Forget Stuff Like Good Flag Bad Flag And All That Discourse, The World's Best Flags Are Those Banners

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Snow Removal Grader

Skeptical inquirer subscribers when they fail to calculate the current directional taboo and walk right into the presence of a supernatural being:

people talk about AI 'spitting out' images that aren't exactly what the artist wants, but other media are the same. This is why drawings always look different than what we imagined before beginning - because the materiality of the pencil or paint is deeply altering and controlling the outcome. It's just that we're used to this, so we think a pencil drawing is wholly our own desire rather than a conflict between our vision and the material.

It's funny that antiwork is such a haunting presence in our society, almost a constructed devil for our society that represents everything we fear, that people feel the need to bring it up as a negative label even when it's totally irrelevant to the topic (like here)

(I wonder if the second person loves or hates the idea of nobody having to work? I get the impression it's the second... Either way, it's a ridiculous response)

does anyone still teach how to calculate directional taboos through Onmyōdō like in the Heian period. I want the experience of not being able to travel in a certain compass direction due to a divine presence

When I saw that Minae Mizumura had written "Art is not democratic. Art is Sublime," I suddenly thought about how remarkable it is that such an opinion is shared by those with egalitarian political values. This does not apply to Mizumura herself, because I don't know what her specific opinions are. Still, it's common to meet liberals with humanist attitudes who have this kind of cognitive dissonance between their politics and their aesthetics.

I don't believe you can truly oppose hierarchical social relations without cultivating a deep contempt for the concept of a literary canon and the ideology of 'classics.'

Mizumura speaks of certain market trends in mass media -- which are difficult to talk to without a separate post -- as representing the opposite of true literary merit, and I agree. I hope that a popular trend based on mass participation emerges and totally vapourizes the world of literature that lingers on from the past.

Perhaps it will be one of those medieval hysteria plagues that made everyone dance...

in the endless battle between aesthetic reactionaries and consumer slop nobody will ever win

Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened

So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.

This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym

I wonder if 'drug user' was an unnecessarily technical-sounding translation of, like, 'addict' or something. "She had so many drugs, like an addict" is a sentence with good flow

She had so many drugs... like a drug user.

Drini, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Coyolxāuhqui

I don't believe that cultures can be better than each other, but I think it can be good to have a past culture for modern ones to organize themselves around and to inspire them