Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)
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Cosmic Funnies
AnasAbdin
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
if i look back, i am lost
@theartofmadeline
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
izzy's playlists!
Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
KIROKAZE
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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JVL
Three Goblin Art
tumblr dot com
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
todays bird
seen from Türkiye
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@synnthamonsugar
My name is Otter, and I mostly do art & writing here!
For a full list of locations, go to my Linktree.
If you want to give a tip for my work, check out my Ko-Fi
If you'd like to pick up a print, take a look at my INPRNT
(I'm slowly adding all my art to my Ko-Fi gallery. If there's a particular artwork you'd like to see a print of, please reach out and I'll add it to INPRNT.)
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
ive always been willing to die on the hill of cis women being able to beat cis men in sports so nobody will ever ever make me concerned about trans women in womens sports even if i was delusional enough to believe that was a comparable situation. do i think a cis woman could beat a trans woman in fucking pickleball or whatever? Buddy I think a cis woman could beat a cis male bodybuilder in sports. You will not get me
many people in these notes are revealing how they truly don't believe afab people are capable of beating amab people at Any sports due to their fragile bird bones delicate skin and and trying to make it seem like i'm feeding afab people to lions in the coliseum. you people are not only wrong but more importantly you are Stupidt
whenever female athletes in a sport start getting similar resources to the men (funding and training comparable to the men's ever since childhood) the difference in performance between the men and the women starts decreasing.
if female athletes are not paid enough to make a living of their sport/require to have a side job for healthcare or retirement funds, they won't be able to reach the same level of athleticism as the men, as they will spend less time and energy training.
if female athletes start getting high pay/professional levels of training later in life compared to the boys', they won't reach the same level of athleticism as male athletes who have been training at high levels from a younger age.
if the best facilities and best coaches go to the men, the women won't reach the same level as the men.
if girls who do sports are not taken as seriously as boys are (do not receive special permits to leave school earlier to go training, etc), the women won't reach the same level as the men.
as long as female athletes and male athletes have different levels of opportunities, we won't actually know if there is a substantial "natural" difference in average across men's and women's performances.
i mean, look at professional ballet dancers. those girls undergo hellish training since a very young age and ballet obviously does not consider female dancers a lesser category of dancers. look at what female ballet dancers do with their bodies while pretty much starving themselves. what do you think a woman can do if she receives rigorous high-quality training since childhood and also eats?
As per prev tags - Throwing Like a Brazilian: On Ineptness and a Skill-shaped Body, by Greg Downey
Is the most thoughtful and coherent interrogation I've read of how physical skills are developed, and how the development of skills is located in cultural expectation, teaching, support, and self-concept, as well as physically shaping the body through practice.
It spins off from a response to a feminist touchpoint essay of the 1980s, "Throwing Like a Girl" by Iris Marion Young, which examines the stiffness and lack of whole-body engagement in girls asked to throw a projectile, and relates this to the pressures of self constraint and self-conscious over-awareness of the body forced on girls.
Downey approaches the topic from noticing that the Brazilian capoeiristas he's training with - who are extraordinarily physically skilled across a range of specific skillsets - are not very good at throwing or catching projectiles. And, more specifically, that the way in which they throw when asked to - stiff, without whole body engagement - exactly matches what Young (and others) have characterized as "throwing like a girl".
Which means that it's not (or not only) a function of self-consciousness, or of an undeveloped sense of body integration - rather, it's the way people throw at the very early stages of learning to throw a projectile.
Which makes the question, then, what is it about the author's own (North American) society, that produces such a disparity in learning experiences between boys and girls - such that even girls who have nominally been taught to throw a ball, have broadly not actually been taught past the very first steps, by ages where their male peers have?
And how is it that this difference in experiences is so obscured, that people fail to recognize the points at which it occurs?
The essay delves into the specifics of these questions with a lot more depth and nuance than I can summarize here. Overhand throwing is a complex skill which is developed in many stages, using this process as a case study, Downey looks at factors ranging from access to coaching through difficult parts of the process, to gendered differences in the opportunity for rowdy, whole-body play.
I really reccomend reading the whole essay. I can't find a fully online version of the whole text, but the website "academia.edu" will let you download it with a free account (use a junk email, they send spam.)
hey. HEY
food for thought
A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕
Sourcing the photos as taken by Mark Ham on Instagram, according to one of the replies.
Happy Pride month to the moon
nerve stretch and glide
(modified from a bigger post)
T-pose/sitting variation
extend arms out in a T-pose; face forward and shoulders back
rotate one thumb up and the other thumb down; turn your head to face the up thumb
move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm
return to step 1's default T-Pose and repeat a mirror of steps 2 and 3, facing the up thumb previously down
continue to alternate for ~1 minute
sitting down, put the first down thumb hand firmly under your butt; your arm should be parallel to your side.
keeping shoulders back, use your opposite hand to gently pull your head to the side for 30 seconds
repeat a mirror of steps 6 and 7
occupational therapist variation
bonus 6 step: with arm in the same position, tilt your head towards the opposite side for a few seconds
👍 give yourself a double thumbs up 👍
it’s funny cuz it’s true
maybe y'all didn't notice but fat people who don't hate ourselves sure did notice that people were obsessed with shitting on fat people in the late 90s and early 2000s (conservative political time) and now are again (fascist political time), coincidentally while the market for weight loss has become a 90 billion dollar industry due to glp1s.
you are not immune to propaganda. it makes some people a whole hell of a lot of money for you to hate fat people and fear becoming (or staying, I think like 70% or something of the US is fat) one of us.
a lot of the fearmongering over fatness comes from studies directly funded by the weight loss industry...i think people don't really realize or think about the fact that research can absolutely be influenced and skewed by its funding. there is also research that shows that an amount of the negative health outcomes for fat people come from anti-fat bias. if you go to the doctor with concerns and the doctor simply tells you to lose weight, your problem is neglected and you may not even bother going to the doctor with the next problem.
every fat person you know for the most part probably has a story like this, of medical neglect. many of the stories i've heard personally are when the complaint or the doctor wasn't related at all, like being told to lose weight at the ear nose and throat doctor or at the dentist. it's straight up just bias. it's such a thing that in the show Shrill it's portrayed, when Aidy Bryant goes to the gynecologist and her doctor suggests she get gastric bypass.
the studies on health and fatness are simply not that black and white and there is basically no research that shows that more than an incredibly tiny minority of people can lose weight and keep it off for more than like 2 years. bodies have set points that they gravitate towards, it's not a personal failure. this also is how the weight loss industry succeeds so well - repeat customers.
some of the harm associated with fatness is also due to weight cycling, which is very hard on your body and is even worse if you get off a GLP1, which according to a recent study causes weight to be regained at a rate that is 4x faster than without taking a GLP1.
you don't have to hate yourself. you don't have to hate other people for their body type either. it makes me so sad to see the thinspo tag going around again in 2026 a lot like it was back in the day.
some resources to learn more here:
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/feeling-fat-may-be-worse-for-you-than-being-fat-idUSTON079061/
A study spanning almost four decades and involving more than 100,000 adults in Denmark found that those with an 'overweight' body mass index
there's so much crazy shit once you go down the rabbit hole. for example, BMI was not invented by anyone with a medical background. it was never meant to measure individual health.
The U.S. weight loss industry reached an unprecedented high in 2023, estimated at $90 billion, largely driven by surging sales of the widely
Evidence is mounting that our body fat supports everything from our bone health to our mood, and now, research suggests it also regulates bl
just gonna reblog this forever because i love fat people and we deserve fuckin basic human dignity and respect regardless of our weight
Catching up on art posts, very honored and proud to share this oil painting which went live this past Friday, a work created for Elliot Lang's 'Character In Context' show at the A.R. Mitchell Museum in Trinidad, Colorado. Opening is June 5th (sorry, I will not be there) Link to the on line catalog with the few dozen talented artist's contributions with preliminary studies and final paintings in the comments below.
Precipice
20" x 16" Oil on Panel, framed, 2026
A part of my series of works in dialog with our mythological fascination with space travel and our place in the universe.
Character in Context
A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art
150 E. Main St.
Trinidad, CO 81082
June 5 - July 31, 2026
Have not stopped thinking about Inferno since it came out. (As I've written elsewhere) it's probably not intentional but to me it's what happened after Tomorrow's Harvest (far afterward), naught left of humanity but memories and artifacts. It feels both deeply human and also detached from it, not like humanity remembering itself but like its creations looking back from afar on their dead creator.
I do think the album is about death, but I don't think it's about death in a biological or even spiritual sense. I think of the quote that goes like "Your first death is when you take your last breath. Your final death is when your name is spoken for the last time." I think Inferno is about the death that's suffered when no one is there to remember. A Memory Death, if you will.
Speaking of which, for whatever reason it gives me really strong vibes of the Voyager probes, man-made objects traveling through deep space until the heat death of the universe. A final remnant of a dead civilization. The track Memory Death really drove this point home to me. The beeping over the heartbeat, to me, felt like a space probe sending back signals to a home that's now empty. And yet it carries a bit of home in it.
I don't think Inferno is dark or scary or depressing. I don't think it's bright or uplifting either. In my heart it is not specifically "about" religion, technology or politics although it relates to those because those are parts of the human condition and will leave marks on the earth that will outlast us. It feels accepting. At peace. Maybe even nihilistic, but not in a negative way. Maybe it's the overall spacey or cosmic vibe that it gives me but it very much feels like (to badly paraphrase an analogy I've heard used for the music of Burial) an unpolluted night sky, pitch darkness flecked with dazzling light.
I think the ending track, "I Saw Through The Platonia" is interesting because it's basically a heartbeat, and radio static, and then finally a signal hum toward then end. Then ten seconds of silence. This was the least "radio" Boards of Canada release imo (none of Geogaddi's number stations or Tomorrow's Harvest's radio transmission textures) so it's interesting to me that we finally get it toward the end, and when we do it's empty. There's nothing left to broadcast. Maybe the last radio signals from earth have reached the last listeners that may have heard them, and for all the universe knows we were never even there.
I think this is why, despite the notes of woozy 60s psychedelia and space-age 70s synths and shoegazy 80s sounds it doesn't feel nostalgic, for any decade nor in general. Nostalgia is filtered memory and there's no one around to remember. The past happened, the archive exists, but there's no interpretive framing for it. It just is. The Process and 177 Giraud's Mirror both feel like open faucets on a flow of information with nothing to make sense of them, because nothing can.
Have not stopped thinking about Inferno since it came out. (As I've written elsewhere) it's probably not intentional but to me it's what happened after Tomorrow's Harvest (far afterward), naught left of humanity but memories and artifacts. It feels both deeply human and also detached from it, not like humanity remembering itself but like its creations looking back from afar on their dead creator.
I do think the album is about death, but I don't think it's about death in a biological or even spiritual sense. I think of the quote that goes like "Your first death is when you take your last breath. Your final death is when your name is spoken for the last time." I think Inferno is about the death that's suffered when no one is there to remember. A Memory Death, if you will.
Speaking of which, for whatever reason it gives me really strong vibes of the Voyager probes, man-made objects traveling through deep space until the heat death of the universe. A final remnant of a dead civilization. The track Memory Death really drove this point home to me. The beeping over the heartbeat, to me, felt like a space probe sending back signals to a home that's now empty. And yet it carries a bit of home in it.
I don't think Inferno is dark or scary or depressing. I don't think it's bright or uplifting either. In my heart it is not specifically "about" religion, technology or politics although it relates to those because those are parts of the human condition and will leave marks on the earth that will outlast us. It feels accepting. At peace. Maybe even nihilistic, but not in a negative way. Maybe it's the overall spacey or cosmic vibe that it gives me but it very much feels like (to badly paraphrase an analogy I've heard used for the music of Burial) an unpolluted night sky, pitch darkness flecked with dazzling light.
I think the ending track, "I Saw Through The Platonia" is interesting because it's basically a heartbeat, and radio static, and then finally a signal hum toward then end. Then ten seconds of silence. This was the least "radio" Boards of Canada release imo (none of Geogaddi's number stations or Tomorrow's Harvest's radio transmission textures) so it's interesting to me that we finally get it toward the end, and when we do it's empty. There's nothing left to broadcast. Maybe the last radio signals from earth have reached the last listeners that may have heard them, and for all the universe knows we were never even there.
Miscellaneous initial thoughts:
shocked at how not-scary it was. There's not really a Gyroscope or Sixtyten on there. I've heard people say "it's like if Geogaddi was The Campfire Headphase" which is an INSANE statement but yeah it is kinda like if Geogaddi was the Campfire Headphase
There's a section in the middle that's just LETHAL, I think it's Word Becomes Flesh / Into The Magic Land / Labyrinth of Blood. The whole thing is basically just banger after banger VERY few ambient tracks
All Reason Departs / Arena Americanada / The Process is another trio, explicilty political and building in energy, The Process made me feel BADDDD like this outbreak of chaos after building fervor and insanity. Arena Americanada struck me as Doing Something immediately, it sounds like a football stadium chant warped in Hell like in a very Geogaddi way
Naraka and You Retreat In Time And Space have been getting a lot of hype but neither of them really did much for me on a first listen. I wish I was unspoiled on YRITAS because if it came out of nowhere it would have been more likely to Get me
I Saw Platonia is the one that had me choking back tears, that one's been really misrepresented in spoilers as "a creepy heartbeat" it's doing SO much.
It's going to take me a lot of listens to get the narrative but I see the shape of it. I think the general interpretation is going to be that it represents an escalating cataclysm followed by the calmness of death but I'm getting something a lot more complicated out of it
Synesthesia rating: dark cool-toned red with a lot of blues, I think a couple light purples in there
REALLY wish my first listen was at an evil bonfire in the middle of the woods instead of a brightly lit record store but oh well I play the hand I'm given
Kaoru Sugino
"The Fancy Cat Parade"
すぎのかおる
「おめかしネコちゃんのパレード」
Savathûn holding Rhulk back from the Guardian, that very Hive love of protecting and attacking at the same time, and how she doesn't even fully know what the Disciple is -- doesn't fully know that it made the worms, that the fate of her whole species turned on an experiment in a pickling vat, itself made by a deferential servant of another, even more unknowable force. And the Winnower, made in an even more distant, unknowable place
All that circling back to the Guardian, who stepped into the Black Garden on the week of their birth, who also knows but does not know their place in the universe
Sav as a protector who, when she realized the worms were a means to an end, extended her protection past them
And the Guardian, knowing the only word the universe listens to is kill, having to go through the motion of destroying the one who protected them, but knowing too that Savathûn is still alive, still in that love/hate cycle she has known for millennia ("You are more dear than my mother, for you have given birth to me a thousand times,") that her Ghost is still out there
that the mechanisms to break the cycle are still ticking, and some of those mechanisms are simply hearts
