By ツネモク

tsunemoku

Artist:twitter

the blair witch isn’t mean, like imagine a group of film majors showing up to ur house with a camera and screaming at u

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork.  In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

#it’s so so important to remember that representation is not one-size-fits-all#what is empowering to one person might be exhausting and oppressive to someone else#some people need stories about having the strength to save themselves#some people need stories about being considered worthy of being saved#some people need inspiration for their independence while others need validation that they don’t have to be able to do everything themselves#before you lash out against something PLEASE stop to consider:#is this inadequate and/or damaging representation?#or is it just something I don’t personally relate to? [X]

List of Black Lives Matter and Racial Equality Petitions to sign:

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News - Retrocrush just announced a bunch of new titles coming to their free streaming service in June 2020, including the Black Jack OVAs, Dear Brother, the 80s Astro Boy adaptation, and more! Check out the link above for the full list!

10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read

I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.

I LOVE THIS POST!!

I’d like to add:

11. Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor

12. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this one is my favorite short story of all time)

13. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

14. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

15. Désirée’s Baby by Kate Chopin

16. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

17. Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala-Ša

(I wanted to put little summaries for each of them, but I’m afraid I’d spoil the whole story if I did!)

katherine mansfield was a writer of short stories as well! i took a course on short stories and we discussed the queer undertones in some of her work

what I REALLY don’t like is this post was made in 2017

Every mornings seagulls flying over the Barcelona city and I always want to capture the awe of seeing them hovering in front of my eyes, painting frame by frame on paper and tvpaint, gouache, charcoal.

An AI's idea of a prank

If you’re a longtime reader of my blog, you’ll know that AIs are consistently terrible at humor. Whether it’s a very simple neural net learning to tell knock-knock jokes, or a more-sophisticated algorithm trained on tens of thousands of short jokes, they tend to get the rhythm and vocabulary correct, yet completely miss the point.

In a previous experiment, I trained a simple neural net on a collection of April Fools pranks and noticed that most of them end up being pranks you play on yourself. Figuring that this sort of solo prank might be useful for this year, I tried a much more sophisticated neural net, one that didn’t have to learn all its words and phrases from scratch. The neural net, called GPT-2, learned from millions of web pages. Using talktotransformer.com, I gave it a short list of pranks and asked it to add to the list.

Here are some of the neural net’s suggested pranks.

Self-prank? New hobbies? Performance art?

It often seemed like the neural net thought it was supposed to be doing its best to suggest recipes or lifehacks.

Step 10: Fun in the Shower Fill your bathtub with cold water. Take the jar of sawdust out of the freezer. Dump it into the water and stir to add some texture.

There are more AI-generated pranks than would fit in this blog post, including some that are such terrible ideas I hesitated to print them here. Enter your email and I’ll send them to you!

My book on AI explains why this is all so darn weird. You can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore (has signed copies!)

life is like… you make connections with people and then say goodbye

i…………………. feel incredibly seen

For our (very basic) digital design class, the first assignment was to create 64x64 pixel portraits of ourselves… it felt like a blast back to my past, when I would erase the stamps on KidPix and draw my own.