people are calling what happened today in gaza “the flour massacre”
the flour massacre
these people just wanted to get food for their families, something as basic as flour, one of the things that the very core of humanity is built on, and israel used it as a trap to murder them in cold blood
evil is not enough of a word. there is not a word to describe what they are doing to palestine. they are bleeding her out, they are torturing her and crushing her and hoping that nothing is left to remember her by when they are done. how can anyone stand and watch what is being done with indifference? how can you watch this level of human suffering, this crime against life and feel nothing, do nothing
As I kid, I wanted to be a savior, trailblazer, the prophecy child. I wanted a big life, with ups and ups like the breasts of mountains and lows like the depths of valleys full of forgotten debris. I was convinced the great flood was knocking at my door, beckoning me to become someone bigger. A juvenile fantasy, a hazy dream.
I'm 19 now. It's not a grand big life, I'm no hero. I love my friends and sunday mornings. I like cats and strawberries. No flood, no rapture, no calamity- just quiet weekdays and sleepy weekends. But oh my days, I am full, finally.
-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The Flesh I Burned
if the devil saw israel he would hand over his throne.
one of the biggest things I can advocate for (in academia, but also just in life) is to build credibility with yourself. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking of yourself as someone who does things last minute or who struggles to start tasks. people will tell you that you just need to build different habits, but I know for me at least the idea of ‘habit’ is sort of abstract and dehumanizing. Credibility is more like ‘I’ve done this before, so I know I can do it, and more importantly I trust myself to do it’. you set an assignment goal for the day and you meet it, and then you feel stronger setting one the next day. You establish a relationship with yourself that’s built on confidence and trust. That in turn starts to erode the barrier of insecurity and perfectionism and makes it easier to start and finish tasks. reframing the narrative as a process of building credibility makes it easier to celebrate each step and recognize how strong your relationship with yourself can become
Kagome Higurashi, just a normal teenage girl growing up in Japan in the early 2000s
Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.
(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)
Can you imagine that I haven't had a drop of water since yesterday?
Unfortunately, we don't have the most basic rights in life.
reminder that donating just a few $ to gofundme campaigns actually helps, you don't have to donate huge amounts if you don't have the funds, every little bit is useful.
"I cant draw" then do it bad who gives a fuck.....
the grass may be greener on the other side of the fence but you don't know how many dead bodies it took for it to get that way
my trick for getting through grad school is learning to navigate the quadrants with all their nuances