gemini ai studio the other day that will generate good SEO titles and brands and descriptions that output to CSV which saves me time uploading designs. Before I did this by copy pasting formulas in google sheets, this will save me quite a bit of time moving forward.
C) I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc.
It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that. In the beginning I kept thinking it was frustrating because I didn’t have any sales data to draw from- so I could be putting up 50 things that no one wanted and didn’t know it. I look back at those times and realize I was correct, that if I had sales data back then I would have been able to grow much more quickly. But now I have the sales data so I can use it to generate more and more desirable products for people. My sales history/data is the most valuable thing I am generating.
D) What the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do.
Hrmmm. You have to be able to spend a year or a few years making nearly no money from e-commerce. The first year I switched to all POD I only made like $9,000. I lived off money I saved from my earlier business endeavors. But once you have the data and the momentum you can just scale up and be successful in whatever niche you find profitable. Be willing to chase the money, none of the niches I sell in are at all interesting to me. At first this irritated me but I value my customer enough that I don’t really mind anymore. I mean I am grateful that there are people willing to buy the things I’m willing to design and that’s very valuable to me.
I guess the “chumps” and the “influencers” you mentioned earlier just lack the dedication over years to make it work. It’s not a get rich quick scheme (I guess it’s possible if you get lucky but it’s not likely to last over several years.)
I have always been a fan of really tedious games like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, or even worse, those desktop based games like Farmville or Factorio knockoffs. At some point in college I thought if I found these so addictive I might as well use that time and energy and pour it into something that actually makes money, and nothing is as tedious as managing a ton of POD designs across 15 different platform accounts, so in a way I did just make those tedious games into a career. By the way, at this point, my career is nearly entirely passive, I actively work on stuff for like an hour a week which is mainly ordering POD items manually from various producers. I could automate this but it’s still so little work that I don’t mind doing it myself. The largest bit of work for me is that once a year I generate and upload new designs which takes a few weeks of working every day. I’m afraid of automating this process because it violates terms for a certain site so I just do it manually still.
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I hope that answered your questions and gave you food for thought. I’m happy to answer follow up questions as well.
In return, you said you know about strippers, bars, hookers, and the nightlife industry. How do you know about those things? Do you work with them or just spend a lot of time with them? I’m gay, you have any insights or experiences or information that I’d be interested in as a fan of, um, gay strippers and gay bars? Also, I never heard the term Hick Hop before you used it. I was imagining it was like mostly a wigger thing but I see some black people involved in this. Where is hick hop geographically centered: The South, the West, Appalachia?
EDIT: I forgot I wanted to add another paragraph at the end that gave a more broad response to the AI question. I answered how AI HAS changed my industry from my perspective above, which basically, it hasn't changed it very much. But moving forward I can see a few huge changes on the horizon. Amazon has already started AI generating tshirt designs and selling them on their website. They aren't very good but neither are a lot of the traditionally designed designs that they sit next to. Amazon has been doing a similar thing for years - competing with their own 3rd party sellers by cutting them out and sourcing from the same suppliers the same items and usually undercutting them in bulk purchases. The fact that they are using AI to compete with designers is not a terribly huge change but is slightly different. You'd expect marketplaces like redbubble and etsy to be overflowing already with AI slop, but it's only encroaching on certain segments. Bad AI slop is unpopular and doesn't sell, good AI slop is good enough that you can't detect it. Glaringly bad AI goods just don't do well in the algorithm. I have seen crazy AI generated products marketed on platforms like temu but they were already pulling ridiculous marketing with photoshop so it's not a huge change there either. I imagine all these changes will continue to ramp up over the next few years and eventually either the algorithm will just hide anything bad and ridiculous or every website will break in a deluge of AI nonsense. I'd bet on the former for now.
I am not worried about AI in the near term, because we're going to be in the stage where early adopters/people who pay attention (like me) can benefit for a little while. I am small and light enough to be able to adapt to the changing landscape. Once large firms get very efficient at using AI in ecom, the situation might change, which is why I diversify my business as much as possible and, failing all that, have always saved a ton of my income and can switch back to a business with a larger moat at any time (I want to have a proper luxury brand some day using my own name, and I don't see AI making this impossible barring some postindustrial all knowing sci fi tier AI which I'm skeptical of coming in the next 5 years at least) or, barring all that, simply retire.
aiislove
16d ago
Ok, I'll write that essay.
Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?
Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.
aiislove
16d ago
I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.
aiislove
16d ago
Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.
aiislove
16d ago
How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?
I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:
I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.
I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.
Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?
I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it
aiislove
16d ago
Yeah I made a post about him a few weeks ago he isn’t too popular on themotte
https://www.themotte.org/post/3413/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/393199?context=8#context
aiislove
1mo ago
In my specific case I already have to manually check each line at a certain point in my workflow so I just eyeball it as I go and there are very rarely things I have to remove. It definitely is more fast because having to brainstorm relevant keywords for every thing definitely takes more time than having the LLM generate them in an instant.
aiislove
2mo ago
I hate the 80s. I could make an entire effort post about this but I think the most terrible force that came out of the 80s was classism. The yuppie resulted in decades of insufferable arrogance and culminated in luxury beliefs that ripped apart the cohesion of American society. The 70s and prior decades showed a respect for rural and non-fashionable people that was completely thrown out in the 80s, at the exact moment that women fried their hair and wore the trashiest clothing of the century. The 80s invented the idea that Americans don't have to respect poor people, which I guess we can either pin on Reaganism or liberal yuppies, but the Michelle Obama-Hillary Clinton-notorious RBG people really, really liked it and took it to excruciating heights in the 2010s.
Oh, I got three QC's! Thank you, I appreciate whoever enjoyed my posts.
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