Silvy's Artfulness

YOU DO IT ON ONE OF THESE! OBVIOUSLY!!!

and that brown end? the hard bit? pencil sharpener. or sharpened with a blade. are you following me? now, attach six of those to a harpy.

I do not like this style. I will never like this style. ... My biggest criticism is that I merely dislike this [art project]. Make me hate it. Make me furious over how much fun you're having with this thing I hate.

As preamble: i am one of the proud 27% who voted “good” on the first poll (didn’t see the second in time to vote). And, in fact, I found the imagery of “claws like sharpened bananas” so provocative i just had to give sharpening a banana a go (plus i remembered i threw some ripe bananas in the freezer like five months ago and thought hey, might as well! bananas, i’m sorry i failed to use you in smoothies as intended; i hope you find peace knowing you were donated to science instead. Rest In Peels.)

For my first attempt, I decided to take the easiest though least faithful-to-the-vision route first: sharpening the banana stem.

I was delighted to discover that a banana stem does fit into a pencil sharpener, so i got grinding.

And grinding.

And grinding.

Things were looking promising at first, but i rotated that thing in the sharpener for over three minutes and after a certain point, it just stopped getting sharper. I guess it became too narrow for the sharpener to like, reach?

(Pictured: the moment my wife asked me what the fuck i was doing to that banana)

But luckily my wife appeared around this time and, after expressing extreme bemusement, she acquiesced to applying her whittling skills to the task. I bestowed upon her a second frozen banana and she got to work.

What a champ.

And…it actually worked!! That bad boy was SHARP!

Like, not “draw blood easily” sharp. But yeah, if claws looking like this ^ were to shoot towards me, i’d be at least mildly afraid. That’s not nothin’ — right? right?

(I’m so good at photoshop)

But at this point i had to admit to myself the thing i’d known all along. Sharpening solely the stem wasn’t actually @pangur-and-grim’s vision.

So i tried, i really tried to sharpen the entire outer part of the banana with a knife sharpener + knife! Maybe it’s because the frozen bananas had thawed too much at this point but. it didn’t go…all that great

Then it was time for my final attempt.

I peeled one of those half-thawed nanners and shaped its soft body (which was the consistency of melty ice cream) with a combination of the knife sharpener and my bare fingers into what i hoped would be a fine point — once it re-froze.

One of them i “sharpened” the tip of; the other i tried to kinda sharpen the side of? By making a very thin ridge all along it. Because if they’re going to be claws they shouldn’t just poke people; they need to slice

Anyway that was an hour ago so i just checked on them and…

tragically, they are not sharp.

BUT i flattened them a little thinner to see if that helps, and now i’ll be patient for once in my life and wait to check on them till morning. Maybe being fully frozen will help

So yeah! The good news is you CAN sharpen a banana stem and that’s gotta count for something. The bad news is that sharpening the actual body of the banana has proven much more challenging.

if i never reblog with an update, it’ll mean I failed, no sharp peeled bananas to present. If i do update….

Well. You’ll get a photo of a razor-sharp banana.

"I'm really sorry that lockdown and the ongoing pandemic interrupted pivotal educational and social/emotional development moments for you. You have an uphill battle towards adjusting to a lot of community based efforts because you experienced a mass trauma during an incredibly important time in your life where you should have physically been around your peers learning to engage in shared community. There is no "but" here, I'm genuinely really sorry. Something many of us consider key points in our interpersonal growth as youths was taken from you, not without reason but without care for its impact on you. I hope you know we are eternally allies in our struggles and if that is something you struggle to know I hope you can learn it someday."

Because so many of the angriest, most disenfranchised people I see on this website are under 24 and I often try to put younger people's behavior in the context of where they might have been 2020. I've seen the impact on my siblings and their peers+friends first hand, all ages 18-24. We've talked about how its impacted them, the isolation, the attachment to the internet, the anxieties and phobias and fears it developed in them due to the pandemic, the political unrest, and the responses to both that we've seen since. I know they're not the only ones and I know how much being marginalized also influences that impact too.

Absolutely insane

She is just. SO fucking OVAL

She has an rotation period of around four hours, which is why she's shaped so weird; it's a fight between the sheer speed and the gravity holding her together.

Earth technically spins a little faster, but Earth is so large compared to her, it maintains its shape. Much the same with the other planets.