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hope is a skill

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"pasta only fills you up with empty calories" have you considered that it also fills me with love

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if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.

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Literally what did olivia laing say about loneliness leading to more loneliness. Loneliness being so repulsive that people sense it from you and stay away. Crazy crazy

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Build an affinity group. An affinity group is a small group of 5 to 20 people who work together autonomously on direct actions or other projects. Affinity groups generally consist of like minded people who come together to get something done. If you already have an affinity group, link and cluster those groups!

Skill up. Delinking from capitalism and colonial apparatuses requires us to learn how to do things for ourselves and each other beyond buying, selling, working, or asking the state to help us. From self and collective defense, to gardening, building bikes, unschooling, and caring for each other- we can learn a skill and share a skill. We can change how we value skills and dismantle hierarchies of class and ableism.

Establish and practice good security culture. Security culture is necessary to survive state repression. We can stop a lot of infiltration and disinformation in its tracks by improving our ways of communicating and navigating conflict. We can still be horizontal and transparent without sacrificing security and safety.

Practice transformative and restorative justice. Strong communities make police and prisons obsolete. We can change our culture to prevent violence and abuse. We can build up our capacities to confront and resolve conflicts. We can strengthen our ties and detoxify our relationships so harm has no space to grow in our communities.

Mutual Aid. Start a mutual aid group and provide necessary support to those who are in need. Mutual aid organizing can ensure our communities are not dependent on corporations and the state. Shift your use of resources to things you can grow and make or procure from others in resistance. Build networks of aid and resources beyond capitalism.

Mutual defense. From arms training to street tactics to bystander interventions and safety teams, we need to have the skills and resources to defend our communities from fascist attacks on our people, non-human beings, and lands.

Build and sustain conflict infrastructure. Conflict Infrastructure is any structure we organize helps us be more effective in our fights. This is infrastructure that goes beyond solely providing awareness and services and instead builds our capacity to wage actual resistance. From community gardens and collectively coordinated farms to infoshops and independent media/communications.

Open squats for unsheltered folx. Rent is theft. Private property is colonial violence upon the land. Abolish rent and private property. Rematriate lands to original caretakers. Create spaces to live beyond landlords.

Defend and reclaim ancestral lands. Because #landback means ending colonial occupation and restoring Indigenous stewardship of our ancestral lands. Regenerate our sacred relations, and all that entails spiritually and materially, with our original homelands. Liberate the sacred.

Reparations. Seize what has been stolen from Black and Indigenous Peoples and liberate it back.  Radical redistribution is necessary.

Shut shit down. Intervene in critical infrastructure at the points where capitalism and colonialism are at their most vulnerable. Seize the streets, factories, ports, fracking pads, pipelines, power stations, smash the borders, be smart and be creative! It’s also an effective way to target those industries perpetuating climate change.

Be fiercely intersectional. ‘Cause we’re not taking those old shitty behaviors with us. Fuck anti-blackness, fuck orientalism, fuck islamaphobia, fuck anti-semitism, fuck transphobia, fuck heteropatriarchy, fuck white supremacy, fuck imperialism, fuck ableism, fuck hierarchy, fuck racism, fuck citizenship, fuck privilege, fuck everything fucked up!

Practice Radical Self & Collective Care. To remain dangerous to power we must care for ourselves and each other. Learn common triggers and how to communicate without being fucked up. Learn to communicate your needs, boundaries, and wants effectively and nontoxicly – remember that folks in the struggle and resistance have the hardest time accessing resources for mental and spiritual care. Movement work can be unsustainable to those with many experiences of settler policing and violence triggers – find ways to communicate and negotiate group norms and boundaries that accommodate peoples’ needs if reasonable. Identify toxic communication patterns and learn / create ways to dismantle them and communicate in more healthy and less harmful ways.Be honest about your limitations and care for yourself and each other. The christianized, capitalized colonial state has taught us to never rest or heal. Reject any attempts at coercing people to go beyond their limits. Radical self-care keeps us safe and invulnerable when consistently engaging in agitating governability by the state.

Make everything accessible for everyone. Reject ableism and objectification of our bodies and lives, establish community care networks with people equipped to provide first aid and care support to a full spectrum of needs. Challenge ableism in our language, how we organize, and how we value each other. We are all enough.

Abolish Rape Culture. Study rape and rape culture and how it relates to the desecration of sacred lands. Transform our culture and practices around dating, humor, relationships, sexuality, consent, parties, sex labor, and play to abolish rape culture. Hold mactivists, rapists, abusers, opportunists, and creeps accountable. Center consent and healthy relationships in everything we do everywhere.

Spread radical and militant joy. We can fuck shit up while we dance, sing, party, laugh, play, wonder, have deep conversations, tell stories, make art, make love, make magic, make brilliance, make awesomeness, and have fun.

#anarchism

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So I posted a silly doodle yesterday on twitter and now people think it was a tutorial. So I got upset and made an actual tutorial so noone says I halfassed the yesterday's one 😡😡😡

Here you go: ~How I draw braids~ 🩷🙏

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YOUR MISSION:

the next time you enjoy a meal in your home, eat it viscerally and animalistically. this need not obligate eating it "viciously" or "violently", though the interpretation is left up to the agent.

if it's a sandwich, let it fall apart. if it's not a finger food, make it one. rip it apart. food sustains us. the matter you ingest becomes you, the process need not be beautiful. embrace this extant part of the universe into yourself in the way that feels most natural to you. approach the meal like you've never seen what humans eat and you werent instructed on what to do with it.

this action is worth 10 points.

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Every January I check in on which emulators are currently #1 🏆

I reviewed Emulation Wiki and updated my "Top Emulators" guide with the latest & greatest emulators.

So are there any updates from 2023? SameBoy is now #1 for GB/GBC. Other than that, there are no changes in the top emulator for every other system.

Note that the graphic I attached is simplified for social media. If you check out my guide, I offer different recommendations for advanced users and people with old/slow machines.

I put (*) for RetroArch since it's a multi-system emulator. Different cores power its video game emulators. And my guide states which core is recommended per system.

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website

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On this day one year ago, I was fired from Crumbl Cookies because my grandfather suddenly died and I cried when I found out and was on the clock. They make you sign a waiver to not talk about the recipes that lasts one year after your termination. Well guess what babes. That day, is today. RIP Nanu, you’ve been missed. But for anyone who likes the Chocolate Chip Cookies or the Iced Sugar Cookies, check out the recipes in the links. Feel free to ask about other recipes, it’s been a year but some things are just reskinned versions of these lol. Good Luck and Happy Baking.

Edit: Here is a Master List of all the recipes I have been able to remember thus far; I will be updating it as I am able!

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This is one of my favorite bits of incredibly clever fuckery that goes on behind the scenes of 3D modeling, and I have an intense compulsion to talk about it right now.

If you've never seen the true geometry of the merc models, you're probably wondering what the hell is going on with the one on the left. Minecraft Steve 3D-printed looking motherfucker.

Believe it or not, it's the exact same model as the one on the right. The light is just being instructed to interact differently with its polygons! The one on the left is being given flat shading, while the one on the right is being given smooth shading.

The mercs have far fewer polygons than you probably think they do. And that's not just because the game was made in 2007! Most stylized faces probably aren't going to have many more polygons than this, especially faces designed for video games. Thanks to the magic of smooth shading, they don't need more than that.

So how the hell is this possible?

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED! Class is now in session!

For our example, let's focus on this area of his ear.

On the left, with the flat shading, you can see that there's a pretty stark difference in the perceived color between those surfaces. But on the right, with the smooth shading, it's... well... smooth!

To understand how smooth shading works, first you have to understand what a 'surface normal' is. They are also just called 'normals'.

See, a single polygon can only ever be perfectly flat no matter how you arrange the vertexes. If you have three vertexes making up a triangle, and you fill in the space between those vertexes to make a face, that face is completely flat. It doesn't matter whether the vertexes are 2 millimeters or 2 miles apart from each other; the plane that intersects all 3 points can never be curved.

In simple terms, the normal of a polygon is defined as the direction in which the face is pointed. Because the face is perfectly flat, this direction can always be expressed with a single line.

On the left is a simple example of the surface normals of a cube. Each blue line represents the direction that its face is pointing.

On the right, the red arrows are pointing to the normals of these ear polygons. In these two clusters of two polygons, you can see there's a pretty big difference between the angle of the normals. This means that there's going to be a big difference in the way light bounces off of them - and that's why it looks so blocky when we just let it be flat shading.

On the left, I've illustrated how light is going to bounce off of each polygon the same way, all the way across that polygon.

If we GREATLY increased the number of polygons, we could make it look a lot smoother, but we don't want to do that. More polygons equals significantly more work for the computer, so the solution is a little concept called 'interpolation', which I've crudely illustrated on the right. See how the angle of each light bounce is ever so slightly different as we move from one normal to the other?

Instead of just calculating the light the exact same way across a whole polygon, smooth shading also looks at the normals of the polygons around it. The rendering engine then pretends that the surface is curved, based on some very complex math.

I don't fully understand it myself. But I imagine that it is probably grossly oversimplifying it to say that it's taking the average of the two normals. Hopefully that description kind of gives you an idea of what it's doing, though.

Imagine if you took a sheet of paper and lightly pressed it over the two angled polygons to try to give it a bit more of a curved surface for light to bounce off of. That's what smooth shading does, but instead of using a piece of paper, it uses whatever material is defined for those polygons.

And that's just a little bit of the magic of shaders in 3D rendering! It is shocking just how much of a render's quality depends entirely on the way light works. There is a whole bunch of stuff happening that honestly has very little to do with the quality or poly count of the model's geometry - it's the shaders and the light simulation that are doing the REALLY heavy lifting, and that's why RTX technology in particular is such a huge fucking deal!

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Class dismissed!

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If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

https://www.211.org/

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#cops

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E.J Sue’s “Mechaforce” is one of the few “How to Draw” books I would point newbies looking to get into drawing robots to. It emphasizes knowing the basics (Very difficult to draw a robot properly if you can’t use perspective) and fundamental shapes and even arm techniques, and gives a neat insight into how mechanical forms work in art. 

These are just a few of the examples from the anatomy section of the book. It’s currently on sale on Amazon and worth checking out, though I will note it is not a “be all end all” resource, thankfully you can fill in your knowledge gaps elsewhere. 

Also since this is popping off please consider taking a look at his Tumblr! right here at E.J Sue Art 

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THERE IS. a website. that takes 3D models with seams and pulls it apart to make a plushie pattern and informs you where things need to be edited or darts added for the best effect. and then it lets you scale it and print off your pattern. and I want to lose my MIND because I've lost steam halfway through so many plushie patterns in the mind numbing in betweens of unwrapping, copying all of the meshes down as pieces, transferring those, testing them, then finding obvious tweaks... like... this would eradicate 99% of my trial and error workflow for 3D models to plushies & MAYBE ILL FINALLY FINISH SCREAMTAIL...

#plushie #stuffy #plushies #stuffed animal