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I'm turning 30 this month, and for some reason have become suddenly interested in material possessions. like what if,,,,,,,,my couch was nice. what if my sheets were nice. is this what happens to you??

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What a year this week has been.

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I cannot stress enough how important the thumb-nailing and color study process is, it makes an insaaaane difference in the quality of (at least my) work. Anyways, here’s a finished final for my sci-fi and fantasy illustration class (the prompt was human and alien interaction).

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it's like meeting a celebrity

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And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.

And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.

This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.

Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.

Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/

#reblogging for future reading as the blog post is like part 9 of 9

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You know, I would have pegged you for too sensible/emotionally inert in a good way to be into gender shit enough to think of "terfs" as a thing and not, you know, normal feminists. Like that's the thing, fandom's always had a lot of Feelings Girl crap about gender going on, but you didn't seem super in on it. "Amused detachment" seems integral to your.. brand? persona? Maybe racist of me, but aligning with the "sex is a spectrum" people seems wrong on a *class* basis, too. Oh, well.

I don’t catch and don’t want to interpret what you’re trying to say here about racial and class attitudes toward gender (charitably or not), but I will say that people who make “biological sex is fixed” etc. a core part of their online identities in 2023 are *very* high up on their feelings about it - they’re hardly more emotionally detached than those espousing the other side of the argument. After all, from the pov of the sensible and emotionally inert, the term “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” is purely descriptive of a set of related political and philosophical positions with historicity and context; if any given individual wants to dispute whether they personally subscribe to any/all of the three parts of that phrase, they’re free to do so. I would never say a TERF is a priori not a feminist, though I’ve encountered plenty of opinion-havers who are trans-exclusionary and also not feminist.

#oh dear oh dear

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[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “do not stand at my grave and weep” after the poem by mary elizabeth frye. the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

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#ok this genuinely blew my mind lol

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[Image description: Pacific Rim meme of three screenshots of Hermann Gottlieb pointing at an enormous chalkboard with his cane. Text reads: “In the beginning the bot accounts were spaced apart 24 weeks. Then 12, then 6, then every 2 weeks. In 4 days we could be seeing a bot every 8 hours until they are coming every 4 minutes. We should witness a double event within seven days.”]

#sigh

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dog day afternoon aka the babygirlification of al pacino

#I GUESS

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Weird question of the day: so what is terfs’ actual endgame?

Like I know the middle game is “everyone identifies with their assigned sex and no one modifies their body in ways that alter secondary sex characteristics.” But then what?

They say they’re feminists, so that would imply the actual endgame isn’t just “the destruction of the transcult” but the end of patriarchy.

But how is everyone identifying with their asab and not modifying their body supposed to do that?

It’s very Underpants Gnomes.

Recruit trans people who doubt.

Destroy the transcult!

…..

End patriarchy!

?????

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Lord, i have seen what you've done to the Tories, and I ask this of you [for the GOP].

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Hilma af Klint  Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, nr 1., The Swan, No. 1 1915 © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

#hilma af klint

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It's about to hit us here in Oklahoma and the rest of the southern states that are not used to this level of cold.

Please take this seriously if you live somewhere this is going to impact significantly.

I just sincerely hope texas' power grid doesn't fail them again.

but at least a small blessing is that this isn't bringing much precipitation with it and the worst of it will be the wind.

Anyway. Stay inside, wear layers, and bundle up. Get your cold weather shit prepped now if you haven't yet.

#Eastern Canada also about to get some srs nonsense weather but we know what we’re doing #stay safe folks

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#nature is healing