Our Lady of Aggressive Indifference

Du Fu once wrote that a man “must read the contents of five cartloads of books” (男儿须读五车书). Real literacy, in other words, is born of wide reading. Without it, a person cannot describe themselves, construct the narrative of their life, or articulate it for others. What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts, and able to activate fresh existence whenever it meets those connections; thus, it continues to live in the latent spaces of the future. When youths encounter such writing, they gain the tools to craft their own narrative to express, create, and realize themselves. Humans achieve agency by composing their lives in their own language. Without a narrative viewpoint on one’s life, there can be no reconstruction of that life, no ethical experience.

ok but if bruce wayne somehow came upon zuko fresh out of banishment he would lose his mind.

Zuko: Do you mind if I wear this blue demon mask?

*Zuko fighting the Joker*

I’m still stuck at the “batman has adoption papers in his utility belt”.

Okay, but you’re missing the best part of this.

iroh: once, i told zuko that he needs to work on his inter turmoil. he screamed at me that he had no such inner turmoil, and then proceeded to go to a cliff during a thunderstorm to scream at God to strike him with lightning

I see your "Alfred and Iroh as tea bros" and raise you "Alfred and Iroh as tea rivals"

hey bruce spent a lot of his bat-study abroad in the far east and has kind of a weeb weapon collection so proposal, what if Bruce appreciates Iroh’s tea

Wait a minute. Batman and Zuko have the same arch-nemesis.

Saw the last comment and my brain would not rest until it happened

For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."

There’s a liquor store near my house that seems to be run exclusively by frat boys. They lovingly curate these bags, which I browsed today while “Oops I Did It Again” played through the store speakers. This is art to me, there is beauty everywhere for those with eyes to see it

Here’s the original, for comparison. And here’s a bit more about the artist and why he created the piece above for MAD Magazine.

Richard Williams on Norman Rockwell:

I think it’s relevant to add that even Norman Rockwell chose to leave his cushy job at the Saturday Evening Post because he wanted to make artwork that was more radical. The Post had rules that wouldn’t allow him to do artwork depicting black people as anything other than servants. The job paid really well and that was a huge reason he continued on. But he wanted change that and so he moved to Look magazine.

I’d just like to briefly say even Rockwell’s seemingly feel good Americana pieces are often more political than people today realize for example

OP the tags!!