I do not agree with veganism as a moral standard. If it is your personal moral stance, that is fine. If you think humans eating meat is inherently immoral, I don’t want to deal with you, you’re hopeless. Vegan ideology behaves more like a sect of evangelical Christianity than a dietary choice.
Veganism is better for the environment, but claiming that it's a morally superior choice ignores cultural and economic factors that make people eat animal products.
It is not inherently better for the environment. That is the thing. When you begin trying to explain that local, sustainably sourced animal protein is better for the environment than imported plant proteins that are farmed 3,500 miles away using slave labor, they start tuning you out. Down is better for the environment than polyester stuffing, leather is better for the environment than pleather. We should work on making animal agricultural practices more sustainable instead of trying to shame everyone into eating plant products that are also farmed unethically and unsustainably.
She's local to me, so I'm friends with her on facebook and everyone has been SO nice to her about it! I see her at cons a lot and she's done events with the group I volunteer with - she's always been absolutely lovely and I could not be happier for her!
we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation
So after extensive interrogation I have an update:
my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.
the truth is actually weirder
she’s aware dandelions look like this
she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions
she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?
she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
This has given me a lot to think about. From the perspective of postcolonial literature, I agree. I'd read that choke-chain article before this.
All in all, I'd rather writers be accused of poor writing than of using AI based on mistaken ideas about what good literature is and on AI detectors, which at this point are basically snake oil.
you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid
you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid
The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén. No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc. There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years — or not. But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:
That's all done with a single design:
You'd think this would have a name, right? (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.) Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those). But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info. Any (human only, please) help?
I follow the "leave nothing but footprints take nothing but photos" rule of state/national parks yeah because conservation. But also because when I was 11 i read a short story about a girl who went to a museum and stole a bandage flake off a mummy on display with the mentality of "im just one person one piece won't be missed" then at night she was visited by the mummy and it plucked a single hair from her head and then the next night a different mummy took another hair and she realized that there were only so many pieces to her before there would be nothing left and that story was forever wedged in my brain. Anyways leave cool rocks where you find them or the mummies will get you
the emoji combo throwback is killing me. like you just had to be there when new seasons were airing LMAO. anyway yes obviously nate knows, i don't think there was even a doubt cause it wouldn't make sense otherwise.
A question I get asked a lot while working at a public library is "how do you deal with homeless people?"
And the answer is, we don't.
The unhoused people who come here seeking refuge 99% of the time understand that they will be kicked out if they misbehave.
The people you have to watch out for are Jessica, who only came because the kid she didn't want had to visit for a homework assignment and she just *needs* to yell at her child for asking to borrow two books or stay an extra five minutes, or Michael, who came in to look at porn on our computers for whatever fucking reason, or Karen who just wanted to come by to throw a fit that the particular book she wanted was checked out and harrass our staff about our collection being too limited.
99% of the time, the people we need to ban are middle to upper-middle class white people while the homeless and mentally ill/disabled people mind their own damn business and are honestly some of the best patrons we have.
I bring this up because today we had a man come in. He stopped at the desk, pulled up a chair and said "I'm newly homeless and was living in my car. I'm disabled. It was impounded. It's raining. I don't have a phone and I don't know where to go tonight."
And we did what we could to help. He was incredibly kind and patient despite his obvious anxiety and stress, more than most able bodied, housed patrons are to us under much less dire conditions. I liked knowing that we were the first place he came.
We have so many people like this who come in everyday. Many are quiet and keep to themselves, but sometimes they talk to us.
They tell us about how they're taking a few courses on a scholarship they applied for from our library's computer at the local community college to get their diploma. Or ask about a manga or dvd or book we might have to help them pass the time.
One woman, who comes in daily with her tattered walker always says hello to me and likes to work on the new jigsaw puzzle with me when we set one out.
So like, treat unhoused people like people. Treat disabled people like people. I don't want my library to feel like the only safe space in the world, but I'm glad it can be one of them.
I'm so sick of hearing about how "the homeless are ruining everything" when they are some of the kindest, most respectful people here. Sometimes they mutter, might not have had a place to shower, and might need a little extra space for their backpacks but that's FINE. It Doesn't Matter Actually. None of that is a problem or any of my business to care about (unless they request help/services), and I also don't think it's any of yours.
libraries provide vital and lifesaving services and i will die on the hill you have to let people who are mentally ill and disabled and homeless and politically disagreeable to you still access those rescourses. its simply too important to society
Every time you go in a public place and something ISN’T disgusting it’s because somebody cleaned it. Every time you feel comfortable using a public bathroom or sitting at a restaurant table or setting something on a gas station counter or playing on a playground it’s because somebody cleaned it.
Thank you to everyone who cleans the world, especially those who are underpaid and under appreciated.
I worked in a supermarket for 7 years and I don't think I can understate just how much cleaning you had to do for it to look clean (it very often where not in the places you aren't supposed to see)
True for food service, retail establishments, gyms, outdoor areas, schools, religious buildings, office buildings, etc. People usually only notice when a space is NOT clean, meanwhile every time a space is clean it’s only because of the diligent work of janitors, maintenance staff, custodians, parks workers, or volunteers.
andulkaphoto
stormborns
kaledo-art
titsay
2087
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
