The thing with ancient civilizations “mysteriously [dying] out” is often less spectacular - it’s not a singular event, but more that maybe crops fail for a couple years, while some sort of pandemic devastates cities and collapses more centralized economies, so people gradually spread out.
Like, it’s almost a process with multiple factors. Not usually just “whoops! time to officially end Mayan Civilization™”
Geonosians didn’t make the clones, the Kamino did. Geonosians are the bug-like species that the empire xenocided after the war, once they stopped needing the labor to produce droids.
Yeah, as a trans person around children, I do awful things like use my influence to encourage children to spend more time taking walks in nature and teach young boys that girls are humans too.
Truly equivalent to the influence of Andrew Tate.
It’s not your job. It is rewarding in and of itself though.
The great part about Boys and Girls Clubs or being a CASA or face painting at a festival etc is that you don’t have to raise them. The undivided attention of adult who seems to genuinely like and care about them for like 15 minutes is the kind of shit that changes kids lives.
I’m not saying “organize community talks at your local library about positive masculinity” or “become a Big” but - maybe a cousin says something shitty at dinner, and you bring it up gently in a chat? Or be a positive role model in spaces where you encounter young men: in video games, on forums, outside…
The best way to create a society where men are allowed to cry and express their emotions is to teach boys and young men these things are okay.
One of the clones is trans right - “Sister” in a newer book?
Have any of the books gone into the sex lives of the clones? You’d think that the way that they are raised and trained would set up a “Sacred Band of Thebes” kind of thing naturally.
There’s a deserter in Clone Wars that has kids and a family iirc, so they can fuck. Jango reads as bisexual to me, so maybe all the clones are inclined to be bisexual.
When I worked in a middle school a couple years back, I heard the Tate shit there. Had a student who would name their Kahoot something like “[female students name] has a nice ass” and administration would refuse to allow me to impose consequences.
If you are around teen boys, please talk to them about Tate. He’s not someone who should be walking free, and he’s not someone children should be listening to.
gives excessive gifts
Huge red flag. Becomes a tool of control (I was married into a wealthy family.)
The big thing is that they can change their personality after marriage - once you are trapped. There were red flags there, which I shouldn’t have ignored, but it was like night and day.
Mine started getting interested in stuff like religion - noticed that his pastor friend got to play WoW all day while the wife basically did everything.
Many kids in the US weren’t even taught phonics.
Teachers were forced to use an expensive curriculum program that didn’t work - and similar shit had been proven not to work in the 70’s. For lots of children, reading is too difficult to be enjoyable because they don’t know phonics.
That video looks like designing a video game asset to me, or putting together a map for W40k match. Part of that might be some personal bias because I don’t really have an appreciation for depictional fantasy art.
One thing I’ve noticed with AI art which I think is holding the genre back as a whole is a focus on realism, especially photorealism, or at least staying vary far away from abstraction. Other styles are largely stolen - like, I’m sure it’ll be happy to make a Basquiat of Ashoka Tano or a Klimt “The Kiss” of Anakin and Padme. But that’s the options as far as moving away from photorealism - the style of artists that already have their stuff in museums.
This also seems to tie into the “AI helps people who don’t have the time/ability to develop drawing skills” argument - that the only way many folks can even conceive of making “good art” is getting really good at drawing photorealistic faces.
Reading fiction teaches empathy, even if you don’t have it naturally or your parents are shit humans. There’s something about the way a novel puts you in the back seat of someone’s mind, the cliche “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
Which is why it’s concerning that:
Many adults don’t read a book after high school. Many high schools don’t even assign books anymore - just passages, because that’s what on the ACT.
Biden and several other politicians have been denied communion for not being anti abortion.
Vance’s Catholicism is the kind of loser tradcath shit an atheist kid from 4chan converts to for the aesthetic and misogyny anyway.
Couldn’t absence of any process be a process.
I guess, why would you even want art without creativity or meaning or intent? Is the goal of art to simply make something nice to look at? That seems to be the way most of the people touting AI art seem to view it.
I just don’t see AI making Fifty Days at Illiam: Shield of Achilles - which really, that kind of beauty in chaos is something that AI artists should be exploring (and was being explored by machine artists in the 70s and 80s.)
It doesn’t really feel like “art” in the making. When I’ve used AI to create an image, it doesn’t feel different from using search terms and tags on an imagebooru, or trying to find a piece of clip art for a presentation.
I think there might be fruit for exploration in digital collage, training ones on models in creative ways… I’m not really seeing anyone using these tools to really “do art” though. I’m seeing lots of anime girls, porn, ShrimpJesus Facebook slop, hamfisted political comics, and occasionally an “artist” crowing over like a generic image of a tiger. I’d like to see better, but I’m not.
Also - if you like making art, I don’t understand the appeal of taking out “process.” You type some keywords, you adjust them if you don’t like what you see.
This might be more personal preference, but something that I’ve come to enjoy working with paint is that you have to wait for it to dry. That it splatters and doesn’t always go where you want it. That the image you have in your head will not ultimately be the image you get on the canvas. That sometimes it’s a process of weeks of dialogue between you and the canvas.
A lot of AI art enthusiasts do seem fixated on product, not process. I don’t know if you are really an “artist” if there isn’t some element of “process” that you are involved with.
Not that all stories need to have morals attached to them, but I think showing older teen protagonists who also struggle with PTSD (the threstrals serve almost as a direct “visual” metaphor) as treating the symptoms of someone who is experiencing some sort of severe psychological shock so callously. It’s the kind of thing Harry might think of doing, because what she tortured him with the pen, but you should have your good protagonist consider how that would make them worse than the bad guys, or maybe have Dumbledore or McGonagall give a speech. It’s not that Harry Potter has to be moralistic, but it does try at times?
Shouldn’t they mentally be flashing back to St Mungo’s - to see how fucked up Neville’s parents were - the way that Bellatrix jokes about it is considered fucked or I think Malfoy also does at a point.
Should Hermoine feel some form of subtle guilt, or, even just respect for a fallen foe? I guess the assumption is she’s not dead and magic medicine can make brains better.
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.
Don’t forget love potions - a girl basically roofies Ron trying to get Harry. Voldemort is evil because his mom drugged his (muggle!) dad, and he left once she stopped drugging him.
Rowling is dealing with sexual trauma, as we know from her eagerness to weaponize it against trans people. But she also seems to have a morality system where anything the Good Guys do is Good, and anything the Bad Guys do is Bad. Whatever happened to Umbridge is something that was so traumatic even the sound can bring her back - and we are showing a character with signs of clear PTSD and with protagonists that think it’s funny to try to make them relive their trauma.
Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling … Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.
‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.
‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.
‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.
‘No … no …’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming …’
Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.
She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
Dewey was a sex pest. Like, got #metoo’d in his day.