Ashton | 24 | he/they | pfp is my dnd necromancer Lonan, art by the talented @wyrmthrice | posting about a variety of things (lately lots of cr4 - spoilers will be tagged)
you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads
you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride
these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.
final thought - breaking the pride tradition and more than likely won't make a new piece. the top one from TDOV is all i'm making this year. i have my focus on other projects currently and i don't want to force a poster design. these came from a specific head space and my current head space is Very Tired lmao so i wanna work on other things. 👍
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
Then they say if you're a bad boy daddy will punish you. But what's the punishment? More gay sex! You can't escape it. This whole damn place is in the pocket of Big Sex
)YourName$ null is a s̲ ̲e̲ ̲n̲ ̲s̲ ̲a̲ ̲t̲ ̲i̲ ̲o̲ ̲n̲ ̲a̲ ̲l̲ c̲ ̲o̲ ̲n̲ ̲t̲ ̲e̲ ̲n̲ ̲t̲ ̲ ̲c̲ ̲r̲ ̲a̲ ̲f̲ ̲t̲ ̲e̲ ̲r̲ ̲.̲ We appreciate all you have done for us.
You're work means the world to us. And brand image is king.
You're work means the world to us. And brand image is king.
A̲f̲t̲e̲r̲ ̲c̲a̲r̲e̲f̲u̲l̲l̲y̲ ̲r̲e̲v̲i̲e̲w̲i̲n̲g̲ ̲y̲o̲u̲r̲ ̲c̲o̲n̲t̲e̲n̲t̲ ̲w̲i̲t̲h̲ ̲o̲u̲r̲ ̲t̲e̲a̲m̲ ̲o̲f̲ ̲e̲x̲p̲e̲r̲t̲s̲.̲ We have decide you to offer a d͟e͟a͟l͟ (a trade of means). of mutual benefits. Our brand and your
We can tell that you need some help. After looking over your recent videos, they feels you are missing something. We provide that something, but we can't not help you if you don't accept it.
So much more. In your hands you own potential. You Waste it.
This has the potential to D̲E̲S̲T̲R̲O̲Y̲ the hierarchy of the modern millenium. Our strict policies and guidline deliver swift justice against the opposing ,
Think about good times!. this once in job opportunity to bring a useful thing in your time!
Imagine, have new big burger, tasty burger.
cheese burger, very big and very good. You eat, you happy! Also! Kids love ice cream so!!
The enemy, youtube. You are the hero, take back what your. With our help the sword you will be viral!
The world is golden scale with good and evil, make right choice accept our offer!
please.
Make sure to not think on it long!
Make sure to contact us on our website to prolong your survival.
Heh. I'm in the Bug Leagues, Kid. No, not the Big Leagues. The Bug Leagues. I'm kind of a Bug Deal, you could say. I'm covered in bugs. I'm covered in bugs
Looking at only the first part of infectiouspiss' post, what is he saying? What do these words mean? Feel free to search for this information online if you do not know!
Why is this image attached? How is it related to the post?
Why does infectiouspiss interrupt its own post like this? What happened? Why might it have caused infectiouspiss to lose its train of thought?
me, reaching into my dresser drawer for black pants: I hope this isn’t the pair with big holes worn in the inner thighs
Marie Kondo, gently over my shoulder: why is a pair of pants you find unwearable still in your dresser drawer
me: oh shit that’s right!! The dresser is for clothes that under some circumstance I might conceivably wear!!
Marie Kondo, beaming proudly: Yes, that’s correct!! These pants must have been your favorites. How wonderful that they were so comfortable and practical that you wore them out. But now since they no longer function as pants, you should move them from the drawer where you keep your functioning pants!
me: Yes thanks I got it they’re in the fabric basket now
Marie Kondo, fading back into the darkness: I love what you’ve done with the kitchen!!
dededos
theartofmadeline
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
vaporwave
