A Smorgasbord of Shiz

I just do whatever

[lethargiclarva]

Couple more Pokemon protagonists for @creatingblackcharacters’s Melanin Beam Challenge! Brendan and May from Emerald

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

ALIEN: ISOLATION

[shoezuki]

obsessed with the canadian ghoulmaxxing acecel

[heartattackkidd]

My mom: "which one is moomin?"

Me: "the little white guy"

My mom: "so who's the hippo?"

[catasters]

[guiltfactory-moved]

sometimes the absence is more compelling. let's lack something and then feel its presence forever in the empty space where it should be.

[fluoresensitives]

Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.

[castrolle]

wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees

[postillfastill]

Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.

[almostdefinitelydying]

Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in

Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American com

[memeuplift]

[mossspores]

life if comes fucks me

[positivelyqueer]

”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

[jaseroque]

Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.

[teathattast]

[segamascott]

this is honestly such a good idea

[girlmostlikely]

This is insane

[the-prophesied-disco-gay]

[mildlyautisticsuperdetective]

the podcast ‘endless thread’ did an episode on this called ‘catfish for dinner’ where they investigated the origin of the story! tl;dr a tiktoker who posts fake drama stories made it up for clout and it’s based on nothing.

[gorefudge]

[fallout-lou-begas]

you don't have to advertise that to me, i'm already well aware

[fallout-lou-begas]

is this before or after the hand stuff

[fallout-lou-begas]

was talking about bus ads with my coworkers yesterday and i'd only just mentioned the "reseller ads" before one of them said "yeah, the one for fucking your brother" and everyone nodded. yes yes we've all seen it

[catmask]

awhile ago a coworker and i were play arguing whether or not the mystery gang were all romantically a thing/polycule or just really good friends (yknow bored at work things) and knowing my bfs interest in scooby doo i texted him asking him to be the tie breaker and he responded “well it depends which canon youre going off of” and just instantly cold sweat knew i was out of my depth

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

Bringing back the classic:

[good-ass-posts]

[beggars-opera]

Every time I hear a reputable museum tell me that most colonial women died in fires it puts me one step closer to homicide

[beggars-opera]

To everyone saying they've never heard this before, it's so prevalent Colonial Williamsburg wrote a book about it

[beggars-opera]

HEY, WHO WANTS TO SEE SOME DEATH STATISTICS FOR THE YEAR 1783? BECAUSE IT'S NOT LIKE YOU CAN JUST LOOK THIS UP IN EASILY DIGESTIBLE REPORTS OR ANYTHING.

Town size: 7500

Deaths: 189

Childbirth deaths: 1

Burn deaths: 0

Tuberculosis deaths: 18

Measles and measles complications deaths: 32

VACCINATE YOUR DAMN CHILDREN.

[brehaaorgana]

I'm confused by the original statement because The Colonial Williamsburg foundation runs museums

Why is the complaint "a reputable museum tells me..." When the reputable museum is the example that is actually specifically and explicitly debunking this? Unless we're saying Colonial Williamsburg and Mary Miley Theobald is actually upholding the myth in their debunking myths book?

[beggars-opera]

Sorry, the complaint is that I've heard this rumor from a surprisingly large number of museums whose interpretation is otherwise solid, and the fact that they hold onto this one myth in particular without researching where it came from annoys me.

Williamsburg is not one of them; as shown they too were so annoyed at this and other myths that they wrote the book to debunk them.

[brehaaorgana]

That makes sense. I edited my reply to add on additional thoughts but I would be very curious to know if you saw this myth mostly in smaller/very local museums or if this was something being peddled like, at a national parks affiliated museum or other larger/more well known museums. I believe that you've seen people say this! (I have seen real crazy shit in museums, including cults doing a tax write off scheme and stuff I would personally argue with. Yes, I had to have a friend drag me away from getting into an argument with an elderly veteran docent at the US marines museum one time. Lmao).

I just kinda hope it's a flaw of like 1) really local/small institutions or 2) ones without a ton of funding who have labels that were decades out of date back in 2012, haha. I can only hope!!

Fwiw my pet theory for this myth: is the flammable clothing myth didn't just come from 1970's polyester recreations (which is what the above book suggests may have been a factor), but instead more from 19th and early 20th century dress fires, partly due to crinolines, but also: flannelette, tulle (on ballerinas dancing by gas or candle light), and possibly the fun toxic coatings of mourning crape/crepe (arsenic, lead, mercury, bromate, copper, iron, and palladium) which were often drapes in veils over the face, as well as worn with crinolines. It's a stretch but I doubt it's easy to navigate when you have black crepe over your face.

Like yeah, the 1970's polyester probably didn't help but I suspect it was moreso stuff like this:

I added the early 20th century mention due to flannelette and its coverage in The Lancet.

Brend, William. “The Mortality of Children from Burning.” The Lancet 182 (8 November 1913): 1321.

Based on statistical analysis, The Lancet] condemned girls’ clothing. Up to the age of 3, boys’ mortality rose sharply: Victorians and Edwardians clothed boy and girl babies and toddlers identically in dresses. Boys’ death rates dropped when they were put in male attire or “breeched” at around 4, and then fell to almost nothing. By contrast girls, who wore looser fitting clothing, died at twice the rate of boys between 4 and 5, and eight times as often L between the ages of 15 and 20.These are striking differences. For example, in the period from 1906 to 191 1, 389 boys aged 5 to 10 died of burns, whereas 1,427 girls of the same age perished. Dr. Brend noted how working-class girls were often bundled in thin layers of cloth:

The girls are worst off. First they wear a thick vest and bunchy flannelette chemise. Flannelette drawers over or under some sort of stays—often boned—follow. Then two or three petticoats gathered or pleated ... Over this is a bunchy frock, often kilted, and a pinafore... Probably no more flammable arrangement than this, consisting of layers of flimsy material separated by air, could be devised. The corner of a pinafore has only to become ignited and in a moment the little victim is a mass of flames. On the other hand, the inflammability of a boy’s costume consisting of cloth knickers and a jersey or coat is far less.

Quoted via Victorian web's excerpt from  Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, which is reviewed in the Victorian Web. — George P. Landow.

The lancet supposedly also claimed some 3,000 women died in crinoline related fires, but a) I've yet to find the specific date and citation for this lancet article despite loads of people referencing it and b) I suspect those numbers are likely partly exaggerated.

Either way I think it's natural that fires would increase in general during the industrial revolution, especially with gas lighting, gas/electrical heat becoming more and more common indoors. I just think people confused crinolines with petticoats and 18th century with 1800's.

The disease STILL killed way more people though oh my GOD everyone should be vaccinated.

Every day we can just be so thankful we aren't dying of measles when vaccinated. 10/10 vaccinated experience tbh I love me an MMR immunization.

[beggars-opera]

Sadly I've heard it from museums of all sizes. I think it's likely not something that a lot of museums teach their guides to say, per se, but because it's so prolific people just stick that statistic in there even if it's not part of the tour.

I haven't done enough research into the 19th century so I don't have numbers for the crinoline years, but by then of course most cooking was done on a coal stove rather than an open hearth.

I suspect that, as you mentioned, at least some incidents involving children have gotten conflated with women of all ages. Flammable kids clothing combined with general lack of safety/clumsiness in kids likely lead to a higher mortality rate there. Combined with a general population that lost the daily wearing of long skirts very quickly and you can see how easy it is to assume that because you don't know how to navigate around a fire in such an outfit, that they must not have been able to either. Those of us who do it regularly know very well how to stay safe, and that natural fabrics tend to smolder rather than engulf like flannelette or melt like polyester. I've had embers fly up and fall on my linen cap, and had my wool cape sweep into the flames, and each time the fire put itself out in about two seconds.

[omgthatdress]

NO you absolutely WANT your PLASTIC SURGERY procedures to be done by a PLASTIC SURGEON.

As in someone who is specifically trained in it and does it every day.

Someone who is not specifically trained in pleasing cosmetic results and not actively practicing pleasing cosmetic results is how you get horrifying cosmetic results

I cannot tell you how many episodes of Botched I've seen where someone with a mangled nose job says some shit like "My dentist did 2 for 1 rhinoplasty...."

[bitsybaby]

Feels like an important clarification from prev

[kyraneko]

I have had a rant brewing for awhile now and this seems like as good a place as any for it:

The "plastic" in "plastic surgeon" did not get here to mean "cheap and fake."

Plastic, the word, predates plastic, the material. The material was named for its noteworthy quality.

"Plastic" means "shapeable." Workable, moldable, malleable, et cetera.

When the first reconstructive surgeries were being pioneered in the 19th century, working absolute miracles like restoring whole faces to girls and women who'd caught fire tending to their kitchen stoves, among a multitude of other devastating conditions, it was this miraculous reshaping that gave the surgery its name: plastic surgery, the shaping surgery.

Time passes, and plastic, the material, is developed, and goes from fantastic modern wonder material to byword for cheap imitation; plastic, the surgery, expands from reconstruction to aesthetic finicking, Barbie is introduced with her unrealistically-proportioned plastic body, and the phrase "plastic surgery" goes from indicating "the reshaping surgery (what a marvelous thing)" to "the fake face/fake tits/fake nose surgery (how vulgar and deceitful)."

Same phrase. Entirely different connotation.

Just sayin'.

You want the reshaping. Go for the plastic.

[penny-anna]

Hello friends we need to talk about this twitter account:

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

He is not cute or funny. Stop platforming him.

[penny-anna]

The chips and salsa thread went viral in June and his website seems to have gone live in July. This confirms what I suspected which is that said website with it's explicit disclaimers was made in response to the big viral hit.

Consequently, back when he first blew up it was potentially a bit harder to figure out that his stories are fictional. That said, the New York Times worked it out so I'm comfortable accusing outlets who ran the story describing him as a Japanese world cup tourist of legitimately terrible journalism.

[penny-anna]

Regarding some comments in the notes:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

Yeah his whole bit is racist and it is troubling that so many people took a guy badly roleplaying as a medieval samurai to be a 21st century Japanese tourist.