syllyism

[syllyism]

💌 New mail: from Tsuzuru! 🍰

“For my birthday, I’d love if you checked out the contributor applications for our storybook zine! There are 11 days left, don’t forget. I hope you’re having a great day too!” 🧚‍♂️🐛

Contributor Applications can be accessed here! 💐

#ohh you wanna join this soo bad #a3 #a3! #act addict actors

[syllyism]

for me this is a weird zone to be in because i do avoid making online friends who like hazbin & hp for example because its easier to mute or soft block these topics, but i do have friends both online & irl that enjoy politically questionable media/celeb figures like taylor swift (my favourite carbon criminal and epitome of white feminism)

its definitely a little too chronically online to expect everyone to cater to a strict set of morals because that requires tedious and often contradictory parameter-outlining (i think genshin is a good eg for this - as slayful as their doomed yuri in honkai 3 is, or how cool the gameplay, the company has a shady track record, refuses to draw melanated people & embodies gacha capitalism).

it can be alienating to completely cut off people who like one or two things that are problematic and not a good way to approach relationships, but i do get this gets murky when it comes to non-fandom related discussions. at the end of the day online at least, curating ur timeline via blocking is a solution

i have no point to this i just wanted to type and procrastinate work

Care to explain why you have mutuals who like irredeemable media (Hazbin Hotel, Harry Potter, Attack on Titan, Captive Prince, etc.)? If they're not your mutuals, you're at the very least in the same circles as them. Maybe do some self reflection about what sorts of people you choose to associate with...

what

#syllysplains

[syllyism]

me and my besties (natsugumi) love nonbinary baddies (ibuki)

#a3 #a3! #act addict actors #kics #ibuki #syllyart

[syllyism]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

[syllyism]

archiving for future research

"Discarded shells from restaurants and hotels are being used to restore damaged oyster ecosystems, promote biodiversity and lower pollution in the city’s bays...

Nestled in between the South China Sea and the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong has been seen historically as an oyster hotspot. “They have been supporting our livelihood since ancient times,” says Anniqa Law Chung-kiu, a project manager at the Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Hong Kong. “Both oysters and their shells are treasures to humans.”

Over the past five decades, however, the city’s sprawling urban development, water pollution, as well as the over-harvesting and frequent seafloor dredging by the lime industry – which uses the crushed shells to make construction material – have destroyed Hong Kong’s oyster habitats and made the waters less hospitable for biodiversity.

The more oyster colonies falter, the worse the problem gets: oysters are filter feeders and purify water by gobbling up impurities. Just one Hong Kong oyster can filter up to 200 litres of water a day, more than any other known oyster species. But decades of rapid industrialisation have largely halted their water-purifying services.

The depletion of Hong Kong’s natural oyster reefs also affects the ability of local farmers to sustainably cultivate their oysters in a healthy environment, denting the reputation of the city’s 700-year oyster farming tradition, designated by Unesco as an “intangible cultural heritage”.

Inhabitants of the coast feel abandoned, says Ken Cheng Wai-kwan, the community leader of Ha Pak Nai on Hong Kong’s Deep Bay, facing the commercial city of Shenzhen in China. “This place is forgotten,” Cheng says. “Oysters have been rooted here for over 400 years. I ask the question: do we want to lose it, or not?”

A group of activists and scientists are taking up the challenge by collecting discarded oyster shells and recycling them to rebuild some of the reefs that have been destroyed and forgotten in the hope the oysters may make a comeback. They’ve selected locations around the island where data they’ve collected suggests ecosystems still have the potential to be rebooted, and there are still enough oyster larvae to recolonise and repopulate reefs. Ideally, this will have a positive effect on local biodiversity as a whole, and farming communities.

Farmers from Ha Pak Nai were among the first to hand over their discarded shells to the TNC team for recycling. Law’s team works with eight oyster farmers from Deep Bay to recycle up to 10 tonnes of shells every year [over 22,000 pounds]. They collect an average of 870kg every week [over 1,900 pounds] from 12 hotels, supermarkets, clubhouses and seafood restaurants in the city, including some of its most fashionable establishments. About 80 tonnes of shells [over 176,000 pounds] have been recycled since the project began in 2020.

Restaurants will soon be further incentivised to recycle the shells when Hong Kong introduces a new fee for waste removal – something that is routine in many countries, but only became law in Hong Kong in July and remains controversial...

Preliminary data shows some of the restored reefs have started to increase the levels of biodiversity, but more research is needed to determine to what extent they are contributing to the filtering of the water, says Law.

Scientists from the City University of Hong Kong are also looking to use oyster shells to increase biodiversity on the city’s concrete seawalls. They hope to provide tiny, wet shelter spots around the seawall in which organisms can find refuge during low tide.

“It’s a form of soft engineering, like a nature-based solution,” says Charlene Lai, a research assistant on the team."

-via The Guardian, December 22, 2023

[syllyism]

hate that "phases of genocide" thing because many peoples around the world have been through those stages multiple times because genocides don't just mean "complete extermination the first time." It means "we, the power-hungry, will keep doing this series of mass oppression through various mechanisms til we succeed in our goal of shattering our victims and we'll deny that it's ever been done before to them or anyone else as benefits us politically while maintaining genocidal conditions short of all-out campaigns of extermination unless and until we can accomplish that too politically."

westerns keep pointing to the fucking phases like "oh my god, it's almost there, we're running out of time!!" You're always out of time. There's never time or reason for inaction in the face of genocide. Y'all just enjoy the excuse to not burn down the extractive, omnicidal status quo. People are suffering and dying, just not in numbers or ways the comfortable deem actionable. It takes a certain amount of cinematic suffering for westerners to be willing to riot and maybe, maybe fight a few cops or troops or politicians. Meanwhile people are in hell because of inaction and doing what they can to organize and survive and resist it while having to hold the too-soft hands of their oppressors and explain "yes, we mean this too has to stop, and you, too, can help." But then I remember y'all dropped the mask a few years ago, embraced fascism and eugenics wholeheartedly, and I wonder why I even bother speaking at all. Even the ostensible anarchists of the so-called west dropped the mask and embraced eugenics as of a couple years ago & I have to remind myself that people will always liberate themselves in spite of their oppressors and despite those feckless fairweather wretches who call themselves allies. What are you doing right now to help? What comforts have you shed for others? There are still some handfuls of people performing direct actions while masked and there are still significant amounts of people masking consistently. There will always be some willing to reject excuses to embrace or maintain the status quo. People will find others truly in community with them, who are willing to do the work when called, instead of wasting time demanding yet more education and reasons for why they should join the fight against genocide. Solidarity within and between communities militantly determined to pursue liberation is what wins out.

[syllyism]

do tell us abt your beef with "cottagecore" and "dark academia" tho :eyes emoji:

let's strap in real quick while i try to sum up all of my issues with these:

this is, in big part, due to a great distaste i have for this current of everything needing to have an 'aesthetic' (which is just hyper consumerism) and it operates like fast fashion. it's all performative and this idea that you need to have only one 'aesthetic' and stick to it is absurd and beyond stupid. this article by maria popova, which references a famous susan sontag article, sums it up well.

i'll go in order. so, dark academia.

the whole ethos and pull of the 'aesthetic' is this fantasy of studying literature in an "old" university, where you talk about art, beauty, literature and it's taken very seriously. the typical visual of the aesthetic is that you're studying at some ivy league school, oxford or cambridge, ect ect. this really blew up during the beginning of the pandemic where we were all attending classes over Zoom and asynchronously, i noticed. there's also this idea that there's something wrong or rotten going on under the surface, something deadly but very very serious and beautiful: at least that's how it's marketed in publishing.

the whole thing is founded on extreme elitism, classicism, intensely Eurocentric and sniffs of white supremacy. it's wish fulfillment based on something pretty terrible at the core and honestly: you really don't need to attend some ivy league school or older university to study literature. you can do that anywhere. a good article that goes into greater detail.

if you want to look at the evils that happen in any university setting, you can do that easily by looking at the sexual assault rates, the racism and violent misogyny and sexual violence of Greek Life on campuses, and racism. not hard, honestly. happens at elite and private schools, happens at public universities.

now cottagecore.

i think this is partially born out of a desire to escape corporate america and the exploitative labor force (which i sympathize with) and wanting to grow your own food and plants, which a lot of us started doing during the beginning of the pandemic. however: people do not realize that to work a farm or cottage is work. to grow your own food, mind your animals, and take care of your own home away from greater society is work and the way that wlw and lesbians have been 'designated' to this "aesthetic" reeks of traditional gender roles being forced on us. the images that may come up when you think of cottagecore also uh

ekes of a colonialist wet dream. it also rubs elbows with the wishes of the alt-right and where they want to force women back into.

this article details it well.

both of these popularized aesthetics reek of elitism, misogyny, and white supremacy but fake progressive.

this article also goes into the specifics of the issues with this brand of aesthetic:

Kimberly Jenkins, the founder of the Fashion and Race Database and Artis Solomon, thinks it’s an interesting time for this aesthetic to be embraced, following the return of many people to the urban environments they fled. She notes that much of the allure of many of these handcrafted things — made slowly and with integrity — is wrapped in layers of moral purity.

i can see the appeal in these two, but there's so much brushing off and ignoring of the ugly roots of these two (along with so many other "aesthetics")

my other beef with these two is how they've played a part in how now publishing is marketing literature based on tropes and aesthetics and it pisses me off because trying to tell me, "oh it's dark academia," "enemies to lovers" "very cottagecore" not only doesn't tell me jack shit about the book, it's shallow as hell. just because something is 'dark academia' doesn't mean i'm going to like it or enjoy it. same thing if you tell me, "it has lesbians."

great! is there literally anything else you can tell me about this piece of media. that's not enough for me to go on to spark my interest.

the performance of online aesthetics on places like tiktok, instagram, and twitter reeks not only of 2014 tumblr, it reeks of fast fashion. it's all consumerism and consumption.

[syllyism]

The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children. Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.

Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.

[syllyism]

Every time i purchase a moderately expensive item the Karl Marx on my shoulder is like "For shame... you purchase yet another pair of jeans when you have 5 already at home, you despicable commodity fetishist? In my time, a man with five outfits would consider himself blessed beyond measure, and yet you want for more, while there are children starving in the world??" to which the second Karl Marx on my other shoulder says "Objection! Those 5 pairs of jeans all wildly uncomfortable or have holes in the ass, due to the decline of clothing quality driven by the fast fashion industry, unfortunately making this purchase a necessity... Plus, by purchasing a slightly more expensive pair of jeans from an independent brand, seeking quality over 'brand recognition', they are deliberately trying to avoid engaging in conspicuous consumption!" to which the third Karl Marx clinging to my back like that beetle from Doctor Who says "Remember, my friend; the less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt — your capital. Buy the jeans," to which I say "I don't know if any of you have actually read Karl Marx"

#@ ops post.. me when i buy official one piece merch

[syllyism]

Taylor Swift bravely standing up for the right of billionaires to destroy public information. (link here)

[syllyism]

some studies (just wanted to draw childe)

[syllyism]

a production of Hamlet where everything is the same, safe for the insertion of a scene where Hamlet gets fucked by Horatio. it’s graphic and passionate, but very beautiful!

[syllyism]

while not an actual action item for the general strike, you could also find some Palestinian recipes to cook. Part of the attempted erasure of Palestinian identity has been Israeli appropriation of recipes/foods. (And some pan-Arab foods too)

[syllyism]

The Great Thieves Yatagarasu!

(click for better quality)

[syllyism]

Turnabout Reminiscence

[Image Description:  a movie-style poster for the Ace Attorney Investigations case Turnabout Reminiscence. In the middle is a young Kay Faraday tugging nervously at her collar. There is a white circle behind her head. Above her are a pair of white folded wings. Behind Kay and the wings is a blue background with lighter blue swirls. On the right is a brown strip with alternating red and yellow circles, and on the right is  another brown strip with alternating blue and yellow circles.

To the left of Kay is the head of Tyrell Badd looking to the left, and on her right is the head of Calisto Yew looking to the right. There is a checkerboard pattern on Badd, and a diamond pattern on Yew. At the bottom is text that reads “Ace Attorney Investigations. Turnabout Reminiscence. Miles Edgeworth • Franziska von Karma • Kay Faraday • Dick Gumshoe • Tyrell Badd • Calisto Yew • Byrne Faraday.” Below that is the symbol of the Yatagarasu in gold. End Description.]

[syllyism]

[syllyism]

#syllylikey