freak of nurture

lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.

arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.

swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.

i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

I understand the appeal of tutorials. You want to learn something in a quick and easily accessible manner, have someone break it down step by step how they do something.

However, my problem with art tutorials since their inception but exarcebated with youtube, tiktok, instagram, etc. is how much that "accessibility" is in reality watering down and removing the nuance of the topic, repeating the same basic terminology and concepts and refusing to look deeper into things. How many times have you seen a color theory tutorial talk about the same terms (analogous, triad, pick contrasting colors, 60-30-10 rule) and come back feeling like you learned nothing new? Or a shading tutorial that went on about light source, what colors to use, etc.

This is why I'm telling you, the person reading this, that you need to let go of the art tutorial and start reading art books. Because the reason all this advice is the same is because they're all repeating from artists who learned from artists who learned from artists who learned from those books, and in the jump from interpretation to interpretation, actual explanations on why things happen and why certain phenomenons exists have been replaced by "do this" and "do that" and "don't do this".

Interested in that so called loomis method? Read loomis' books where he pioneers it. Curious on how colors and light work in a canvas? Most of that is sourced from James Gurney's Light and Color.

These books can look daunting, but you will learn a lot more by accepting their size and long explanations as they are, to go into the science of why things work this way, instead of looking at tutorials removed from their context and presented as random factoids.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

This part of my heart is now breaking. Amal, who's been on a poor diet because she can't afford better food, is unable to breastfeed baby Mina any longer, and is unable to afford enough formula to compensate, and now both mother and baby are weak and malnourished.

Amal is suffocating from the stress of having to provide for her daughters. Her husband Motasem is doing everything he can (recently, he was almost caught in a bombing while trying to get food) but they're both overwhelmed. I wish there was anything I can do for them.

I'm begging you to donate if you can and share if you can't. I want, more than anything in this world, for these kids to grow up healthy and for their parents to be able to rest.