#We Can't Study

[oratokyosaigunda]

Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai series banner

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

You keep telling yourself that Namari.

[im-okay-unless-im-not]

Super proud of my bf for working on a stem erasmus+ project on top of teaching and tutoring and having a robotics group and free finals prep for his students and keeping it together and not breaking down every five minutes

Couldn't be me tho

[palskippah]

Hi!

I drew this because I was feeling really sad, but it works as a Bowser's birthday thing too woooo!!

[inkskinned]

the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[collophora]

Found a cool color palette. Might finish it later. (Probably not.)

[neversetyoufree]

She can't keep getting away with this

[happyk44]

Jason who immediately loses respect for people who don't own up to their mistakes vs Annabeth who would rather die than admit she made a mistake

[bookwyrminspiration]

there are so many words that I have only ever heard from my professor's mouth. if he hasn't told us and it's not in the two (2) pdf sources his institution has provided, i'm fucked

[hazelelel]

m o r e s n a p e

[its-a-me-mango]

the two fan that were meant to be jokes but didnt end up being serious

Guys is it possible for a 1920's mad scientist girly and a 2020's TV head to be friends? (it is not)

[chemblrish]

2 December 2023

I caught the cold, so I'm working from bed today. I hope it'll pass over the weekend :/ I have some very important plans for Monday and I really don't want to delay them.

My exercise for the next inorganic chem lab seems fun but I'll also have to work with HBF4 which I am not thrilled about lol (this mfer literally EATS GLASS). Most importantly though, I passed the first pchem test!! :') I got a decent score, especially considering the fact over half my year failed. I know I could've done better but I also know this test was genuinely hard + I see where I made mistakes - and that's always a meaningful takeaway

[the-way-astray]

you could theoretically read the series in the order 8.5, 9.5, 9 instead of 8.5, 9, 9.5 because books 9 and 9.5 take place parallel to each other but also sophie and keefe never interact between them so hypothetically there should be no difference (and no spoilers either way).

another thing you could theoretically do is alternate between reading books 9 and 9.5. a chapter here, a chapter there. it would be like reading a longer version of unlocked, with the povs alternating between sophie and keefe.

in fact, in theory, there could be a possibility of even less spoilers if you read it 8.5, 9.5, 9. for example, if vespera makes an appearance in unraveled, and you didn't know she would die yet, it could be a really cool way to see her last minute and have an extra layer about her before her death. whereas if vespera makes an appearance in unraveled and you already know she's going to die, it feels a little more empty. not completely meaningless, but like. kinda empty. like if vespera hints at a larger plan or something in unraveled and you didn't know she was going to die, you'd be super excited to see this plan shake out, but now that we know she's going to die something like that wouldn't hit as hard.

[dustykneed]

Hello! Random whipper snipper! Share a WIP of your work!

ooh, with pleasure. six the musical araleyn fanart? in the year 2k24? more likely than you think xDD

i realize this looks finished, but technically i'm still deciding whether to add a background or not lol. still, for the sake of sharing a proper WIP, here's a line or two from an araleyn brainworm WIP that i started reworking yesterday (mild tw for religious guilt and period-typical internalized homophobia from aragon's pov):

She remembers sharing her bed with Anne at Henry's behest, remembers the nights of tossing and turning and trying not to think about Anne asleep next to her-- remembers waking up to dark hair spilling across her pillow and the press of blood-warm bosoms against her own, softer than sin, as hot as the Devil, remembers lying still as death, mouthing prayers into the heat of Anne's neck like an act of penance.

[aimasup]

throws up my hands in mock resignation but also a hint of frustration Okay Valentino is a cool villain I guess

He's like. Genuinely unsettling. Wish the show struck a better balance with his character sometimes (like sometimes when he's onscreen I have to skip over because I feel queasy and sometimes he's so unsubtle he feels more like a prop than a guy who's going to be a Huge Deal in s2)