Creative Sparks Art

Artist, Animator, Crafter, Educator, Critter, Historian, and wherever else the seratonin and ADHD takes me :) Thanks for checking out my stuff!

[creativesparksart]

Hello world! Finally joining Tumblr as a new platform to share my art! I’ll be working on posting some of my older stuff over the next few weeks and also connect my other social media! In the meantime, here’s a recent #vaxleth piece that I did in honor of the amazing #legendofvoxmachina series. 

[wulfbones]

ⓘ This creature HATES the usage of generative artificial intelligence.

[mysharona1987]

[lynati]

If the trash pickup people stop doing their job for two weeks you'd be throwing a fucking tantrum. Same for the janitors who keep your office spaces and bathrooms clean. (And that's before the various illnesses start to spread all over your city from the build up of pathogens.)

The people responsible keeping our spaces clean (and thus, mostly disease-free) should both be paid more AND thanked more.

[hunter-rodrigez]

If some tech billionaire who makes a million an hour stopped doing his job for two weeks, nobody would notice... well, some might notice because things would suddenly improve across the board.

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[creativesparksart]

"JK ROWLING IS ALIVE AND ACTIVELY USING YOUR MONEY TO OPPRESS TRANS PEOPLE"

[jennydolfen]

I had the incredible privilege to design this year’s Pride Shirt from Critical Role! It features our beloved Blue Boi Dorian Storm on hos steed Coriolis. I snuck in a little favour of his lover, tied to his arm, and some sneaky Latin: “Amore fiunt homines” is Latin for “It’s love that makes people.”

You can find it in all the CR shops! I’ll be offering prints, too. https://shop.critrole.com/collections/new-products/products/how-do-you-want-to-slay-this-t-shirt

AD: Adrienne Cho

[requiem-on-water]

Meteor Shower, oil on panel by Mia Bergeron

[000l]

[shrewreadings]

like to charge, reblog to cast.

[renthony]

I was 12 when the first of my siblings was born, so I have very vivid memories of the way my mother was excluded from a lot of spaces because people find children annoying.

If you think "children should not be allowed in this space," you HAVE TO reckon with the fact that you are now excluding parents (and very often women specifically) who don't have access to childcare. You are isolating people who are poor, or rural, or single parents, or any number of other factors that might prevent someone from having on-demand childcare. You are cutting them off from being able to exist in public. You are denying parents and children the ability to fully participate in society.

My mom spent several years only leaving the house to buy groceries or take me to school, and even then, people would still come up to her to complain TO HER FACE about how she shouldn't bring a crying toddler to Walmart. Entitled strangers would literally try and demand that my mom leave and come back without the kids.

"Why can't your husband watch them?" Because he was at work, usually working extreme amounts of overtime so we didn't get evicted, because landlords don't like it when you stop paying rent.

"Why can't you send them to daycare?" Because that costs money.

"Why can't your teenager stay home with them and babysit?" Because I also deserved to be able to leave the house for something other than school, and taking me to the grocery store was how my mom taught me to manage a household budget, shop sales, and meal plan.

"Don't bring your kid in public if you can't CONTROL them and make them stop crying!" Kids cry when they're upset, and being dragged around a store is upsetting! Don't be an asshole! Children are human beings who are still learning how the world works, and they don't have a lot of agency. You'd cry, too.

"Spank them until they learn to stop crying!" That's just straight-up child abuse, Jesus Christ.

What the fuck was our family supposed to do? Never go to the grocery store? Starve because strangers couldn't handle a toddler existing in public?

[tam--lin]

it's pretty easy to imagine that you are one of some fractional holdout against AI while everyone else has fallen into some misguided love affair with LLMs, and I am so happy to tell you that this is not the case.

the US public is deeply suspicious of AI's impacts on jobs and education. Kamala Harris and the Republican party are both polling better than AI. 8/10 gen zers are concerned about AI's impact on education and only 18% are positive about this technology. there is widespread, bipartisan grassroots organizing against data centers. 97% of Britons are against Grok's "undressing" technology. the majority of Americans are concerned about AI in arenas like self-driving vehicles and healthcare. Even polling data from companies centered on AI shows significant concern around generative technology. OpenAI isn't meeting internal growth bench posts. On top of all that, Musk and Altman are currently both making fools of themselves in a very public trial.

[tam--lin]

I wrote this to ground myself because within the last month my workplace and gym have become overrun by AI graphics, then I logged out of Tumblr and immediately discovered that my Chemistry professor has switched to transparently AI generated exam feedback

[luckthebard]

I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.

This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.

My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.

We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.

A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.

The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.

Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.

(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).

History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.

[luckthebard]

I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.

This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.

My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.

We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.

A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.

The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.

Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.

(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).

History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.

[luckthebard]

I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.

This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.

My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.

We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.

A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.

The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.

Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.

(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).

History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.

[clonetroopers-blog]

I found some sort of art. Bet you like it:)

I think this is 501st legion troopers painting their helmets into 332nd pattern.

[creativesparksart]

Its been a minute since I've posted art on here. I made this piece back in August when I was really feeling the fascism drain and dealing with work being really toxic too.

Things have simultaneously gotten better and worse, but the message still stands.

I called this piece Icarus because we focus so much on his death, that we lose the focus on his years growing up in a prison, kindling his hope of freedom and his dad fighting to free them both despite the fear.

In a country where people are constantly trying to tear us down, the hope is what helps keep us alive

[ectos-cave]

i may have a mood disorder

[josilverdragon]

"The horrors persist but so do libraries, books, iced coffee, sunsets, trees, the word 'fuck', the moon and the sea."

[c3lest1ann]