From now on I will start publishing some of my art (most of it is old artes, but I've taken to drawing & painting again).
Also, I have planned to start comissions soon enough if anybody is interested!! (I'll post all prices, conditions & stuff of the like as soon as I can)
See you again soon~! 😘
P. S. Despite this new direction I will keep rebloging stuff that I find interesting like I've been doing until now whenever I'm not busy with comissions or my not-so-weird-or-interesting-life.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore
The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:
We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.
It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.
An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.
I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.
Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”
As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species
Death and life are forever intertwined, both feeding the other unwanted an eternal dance. The key is that when you must kill, do it mercifully and with respect, and let the remains be of some use- be that eating them yourself or letting scavengers and decomposers perform the last rites
Well, we should certainly make sure that everyone knows about this image, or how will they know not to post it? It's not like "That image of Musk looking like a Nazi" would narrow it down.
[Image description: a post on r/anticonsumption titled "First world trillionaire reached out to Reddit's CEO asking to stop people from posting this" attached is a photo of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute at Donald Trumps 2025 inauguration celebration rally. A transparent photo of Adolf Hitler doing a Nazi salute is edited over top. /End ID]
you can be peeling a boiled egg and think to yourself wow. that was so simple. and then you peel another one and it’s like being in the throes of war. shell everywhere. egg mangled. tears in your eyes. that’s how god keeps you humble
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
Thanks for the correction! I was like 8-10 years old when this all went down (2014-2016) so I only know vaguely about it. I’m still learning about this.
Zoe Quinn also has a book called Crash Overdrive, which I feel should be required reading for literally anyone using the internet in any capacity, especially as more and more things get moved to online spaces, and especially for people who use the internet for their livelihoods. It's a fairly short read (I read the entire book in a single day, although I will note this was during and for grad school, so actual reading time may vary for normal, non-grad-student readers), and can be a bit depressing--Quinn details the years of harassment they received due to gamergate, it's not a pleasant read, but I do think it's an absolutely necessary book to understand what happened and why and how, and Quinn has a surprisingly resilient sense of resolve come the end of the book, which details all the safety measures someone can and should take with their online activity.
If you can't get out to your local library to borrow the book, you can also find it here on the Internet Archive (though it looks like the lending is limited? it doesn't appear to be an open text at least, so a library might be your best bet if you can't purchase the book). Of all the books I was required to buy and read for college classes, this is probably the most important and impactful, and it's the only one I'd strongly encourage everyone to read for themselves.
This is actually such a huge thing for an actor to do. Like we know he is wonderful and correct about this and not afraid to say so but when was the last time an actor this famous called for a boycott of a series this popular on a network THIS BIG.
If you've ever thought to yourself "I basically know who this person is" about a stranger from reading their posts or watching their youtube videos, I guarantee you're wrong. Yes, even if you've been following them for a long time. Knock it off.
It's possible to know a fictional character purely from the little vignettes in a story because the author has intentionally structured those moments to show every relevant facet of the character. If you finish a story, and there were two scenes where the character was nice and one where they liked rollercoasters, then that's the character! They are nice and they like rollercoasters.
REAL PEOPLE DO NOT WORK LIKE THIS.
Real people posting on social media may appear somewhat similar to a fictional character being revealed scene by scene. DO NOT FALL FOR IT. You are not being shown a curated collection of carefully authored scenes that intentionally build up to a full character! You are seeing a random assortment of moments when the person felt like posting on social media, filtered through imprecise wording, missing context, whether the person slept well the night before, and who knows how many other factors. Real people are orders of magnitude more complicated than fictional characters because they are not designed to be easily understood by an audience! If you try to interpret social media posts as a found-footage story it will lead only to ruin!
I feel like people who believe in body language experts are falling into the same trap as this as taking too many cues from creative works.
Actors in movies are deliberately emphasizing certain behaviours and body movements to communicate the internal thoughts of their characters to an outside viewer.
Real people in real life do not do this. There could be hundreds of completely non-dramatic reasons for why a stranger in an interview sniffed or fidgeted or scratched their arm or broke eye contact.
The belief that body language can be read cleanly and interrogated is an excuse that results in a lot of neurodivergent people or people with uncommon body language getting harassed or accused.
Weirdest weirdo in Weirdoland @adalborj - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
