bring this one back.

i’m so fucking happy for you and your northern lights no i’m being serious congratulations man that’s awesome you really (clenching my fist so hard my bones creak) deserve it

so someone reblogged a Gao Hang piece to my dash and I was like oh cool! That guy who does paintings that look exactly like oldschool 3D graphics; I love that guy! So I went looking for more of his paintings to add to the post, for people who might not realize it was paint instead of 3D art, and I found lots of great stuff! Like "For home defense 2", 2020:

and "Hand study", 2023:

and... um... hm.

"The fake picture fooled every American", 2020. From the instagram post he made for this painting:

gaohangart: I always wanted to discuss about the power of language and the right of speech: You should trust a Chinese looking man like me rather than Google. When you search Tiananmen Square on Google all you get are pictures of the Tank Man. This isn’t Tiananmen Square. The Tank Man was a fake picture and people give so much fuck about it. However it has entertained all of us. You see? Speech could be anything, but not all speeches are worth being listened. What’s really important is that we are viruses to earth and we are not working hard enough. You see? Another one.

The photo he's referencing is one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press on June 5th, 1989 in Beijing. It depicts a man blocking a column of tanks, the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre:

the photo is real. The guy in it is real. It's one of many photos taken of this real guy by multiple other real guys from different news outlets. There is video footage of this guy. The reason why Gao Hang believes the photo is fake might likely be because this photo is ruthlessly censored in China, where he is from. I think the thing about people being "viruses to earth and [...] not working hard enough" is supposed to be an example of another kind of speech that's "not worth listening to", but I'm not totally sure what he means by it.

And when someone in the comments asks him for what the truth is behind the photo, this exchange happens:

commenter: what's the history of the tank picture then? That's wild to hear gaohangart: It depends on who you trust and what you believe you see. Quantum theory you know.

Quantum theory, you know.

I don't know what the takeaway is here. Go looking up more of a cool artist's work, be confused and dismayed at the power of censorship and the weird twists people's brains can have in them? But there it is.

idk I kinda take that

"You see? Speech could be anything, but not all speeches are worth being listened."

as him saying "the tank guy stuff I just said is bullshit and not worth listening to", which he reinforces by then saying two more bullshit things("people are viruses" and "people should work harder").

I mean: it wouldn't be surprising to see a Chinese citizen doubt this, given all the propaganda around Tienanmen over there, but I read this as him being sarcastic. The "quantum theory" comment could be another sarcastic knock, this time at how "quantum" gets used in all sorts of quackery and scams.

I don't follow their accounts tho so idk how common such comment are; I'm just reacting to this one instance.

The authors’ intentions here were not just to signify the curtains were blue- but to trick you!

The author disliked you personally, and wanted to send you down a path of anti-intellectualism; a path you thought you’d carved yourself in direct “defiance” of the author!

A life where you ignore the symbolism and meaning of all works, boiling them down to their most basic meanings rather than what they represent. The author does this because he is a Time Wizard. The curtains were red btw

i hate job hunting so much why couldn’t i have just been sent abroad as a girl to serve at the court of margaret of austria and then later to serve a succession of french queens so that i could return to the english court years later as a lady of sophistication and charm capable of causing one of the greatest religious schisms in european history

if one more person reblogs this to tell me that Anne Boleyn got executed I’m gonna shake their hand and thank them because despite me evidently knowing the specifics of her early career in Europe pre-1522 I somehow was not aware of her extremely famous beheading. I had no idea. Thank you for enlightening me.

Help! Is my friend going to be all pissy that I lost his cat?

Miss Manners, Washington Post, 28 November 2022:

What a shock it must have been to discover that leaving the doors of your house wide open resulted in a cat vacating the premises! Such a bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence could never have been predicted! Consider reaching out to Ripley's to see if they are interested in this surreal and freakish incident.

But to the heart of your question: it's difficult to say whether any given person would give a single solitary fuck if their pet fell off the face of the earth. Everyone is so different! Sure, a few folks might want to know that their beloved companion has been lost, but the vast majority are probably just going to be like, meh, win some, literally lose some -- hence your harrowing conundrum about whether this man deserves to know whether his cat is safe in the care of the person entrusted with such! A handful of people would want to know about and participate in the search for a lost pet, but a lot of people probably forget they even have a cat once it leaves their direct line of sight! It's entirely possible, even more likely, that your friend is just this kind of person!

And yet, what if there is the tiny, minuscule, almost unfathomable chance that your friend cares whether his cat lives or dies? It's already truly bizarre that this feline hit the bricks after finding every available escape route labeled with a neon sign saying "take me," so it's hard to imagine the universe handing you something as doubly strange as your friend giving the barest shit about his errant pet.

The best course of action is to keep everything to yourself, forever, to avoid having one awkward conversation. On the off chance your express concern about his cat's whereabouts, simply place his belongings on the curb. Act as if you have never met him and never heard of his cat. Problem solved.

That would be absolutely horrible.

It’s important that everyone understand that, when I say that I “like” a villainous character, what I in fact mean is that I consider them to be both cool and morally praiseworthy, as well as correct in their aims and methods and worthy of emulation by people in the real world. Just in case there was any ambiguity on this point.

I further elaborate that I consider them to be An Excellent Role-Model for Impressionable Children.

I almost neglected to mention that they are a worthy sexual partner and that I am aroused by everything that they do.

…what

Well if we’re all dead from global warming then he isn’t wrong @thefingerfuckingfemalefury

(Puts finger to head in the “I’m so smart” gesture) “No one can commit sexual assault

If we destroy the very earth itself and humankind ceases to exist”

I have no doubt he said this unfortunately 

Well the only other option is not letting rich white men get away with sexual harassment/assault just because they’re rich and white

no it definitely makes much more sense to just destroy the planets ability to support any form of life with rampant pollution

His argument is even dumber than that, with a side of manichean, faux-christian symbolism. From the Article:

You heard it here, folks: rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment can’t happen in well-lit rooms, because light is filled with Righteousness which drives away Evil Acts. I wonder what the atomic number of Righteousness is? What’s its reactivity??

So really fossil-fuels are direct moral goods, since they can be burned to produce Evil-Purifying light. It’s just too bad, I guess, that there’s no other way to make electricity to power lights, or maybe that light powered by electricity produced by renewable, non-polluting, means doesn’t have the same anti-Evil effect *the biggest jerkoff motion*

Also: that final sentence should be “when the lights are on, when you have light that shines the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts.”

Also Also: that last sentence is a sentence fragment. When the lights are on what? What does having the lights shining on those types of acts DO, Mr. Perry? I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to give you failing marks for this paper.

is criticism possible?

‘A recent remark of Mr Eliot’s poses for us at the outset the fundamental question whether we (mere critics) have any right to talk about Milton at all. Mr Eliot says bluntly and frankly that the best contemporary practising poets are the only ‘jury of judgement’ whose verdict on his own views of Paradise Lost he will accept. And Mr Eliot is here simply rendering explicit a notion that has become increasingly prevalent for about a hundred years - the notion that poets are the only judges of poetry. If I make Mr Eliot’s words the peg on which to hang a discussion of this notion it must not, therefore, be assumed that this is, for me, more than a convenience, still less that I wish to attack him qua Mr Eliot. Why should I? I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial.

Let us consider what would follow if we took Mr Eliot’s view seriously. The first result is that I, not being one of the best contemporary poets, cannot judge Mr Eliot’s criticism at all. What then shall I do? Shall I go to the best contemporary poets, who can, and ask them whether Mr Eliot is right? But in order to go to them I must first know who they are. And this, by hypothesis, I cannot find out; the same lack of poethood which renders my critical opinions on Milton worthless renders my opinions on Mr Pound or Mr Auden equally worthless. Shall I then go to Mr Eliot and ask him to tell me who the best contemporary poets are? But this, again, will be useless. I personally may think Mr Eliot a poet - in fact, I do - but then, as he has explained to me, my thoughts on such a point are worthless. I cannot find out whether Mr Eliot is a poet or not; and until I have found out I cannot know whether his testimony to the poethood of Mr Pound and Mr Auden is valid. And for the same reason I cannot find out whether their testimony to his poethood is valid. Poets become on this view an unrecognizable society (an Invisible Church), and their mutual criticism goes on within a closed circle which no outsider can possibly break into at any point.

But even within the circle it is no better. Mr Eliot is ready to accept the verdict of the best contemporary poets on his criticism. But how does he recognize them as poets? Clearly, because he is a poet himself; for if he is not, his opinion is worthless. At the basis of his whole critical edifice, then, lies the judgement ‘I am a poet.’ But this is a critical judgement. It therefore follows that when Mr Eliot asks himself, ‘Am I a poet?’ he has to assume the answer ‘I am’ before he can find the answer ‘I am’; for the answer, being a piece of criticism, is valuable only if he is a poet. He is thus compelled to beg the question before he can get started at all. Similarly Mr Auden and Mr Pound must beg the question before they get started. But since no man of high intellectual honour can base his thought on an exposed petitio the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all, neither his own poetry nor that of his neighbour. The republic of letters resolves itself into an aggregate of uncommunicating and unwindowed monads; each has unawares crowned and mitred himself Pope and King of Pointland.’

- C. S. Lewis, ‘A Preface to Paradise Lost’ (Oxford, 1942), pp. 9-10