BestOfLemmy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40405763

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/43605385

https://piefed.social/comment/9107720

Interesting comment by @PugJesus@piefed.social

User gives a highly impassioned and informed response as to what they think about horses.

https://quokk.au/post/465742

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39229294

Cozy scenes of a matsuri village [OC]

Hello!

When I was a child, I grew up playing older Japanese games like koi-koi, go, and later on in life once I grew older and more capable, riichi mahjong and shogi. I had an interesting childhood, being a tiny little white kid in rural Japan, not far from an air force base, back in the late eighties and early nineties. One year in my thirties, my wife picked me up a little sake shop made of lego, and I was stunned and awed.

An idea started to take shape, and to be quite frank, this is the fourth time I tried to execute on this idea. I first started attempting to shoot this series back in '21, and it was badly lit, and my flat's interior could be seen in the background of the shots. It didn't really capture a vibe that I was looking for, but it was a good proof of concept. It had hanafuda cards lining the streets and alleyways, a signature part of all the future versions to come.

What you see now here in this post is a culmination of ideas and a reflection over four years about what I had hoped to achieve with this project. There's people living their lives in this tiny little matsuri city, telling little stories as they go. It's a little dusty here and there, partially cause I don't have good ventilation, and also cause a city without a bit of grime has no good stories.

Of subtle little note here are plentiful small details: the alleyway behind the shaved ice stand has a riichi mahjong hand of thirteen orphans as fencework, with a few girls chatting on top of and next to it; a silver general and a gold general are checkmating the opposing king in an alleyway near a takoyaki shop, and there are kabufuda cards for 8-9-3, which sums to zero in a game called oicho-kabu, where the yakuza get their name from (even in this cozy fantasy village, there's still back-alley violence!). Shogi pieces lurk across the town, using it as their own battlefield, to which the residents are blissfully unaware of. The go stones have been played in a reasonably-strategic way, if there was a giant tree and a sushi cart and some people on the board, but hey, Jon Bois once depicted a gridiron football game with a Bojangles and some apartments on the field, so this too is allowed. All the sakura cards from the two hanafuda decks are all centered around the tree in the back. There are a whole lot of other details that might catch your eye too!

This couldn't have been executed so perfectly without a few of my trusted friends: Willow, on lighting and weather illumination; Marisa, on stage work, reconstruction, and clumsiness recovery; and Brenna with her excellent story-telling work--every time I'd pose a figure, she'd somehow make them even more expressive. The work of them together as a crew has pushed this project to heights I could have never thought were possible. It took three hours to build the set, another seven to shoot it over two days, and I did the editing not far away on the laptop I write this artists' guide with.

It is my sincerest hope to that this work makes you feel wistful, longing for a cozy fantasy that can't really exist. Even myself, when I look at my own work, I feel my heart get a little bit warmer at the bustling town I worked quite hard on. And thanks to you, for coming to see the heartfelt work of my crew and I!

--Tanis

Explanation for those whose high school bio lessons were subpar: every fetus starts out with genitals that appear to be a vagina with a disproportionately large clit. If you've got the SRY gene on one of your chromosomes, the clit becomes your dick and the proto-labia fuse and become your balls. This is why your balls (if you have them) have a vertical seam at their midsection; that’s where your labia fused. So, it's often said that we all start out female.

https://lemmy.world/comment/19241986

Bro, are you even relax maxing bro? Are you achieving nirvana on your 15-minute break, bro? You gotta start microdosing rest every time you blink, bro. You gotta do it, bro; you gotta achieve the most relaxation you can otherwise you’re just waisting time, bro. You gotta take it slow as fast as you can, bro!

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/20828299

Quoth:

At the risk of killing the humor, I found this passage from The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin enlightening:

But to appreciate fully the inventiveness of right-wing populism, we have to turn to the master class of the Old South. The slaveholder created a quintessential form of democratic feudalism, turning the white majority into a lordly class, sharing in the privileges and prerogatives of governing the slave class. Though the members of this ruling class knew that they were not equal to each other, they were compensated by the illusion of superiority—and the reality of rule—over the black population beneath them.

One school of thought—call it the equal opportunity school—located the democratic promise of slavery in the fact that it put the possibility of personal mastery within the reach of every white man. The genius of the slaveholders, wrote Daniel Hundley in his Social Relations in Our Southern States, is that they are “not an exclusive aristocracy. Every free white man in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch.” This was not just propaganda: by 1860, there were 400,000 slaveholders in the South, making the American master class one of the most democratic in the world. The slaveholders repeatedly attempted to pass laws encouraging whites to own at least one slave and even considered granting tax breaks to facilitate such ownership. Their thinking, in the words of one Tennessee farmer, was that “the minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman . . . you make him an abolitionist at once.”

That school of thought contended with a second, arguably more influential, school. American slavery was not democratic, according to this line of thinking, because it offered the opportunity for personal mastery to white men. Instead, American slavery was democratic because it made every white man, slaveholder or not, a member of the ruling class by virtue of the color of his skin. In the words of Calhoun: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Or as his junior colleague James Henry Hammond put it, “In a slave country every freeman is an aristocrat.” Even without slaves or the material prerequisites for freedom, a poor white man could style himself a member of the nobility and thus be relied upon to take the necessary measures in its defense.

@TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world