Yo I just saw an anti-shifter post,,, under the #shifting tag?? Bro do you WANT to argue??

seems to me like zac oyama is repping some experiences of asian american schoolkids, defined by such hits like 'regulate your anger,' 'communicate clearer to deliberately misunderstanding assholes,' and 'perpetual sense of unbelonging in both the american part and the asian part of your life.'

anyway please show love to your queer and indigenous friends and show support for the groups and organizations trying to make a difference for these communities IN the states they live in. most of us don’t want to leave, and we shouldn’t HAVE to leave to be recognized as humans worthy of rights and respect and love, not just by our representatives but also by queer people (especially white people) in big cities in the north who assume their experiences are universal.

gonna start subjecting u lot to my rambling abt classic viet authors

in the newest edition of skinny bitch audacity (fatphobia):

comparing weight gain to... being a meth addict. and that you can look at someone and be qualified to say theyre degrading their health if they arent a small enough size for you to be attracted to them/be 'acceptable'

[IF YOU SHAME ADDICTS ON THIS POST YOURE GETTING BLOCKED. IF YOU SHAME FAT PEOPLE ON THIS POST YOURE GETTING BLOCKED. I WILL NOT WARN YOU TWICE.]

Idiot ppl: what is this new trend of feminism in Desi culture?!?!!! Women r supposed to be at home!!!

Me, a woke Desi: actually there were a lot of queens, merchants and warriors in Desi history, like-

Idiot ppl: OMG ur one of feminazis, aren't u??

Me: It's feminists and as I was saying, there are a lot of badasses in history like,

Jhansi ki Rani aka Rani Lakshmi Bai led a rebellion against the British raj

Umayamma Rani, queen of Kerala, made the first open revolt against British, established a women's medical College in Kerala, worked against caste system

The story Kannagi, lady from the Chola n Pandiya kingdom times.

Rani Velu Nachiyar, known by Tamils as Veeramangai("brave woman"), first Indian queen to wage war against British.

Nur Jahan's administrative skills proved greatly valuble during her period of reign as she defended the Empire's borders in her husband's absence and navigated family feuds, rebel uprisings. She attended the court whether Janahgir was there or not.

Bharatiyar a 19th century feminist poet.

AND THERE ARE SO MANY MORE

So what did we learn here u mysoginistic piece of gobar

FEMINISM EXSISTED BEFORE UR FORE-FATHERS WERE BORN U UNEDUCATED OFFSPRING OF A DEMON!!

Thankyou for coming to my Ted talk

controversial opinion perhaps but i kinda hate when youtubers, esp ones with a large audience, pull armchair psychology on villainous or clearly negative characters, when they don't have the disorders they're talking about or some background in psychology or at least talking to someone who has it to make sure what they're saying is relevant. it kinda feels like it adds to the constant demonization of these disorders (like. going "this character is bipolar because they killed someone on a whim" is Not Great to say the least) without any regard to how it affects the real people who live with them

got very passionate about explaining the taylor’s version lore to georgia boy that i apologized for being annoying 🥲 (and he said i didn’t have to apologize because he wanted to learn)

im being so serious besties i am not cut out for academia

Just dawned on me that i am a homeschool dropout and that this is kind of a fundamentally hilarious combination of words to be

genuinely nothing will be as annoying to me as nonasian ppl thinking they know everything abt asian culture from either seeing it on media or being around asian people

bitches be like “omg you have to watch this piece of media it has such good female characters” and then it’s the 10000th story about how much it Fucking Sucks to be a woman sometimes

Ok I'm curious, could you elaborate on art school education when you have the time?

Mainly because my friend went to art high school and feels she wasted all the years there while I've been self-teaching myself for a few months by just messing around, so I was wondering just how different the two approaches are :0

Oh, I have lots and lots of thoughts on art education. I do feel that I need to preface this with the whole "my experience is not universal", bc all my feelings about art and art education stem from my own experiences of being self-taught and then getting actual formal college degrees in art.

The shortest version of my long rant, under the cut, is that there isn't a superior way to learn art. With art education, you run the risk of getting bad teachers who don't teach the subject well, and you can also run into teachers who aren't open-minded about approaches to art that differ too much from their own--the flipside, of course, is that there are sometimes amazing teachers who can challenge you to try new things you'd never had thought of on your own, or who have already made a lot of mistakes that they can tell you about so you don't have to make them yourself. With being self-taught, you have to figure out everything on your own, and sifting through online tutorials or reading books can be difficult to find "actually useful and well-explained" advice, but you do also get the freedom of doing literally whatever you want and really focusing what you learn based on what you're actually interested in. Each has it's pros and cons, but neither is technically better or worse, per se, although education of any sort comes down a lot to each person's situation in life, as not everyone has access to education or even the tools for making art.

For the long, long expansion of my thoughts and some of my personal experiences with art education specifically...

In short, I'm technically entirely self-taught, despite holding two different art degrees. Aside from some feedback I got from my 8th grade art teacher (who had agreed to look at my hobby art in her own spare time outside of class), I basically taught myself to draw entirely on my own, using various "how to draw" books, online tutorials, and just a lot of general experimentation and continued drawing on my own. Which meant I made a lot of mistakes, or didn't try out certain things, or got frustrated bc I couldn't figure out how to do something, but overall I had a lot of fun. The actual art classes I took in middle and high school? Well, I took a life drawing class in high school that taught me how to draw from life, a skill I never would have acquired on my own bc the process for learning that skill requires a lot of patience, and personally, I find life drawing to be extremely boring. My high school art teacher was also allowing blatant copyright infringements to occur in her class, which was something I learned years later when taking a media law class in college to learn about copyright law specifically, so I guess I learned what to not do as a teacher if I manage to become one, but I didn't learn a whole lot of actual art skills or even really improve my art in any significant way. I never actually learned anything like the elements of art and how to use them, or color theory, or any of that, in class or even on my own, but because I was constantly looking at lots of art online, and making art on my own and experimenting with new things, I ended up learning all of the "essentials of art" intuitively, sort of like how children learn the grammar of whichever language(s) they grow up speaking without learning the actual formal grammar of the language. Which I think a lot of artists actually do as they continue to make art, even if they don't realize it.

Anyhow, moving on. I personally really enjoyed my undergrad illustration degree. Now, to be fair, if someone was willing to pay me to attend college for the rest of my life as my actual career, that is what I would do bc I love learning, and I love the challenge presented by college courses. But do I feel like I learned anything new about art in those classes? Yes and no. I took a lot of art history classes bc I had never had any art history before college, and found I loved the topic a lot. The life drawing classes I was required to take felt like a waste of time bc I already had that skill from the one high school class, and I spent most of those classes fighting the teachers about why we should have less nude models (bc nudes are super easy to draw from life, but clothing is very, very difficult, and I wanted to learn how to draw clothing as a challenge bc I was bored in those classes). I spent one class teaching the entire class how to use Photoshop bc the teacher's method was absolute BS and I could do everything faster and easier than what we were being taught bc I had been using the program for years (the teacher even joked about how I had hijacked the class, to which I'm still not sure was meant to be friendly or malicious). The "Anatomy for the Artist" class I took was one of the most useful classes I've ever taken, and really helped me with drawing not only humans, but anything with a skeleton and muscles, since the teacher's approach made it so I learned the skill of using actual real-life anatomy as a means of creating art from the knowledge of anatomy (and I lucked out for this class bc I had an adjunct who was there to cover the actual teacher who was on sabbatical, and from what I heard from classmates I would have learned nothing from the usual teacher's approach to the class; I hope the teacher I did have found a good stable job bc she was amazing). Most of the actual core illustration classes helped me improve my art a great deal, but not bc they taught me anything--more so, it was that I had to create a lot of art for them, and find creative solutions to the challenges the projects would present (there were lots of "illustrate this abstract concept without using x, y, or z imagery" or "create an illustration within these specific parameters" which really required me to think about how to plan and go about completing the final project). Somehow, the actual "foundations classes" that I took--where I was supposed to learn things like design theory, the elements and principles of art, color theory, etc.--well, let's just say the teacher was on his way to retirement, and didn't teach any of that really well, so I still ended up going through my undergrad more or less on intuition and the art skills I had cultivated on my own. Mostly, college art classes were useful in helping me to improve my art, not because I learned new things (although I did learn some new things), but rather because I needed to make lots and lots of art in a relatively short time, and making art constantly is the fastest way to improve.

That all said, I still never really got the point of things that I kept seeing or hearing as common art advice. For example: "Use references." Okay? What does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do that? I was never taught that once, and it was only partway through college that I figured out that people meant "look at a photo of a real person to figure out a pose or something" and not "learn about the subject you're trying to draw so you have an understanding of that subject that allows you to draw it from your imagination how you want". And honestly the former advice is useful but...only useful to a point, so I'm kinda glad I never learned it bc it would have stunted my development and presented a roadblock. In either case, I was never taught how to use a ref or what "use a ref" meant in my formal art education, and by the time I figured it out on my own, my repertoire of art skills made the advice moot.

So what's all the long and short of this? Is art education a sham and useless? Well, not entirely, but maybe sort of. It really comes down to which teachers are teaching the subject, and how they do it. I only had a handful of art teachers who were really able to get me to think about art differently and push me to learn more and improve. But I also had a friend in my undergrad class who had never drawn in his life and he found most of the classes super useful bc he wasn't coming in being self-taught and already drawing. We were at different places in our art journeys, and so we got different things out of the college classes.

I do feel overall that the focus of my college classes was more productive than the lack of focus from my high school classes. Would I tell everyone who wants to get better at art to go to art school? Hell no. I got a degree in art because I love it, and because I had hoped to work as a video game concept artist (for which one does need at least a BFA to get hired by most companies). Of course, by the end of my degree I had figured out the video game industry in America was absolutely not a place I wanted to be working for my own health, but my frustrations with how my art education had been structured, paired with the fact that I spent a few classes actually teaching my classmates things, made me think I might make an okay art teacher. But even my wanting to be an art teacher still comes from a place of deep love for art. For those who just want to take up art as a hobby, self-taught is fine, and sometimes it will be better than getting stuck with a bad teacher who'll crush the enjoyment of art. Yes, I think a well-structured art course could help someone learn art and become confident in their art, which is part of the reason I want to try teaching it (esp. bc it took me years to learn some things that a good teacher would have just like, covered in a core class), but like...self-taught or school-taught, there isn't a superior way to learn art. They're both just very different approaches.

I hate studying I just wanna create stuff and see the world I hate how little control I have over my life

Just finished The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert (my dad likes to play audiobooks in the car on trips) and I didn't like it much (and there's quite a bit of Yikes in it, because frank herbert and the 1960s in general,) but the aspect I found most interesting was the concept of like. A world's subconscious desire to kill The Other.

In the book an investigator visits a small cultish town in order to investigate it for a market study after a few other researchers mysteriously died. he gets into a frightening number of "accidents" while he's there (like the former investigators) and starts believing that there was a conspiracy among the townsfolk and all of them were intentionally trying to murder him.

tl;dr, it turns out it actually was a subconscious yet intense phobia/hatred they had of The Outside they had as part of their personal traumas, childhood indoctrination into their local cult, and the LSD-like drug they were constantly on. They didn't mean the investigator any harm, if anything they were extremely welcoming, kind, well-meaning people, but this background radiation of fear and rage kept making them accidentally do things to kill him - mixing up insecticide and spices in his food, gas fumes being pumped in his hotel room after a botched maintenance job, a torn carpet tripping him off the railing of the balcony, and Many Other subtle attempts on his life that he just happened to avoid by sheer chance.

But all the townsfolk don't really think anything of it - the town doctor, especially skeptical, "diagnoses" him as "accident-prone" until the investigator begs and pleads with him for days after several brutal accidents in a row, and only then does the doctor start believing him but even then only comes up with the theory that all of this supposed malice towards the investigator is "subconscious" - later shown to likely be correct when the investigator himself, after overdosing on their special drug, "accidentally" shoves his colleague off a roof, killing him, but the investigator physically cannot see it as anything but an accident anymore. it simply doesn't reach his mind that he killed a former friend of his. it was just an accident. he just fell, all on his own.

the idea of A Town That Wants To Kill You, But It's Nothing Personal resonated with me from the perspective of being a disabled person, especially one in a generally welcoming, accepting environment. when you're disabled, not a lot of people will come to you bearing their ableism between their teeth. They'll be nice, insensitive maybe, but nice, and are often outwardly willing to accomodate you. But they also stick out their leg as you're walking along to trip you. They'll apologize, and you'll maybe even believe it, even though to you, from your perspective, it was obviously an attempt to harm you. You excuse it once, maybe twice, but after a point, you realize that this world, this community you have entered, is actively hostile towards you and everyone like you. so you start screaming it to the rooftops. you tell authorities that the world wants to hurt you, but they begin affixing labels to you like "paranoid" or "anxious". they know no one actually has it out for you, personally, after all. that would be ridiculous.

but you still keep getting tripped down the stairs. the rat poison and the sugar at your favorite coffee shop still keep getting mixed up, but only when it's your order. in the hospital, recovering from your previous "accidents", a nurse will still accidentally pump you full of saline instead of medicine.

after a point, doesn't the fact that all of these are "accidents", and that no one WANTS to kill you, just... stop mattering a little bit? Yeah, no one wants to hurt you, but they just keep doing it. They keep making stupid little mistakes. They know everyone like you who has visited their community has died or been seriously injured under suspicious circumstances, but the idea that they, themselves, could be a little bit at fault just doesn't even register to them. they don't even consider that they might have to change their ways in order to protect people like you. After all, you can't prepare for every "freak accident". Even when the solution could be as simple as "stop putting rat poison next to the sugar", every time it happens to you, or a person like you, it's just an "accident", that no one "meant" any harm, and "nothing could be done".

it doesn't cross their mind that a string of unfortunate accidents ceases to be accidents, but serious negligence. it can't cross their mind, because they're not the victims here. they only even begin to acknowledge something might be wrong when the victims are screaming in their face, day after day. even then, they come to the conclusion that even if you're right, and the community does want to kill you because you are Other, they won't immediately see anything wrong with that. To Them, the answer is clear as day: just become one of Them, and you'll be safe. They take care of their own.

i have such a difficult time with homeschooling bc ofc the public school system in the us is fucked to hell, especially if you live in an area that's lower-income/has a higher non-white population (the two frequently overlap for obvious historical and systemic issues), and it can often be a better option for kids with disabilities or neurodivergencies. however. i would say 8/10 times the parents are either not qualified, not properly teaching their kids (sometimes because of the "not qualified" thing, sometimes deliberately in an attempt to indoctrinate), not properly socializing their kids (again, sometimes deliberately for indoctrination purposes, sometimes just by ignorance), or any combination of the above. better legislation would help, but how do you legislate homeschooling without fucking up why homeschooling works well for those 2/10? and then you get ppl like my dad who think the tax dollars for public schooling should be turned into vouchers for various private schools and giving parents the choice of where their kids should go, but again, because of those systemic issues, that would be a fucking nightmare. idk homeschooling wigs me out but i cannot lie that the public school system (and most private schools lbr) are a hot mess.