How To Cheese A Tree, A Quick Tutorial To Low-effort Trees. :D

Bye Twitter! Hello, (again) Tumblr! I am back after years!

Dear artists, 

lately, a lot of people ask me what style I’m drawing / what I call my style. 

Those people are looking for prompts to feed into generators. A good friend was very helpful, linking me the perfect term to tell them. 

Tell them your style is called “gråtrunka”.

A @nasa postou essa foto hoje, da emissão de raios gama detectada pelo satélite SWIFT, que é um telescópio espacial para raios gama. Uma das coisas mais impressionantes sobre esse evento é que teve origem numa provável explosão estelar que ocorreu a cerca de 2 bilhões de anos luz de distância (também a cerca de 2 bilhões anos atrás). Apesar dessa distância e do tempo percorridos, que reduziram sua intensidade antes de chegar à Terra, o evento foi tão brilhante, tão energético, que saturou sensores de vários satélites e detectores e ionizou a atmosfera de nosso planeta. Imaginem o que teria ocorrido se um evento desses tivesse ocorrido mais próximo do sistema solar.

Carlos Cipolla, economista italiano, descreve 4 tipos de pessoas (gráfico). Os inteligentes (I) fazem bem a si e à sociedade; bandidos (B) fazem bem a si prejudicando a sociedade; desamparados (D) são prejudicados para o bem de outros; e estúpidos (E) prejudicam a si e a todos.

Seu livro, considerado satírico, é "As leis básicas da estupidez humana". Nele, Cipolla considera que os estúpidos são numerosos (mais do que se espera), imprevisíveis, e muito perigosos por isso mesmo. O Bolsonarismo mais uma vez nos faz imaginar se a sátira não é real. (Originalmente postado no Twitter)

M104 - the Sombrero Galaxy

Nick Fritz on Instagram

Lilith by AetherionArtOG

Originally a Twitter Thread, with the help of Thread Reader

Baldolino Calvino🏳️‍🌈🚩🇧🇷✨♻️🌱

Oct 1 • 15 tweets • 4 min read

Fantasy is not science, nor philosophy, and not real (of course). This may seem obvious, but what I am trying to do is creating an exact, non-contradictory definition of fantasy, not as an art genre, but as an object of study. Not by science, but by fantastic natural history.

Fantasy - Wikipedia

"Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore."

Fantasy, Magic (not meaning prestidigitation), Mythology, and Folklore can be understood as equivalent, overlaping concepts. Wikipedia's entry is mostly tautological, circular, thus.

However, this is an article about the artistic genre, and one could say that it refers to art expression (written, musical, cinematic, other) that uses these references. This is enough for this use case, but we do not advance in an objective conceptualization of fantasy.

Fantasy (psychology) - Wikipedia

"(...) fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery."

This entry about the concept of fantasy in psychology gives a more elaborared view of it. However, what differentiates fantasy from other instances of human creativjty? The article continues: "Fantasies are associated with scenarios that are absolutely impossible."

Wikipedia's entry on Fantasy (psychology) does not give any reference to this concept, and proceeds listing the importance of Fantasy for various theoretical approaches (Freud, Klein, Lacan), or pathologies (narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia). It is not unified.

More revealing is Wikipedia's "History of Fantasy" (about the literary genre).

" (...) the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore (...)"

It makes a clear distintion between ancient myths and folklore, and so-called "modern fantasy", whose first explicit representant was Scottish author George MacDonald in the late XIX century, with his novels "The Princess and the Goblin" and "Phantastes".

Important precursors were Dickens, Thackeray, Andersen, Ruskin, Morris. And MacDonald's work enormously influenced Tolkien and Lewis. One key word in this historic description of Fantasy is "speculative". And a defining characteristic of modern fantasy is the "fantasy world".

Distinctive differences of modern fantasy are the postulate of a secondary fantasy world apart from reality; fictitious by design; and narratives from a (group of) author(s) with an interpretative aim. Myths or folklore does not have any of these characteristics.

The entry goes on in a detailed description of the development of Fantasy as a literary genre, since writings about tales and legends from Middle Ages. However, one fun example of how medieval mind understood the fantastic can be seen in the novel "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco.

Most of this Wikipedia's entry is based upon https://twitter.com/john_clute and John Grant's https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/, published in 1997, and fully available on the internet.

More to come, be patient.

Does anyone can see a fractal there?

 NGC 2207, Angel Wing

3,000-year-old clay pig found in

2020 at the Lianhe Ruins in China. When it was

discovered, the pottery has gone viral as it looks

similar to the pigs in AngryBirds or Peppa. Now

housed at the Sanxingdui Museum

Linktree

museumofartifacts | Instagram, Facebook | Linktree

Linktree. Make your link do more.

magic is everywhere

The mythical fox // Dennis Lehtonen

In Finnish the word for northern lights is ”revontulet” and it directly translates to ”fox fires.” According to the old mythology when it runs along the tundra, the fox’s flaming tail sweeps snowflakes into the sky and the fur scratches the trees, setting the skies on fire. That is how the northern lights are created.