Global Warming Impact on Clothing

At least on DA, the site for amateur artists to post their work, women and girls seem to be wearing more skimpy clothes.  Even depictions of well known fictional characters---Cinderella, Tinker Bell, Supergirl---have them wearing very skimpy clothes.

As I have observed before, the membership of DA is mainly young male artists with very adolescent tastes, which results in some of the art being the sort of thing that teenage boys would reputedly scribble in the margins of their notebooks; only now it is put up on the Web.  These pictures have always been scantily clad.

But on Instagram, and other places where girls upload photos of themselves, I wonder whether more skimpy clothing is the norm?  And what about guys?  I see a lot of pictures of guys in shorts, but that could be because it's getting to be summer.  We've got to study this for a full year before we jump to conclusions.

"Hot!", "Hot!", "Hot!". Aaargh!

I've been regaling you with complaints about the site DA (DeviantArt), or rather the artists who are members of the site.

When an artist uploads a piece, he/she is allowed to fill in a text field to describe the work.  Actually three fields: a title, a longer description, and a list of keywords.  In each field, the goofy artists often describe their work in (what they think are) glowing terms; e.g. "Hot young girl, with large breasts!", or "Beautiful, nude young woman, relaxing in the forest."  The word 'hot' appears so often that I need to turn on the fan.

To be fair, many of these artists are foreign, or: let me be precise: non-native-English speakers, so one wonders where they have learned English.  Some of them actually are native English speakers, but all through their school years have been so focused on artwork that their language skills are very rudimentary, and they manage to get by using words like 'hot' and 'beautiful' and 'sexy' because, after all, many of them are imitating the artwork found in comics, manga and anime, much of which can be described---by fans---using those three words alone.

There certainly are members with better language skills, but they're swamped by the 'hot / beautiful / sexy' boneheads.  Their intellectual age, on the average, seems to be about 12 ... OK, maybe about 16, which is not much more than a couple of decades younger than I am.  But I'm not primarily---or even at all---a graphic artist.  If I had gone into Art (which usually means 'drawing'), I suppose my language skills would have remained at the primitive level.

Kay, making devilled eggs for visitors.

Art That Pushes Our Buttons

When watching a movie, have you ever got the feeling that the director (or producer, or screenwriter) is getting a cheap reaction from the movie audience with a scene, or a plot twist that is guaranteed to get a desired reaction?

Westerns, for instance, have been made for nearly a century, and movie buffs know really well how certain types of scenes get the audience cheering.  Chases, for example.  Even car chases work really well.  I was watching Conan the Barbarian, and in the first couple of minutes we see Conan's mother brutally killed.  In The Beastmaster, similarly, a woman brutally has her child extracted from her womb.

In these sorts of situations, I'm firmly convinced that the movie producers intentionally insert certain elements to provoke a desired reaction from the audience.  They are being manipulative.  It is a cheap technique, because they have a captive audience.  Instead of a story developing organically from the initial circumstances and the characters involved, it moves from engineered reaction to engineered reaction.

This sort of movie could be extremely successful, but at the cost of the audience manipulation being visible.  In Avatar, for instance, there are a couple of scenes that are very manipulative.  In Star Wars (A New Hope), there are many manipulative scenes; some of them intended to elicit a chuckle, others intended to make us mad.  The destruction of Alderaan was definitely intended to underscore the evil nature of the Empire.  Similarly the murder of Luke's uncle and aunt, though the latter made Like homeless, which was an important plot requirement.

Well, guess what.  I'm finding that, on the amateur art site I often report on: DeviantArt, artists are beginning to insert picture elements that have gotten favorable receptions, just to guarantee success.  This is pandering.  The girls have large, pneumatic breasts, very long hair, sometimes a girl is depicted nude, with the caption saying: ready to go exploring.  Give me a break.  I have already complained about girl fighters wearing platform slippers.  But girl fighters with long, flowing Rapunzel hair? I think not.  My problem is that I was partly trained as a scientist, and inconsistencies really grind my gears.

School vs. College

What's the difference (between school and college)?

Not a lot, it seems to me.  To most kids, school is something your parents  have wanted you to get through.  (Some of these parents have struggled to get work, because they hadn't been to school, or dropped out; they're convinced of the usefulness of school.  Other parents are both busy working, and just need a place to stash you until they return from work.)  The attitudes of kids towards school is influenced heavily by their parents' attitude, even if the kids and the parents fight about everything else.

College, in contrast, is, on the face of it, a place a kid wants to be: away from the parents, lots of potential for---well, let's call it 'Romance'---and improved chances of getting a job.

In my own case, I loved college.  Many of the things I was taught were the same old things from high school, but they were more logically linked together.  You understood why they were joined together, it made good sense.  Often, your college courses went no further than high school courses; in fact some of my high school courses were even a tiny bit more advanced!  But in some cases, you knew your college courses were giving you the real deal, something you would not have known if not for your college education.

Unfortunately, in some junior colleges, you just get a second chance to get some material you ought to have picked up in school, but then you were young, and distracted, and stupid, and have sports practice.  Now you're older, smarter, got even more things to do, but it's a second chance, and you don't waste those.

So, most kids who've been to college, really know more, and are capable of more things, than high school graduates.  But it depends on the person.  It's quite possible for a kid who's been through college to be just as dumb and unmotivated as a high school kid, unfortunately.  That's why god made HR people, who must know what they're doing.   But unfortunately there's no way to ensure that the new college graduate employee applying for the job opening in your company is any good.

Kay Hemlock Brown

P.S. :

I forgot one of the most important facets of College.  In school—even high school—you meet kids from around where you live.  In college, you meet kids from all over.  My cousin went to a top-rated school in the East.  She was of mixed parentage, and the school admissions director was just dying to get her in, and they gave her all sorts of scholarships to entice her.  They really tried their best to provide students with a diverse set of classmates.  (They're making a fuss about this in Congress, saying this policy prevents good old American kids from getting a place.  It's sort of a variation on the reverse discrimination argument.)

One result of this fact—a diverse student body—is that kids get comfortable with people of different ethnicity than their own.  White kids who have attended college have friends who are black, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Palestinian, Israeli, Russian, and so on, and less likely to harbor strange prejudices about, say, Mexicans, like Donald Trump has.  Furthermore, you're likely to have met more than a single individual from any racial group, which means you're less likely to think that everyone of that ethnicity is 'x', whatever that is: clever, or stupid, or obnoxious, or friendly, or tight-fisted, or tends to lie a lot.  Like the University of Pennsylvania.  You'd expect that everyone there lies through their teeth, just based on knowing Trump.  (But actually, I don't think Trump spent much time there.)

AI Cosplay!

I've just heard of this: AI Cosplay.  I can't even guess what is intended; does some cosplayer get into costume, and then modify the image with AI, or is this some robotic person doing cosplay?

Cosplay doesn't make _any_ sense unless there's an actual person sort of acting out a scene.  The talent is seen in the makeup, the wigs, the costume, the expression, in short the acting.  When that's taken over by AI, there isn't anything left to appreciate.  It just becomes fantasy fan-art, which is interesting only to fans of that Fandom.  In Cosplay, we can relate to the final shot at many different levels, but basically relating to the cosplayer as a human being.  In this new genre, if you want to call it that, there really is no human being at all.

One of Each Book!

This is both really cute, and very satisfying: a day after I made all my e-books free, the downloading records showed that one copy of every one of my books had been downloaded!  Of course, I don't know whether a single person was responsible for downloading all of them, but it seems likely that it was.

Furthermore, they, whoever they are, may not like all the books, or even a single one of the books (and may not read them all), but I have to be satisfied with interpreting the statistics this way.

I was a very different person when I wrote many of the books (than I am now), and when I read some of them now I'm stunned by how well I did, in some cases, as well as how embarrassing some passages are!  You may wonder whether the same person wrote them all; well they did, and it was me.

Well, a happy St. Patrick's Day to anyone reading this.  (I believe St. Patrick was a Roman, but I could be wrong.  He definitely had a Roman passport.)

Regards, from a grateful and appreciative Kay

Read an Ebook Week!

Just learned about this thing, and enrolled all my books ago.  Get over to Smashwords and get all the books for free right now; we can talk later.

This is a silly event; I just can't take it seriously!  Anyone who wants to read at all would probably be reading ebooks, but I recognize that some people don't own the equipment to do so, like an ebook reader, or a tablet.  Also, a two-week event would make a little more sense.  Anyhow, enjoy!

Kay