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haruka tenoh (ft. their wife) sketches

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"Games are art" doesn't just mean "games are good," to me it also means "games have meaning and deserve to be looked at as pieces created by people that actually reflect the circumstances of their creation." This means looking at games critically beyond a lens of "is it good on the scale of gameness?"
The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.
And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.
This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"
And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.
And at the end of the day, I enjoy D&D when it's basically fantasy cops and robbers, or robbers and other robbers: it's a game of accumulating power by killing creatures and stealing their stuff. It's a really fun and I would even dare say good game when played that way. The reason I caution against approaching D&D from the point of view of "we must find the right type of monsters our characters can kill with moral impunity" is because you might accidentally end up from going from one unexamined trope to another but more importantly part of the buy-in of D&D is accepting that D&D the game as it exists thinks certain classes of monsters (and as we know from earlier, more equal opportunity editions, Men are also Monsters) are okay to be kill. It's literally fine, you won't be morally compromised for engaging with the game as is: but also, if you're fucked up like me you might find joy in thinking about "hey isn't it weird how this medieval fantasy world looks more like the American frontier than an actual medieval society?"
blue in space
β¨ see my process on cara β¨
"Fat Tiger" by "Uncle Bum" (δΈδΊι¦¬ε€§ε).
art by heavensghost

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marijke van warmerdam, from the book βsoon and nowβ
Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?
Fun fact: In Japan, a cultivar of yellow orchid was created in the 90s and was named "Happy Valley Sailor Moon."
It's a hybrid flower that was named after Sailor Moon because the botanist who created it, Shigeru Makoto Kono, thought that the flowerβs yellow color matched the color of Usagiβs hair. Naoko Takeuchi herself received these flowers and was so happy with them she decided to incorporate them in several artworks (as revealed in the linear notes of Sailor Moon Artbook Volume 5).
I will never be accepted into the greater artist community until I learn to love the acrylic charm. Yes master the American social media artist selling mass produced acrylic charms with their own digital design printed upon it is the most exploited proletariat in the world. No master I will never ever learn about the exploitation of global south workers. Yes master the acrylic charm was spontaneously generated as soon as the Artist paid a completely arbitrary fee. No master the Artist is the only person who matters
A mid-sized western art youtuber can hire a team to design a plushie, have that plushie manufactured in a South Asian country, get it shipped to America, and sell it for 30 dollars. And this is just some arbitrary number with no geopolitical context and if you, the Consumer, think it's too expensive. Then you are Starving The Artist, the poor poor prole who can't afford to eat but can, somehow, afford to use the labor of 400 Bengali women to make a plushie of a frog wearing stockings.
you are all too comfortable with implying a lack of intelligence is a moral failing and your intelligence and/or academic skill makes you in some way superior/a better person, sometimes even going as far as ""joking"" about "natural selection", that the nebulous "stupid people" should all die. this is a eugenicist thought pattern and you sound like a fascist, just so you know.
cognitively & intellectually disabled people are real, more common than you think, and exist in online, in real life, and in your communities. we see it when you say things like that. not only do you have no way of knowing if the person you're talking about is one of us or if they're some kind of "acceptable target" to you, but when you equate intelligence to morality, you hurt us all the same. make space for the intellectually disabled in your activism or admit you're a fascist like the rest of them

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"okra was grown in Philadelphia by 1748" is the next fact I have to try to track down a source for. "1748" is a specific-ass year, which indicates to me that there is a primary document somewhere. wikipedia cites a website that seems to be selling essays to students??? and everywhere else is presumably getting their information from wikipedia. xkcd citation loop comic
Finnish botanist Peter Kalm traveled within the colonies from 1748 to 1751 collecting seed and plant specimens for his professor, Carolus Linnaeus [...]. In his diaries, Kalm noted okra grew wild in the West Indies, but it was planted in gardens in America.
β "Significant Seeds: An African Food Tradition," 2022
ah
having the additional search term "Peter [or 'Pehr'] Kalm" helped me narrow this down a little. there's this bit in an article from Swedish Colonial News:
unfortunately, there are no footnotes or in-text citations. there's a bibliography, but any sentence in the article could be sourced from any text in the whole thing. Dr. Lawrence Backlund, come here for a second, I just want to talk!!
assuming this information is in one of the Kalm texts cited (and not e.g. a secondary source about Kalm), I have four books to track down and skim:
or, I guess, three, since I cannot read Swedish.
I can read some swedish. From pg 209 of En resa til Norra America, Pehr Kalm's diary from his travel to the US. He was sent to do botanical field research. The quote is from his diary entry the 19th of September, 1748.
Okra var en vΓ€xt, ΕΏom vΓ€xer vildt uti Weftindien, (det Γ€r, pΓ₯ AmericanΕΏta ?arna), men planterades nu har i kryddgΓ₯rdar. Hos Miller uti des Gard. Diction, heter den: Ketmia indica, folio ficus, fructu pentagono recurvo eΕΏculento, graciliori & longiori, ibid, fp. 18. FrΓΆhuΕΏet, hvilfet Γ€r en lΓ₯ng ΕΏfida, ΕΏfΓ€res ΕΏΓΆnder medan det Γ€nnu Γ€r grΓΆnt, och fofas i ΕΏoppor , da den gΓΆr ΕΏoppan tjo? ΕΏom en tjo? vΓ€lling, hvilfa ΕΏlags ΕΏoppar aΕΏ ΕΏomliga hΓ₯lles fΓΆr en de-lice. Negrene diΕΏfa henna ganΕΏfa hΓΆgt.
Transcription above by me, not sure what all the letters are. Below is my translation:
Okra was a vegetable/plant, that grows wild in the West Indies (that is, on the american[farms? tropics?]), but is planted here in herb gardens. In Millers Gard. Diction [The Gardeners Dictionary by Peter Miller?] it is called: Ketmia indica, folio ficus, fructu pentagono recurvo eΕΏculento, graciliori & longiori, ibid, fp. 18. The house of the seed, which is a long pod, is cut off while it is still green, and [added?] to soups, because it makes the soup thick like a thick gruel, a kind of soup considered a delicacy by some. The negros speak highly of it.
βI have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.β
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmotherβs house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Donβt let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint β dot and line β will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.
All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.
a lot of people seem to really earnestly believe that women have thicker lips than men on average and despite my best efforts I have been unable to find any evidence that this is the case.
also a lot of people believe that human height is bimodal by "sex" which is not the case. if you plotted human heights by prevalence you would get one peak, not two. height is not sexually dimorphic enough to be statistically bimodal, and that is even though we live in a world where infants who were assigned female receive poorer nutrition from birth. I daresay if that were not the case, there would be even less of a difference
I struggled with finding height charts that don't break it out by gender (which goes to show how strong the ideology is that men and women are incomparable), but I did find this page, which has this graph that shows that the crossover of their "male" and "female" curves (no words on how they defined those, or if their samples knowingly included any trans people at all), that +1SD for women was taller than -1SD for men, and while I haven't added the two curves together, I can tell by inspection that at the point where they cross, the sum would be higher than either sub-peak.
A mixture of two normal densities will not be bimodal unless there is a very large difference between their means, typically larger than the sum of their standard deviations. If male and female heights are even approximately normally distributed with means and standard deviations close to those reported by the NHANES survey, the difference between the means of male and female heights is not enough to produce bimodality. Yet photographs of living histograms do show bimodality. We have discussed several reasons why a histogram of male and female heights may have a bimodal appearance even though, using reasonable estimates of the parameters, theory says the underlying distribution is mound-shaped. For example, the tendency of students to favor certain values when self-reporting their height may contribute to the phenomenon. And when taking small random samples from a mound-shaped distribution, it is common to get a histogram that looks bimodal.
β Mark F Schilling, Ann E Watkins & William Watkins, "Is Human Height Bimodal?"

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γγζΌδΈγγ
i guess the thing that people who scaremonger about falling media comprehension skills forget to account for is that media comprehension is maybe only like 10% reading comprehension and 90% social, historical, artistic and political knowledge which is not knowledge that you can gain easily by just reading or being able to comprehend the meaning of a text.
because the meaning of the text is not just the words and sentences and syntax, but its also because so much of meaning in a text is assigned through the subtler moves of articulating how this thing is like that thing and conveying that meaning through signs and symbols (e.g. being able to parse that when wodehouse uses a reference to a character sulking like achilles in his tent, you understand the reference and what it means, but you also understand that the character comes from a social background of being acquainted with the classics enough to cite achilles sulking in his tent, which contains baked in signs about wealth and class and education versus not necessarily being able to parse why a period-specific work of art is mentioned in a text (e.g. Watteau's Triumph of Love in An Ideal Husband) and therefore what it means).
and you can understand those signs and signifiers primarily either through a) instruction or b) exposure. and exposure means exposure to a lot of culture, across time and place, in order to be able to contextualise the specific work you're engaging with for a meaningful reading of it. it means being exposed enough to recognise that the world of jane austen's emma is remarkably similar, for example, to tolkien's shire; or to recognise that if macbeth held enough interest for tolkien on one front, where else might have it have held his interest (e.g. thane v. thain). tl;dr media comprehension is a far more complex skill than just like understanding surface level syntax and meaning.
in addition to all of the above, comprehension also means understanding the context within which a work is situated - what other works is it in dialogue with? is it part of a broader school of works, or in reaction to them? is it building on them, even if not consciously? is it simply being put out in the world contemporaneous to them - and if so how should one contextualise the contemporaneity? many things that simply cannot be learned just by reading a text, but acquired thru broader study...