Syntactic Sugar

Leng | 30s | writing, drawing, fandom | januarytala @ ao3 | 🇵🇭 🇨🇦 ✝️

[ceruleanheaven]

[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over

[misidentifying-animals-in-posts]

best animal names: bugs with jobs edition

[inkedmyths]

The problem with being a Creative Person is I want to create all the things. I want to draw a little drawing. I want to write a fic. I want to write a book. I want to paint with watercolors. I want to paint with oil paints. I want to animate. I want to make something out of clay. I want to sew a dress. I want to play a song on the ukulele. I want to play a song on the cello. I want to play a song on the harp. I want to write a song. I want to write a musical. I want to make a webcomic. I want to make a video game.

I want to do EVERYTHING but I don’t have the TIME or MONEY or MOTIVATION

[crownkeeper]

before there were blorbos there were little meow meows and before there were little meow meows there were cinnamon rolls

[i-like-reblog-maps]

What month were you born in?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Voting ended onMay 28

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. I’m also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didn’t just make up the numbers. So. Behave

[edgar-allan-possum]

[agendermetalbender]

[leng-m]

The frustrating part about broaching issues of skin whitening, plastic surgery, and the overrepresentation of mestizos in the Philippine entertainment industry is that most Filipinos a) think the problem is blood quantum (so they don't want to touch the issue with a ten-foot pole), instead of colourism and lookism within the filipino community, or b) accept colonial mentality is at play but believe it's inherently a part of filipino culture and shouldn't be challenged. And this is why I don't think filipino beauty standards will ever change.

[rosegardendeprofundis]

Source: @laceypaigepoetry on Instagram

[thoughtsickles]

people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.

[arkipelagic]

trying to have a conversation in a filipino gc but it’s made up of mostly foreign-raised filipinos and they only start talking when the subject is about representation in a fucking cartoon or whatever

[arkipelagic]

hi my interests are in mindanao history and contemporary society with a special focus in moro and lumad communities

*crickets chirp*

i also like prehistory and am very interested in ice age philippines and our pre-austronesian ancestors in mainland china

*crickets chirp again*

would anyone like to talk about the earliest trade networks connecting what is now the philippine archipelago with modern day southeast asian states plus taiwan?

*crickets continue to chirp*

have you guys heard of that cartoon starring liza soberano and h.e.r.?

[arkipelagic]

@austerity-audacity-asceticism not so much as precolonial but prehistorical, but here they are:

arkipelagic

From left to right, top to bottom: pottery vase; burial jar; bronze weapon; clay fruit tray; and jade lingling-o. Photos #1–#4 by Bình Giang

When discussing Southeast Asian trading networks, the Sa Huynh-Kalanay Interaction Sphere exemplifies the kind of cross-regional social-econ

As many scholars have noticed, the Indianized polity of Champa [established in AD 192] in central Vietnam provides functional parallels for

both excerpts are from “Coastal Connectivity: Long-Term Trading Networks Across the South China Sea” (2013) by Hsiao-chun Hung et. al. related works (open access) include:

Taiwanese Prehistory: Migration, Trade, and the Maritime Economic Mode by Chin-yung Chao and Timothy Earle

Forged by Waves: Lingling-o and the Entangled Histories of Pacific Asia by Andre O. Magpantay

[austerity-audacity-asceticism]

oohhh thank you so much for the links!!

i've always been vaguely aware that prehistoric merchants from the philippine islands traded with other south east asian countries (thank you, sibika!), but i always had the impression that this exchange of goods happened in the western coasts of the philippine islands. to know that that nephrite was found in central visayas.... interesting!

(and as a side note, it's so interesting to note that researchers believed that the jade was traded as blanks and later on carved by prehistoric filipinos; i wonder what their methods were for carving jade were, and if other carved jewelry would be sold to the neighboring asean countries)

which makes me now wonder how quickly goods were exchanged from SEA merchants to the hands of merchants belonging to the regions of the visayas and mindanao, and if prehistoric filipino merchants traveled as a group or individually.

i'll be sure to check out the other sources that you listed, as well as "Coastal Connectivity: Long-Term Trading Networks Across the South China Sea.” i really wished that this knowledge was taught more in (at the very least!) the university level

tagging also @local-heretic, who might find this interesting too!

[local-heretic]

graduate in history here, thanks for the tag!! it's so SO important to be looking at the histories of post-colonial societies to do away with the narrative that folks like us were "uncivilized" and "had no culture"

[titsay]

[drchucktingle]

gift

good practical reflection for artists who feel like whatever theyre making just isnt working is the sit down and VERY HONESTLY ask yourself: what is the gift here? it can be a lot of things. what am i giving to myself? to the world? what feeling? what expression? art that resonates is art that GIVES

i think this is part of why theres such a disconnect for people who try to make 'art with ai.' if you REALLY ask yourself 'what is my gift here with this ai art?' the answer is nothing. no story to give, or real feeling, or new idea. then these folks they are confused when it doesnt resonate

time and attention are VERY precious. why would an audience give you one of the most existentially valuable things in the universe, their time, if they know you are not a giver in return? EVEN if it means you are giving back to yourself and writing for an audience of one. YOU STILL GOTTA BRING A GIFT

[arahir]

i just can't convey the frustration and sorrow that it's been to grow up at first without the internet and then watching it bloom into this useful, fun, connecting force you sometimes spent time on, only for it to degrade into this constant oppressive waste of time and energy where people are constantly pumping out algorithmically designed content for max algorithmic appeal and even the most simple search generates either no results or an infinite abyss of ai generated slop none of which is usable or correct. we briefly had a library of alexandria and then fed it into a paper shredder so advertisers could sell a random mash of pulp back to us at a premium.

[leng-m]

The downside of the advise that you should just start on a project even if you don't have the skills yet, is that a few years later you can barely look at it.

[fractally]

don't worry about me when I say this but I think in a way being hunted for sport would be a relief. my nervous system would be like, wow. finally, a proportional reaction

[fagcrisis]

i hate the word spicy can we bring back calling things erotic

[maryoliveoil]

rolling up to Wendy's to get an erotic chicken sandwich

[magicmooshka]

recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.

It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.

[ellipsus-writes]

We want to hear from you! 📣 🗯️

Over the past two years, the mess that is generative AI has barrelled its way through human creative spaces. It’s been… a shit show.

The effects of this hostile takeover are well reported: slop, enshittification, deepfakes, misinformation. AI came straight for creative work first (because it was illegally trained on it 🙃)—and yet, beyond the (very real) concern of industry redundancies, and the (dubious) claims of AI “replacing” human creatives, there’s notably a lack of discussion about how it’s impacted creatives just being creative.

Writing, scrolling, reading online—the basic ways we live our daily creativity are being impacted by This Thing, and it deserves more attention.

We know you have an opinion—and we know it’s good. We’d love if you’d share it with us.

The survey is anonymous and takes about 3 minutes. We’ll compile some of the findings and publish for all to read. (And if you want to be quoted in a future essay or social posts, please feel free to leave your name/pseudonym or social handles in the optional contact form at the end.)

We're committed to supporting human creatives in the age of AI—and we’re working to build a human-led, human-affirming network to make sure that human creativity is protected. Because without art, we’d be really screwed.

So please, tell us how we can help! Take the survey here.

- the Ellipsus Team xo