Art Teacher: Can you explain some of the reasons why my students would need to refine their writing skills? My Boss: [Long and slightly pretentious explanation about how artists need to explain and unpack the meaning of their art and their motivations and write museum blurbs] Me [a writing tutor, watching a group of 30 students shut down]: …may I say something? Art Teacher: …yes? Me: I’m friends with professional illustrators, folks who work in the comics industries, people who do 3D printing for a living, and people who do commissioned art. And the best reason to refine your writing is to be able to explain to people why it’s worth something, and be able to get other people excited about what you’re doing so that you don’t “die from exposure”. Portfolio summaries are important. So is social media. Everything from instagram captions to Patreon posts- Students: [instantly perk up and pay attention] Art Teacher: [interrupting me with a nervous laugh] Yes well we all need to make a living, but REAL artists- Students: [all tune out again]
STOP!!! FUCKING!!! DOING THIS!!! Art students deserve to know how the skills they’re learning will help them professionally, regardless of how they choose to use their art degree. Teaching that there’s only one way to “make it” as an artist is what literally STOPPED ME FROM DOING ART because I knew I was never going to be a museum artist. (All I wanted to do was doodle fairies.)
Anyway I’m gonna die mad about this.
Fuck art elitists who act like the only “real” art is museum/gallery art. Just because the person who paid for your art is a millionaire in a dick measuring contest with other millionaires doesn’t make your art inherently superior to another artist whose art was paid for by someone who wanted their D&D character illustrated and will love that art every time they get their character sheet out.
After giving birth in a Saskatchewan hospital in 2001, a doctor performed a tubal ligation on 29-year-old *Lisa, leaving her unable to have more children. She does not remember signing a consent form, but remembers her upset husband saying, “I’m not signing that!” to medical staff. After the surgery, the doctor said, “cut, tied and burned. There. Nothing is getting through that.”
Across Canada and as recently as 2017, Indigenous women report being forcibly or coercively sterilized. Some women were incorrectly told the procedure is reversible. Others were separated from their babies until they consented to a tubal ligation.
Forced and coerced sterilizations of Indigenous women are a result of systemic violence and discrimination against Indigenous peoples in the provision of public services in Canada, a pattern well known and acknowledged by government. They are an assault on Indigenous women, their families, their communities, and their Nations that have already been subjected to forced assimilation through colonialism, including eugenic practices.
Sterilizing women without their free, full, and informed consent is a form of violence and torture. Measures to prevent births within ethnic or racial groups is explicitly prohibited by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
All women have the human right to make decisions around if, when, and how to create a family. All women have a right to live free from violence and discrimination. All women have a right to health.
We ask the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, to take immediate action to end sterilizations of Indigenous women without their consent. We ask Trudeau:
Investigates the scope and scale of this pattern of rights violations;
Ensures non-repetition to make sure this practice is halted once and for all;
Guarantees justice and reparations for survivors and their families.
Join the movement to defend Indigenous women’s rights to dignity, health and violence-free lives. Sign and share this petition today.
While cleaning out my room I found a paper that my therapist gave me some time ago to deal with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Sorry the paper is a little crinkled and stained, but I figured I’d post it in hopes that it will help someone like it helped me.
Here it is again with text for anyone who can’t see the picture
That thought isn’t helpful right now.
Now is not the time to think about it. I can think about it later.
This is irrational. I’m going to let it go.
I won’t argue with an irrational thought.
This is not an emergency. I can slow down and think clearly about what I need.
This feels threatening and urgent, but it really isn’t.
I don’t have to be perfect to be OK.
I don’t have to figure out this question. The best thing to do is just drop it.
It’s OK to make mistakes.
I already know from my past experiences that these fears are irrational.
I have to take risks in order to be free. I’m willing to take this risk.
It’s OK that I just had that thought/image, and it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t have to pay attention to it.
I’m ready to move on now.
I can handle being wrong.
I don’t have to suffer like this. I deserve to feel comfortable.
That’s not my responsibility.
That’s not my problem.
I’ve done the best I can.
It’s good practice to let go of this worry. I want to practice.
Definitely the easiest to watch if you only have a few minutes here and there
This is a thoroughly modern version, so keep that in mine
Stays loyal to the story while making it modern. There’s no question that this is Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte is fucking adorable
Lydia has an amazing character arc that fits in a more modern sense and is PERFECT
Georgiana is the cutest thing I have ever seen
Lizzie encompasses the young adult in this day and age
I think they all have Twitters which is really neat?
Fitzwilliam is a joy
Cons:
There are several characters you never get to meet like her mother and father, only second hand
It is very Lizzie centric (which I like), and that’s obvious, but it means that you get more of her than you will than in any other adaptation and less of everyone else
Kitty does not exist
Mary does exist, but as a cousin rather than a sister (because most people don’t have 5 kids in this day and age)
I honestly can’t speak highly enough of any of these, especially the Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is just such a unique take on the series.
The contextual foreignness of firm breasts in a society that doesn’t use bras
This is funny and charming
By far one of my favorite posts.
I love that across cultures, every woman grabs their boobs.
My friend is an army wife and spent some time with her husband on his Pacific posting. One day the locals invited the families from the British base for a big get-together. It was going really well but after a few hours the British women noticed that a lot of the local babies were crying, so my friend asked one of the mothers if there was something wrong, like a bug going round or something. The mother replied,
“Oh no, they’re just very hungry.”
So my friend asked, “Why don’t you feed them?”
And the mother said, “We will when you’ve gone. We use our breasts to feed them and we don’t want to embarrass you.”
And my shocked friend said, “But we do that too!”
So all the British mothers who had babies sat down and whipped out their boobs to feed them (whether they were hungry or not) and the relieved local mothers then did the same.
Two things:
- because western ladies usually cover their boobs the local ladies weren’t sure whether western women use boobs for what they’re supposed to be for
- women everywhere are considerate of other women
I also really love this photo set because, far too often, we only see pictures of African women as anthropological archetypes. They are treated like exhibits to be studied, similar to exotic animals or landscapes, rather than human beings. I LOVE these pictures, because here we have women of two different cultures laughing and talking and playing around. You can see their personalities shining through and I LOVE IT
Women 🙌🏾
this is one of those photosets that fills me with the rocket-fuel equivalent of hope and optimism
Reblogging this beautiful post before it becomes a tumblr crime
That last comment broke my heart, honestly. This has always been one of my favorite photo sets because of everything it presents: confidence, curiosity, personalities shining through the lens, positive interactions between cultures––
––and now it’s going to be goddamn BANNED because of “female presenting nipples.”
You’re inflicting so much harm with your decision, @staff and @support. You’re erasing so much more than you could ever realize.
This photoset is beautiful because it presents bodies as what they are - not objects solely for titillation, but as something everybody across the world has, and that they hold the potential of positive connection.
Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]
Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?
this really does sound like an episode of black mirror
This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.
…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.
This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.
Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.
Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.
This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.
As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.
This is a great book, all about the work of spinning and weaving, how it developed, and how and why it was women’s work. It makes the great point that women’s work is ephemeral - food, cloth, it’s all things that don’t survive archaeologically, so that it’s something that gets overlooked. The author also knows how to weave herself, and has tried out weaving some ancient cloths, pointing out that it’s only by doing something like that that you can work out practical issues.
One of the things that was really great was the author pointing out that the most plausible reconstruction for the Venus de Milo is of her spinning:
Even better, is that since the book has been written, an artist who makes 3D printed sculpture has made a 3D model of what she would have looked like - and you can buy one for yourself:
I love this concept
OKAY Tumblr, I’m gonna try this one more time. The tags for this post haven’t been working properly and more people need to see this, darn it!
Let’s try linking some good people in and see if that makes it play along.
Oh I love this! I would 100% want a spinning venus in my life….
Thanks for the tag!
Also if you have access to an academic library they may have the same author’s Prehistoric Textiles, which is both broader and more in-depth and tells you about the domestication of sheep and terms for weaving in pre-Hellenic languages and is amazing.
“In today’s unanimous decision, the Tennessee Supreme Court explained that, under state law, a life sentence is a determinate sentence of 60 years,” the court wrote. “However, the sixty-year sentence can be reduced by up to 15 percent, or 9 years, by earning various sentence credits (good behavior. & getting involved in prison based education programs while incarcerated) Therefore, the Supreme Court concluded that a defendant serving a life sentence for a first-degree murder committed on or after July 1, 1995, may be eligible for release after serving at least 51 years of the sentence.“
For those of you who haven’t yet caught up to this story:
Cyntoia Brown was a 16 yr old girl, who at the time of the incident was living in a room at a Nashville InTown Suites with Allen (the man who propositioned her for sex) because her pimp and boyfriend Garion McGlothen, nick-named “Kut Throat,” insisted that she needed to earn money.
After Allen took her to his house, he showed Cyntoia multiple guns, including shotguns and rifles. Later in bed, as she described in court, he grabbed her violently by the genitals, his demeanor became threatening and, fearing for her life, she took a gun out of her purse and shot him.
Call Governor Bill Haslam (615)-741-2001. she has a Clemency hearing May 23rd. DEMAND JUSTICE!!
#StayWoke
The parole board split on whether Cyntoia should be granted clemency. /BillHaslam can still grant her clemency before he leaves in January. You can reach him at: phone #: (615) 741-2001; e-mail: bill.haslam@tn.gov
