hold up im reading more about the lionfish thing and this one island in Honduras has had such a huge problem with lionfish that the measures they have taken include
• getting special exemption from the Honduran government to allow divers access to harpoons and spears which are otherwise illegal in fishing
• public campaign to teach people how to prepare and eat lionfish (apparently they are very tasty once the poisonous spines are removed) (but watch out)
• holding lionfish combination hunting competition and cookout (reportedly they killed and cooked 1,700 in a day) (someone killed 60 of them with a rubber band spear gun???)
• most recently and apparently out of desperation, the divers in charge of culling the lionfish in the Roatan Marine Park just started. feeding the lionfish they killed to sharks. bc what else are you gonna do with it
• the sharks don’t seem to notice or be affected by the poison and begin hanging out with the divers
• the sharks then were seen hunting and killing the lionfish on their own
like this is nuts to me sorry. the sharks just had to be shown “hey this is food, did you know?? you can eat these!! here try one!!” we are possibly altering an entire foodchain bc we like feeding the big ocean wolves
I like to think that Vulcans who come to understand that Humans just can’t try to process emotions the same way as them, it’s just healthiest to let it out in harmless ways, decide that venting and stuff should be taken just as seriously as Vulcan’s meditation time, and will encourage the Humans around them to complain about what’s upsetting them
People who are used to aloof Vulcans who avoid Humans at all cost running into one comforting a Human
“-and then they said my cheesecake was subpar, and they didn’t even bring a dish!!!”
“The purpose of this event was that every participant brings a food item of sorts, correct?”
“Yeah!!”
“And they did not follow this rule while insulting dishes that were brought?”
for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal
before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"
and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"
This is a subject that really interests me because I (28 years old) had computer classes in grade school where learning how to efficiently type was a big focus. As a result I have a very high WPM (words per minute) count and am an excellent touch typer.
However, I've heard that they started phasing out computer classes in a lot of schools because it's assumed that kids/teenagers already know how to use a computer in this day and age. But smartphones are more popular than computers now, and as result a lot of Gen Z/Gen Alpha kids are able to text very quickly but their typing skills aren't as good.
at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
Idk a lot of the backlash to broadening who falls under what terms comes from the need to distinctly fall under the specific label you worked towards…but distance from adjacent labels only limits your allies and puts you in a rigid box you can’t come back out of either.
Saw a post by a trans woman horrified by the concept of having overlapping experience with femboys because “fuck you I am a woman.” You are. A woman with a lot of overlapping experience with a GNC man. You’re not a GNC man. He’s not a woman. And the gap between you two is not a chasm.
“How dare you say trans men are similar to butch lesbians. Trans men are men.” Yeah, men with similar experiences to butch lesbians. The butch lesbian isn’t a man. You aren’t a woman. And the gap between you is not a chasm.
This mindset doesn’t even account for GNC men who also ID as women, trans men who use the label of lesbian. Butch can be a label for a person of either AGAB.
Binary trans people wanna separate themselves from each other and from nonbinary people sooo bad. Now it makes eggs feel like the jump from GNC woman to man is an insurmountable journey. A femboy gets told he’s making a mockery of trans women’s experiences. A transmasc femboy is seen as just a faker. A butch trans lesbian is seen as a faker.
These labels are all just plots on the map, not one side or the other. You journey to the farthest edges and you find twinks and lesbians who look and act identical despite being supposed opposites. It’s all made up, we’re all queer.
i genuinely don't care how good a piece of ai generated art or writing looks on the surface. i don't care if it emulates brush strokes and metaphor in a way indistinguishable from those created by a person.
it is not the product of thoughtful creation. it offers no insights into the creator's life or viewpoint. it has no connection to a moment in time or a place or an attitude. it has no perspective. it has no value.
it's empty, it's hollow, and it exists only to generate clicks (and by extension, ad revenue.)
it's just another revolting symptom of the disease that is late stage capitalism, and it fucking sucks.
When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue - The Green Knight 2021
Portrait of Dev Patel in his role as Gawain in The Green Knight. Acrylic paint and embroidery floss on Cotton. 17 inches diameter.
everyone makes fun of soap when they find out how many hair and skin products he keeps on hand. the cabinet in his bathroom is filled to bursting and he always keeps travel sized bottles on him on missions
when soldiers outside the 141 find out, they call him precious and self-obsessed, a vain pretty boy too preoccupied with his reflection to focus on the enemy. no wonder how he got his callsign. price has given up telling him to leave them on base and just teaches him to individually wrap them so they don’t rattle against each other and give himself away
what they don’t know is that each product contains an ingredient that when mixed with any number of the others, creates potent chemical bombs. he was caught unarmed once, he won’t let it happen again