andros_rex
@andros_rex@lemmy.world
- Comment on Need a tiebreaker 4 hours ago:
Is this like a northern state thing?
The only places I know that don’t do bags are Sprouts (charges 0.10) and Natural Grocers (they give you leftover boxes if you ask.)
I’ve got a bunch, but can’t share - hoping to process them into yarn.
- Comment on Ben Shapiro's sister 1 day ago:
He’s a failed theatre kid. He probably got rejected for a pre-blocking handy.
- Comment on Ben Shapiro's sister 1 day ago:
Yeah - just like how Stellar Blade (vidya game) was the great end to wokeness because it had a (not underage!) girl that sounded like a child but was dressed like a stripper.
- Comment on Ben Shapiro's sister 1 day ago:
“Yes, getting wet is a symptom of BV, it’s very normal the four times that we had sex that you felt like you were sticking your dick in sandpaper.”
Wonder if Abby has an easier time getting some WAP from his wife…
- Comment on Ancient civilizations probably mysteriously died out because they became so advanced they realized what they were and just couldn't anymore. 2 days ago:
The thing with ancient civilizations “mysteriously [dying] out” is often less spectacular - it’s not a singular event, but more that maybe crops fail for a couple years, while some sort of pandemic devastates cities and collapses more centralized economies, so people gradually spread out.
Like, it’s almost a process with multiple factors. Not usually just “whoops! time to officially end Mayan Civilization™”
- Comment on Think they talked about this in the group chat? 2 days ago:
Haven’t confirmed anything, but saw this too.
- Submitted 3 days ago to [deleted] | 20 comments
- Comment on I'm so vegan I could eat a burger and still be a vegan 4 days ago:
There’s an argument that it’s “vegan” to eat lionfish if one lives in say, Florida, because they’re an invasive species extremely disruptive to the environment. Killing them is a good thing and the fact that most things on US coasts won’t eat them is part of why we have the problem anyway.
Even if you go full negative utilitarian to the point where you are concerned with wild animal suffering, killing lionfish is good.
- Comment on I'm so vegan I could eat a burger and still be a vegan 4 days ago:
When I was vegan, a lot of people seemed personally offended by my choices. I know there are preachy vegans, but if you really want to be preached at, you’ll get it by being vegan at any kind of food gathering.
- Comment on And then I'll sell my AI, so everyone can make drawings - EVERYONE can be an artist! And when everyone's an artist... no one will be 4 days ago:
That video looks like designing a video game asset to me, or putting together a map for W40k match. Part of that might be some personal bias because I don’t really have an appreciation for depictional fantasy art.
One thing I’ve noticed with AI art which I think is holding the genre back as a whole is a focus on realism, especially photorealism, or at least staying vary far away from abstraction. Other styles are largely stolen - like, I’m sure it’ll be happy to make a Basquiat of Ashoka Tano or a Klimt “The Kiss” of Anakin and Padme. But that’s the options as far as moving away from photorealism - the style of artists that already have their stuff in museums.
This also seems to tie into the “AI helps people who don’t have the time/ability to develop drawing skills” argument - that the only way many folks can even conceive of making “good art” is getting really good at drawing photorealistic faces.
- Comment on And then I'll sell my AI, so everyone can make drawings - EVERYONE can be an artist! And when everyone's an artist... no one will be 5 days ago:
Couldn’t absence of any process be a process.
I guess, why would you even want art without creativity or meaning or intent? Is the goal of art to simply make something nice to look at? That seems to be the way most of the people touting AI art seem to view it.
I just don’t see AI making Fifty Days at Illiam: Shield of Achilles - which really, that kind of beauty in chaos is something that AI artists should be exploring (and was being explored by machine artists in the 70s and 80s.)
- Comment on And then I'll sell my AI, so everyone can make drawings - EVERYONE can be an artist! And when everyone's an artist... no one will be 5 days ago:
It doesn’t really feel like “art” in the making. When I’ve used AI to create an image, it doesn’t feel different from using search terms and tags on an imagebooru, or trying to find a piece of clip art for a presentation.
I think there might be fruit for exploration in digital collage, training ones on models in creative ways… I’m not really seeing anyone using these tools to really “do art” though. I’m seeing lots of anime girls, porn, ShrimpJesus Facebook slop, hamfisted political comics, and occasionally an “artist” crowing over like a generic image of a tiger. I’d like to see better, but I’m not.
Also - if you like making art, I don’t understand the appeal of taking out “process.” You type some keywords, you adjust them if you don’t like what you see.
This might be more personal preference, but something that I’ve come to enjoy working with paint is that you have to wait for it to dry. That it splatters and doesn’t always go where you want it. That the image you have in your head will not ultimately be the image you get on the canvas. That sometimes it’s a process of weeks of dialogue between you and the canvas.
A lot of AI art enthusiasts do seem fixated on product, not process. I don’t know if you are really an “artist” if there isn’t some element of “process” that you are involved with.
- Comment on This is real 5 days ago:
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 6 days ago:
Not that all stories need to have morals attached to them, but I think showing older teen protagonists who also struggle with PTSD (the threstrals serve almost as a direct “visual” metaphor) as treating the symptoms of someone who is experiencing some sort of severe psychological shock so callously. It’s the kind of thing Harry might think of doing, because what she tortured him with the pen, but you should have your good protagonist consider how that would make them worse than the bad guys, or maybe have Dumbledore or McGonagall give a speech. It’s not that Harry Potter has to be moralistic, but it does try at times?
Shouldn’t they mentally be flashing back to St Mungo’s - to see how fucked up Neville’s parents were - the way that Bellatrix jokes about it is considered fucked or I think Malfoy also does at a point.
Should Hermoine feel some form of subtle guilt, or, even just respect for a fallen foe? I guess the assumption is she’s not dead and magic medicine can make brains better.
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 6 days ago:
Some others from the esoterica.
It’s really tragic how much conspiracy spaces have been overtaken by scary alt right ideologies. I think there was some purposeful targeting of seriously mentally ill and vulnerable people with some of those conspiracies.
I want a return to like Whitney Strieber’s Communion. I would shit myself with delight given the opportunity to attend a conference where people talk about the wars between the Dracos, and whether or not the Greys are on our side, but part of the Dracos plan is making us gay or something. There’s always been the antisemitism on the periphery, but David Icke started making that impossible to ignore.
Spirit Science guy I think still steers that line (Jews are space aliens, just good ones).
Roswell, New Mexico is amazing - the town eats that shit up, the museum is awesome, the McDonald’s is done up like a UFO.
I once went to a lecture on Bigfoot in a used bookstore in a small town, where a man described an encounter where he was terrified by a family of Bigfoot into staying in his RV to a captivated audience of 8 people, including myself, my ex husband (who was not eager in his attendance), the book store owner, and few elderly couples. It was great.
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 6 days ago:
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 6 days ago:
Don’t forget love potions - a girl basically roofies Ron trying to get Harry. Voldemort is evil because his mom drugged his (muggle!) dad, and he left once she stopped drugging him.
Rowling is dealing with sexual trauma, as we know from her eagerness to weaponize it against trans people. But she also seems to have a morality system where anything the Good Guys do is Good, and anything the Bad Guys do is Bad. Whatever happened to Umbridge is something that was so traumatic even the sound can bring her back - that we are showing a character with signs of clear PTSD and think it’s funny to try to make them relive their trauma.
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 6 days ago:
Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling … Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.
‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.
‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.
‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.
‘No … no …’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming …’
Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 6 days ago:
I have taken some classes in religious studies, although I don’t know if I can say I formally “study” it. But it has been a lifelong “special interest.”
I just grabbed Hymnody from the thrift store so haven’t read it yet. But yeah, I read most of them.
As far as criteria, it’s complicated. I get a lot of books by thrifting - there’s usually a lot of bulk generic Protestant stuff, which I don’t usually pick up because one probably could fill an apartment with just shit associated with the Left Behind series or the Purpose Driven Life. (Or I Kissed Dating Goodbye in that above picture, that just got pruned into an art project because I could get another one for $1 pretty easily).
I’m usually seeking ideas that I haven’t encountered yet or things that are so ridiculous and kitsch that they amuse me. (Which goes for my book collection as a whole.)
Ie, the value in that SDA textbook Light Bearers to the Remnant is comparing what SDAs claim about Ellen White and the Kelloggs to mainstream history, and it would be fascinating to write an article on. Or I grabbed a copy of modern reprint book from the 1800s that argued that the wine in the New Testament wasn’t alcoholic, and watching someone contort themselves in knots claiming that Jesus turned water into grape juice is amusing.
The really kitsch stuff I enjoy stoned. I’ll watch videos warning Muslim women of the evils of painting their nails (you can’t clean your hands properly for prayer apparently, because water can’t get to the nail) or Bibleman or those classic Mormon cartoons.
As far as personal beliefs, I’m something like a Discordian ultimately. I don’t really “believe” in her, but I have rituals I do to worship Eris. (She wants me to get stoned, pretend to be Jackson Pollock and commune with her by typing random letters in the YouTube search bar - which is what I want to do anyway. She’s an awesome Goddess like that.)
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 1 week ago:
She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
- Comment on Dolores Umbridge was a JK Rowling Self Insert all this time. 1 week ago:
The implication is that she was sexually assaulted by the centaurs.
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 1 week ago:
The most immediately accessible gems of the collection.
- Comment on RFK JR just told us Elon Musk can't use the toilet unassisted 1 week ago:
I am fairly confident (as are my therapists) that I am somewhere on some sort of spectrum. However, when I looked at the process of getting a formal diagnosis, it was several thousand dollars which would not be covered by insurance and would be a full year at least on a waiting list.
The average of diagnoses for AFAB folks is around 30. Clinicians are not trained in recognizing the way that ASD presents in girls, and are to this day often taught that it doesn’t really present in girls at all (a current gig is tutoring intro psych - this was in a students textbook!)
Self-diagnosis is problematic, but you also must acknowledge that accessing resources to even get evaluated are often completely out of reach.
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 1 week ago:
Oh yeah, if you have old BoM before some of the fun changes. Watchtowers would be fun too, only have got read through PDFs.
(I have training manuals for Mormon missionaries, the textbook on Seventh Day Adventist history as used in Seventh Day Adventist colleges, and watch the Left Behind with Kirk Cameron at least once a year or so.)
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 1 week ago:
No!!! They are so much fun to collect! Keep them and send them to me!!!
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 1 week ago:
Yes, this is a Chick tract, which are real comics you are supposed to give to people to convince them to become (Jack Chick’s specific variety of) Christian.
- Comment on Bobby won’t live long. 1 week ago:
Lisa. (Which I wonder if it inspired the video game Lisa at all - similar themes). It’s horrifically fucked up, but of note is that the doctor doesn’t report the dad for letting his friend fuck his daughter (giving her herpes), because the dad finds Jesus and promises never to do it again. (This is how it often happens to this day in parts of the Southern US - like they pulled it because of bad PR, not because they didn’t stand behind the message: it’s not “wow this was fucked up and we’re sorry to have ever thought this was a good idea” but just “we no longer stock Lisa”
It looks like the internet archive took down their copy, which is concerning. It’s been out of print for decades.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 22 comments
- Comment on i can’t tell if this is edginess or mental illness? i hope she’s doing okay 1 week ago:
Can’t diagnose borderline in teenagers. Personality is not set, hormones are wild, personality disorders aren’t really appropriate models. Hearing voices could be borderline, early schizophrenia (not common in teens, but drug use might play into this), lies for attention… We don’t have enough to suggest that with more evidence.
It tends to be thrown around too freely (like how everyone has NPD now) and misdiagnosed in women too imho. I suspect it’s often actually PTSD (sexual trauma) or ASD.
I’m not a psych, but I’ll happily be called out by one.
- Comment on How long does it take for someone to reach a high level of drawing? 1 week ago:
I think the key is not to think of drawing as a like a skill you can cap out. It’s more that it’s an art form which if it’s really for you, you’ll spend time interrogating and exploring it and finding your own “level.”
Like, if it’s just because you want a medium for story telling because of the comic - if it’s a barrier - a lot of really good webcomics shine because they use other techniques. Or sometimes writers and artists work together.
Something that helped me go from stick figures to things recognizable as animals and my environment was a drawing course from the Smithsonian (online during Covid - I think they still have regular courses though). That kind of formal instruction helps you focus on what is is essential and gives you opportunities for specific feedback. Being encouraged to invest in things like charcoal, pencils, the right kind of paper - these things are necessary but then sometimes part of learning to enjoy a hobby is spending $5 on a pencil.
