(biologist - artist - queer)

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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月10日

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  • Are you an artist? I don’t know many artists with your perspective, but I don’t want to say artists never have this perspective.

    As someone with higher education in studio arts, I can’t speak for all artists. But I can say, in my experience, the cognitive skills that allow an artist to break a subject down into base, renderable components aren’t particularly burdened by familiarity. Like, I don’t think it’s harder to realistically paint my face, or my spouse’s face, etc. than it is to paint anyone else’s face. Part of that is just that it’s generally hard to render faces realistically without adding stylistic choices or bridging over the tricky parts, whether the face is familiar or not. Again, just my experience.

    I also don’t think realism or “visually accuracy” is necessary for a good self portrait. Sometimes the self portrait is an introspective exercise. Sometimes a self portrait is not representative of our physical self at all, or is fully abstract.

    This self portrait is lovely, especially since I feel like (read: don’t know for sure) based on the title that he tried to capture his expressive emotions during a vulnerable moment. It’s raw.


  • As an education professional: what the hell, dude? It’s not unfortunate that we aren’t just dropping struggling students without first carefully examining why they’re not succeeding.

    You might be right that you can’t let some students detract from the class for other students, but the solution there is advocating for better funding and more staff to be able to give every student what they need, whether they’re above or below the expectation for their age.

    Saying it’s “unfortunate” that students don’t fail (read: ruin their whole god damn lives) as often anymore is blaming our most vulnerable YOUTH for the systemic problems of our society. It’s not their job to be what the school environment wants them to be, they don’t even have a choice about whether or not they are there. It’s our (as educators, and as tax paying and voting community members) responsibility to make sure they get the education they need to be functional members of our society.

    We even have huge bodies of research to reinforce this. It’s not a secret that the school environment excels at making nice workers, not critical-thinking and well-adjusted adult humans.

    Take it up with the school board! Take it up with the local, state, and federal government! Take it up with the voters!


  • The whole point is that we still don’t know what Lucy actually looked like, and therefore whenever we depict her we are “filling in the blanks” with our own interpretations. In the past, we didn’t know whether she was likely to be covered in hair or not, but almost every depiction showed her covered.

    The author of the article, who has a PhD and is the chair of a college’s interdisciplinary humanities department, makes the point that when we exclusively depicted her covered in hair when we didn’t know whether or not she was covered in hair, we were projecting our standards of modesty onto her. We also idealized her as a mother, as exemplifed by her depiction with protective and warm body language toward fictional children and male partners. These are aspects that various artists, researchers, and journalists projected onto a skeleton, not truths about Lucy as an individual.

    When it was revealed that Lucy, in fact, was likely not covered in hair, and instead likely walked around naked and uncovered, we did not immediately revise these depictions. They disrupt the previously held projections and interfere with the narrative of Lucy as a “perfect mother” by modern standards-- not because she can’t be both naked and a good mother in an absolute sense, but because these are disparate and conflicting signifiers in our modern society. In essence, it’s harder to solidifiy her illustration as “the mother of all humans” to an audience of modern Westerners if she can’t be depicted with “chastity and modesty”, because we strongly associate those characteristics with good motherhood.

    It is, therefore, a media analysis of the depictions of Lucy, it’s not about Lucy herself. It’s about how we project onto Lucy, and what that says about the people doing the projecting.

    Of course, humans societies that are alive today are also valuable examples in the process of self reflection. But ignoring the observations made by the author and other researchers is like saying we don’t need to analyze media (books, movies, TV shows) that depict society, because real society is right there!



  • The literature on PTFEs illustrates that it is, at best, uncertain whether there are health harms relating to contact and ingestion. Most of the studies struggle with confounds, controls, and sample sizes because almost literally everyone has been exposed to PTFEs. Toxicity researchers would not definitively agree that it is “completely harmless”.

    The other commenter is right, also, that PFOA and GenX (the chemical, not the generation) are more evidently harmful and both involved in, and released from, the creation of PTFE.

    Just throwing this out here in case someone is like “wait, IS Teflon fine???”


  • Why would we even want that, though? Harris is a cop, and her presidency would likely be just as impotent and mediocre as Biden’s. Like Biden, she’s going to bend to corporate interests, please no one in the interest of pleasing everyone, not make or advocate for any major protective reforms to the democratic process (ranked choice voting, etc.), and try to take the high road against directly calling out fascism. When will the DNC get it through their heads that their departmental politics and seniority process shouldn’t decide the president-- the people should?

    Also, I find it immoral of them to play a horrible game of “switcheroo” with Harris and Biden. It feels like what you’re saying is, they know she’s unpopular and would lose an election, but if we switch her in for Biden through this presidency then everyone will see how great she is! We don’t need an election, we just need the great and powerful DNC to plan our presidents for us!!!

    To clarify in case it isn’t obvious, I am a trans, disabled leftist. But this is EXACTLY why Trump is so popular and why everyone hates the DNC.




  • It must be different in different places. I went from a renter in one area, to an owner in the same area, to a renter again in a different area in the period of 5ish years (long story).

    Rent in the first area was about the same cost for a two bedroom, two bath, 1000 sq ft apartment as the entire mortgage on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1200 sq ft house, including principle, interest, and taxes. The only reason people would rent there is because they don’t have the money for a down payment.

    When we left that area, we could have become landlords and rented the house out. We could have easily gotten twice the entire mortgage in rental income, but we felt that being a landlord was unethical (especially since we were relatively wealthy for that area, although we made less than the US median family income). We sold the house and broke even.

    Now, we live in a much higher COL area. It’s true here that renting is much cheaper than buying, but that’s because you can’t get a SFH for less than about $1.5 million here. My rent on my 1 bed, 1 bath, 700 sq ft apartment is more than twice my mortgage in my previous area. Our incomes have increased, now we make slightly above the median family income. But our leftover at the end of the month honestly went down a ton. If we weren’t here to get an education, we’d be gone by now.

    Just saying… As someone who has both rented and owned, I definitely feel more like I’m shoveling money into a fire as a renter. Owning was the best financial situation I’d ever been in.



  • I feel like this is true if the reader is meant to have the perspective of the person who feels that something is magic (the Hobbits, in the example from your video). However, not all magic in fiction is like this, and sometimes the reader is supposed to mostly have the perspective of Galadriel, or to gain her perspective over time.

    An example is Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The reader has the perspective of the Hobbits at first, because that is the perspective of the main character. But the story has themes of “lifting the veil” of magic, and by the end both the main character and the reader have a more similar perspective to Galadriel.

    I guess what I mean is, I agree with you and the video’s author in large part… but like… to broadly say that magic “should” be used in literature in a certain way ignores how it can be used in different ways to great effect!



  • stoneparchment@possumpat.iotoMemes@lemmy.mlThis is the way
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    3 个月前

    I feel like I’ve seen this take a lot more in the past ~5 years than I did before. Not just that zoos are unethical, but that any animal ownership (or really interaction of any kind) is inherently abusive.

    You’re certainly entitled to feel however you want about animal ownership and act accordingly, but personally I feel like it’s honestly kind of a weird take?

    Humans are obviously not the only species that develops symbiolotic relationships with other organisms (in a diversity of power dynamics), but we are also not the only species who take on specifcally ownership or shepherd roles for other species (like spiders with frog pets, or fungus farmer ants, among many many other examples). Thus, the ontological position this opinion must operate from is that humans are somehow distinct and superior to nature, such that we have separate and unique responsibilities not to engage in mutualistic ownership with other organisms, on the basis that like, we’re somehow “above” that? That we’re so enlightened and knowledgeable that we exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms?

    Of course, a lot of our relationships to animals can be described as harmful in other terms without needing to take this specific stance. Like, our relationship with many agricultural animals can be critiqued through the harm done to their individual well-beings and through the harm their propagation does to the global environment. Or irresponsible pet owners can be critiqued for how their unwillingness to control the reproduction or predatory abilities of their pets can harm local ecosystems, like an introduced invasive species might. Or valid criticisms of many zoos when they prioritize profits over animal welfare, rehabilitation, ecosystem restoration, and education. Or that the general public picking up wild animals is a problem because it disturbs their fragile ecosystems and traumatizes them, especially when done on the large scale of human populations (but distinctly not for ecological study, wild animal healthcare, education, etc., like Steve Irwin et. al) But none of these are specific criques of the mutualistic ownership relationship itself as much as problems with the way we handle that relationship.

    Idk, I’m interested to understand your opinion, especially if it has detail I’m missing beyond “we shouldn’t have pets, zoos, or farms because we’re better than that”!


  • it is definitely still a problem, the “naturalness” of the finish is irrelevant

    even burning wood itself releases compounds that can be harmful (hence why we advise against breathing in smoke)

    I second the idea from a separate poster that if you want to burn, seal, and add more burns-- just use a solvent to remove the seal before you do the second set of burns. Or burn it all at once before sealing



  • "if you can’t afford to leave, or you or your family have medical needs and can’t relocate, or if all your friends and family and social spheres are here, or if your job is context dependent, or if you’re undocumented, or if your spouse or family disagrees with your desire to move, or if you’re enrolled in in-state college, or if you’re elderly and have lived here your whole life, or if you have a farm, or if your ancestral home is nearby, or if you’re homeless, or if you have a strong sense of duty to your community, or if you’re a military service member, or if you’re a kid…

    …that’s on you!"

    edit: also, many marginalized people know and will tell you-- there isn’t a place on this earth for people like us with 100% safety from violence



  • I know you’re at least partially talking about labels in general, but since this is in reply to a poll about queer identities, I am taking your comment to be related to LGBTQ+ labels.

    I don’t think most individuals with an LGBTQ+ identity think of themselves as only that identity. Race, class, religion, ability, and other dimensions of identity ultimately combine to create the whole person. In fact, most discourse surrounding identities involves some analysis of intersectionality, as coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. In essence, she illustrated how being both black and a woman brings different experiences and struggles than being a white woman or black man. As an extension, the queer identity a person has and the other identities a person has interact to inform their experiences in ways that are different than having any one of those identities alone.

    If some people externally equate a queer person’s whole self and their queer identity, that isn’t the fault of the queer person. In fact, this is another reason why having a label (as inadequate as it might objectively be) can be useful. Queer people need those labels so they can maneuver in society to build coalition and obtain equal rights. If we squabbled over the differences between subjective experiences of queerness, our groups would be smaller and have less bargaining power.

    I might be way off about what you meant in your statement, but i figured it was worth throwing this out here anyway!