the thing about the venus of villendorf as a self-portrait-visual-distortion thing is like. It's a cool idea i guess. (though i feel like its kind of relying on assuming that the artist wouldn't have some understanding of how perspective works. Like you don't need to be able to scientifically explain the refraction of light to understand that things look different from different angles) My big issue with it is that it often seems like people are using it as a reason to say "Oh it's okay, she wasn't really fat" because we're a bit wedded to this idea of this heightened primitive era when everyone was super sexy and toned, with the unspoken inference that fat people (whether with lipoedema or just generally fat) are purely a product of the current (fallen) age.

Point is - it's okay if she was fat! Maybe she was fat and that's okay! Maybe that was something the artist wanted to celebrate, because it had a cultural significance, or was considered desirable, or maybe that waa just a person that existed and the artist portrayed them as they were. I think if we keep bringing up the visual distortion thing, it's fair to ask why we're so eager to disprove the possibility that fat people existed in the past, or that anyone might want to preserve the image of a fat person.

What are your thoughts on the theory that many Venus Figurines are self portraits? How the exaggerated proportions fit with a woman studying her own body?

i know you do a lot to maintain your appearance(which is cool! be the master of your own reality etc), and i was curious if you plan on dying your hair when it starts graying? you might be doing that already for all i know, but i think you'd look incredible with gray hair. i hope i don't sound like some kind of pervert

Apologies if I misunderstood your post, but I have a copy of the Harold Holt TikTok if you're looking for it. Happy to send it whatever way is convenient.

your thing about men and needing to 'feel' useful vs actually reflecting and thinking about whether what they're doing is actually helpful to others hit so haarrddd. My family is currently taking care of my sister's kid due to reasons and my Dad was all 'I am retiring so I can Help with Baby. And yet we keep having to have the convo of 'I know you think this random home improvement project will be helpful but right now we do not need a new bookshelf/the garden dug up/hallway filled with boces of fake turf you swear you're going to put out on the deck someday soon." Most of the time all we need is for him to do the boring day-to-day stuff that toddlers need. Feed him (without needing to be told exactly what he's supposed to eat) Hang out with him (Without needing us to tell him a specific task or activity, he is 18 months old, all he needs is for someone to sit on the couch and be present in the moment with him as he explores the miracle of which cars can be balanced on top of the others) Do the basic mental work of keeping to his schedule, without my mum having to come notify each mealtime/nap etc. I think to a certain type of traditionally minded guy, it probably feels humiliating to suddenly have to take direction from others, or to realise that not every situation is one that you can individually and permanently fix, but also, like, skill issue. I've been doing that all my life. Also its amazing that some men will chafe and complain about how limiting and sysiphean the whole daily grind of keeping a kid and household going is but never bother investigating why they felt it was okay to ask that of their wives for 3 decades. Hm. Sorry for ranting in your inbox

Hi hello, I've been searching high and low for the Harold Holt "you'll never see me again" tiktok and I can't find the damn thing anywhere. It haunts me. Would you happen to have it on hand? I remember it was in that huge thread before your previous twitter got nuked.

context for the photomatt thing?

Hello I wanted to thank you for spreading the good word that people still use ebay. I tried it and am inundated with messages from some of the most annoying people on the planet on that site, but they *do* want to buy my 1940s ray bans and barely worn patent leather creepers and OEM car radio and other junk I've been trying to get rid of for years

do you think blacklisted words/tags is useful info for tumblr to sell? they dont seem to be using it when recommending posts "for you"

trying not to use twitter anymore, and am locked and you don't follow me, but: i had the exact same 100% disk usage, low/zero CPU/other usage issue in March on a win10 laptop. the problem was the hard drive dying. i had 2-3 days of issues and then the hard drive just fully failed. if it has two drives, and the OS is on the other one, it might run okay and "survive", but you want to back up everything on its drives ASAP if you can. the problem i had was that it was trying to spin up the drive, the drive was failing, and thus disk use was maxing out as it physically could not meet the spin asked of it. (which made it fail faster)

AI is not neutral, if it ever was it certainly isn't now. And I have never seen it used as an effective tool in any step of the creative process, especially not in any way that is not actively detrimental to the development of the artist in question. As a professional artist and writer, I am of the incredibly firm opinion that using AI generated images and text will not help anyone learn how to refine your own creative process-- there is no art that is unskilled labor, no step of the process you can just automate without it feeling less human, less expressive, less like you are sharing a part of yourself and your own mind with the viewer. Looking at another artist's work for inspiration is perfectly normal and helpful, but you can already do that without using a tool built on harvested artworks from thousands of artists who are unaware their art is being put into a blender and churned out into something new to be touted about as if it was pulled from nothing. The fact that this is the foundation of the tools means they are NOT neutral software. Their current application as an attempt to cut artists out of their skilled labor positions just cements this.

thank you for speaking rational thought AS AN ARTIST into the ai debate. i get so tired of people over simplifying, generalizing, and parroting how they’ve been told ai works lmao. you’re an icon

what do you think about the recent hypothesis that orexin/hypocretin is implicated in adhd and autism? don't think i can put links in asks but the article is open access: "Orexin/Hypocretin System Dysfunction in ESSENCE (Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations)".

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