Dan Lam’s Radiant Otherworldly Sculptures Evoke Interstellar Phenomena in ‘Cosmic Shake’

bee real, my senior thesis

Chen Fang-Yu

active buff

They did it again

boy.radio for giddy up cowboys

July 4 is Blueberry Ice Cream Day to me

It's a family tradition, and one I'm happy to keep alive in place of patriotism. This ice cream contains no egg yolks and has an amazingly silky texture. The almond extract complements the blueberries, but feel free to reduce it (especially if you have especially good blueberries) or leave it out entirely if you're not a fan.

Grandma’s Blueberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

2 cups fresh blueberries

1.5 cups sugar

2 + 2/3 cup heavy cream

1 + 1/3 cup whole milk (NOT 2% or skim)

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon almond extract

Pinch salt

Mash berries thoroughly with sugar; let stand at room temp for 1 hour. Combine with remaining ingredients; chill to 40 degrees or cooler. Churn in ice cream machine and transfer promptly into a pre-chilled container and then into the freezer. Makes about 2 quarts.

If you don't have an ice cream machine, there are a couple of alternative methods you can try, thought the texture won't be quite as smooth.

With either method, make sure to transfer your ice cream to a sealable container for storage once it's frozen.

made a soup zine in 2021! asked my friends to send me some recipes. :' ) had a lot of fun with the lettering.

gdrive link to a PDF here. feel free to print it out at home! hope this keeps you warm and soup-cookin' for the rest of winter!

This article documents the severe and ongoing specimen neglect I witnessed over 12 months working at Florida State Collection of Arthropods. FSCA actively solicits donations, then picks and chooses what specimens to care about based on individuals' personal favorites. The rest are left to rot.

Please take a look and consider sharing this, it's extremely important for people (especially in science, taxonomy, natural history, museum curation, etc) to know how and why scientific material is being lost.

I’m taking pottery lessons right now… and my teacher said “the kiln gods are being kind to me right now.” And that made me stop and think. Is there a god of pottery? I tried to look it up but it’s hazy.

In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.

In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.

I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.

But I wasn’t able to find anyone else. Pottery being such an important part of daily life all around the world, it seems like there would be more. Does anyone know of any other gods of pottery?

kiln gods are also A Thing!

they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything

I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery

here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)

the head of the ceramics dept learned his wood fire techniques in Japan, including a Shinto take on the kiln gods.

wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.

everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln

and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).

cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering

he also opened the firing by sharing some sake with the kiln before lighting it

we have so little control

the kiln can finish our work

and make them functional

or it can destroy it all

so we make offerings

and protectors

and pray

- Clay Pigeon

So @susanontherocks, as someone who nearly dedicated my life to studying the history of porcelain, I love this question!

I'd argue that ceramics are so important for humanity that they're often connected directly to creator gods more generally. Even when there aren't Kiln-Gods specifically in some mythologies/cultures, that gap is often filled less directly by having Gods-as-Potters (in place of, or in addition to Kiln Gods).

actually for an example I'm familiar with as a Jew, this is definitely a running theme in the Hebrew bible! It's one of those things that I think a lot of people haven't thought about, or don't realize when they read in translation but it's sort of everywhere and enough that I would say YHWH is - if not specifically a god of pottery, then definitely a God frequently titled as a potter!

The earliest positioning of YHWH as a creator-potter is Genesis 2:7, where YHWH forms the first human from the "dust (clay) of the earth." The verb used is וַיִּיצֶר֩ which...literally is the word for forming/molding something out of clay as a potter! And that is hammered home by the first human being 'adam (the word for ruddy red, like clay) made from ha-adamah (the soil). In psalms, the first time the word "golem" is used is as "golmi" ("my golem,") which is referring to the unfinished human before god's eyes as like, raw material (which is what golem means and why Golems are made of clay!).

Then this continues:

Isaiah 64:7

Plus in Jeremiah 18:6 "just like clay in the hands of the potter..." And again in Isaiah 45:9 which compares YHWH to a potter and humans to a potsherd of earth.

Job 10:9 refers to YHWH fashioning him from clay, echoed again in Job 30:19. And in Job 33:6, Job makes an argument for the basic equality of humanity, again comparing God to a ceramicist: "You and I are the same before God; I too was nipped from clay."

Isaiah 41:25 implies that the kinds of power that YHWH can grant those who invoke their name can "trample rulers like mud, like a potter treading clay."

This parallels with your example of Khnum, even with the implication that unborn humans are first formed in clay by the deity before they end up like...in the womb).

Other creator deities as potters would be like:

There's a billion more - I think loads of creator gods are potter-Gods, but maybe aren't necessarily the same as Kiln-Gods although arguably a potter might have historically valued a potter-God all the same, since ceramics and pottery are often directly tied to the mythology of the most fundamental creation of humanity. These also sometimes overlap in the domain of fire or lightning gods. The Italian Renaissance artist Picolpasso does describe christian ceramicists praying specifically before lighting the fires of a kiln.

Also related: there ARE demons of pottery in Greek myth! The Daimones Keramikoi: Suntribos (the Shatterer), Smaragos (the Smasher), Asbetos (Charrer), Sabaktes (Destroyer) and Omodamos (Crudebake).

Someone wrote a dissertation on the influence of Chinese Kiln-Gods on American ceramicist rituals: Pathways of Transmission: Investigating the Influence of Chinese Kiln God Worship and Mythology on Kiln God Concepts and Rituals as Observed by American Ceramists by Dr. Martie Geiger-Ho, but I'm not familiar with them or their work, tbh.

I have read William Fairchild's writing before though, and he has an article from the 60's which argues that Japanese myths replaced clay with metal in relation to deities of fire and lightning, which could be related/interesting.

And in Chinese, a pottery/kiln God is called 窑神 (Yaoshen, literally Kiln God). I'm having trouble verifying specifics with simple online searches and it would take me a looonggg time to go through all my book-PDFs but I suspect there's a fair amount of overlap there with Chinese folk religion, and especially daoism since there's a concept of the internal furnace, and alchemical concepts often overlap with ceramics in various ways.

happy summer to all

this is how jock stoners can still win

theres one right answer and then one REALLY wrong answer :)

This is cosmic Crisp fucking slander

@arcticarthropod ain't tried cosmic crisp before where do I find it?

They're slowly spreading out of the pacific north west. Hopefully in a supermarket near you soon