As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause "you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes" not realising that every single one would be shit, you'd have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could've been spent just writing a screenplay.

Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.

Matthew Dow Smith: "Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date."

Morning exercises for the gang;

They're so cute.

- Still Ryoko Kui's art -

another reminder to stop buying/watching/reading anything JK Rowling associated

I cannot stress enough she is a primary funder of transphobia. She is not just someone with bigoted views you can seperate from her work, her work funds the bigotry.

this is so cute, laios is such a good brother

Another mermaid warmup drawing

I think one thing we need to address in the US if we want to de-stigmatize multi-generational households that include ADULTS from multiple generations, is that parents need to learn how to have adult relationships with their offspring.

Should my daughter deign to live with me when she's an adult she will not be my some vassal that has to obey my household rules. She graduates into being a peer in setting and managing the boundaries, cleanliness and appearance of our home.

Too many parents want to have relationships with grown ass adults in which the parents maintain control and authority, and in which they leverage money and history to get their way from an adult who, very reasonably, wants to be able to make choices and have influence. And then those parents wonder why their kids keep their distance!

But then people act like I've lost it because I let my 5 year old pick the color of paint in her room- a room I seldom spend time in except to take care of her, and a room in which I want her to be comfortable and happy.

I'm not gonna let her choose a paint color for the kitchen right now, because she's capricious and bad at negotiating so we can pick a color we all like. But when she's an adult, if she's still living here? Why shouldn't she get to influence her environment?

People like to have agency. We limit the agency of children because they make choices without the full ability to understand the results (sorry baby, you are gonna get vaccinated for pollio even if you don't like it. You don't understand pollio).

But limiting an adults choices in their own home, just because you don't think that home should be a real home for them because it's just for you, is kind of an asshole move, to me.

No need to argue with me if you disagree. You can have your own opinion.

But I couldn't treat my kid that way, and I have seen enough to know that not every parent treats their adult children like permanently incompetent interlopers.

I didn't just buy this house for ME. I bought it for MY FAMILY. My baby is my family, and she will be no matter how old she gets.

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:

BOOOOOST

Seattle has joined them:

"But NORMAL People's Bodies Didn't Look Like That!" ...right?

Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.

I've had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings "fat" and "obese," mostly along the lines of this:

"It's because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn't look like that!"

The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn't have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren't painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.

Supposedly. We'll see how well that holds up.

Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500's, Dürer tried to put together essentially a "how-to-draw" book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of "constructing" figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)

However, in his "constructed" drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.

I'm showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.

These are a couple of his more "average" women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.

Here's a "strong woman" and "A very strong, stout woman"

This is what he refers to as a "stout woman."

Here's where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a "peasant-type" woman

^That. That's what a "peasant" body type looks like.

He labeled this one "A peasant woman of 7 head lengths"

in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500's is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a "peasant woman" body type looks like!

He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they're not particularly emphasized over the "Strong" and "Stout" figures. Nor is there exactly a "default" figure. He's just...going over the range of variations that there are?

Here's another "stout woman," covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:

now that's too technical for me to make any sense of but

this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist's drawing advice

In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it's important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500's is telling you so, Die Mad About It

all of this is from "The complete drawings of Albrecht Dürer" by Walter L. Strauss

I think it would be helpful to take a serious look at Artemisia Gentileschi's body of work as she painted people of all sizes and in a relatively non-sexualized way. She was also part of the Italian Baroque school that was interested in illustrating Bible stories through the use of real-life, usually middle class or poor, people. (See especially Caravaggio).

Susanna and the Elders is likely drawn from someone she knew in real life. And the Gentileschi's were well-off painters but not rich people.

This is a self-portrait. Thin women don't have arms like that.

And her Lucreta is built like a rugby player; she's fat, but in a very different way than Peter Paul Rubens' wife Helen Fourment, who is the platonic ideal of "voluptuous" and was considered extremely attractive by numerous peers in her time.

Fourment was painted as a sex pot, though, and in my mind it's very obvious that Rubens thought she was hot stuff and wanted everyone else to know about his hot wife. And people bought them! And kept the paintings around! I mean, it's a little weird in my mind to paper over

It just seems weird to me that a person could just dismiss the hotness of this woman with "she was rich and didn't do physical labor." It's a modern construction to flatten the past and say that fatness was linked with richness; even well-off people came in a variety of sizes. Fourment isn't just hot because she's fat. She's hot because it's obvious that Rubens the painter found her incredibly sexy and painted her thus. And that he even found her knees and her cellulite hot because he included them. This isn't an idealized Renaissance painting of the 15th century. The specificity of this woman's body is what makes it hot, and one part of it is that she was fat.

if you're just joining us, george takei is having to educate jk rowling on holocaust denial

"menstruation is punishment for original sin" is a fairly common doctrine (altho in my experience it's usually more implicit than just baldly stated like that)

anyway this implies that of all the animal kingdom, humans are not UNIQUE in sinning, but are joined by bats, the elephant shrew, and the spiny mouse species Acomys cahirinus. (according to my 5 seconds on wikipedia at least)

this mouse has committed crimes against god

oh it's going down

jesus fucking christ

"i wish i could do something 😔 / i wish the wga had a kickstarter or a gofundme, i would throw money at it" good news! it's amazing how you can literally go onto the wga strike website or the wgawest linktree from their twitter and find links to support writers and other workers affected by the strike

It’s called the foot-in-the-door method. First, you propose something that is slightly outside of allowable norms: denying gay people wedding cakes on grounds of “religious freedom”. Then, you slowly ramp up how extreme your demands are, coercing the other side to giving a tiny bit of ground each time, until you’ve shifted the entire fucking playing field. Conservatives are also very fond of the door-to-face method, which is demanding something completely outlandish that you know will be refused, and then asking for something less ridiculous by way of compromise, again resulting in a gradual shift in norms until views that were once considered moderate or reasonable become unthinkably liberal by destroying people’s sense of standards. The combination of these methods is called the “foot-in-the-face” method, which sums up where this whole thing is headed quite nicely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique

Hey remember how you guys kept saying “why not just go to another bakery”? 

Dana’s last ‘fuck you’ to Disney

He/they collector

Genderqueer/bi-gender papa king

TWO girlfriend kisses

Onscreen mlm kiss

Implied aladarius

a happy ending to the bi/enby couple

A happy ending to the aro/ace character

And

Death to the white Christian puritain

ppl who oppose gender affirming care for kids are nuts like the extent of medical intervention for trans kids is maybe puberty blockers but they’ll still be like “SO UR SAYING WE SHOULD LET TODDLERS HAVE TOP SURGERY???????” barbara toddlers do not have a top to surgery

Saw someone asking "so do you endorse giving puberty blockers to five year olds?"

Friend, a five year old should not have puberty to block. If they do that's called precocious puberty and is the original reason puberty blockers were invented. If a five year old is going through puberty I absolutely endorse them being given puberty blockers