Science communicator, with a background in biology and anthropology. Loves writing. Unapologetically geeky and feminist. Have more obsessions than I can count. (She/her pronouns)
what if jellyfish were just, like, really big. all the time
Image description: digital art of a massive aquarium tank containing two huge, reddish-orange jellyfish. They’re swimming downwards, and the dark silhouettes of various observers are visible at ground level. The tank is otherwise empty, like a vast ocean. End description.
thank you so much to everyone who supported me by buying my zines up until now, and thank you to everyone else who decides to check then out now ❤️ hoping to make some new art once my instability subsides
I purchased these zines already and I highly recommend them :D
Getting Involved In Your Community: A Guide For If You Don’t Know Where To Start
I’ve seen several back-and-forths on tumblr that boil down to “media consumption is not activism; if you want to do activism, go volunteer or get involved in local politics.” I agree, but also understand that it can feel daunting to try. Especially when you don’t have a lot of money to donate places or know anybody who’s organizing things! I definitely get it. But I also agree that volunteering is valuable - not only does it make you feel good, like you’ve accomplished something meaningful, it gets you out of the house and meeting new people in a structured environment. It helps you get to know the people in your community, and what’s going on in your town or city.
There are LOTS of ways to do this! You don’t need to already know people, or have organizing skills of your own. Finding something that works for you can be really rewarding, and it doesn’t have to be difficult.
another thing that people are clearly having a bit of trouble wrapping their heads around is the concept of objecting to the terms in which something is criticised, and how that does not necessarily equate to defending that thing.
some people tend to like to reduce things to “pro” or “anti,” and any attempt to delineate a position more nuanced than that will still be immediately assigned by them to one of those two “camps”
like, even setting aside the fact that these people are saying “AI art” when they actually, unbeknownst to them, mean something far more specific that is neither inherent nor exclusive to art created via machine learning processes (namely, the collection and use of large data sets scraped from all areas of the internet without the uploaders’ permission, at the behest of and used for the purposes of capital)—
—even if all “AI art” were unethical to produce, I would still be right to point out that the some of the arguments people were using to criticise it relied on an equation of “physical movement” to “effort” to “merit” and were thus ignorant of art theory and art history and ableist. something being “bad” does not mean that you can use any old argument you want against it with no pushback
if a woman pushes a small child into a well, and you say “well that woman is clearly an evil c*** with no maternal instincts in her shrivelled unnatural unfeminine heart,” and I say “well clearly you are being misogynistic,” then am I defending the action of pushing a child down a well? well, no.
Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
