beware this is where i blog

Death of the Author is a term coined by Roland Barthes for his essay of the same name in 1967.

In brief: death of the author is the concept that analysis of a work of art should not be focused on the artist's intent; the artist's intended reading of their own work is just A reading and no more valid than anyone else's.

A good straightforward example of this in practice is the response to Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary. Weir is adamant that his work contains no politics but I would say that PHM is pretty clearly a story about climate change.

Word already had a word count?! That WORKED?

2. Is because the basic way AI works, the reason the output isn't the same thing every time, is that they took the math part of computers and used it to approximate the rest of the owl. Instead of computing a result, it guesses what might be there based on context, without actually understanding any of it.

me at 20: so what I think I want is to have a successful career, and work hard for promotions, and establish myself in my industry, and make a good life for myself, and sure it's not curing cancer but it's more realistic

What I mean by that is this: it is a fact that there are significant representation gaps and problems for virtually every marginalized group, which are significantly worse in certain genres and media.

But "there are no good stories about x marginalized group" is not true for virtually every marginalized group, and it is especially true for large marginalized groups like women and Black people.

So you as a reader don't get to blame authors for the fact that you don't read stories about women, or about Black people, or about disabled people, or about asexual people, etc. You may not consciously be avoiding those stories, you may not be spontaneously running into them in the wild, but you are also not making an honest effort to find those stories. Because if you were, you would be finding them.

It's not the fault of capitalism that you don't read about women or Black people. It's not the fault of the publishing industry or TV broadcasters or fanfiction writers.

We talk a lot in fandom about how readers are responsible for what they read in the context of not getting mad at authors for writing something that you don't want them to be writing--but it's also true when it comes to choosing what to read or not read.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

Being aroace myself I find it pretty annoying how there seems to be this general consensus (it's less prevalent here on tumblr fortunately) that there is ONE (1) way to be aroace and that is to never be in any sort of relationship and/or never feel any sort of attraction of any kind as if anything else would somehow invalidate your identity.

I have seen several people with a real nasty attitude, attacking anyone who ships the character they perceive as aroace, or portrays them as being in any sort of romantic or sexual situation, claiming it is "disrespectful towards aroace people" and "erasure".

This might be a hot take but I think it's the exact opposite:

The rabid ship-haters are the actual problem here, indirectly claiming that people on the aroace spectrum are a monolith, reinforcing stereotypes. It usually goes hand in hand with infantilization aswell ("I cannot imagine him having sex at all, he is too pure."). Not to mention that there is a relatively big demographic of aroace artists and writers that express themselves by drawing porn or writing smut about the characters they relate to (scandalous, I know!).

The idea that queerplatonic relationships with sexual and/or romantic elements (especially in fiction) are somehow in direct opposition to aroace identities is baffling to me. An aroace perspective on romance and sex will always remain aroace.

incredible

you say “nail jello to a tree” and most people think jello all by itself.

but if you put any actual thought into what you’re doing and then give it just a little support

well gosh. look what happens.

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.