we forgot to teach your boyfriend media literacy and he completely misunderstood all the themes and narratives. yeah the underlying message too. he got tricked into believing in-universe propaganda and is writing a longpost about it now sorry
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This is why I dislike looking back on the past as if everything has been constantly improving to get us to where we are now
Our cement isn't as strong as the Romans, our steel isn't as strong as Damascus steel, we cannot replicate the beauty of a Stradivari violin, we've already lost some of the technology that flew Apollo and Gemini to space
And when I live out a suitcase I have to sift through a pile of stuff like a neanderthal
I hate to tell you this, but none of your examples are true.
Roman concrete lasts longer, but 1) we’ve already learned how to replicate AND IMPROVE it and the reason we don’t is 2) it’s not as strong as modern concrete. Modern alloys are stronger than Damascus steel. When blindfolded and asked to tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a modern violin, experts misidentified the modern violin as the Stradivarius a little over half the time. And while we have indeed lost some of the technology that first got us to the moon, that technology was cobbled together by hand and the fact it worked at all is nothing short of a marvel.
If you want to talk about how things aren’t always better in the present, consider:
—we’ve replaced thousands of forms of localized, “this will keep you cool in summer and warm in winter” architecture with standardized window-filled boxes that do neither of those things
—hundreds of varieties of very good apples have been lost or nearly lost because they were smaller/not as fast-growing/didn’t look as nice on the shelf as modern varietals
—basic life skills like cooking, sewing, and basic car maintenance are no longer taught in most schools
—ornamental ANYTHING has been widely eschewed in favor of “efficiency” and “resale value”
—while modern glass is stronger than medieval glass, we struggle to reproduce the vibrant colors of medieval glass because in a lot of places we don’t know what it was colored with
—fast fashion has given us more options Re: clothes, but it also means we’ve replaced natural, low-impact fibers like wool and linen with plastic, which is worse in basically every way
—the pyramids were built with such precision that in places where the outer capstones are still present, you can’t get a credit card between them. While we can theoretically do something like this in the modern day, it’s not considered worth the effort because it’s fucking HARD, and nobody has actually figured out how the Egyptians did it in the absence of automated tools
—art nouveau and Art Deco went out of fashion and I think those two tragedies speak for themselves
—we’re struggling to rebuild Notre Dame because over-harvesting of forests means we don’t have trees big enough to replace the roof beams
—we have very little idea what we lost in Africa due to colonialism and racism. We do know we lost entire literary traditions and we can only mourn and wonder about thousands of years’ worth of art
You can make the point on every front without relying on long-debunked legends.
the body is wild because all that shit just kind of grows there in a semirandom way, so it's not even consistent from person to person, but it doesn't get tangled up too badly because it's all held in place by bodymeat like a vascular aspic. which sounds good but it means it's really hard to replace anything, because you're not supposed to. it's just another example of how planned obsolescence encourages waste
transhumanists are just people who believe in the right to repair (our flesh prisons)
Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold,
Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old,
Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature's sweetness to all,
Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall,
Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea,
Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.
Behold Saturn in a new light! This is an ultraviolet image of glowing hydrogen in Saturn’s atmosphere. It is being heated by material falling from the planet’s rings.
The rings appear much darker than the planet’s body because they reflect much less ultraviolet sunlight. An extended latitudinal band is 30% brighter in ultraviolet light than the surrounding regions.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and Lotfi Ben-Jaffel (Institute of Astrophysics/University of Paris and University of Arizona).
i don't like to yuck people's yum but i have to say that my least favorite thing to come from the current state of Artists on the Internet is the idea of a sketchbook as something nice and pretty and shareable. like i love me a notebook full of gorgeous art don't get me wrong but that is NOT what a sketchbook is. a sketchbook is my friend who i carry around everywhere like a purse chihuahua. it is the physical manifestation of my notes app. it is the container into which i wring my brain out. it is my therapist. and most of all it is filled with absolutely terrible sketches that should never see the light of day.
this post is making the rounds again and the amount of people saying that the pretty sketchbooks phenomenon ruined sketchbooks for them is HEARTBREAKING and i stand by my opinion that sketchbooks should be like a jar you put your OCs in. and then you shake them around in there. that's what they're for
















