“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then it suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.” It wasn’t much to go on, but he played it for Mick Jagger later that same day. “He only had the first bit, and then he had the riff,” Jagger recalls. “It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar—it didn’t sound like rock. But he didn’t really like it, he thought it was a joke… He really didn’t think it was single material, and we all said ‘You’re off your head.’ Which he was, of course.”

I've heard some famous artist attributed with the quote "art is done when you give up on it" and some other famous artist say "art is done when you're ready to let go" and the thing of it is, the act of creating art is a process, lots of people are obsessed with process, and people with little self-confidence will happily pit their process against someone else's process as to why they're artists and the other person isn't.

I've sold photography. Not for enough to make a career out of it? Not for enough to put up with the people who buy it? But enough to feel entitled to my opinion. And I once spent a fourteen day roadtrip shooting photos with a Pentax 6x7 and a Nikon F5 while my buddy lumbered out his Mamiya RZ. Pretty much every time we stopped, I'd rip a dozen photos in five-ten minutes and be done. My buddy? He'd spend half an hour setting up and then bracket 5x in exposure and 5x in DOF.

Now - I had a lot more good shots. But if I had a shot of something, and he had a shot of something, his were better on average. Not every time? But enough of the time for me to acknowledge that four semesters of photography training had amounted to something. He would never get that Cartier-Bresson shot. The Parrish? Yeah, he could get the Parrish.

One of the reasons I hate photographers is that for way way waaaaay too many of them, "pissing on other people's method" is how they prove themselves to be photographers. It's gone up radically since film has gone away, too, because it used to be a lot of work to get an image when you didn't know what it looked like until a couple days later. But even on this, the photographers are ahead because AI has been in photo editing for like ten fucking years.

HERE'S MY HATORADE

The guys who spend all fucking day in Photoshop are the ones who don't know how to point a fucking camera. And now, they're salty because the guys who aren't even trying to hold a fucking camera are better at the tools that they use. "Digital image manipulation, but only of a highly particular kind" is such an obscenely stupid hill to die on that I can't help but compare it to GamerGate. "ZOMFG you wrote a video game and also had a uterus" = "ZOMFG you digitally manipulated an image but didn't start in MS Paint."