Something I learned is if you don't step out of your artistic comfort zone a little, you're gonna be even more exhausted with making art. Your mind is a caged tiger and it needs to attack something new from time to time. Your mind is pacing in its enclosure 🐅
If you don't like drawing figures and poses because they're frustrating, draw figures and poses and get frustrated! Draw them! With anger! Swear and curse at them!
If you don't like drawing traditionally because there's too much room to make mistakes, draw traditionally and make mistakes! Scream while doing it! Put on scary music! Make it silly!
This goes for any kind of craft or skill
You stand to lose nothing in the end (Except maybe your own patience and sanity but that's temporary). But you do gain at least a little bit more knowledge and skill to feed your mind tiger
it is unfortunate that there's no reason for most people to remember high school chemistry because the best analogy I have found for "the amount of energy that it takes me to initiate a task, which can be higher than the amount of energy it takes to actually complete the task" is "activation energy" and it's not precisely perfect but
yeah. and you can even include "thing that reduces the barrier to doing the task" as a catalyst/enzyme
anyway. unfortunately this does not actually clarify anything for the average person. but #ToMe it works
Glasgow Zine Library needs of renovations in order to safely store and display their zine collection, and improve accessibility.
Good news: They are currently only £500 away from their £12,726 goal, and for every donation made, Creative Scotland will double that money.
Bad news: This is an all-or-nothing fundraiser, so if they don't meet that goal before June 13th, they get nothing.
From their fundraiser:
"Our ability to safely and accessibly store, preserve, and display our zine collection is in jeopardy. In addition, we are running out of space to continue accepting zine donations. That is why we urgently need to upgrade our collection storage and display to increase capacity, accessibility, and improve preservation.
Our archive, which holds the entirety of our collection, is running out of space to safely and accessibly store and preserve the zines. As a result, the condition and future of our zine collection is at risk of rapid decline due to insufficient storage and preservation capacity.
We have reached capacity, turning away major donations, and (with permissions) donating duplicates.
Reaching capacity of our archive means that we have to turn away zine donations and halt zine acquisition of cultural objects. For instance, we turned away 249 issues of historically significant literary zine, 100 issues of an important writing zine, and a large collection of music zines and magazines. Another donor wants to bequeath a significant 1980-90s zine collection including historical trans zines.
Currently, we do not have the capacity to store and preserve them. Without this project we cannot properly preserve the collection or sustain zine donation intake."
I've been attending Glasgow Zine Fest for a few years now, and the work they do not only preserving such a variety of voices, but supporting new zine makers and local communities is amazing. They've run fundraisers for Palestine and refugees, coding meetups for trans folks, and anti-capitalist writing workshops.
I'm really hopeful they'll be able to make this deadline, but I've donated as much as I can. If any of yous have some to spare, please consider it. And consider visiting, as well!!
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
practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance
“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!
I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago. There’s a specific thing there but I’m just not sure how to phrase it.
It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect. It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.” It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things. It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.
It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.” And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it. Sometimes you become quite attached to them. Sometimes maybe too attached. But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality. It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.
When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.” It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain. It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean. They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.
And lots of things follow from this. You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it. So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos. You collect #quotes. You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.
You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori. You like data. But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again. But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many. You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation. You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.
You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you. When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it. And you tend to your collection.
I just realised that a lot of people who follow me have talked to me about their experiences of ostracism and it would probably be helpful to quite a lot of people here to be aware of No One Is Disposable, which is a resource library and discord server for people who've experienced public shaming & ostracism.
titsay
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
izzy806
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
