182B and photoshop (against)

Colour Record No. 182, Side B:

And today, the case against photoshop.

So let's review the Slender Man stabbing:  Last year in Wisconsin two twelve-year-old girls stabbed a third twelve-year-old girl almost to death.  The two girls who allegedly did the stabbing apparently acted in the hope that they would, as a result, become tight with the Slender Man, a fictional character.  The victim barely survived, the two accused are being tried as adults and facing up to 65 years in prison, and the creator of the fictional character apologized.

My point is this:  We of species Homo Stultus have been endowed with certain superpowers, such as those of thinking the unthinkable, of believing the unbelievable, of imagining the unimaginable.  You write a horror story with a horrifying (but fictional) protagonist, and---if you write it sufficiently well---somewhere on this planet some of us will think your story true, will believe you are writing it personally to us, will imagine it a sign.

In which event we shall, of course, follow that sign.

And visual images are, in this matter (as in many other matters), severalfold more effective than verbal images.

So if you draw a visually appealing image of a Slender Man, or---what is more common---of a slender woman, or of a man jumping off a bridge, then it's always possible  -_-  that someone somewhere might fail to realize that the image is only appealing because of the artist (i.e. because of you) and not because of the slenderness or the suicide.

And then your believers might try to manipulate their bodies---in real life---into comparable slenderness or suicide.

Since I myself have firm plans to keep using photoshop  :)  I shall stop short of demanding an injunction or anything against digital manipulation, but the above is the case against it.

Tomorrow:  The "but" blog.