Rynling R&D

The University of the Arts is closing June 7, its president says
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1d57wx2/the_university_of_the_arts_is_closing_june_7_its/

In an abrupt and stunning development in Philadelphia’s higher education market, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia is planning to close its doors for good on June 7, president Kerry Walk said Friday evening. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, its accrediting agency, reported that the school with nearly 150-year-old roots notified the agency of its imminent closure on Wednesday, the same day it started a summer term. It comes following a precipitous decline in enrollment and a severe cash flow problem that had been building over time.

Apparently, the school decided to close without telling anyone on Wednesday. The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the story on Friday afternoon, and a lot of people only learned about it from the Reddit post on Friday evening. Students received an email a few hours later, but faculty have yet to be officially notified as of Saturday morning. Awesome.

As people have noted in the Reddit thread, a lot of smaller colleges (including art schools) announced their permanent closures in April and May of 2024. This is a general trend, which makes the current situation at University of the Arts all the more frustrating. What a university will do when the writing is on the wall is to hire an "undertaker president" whose job is to make sure the closure goes smoothly. University of the Arts would have known they were going to close since they hired their own undertaker president, and not telling anyone (to the extent of admitting new students and hiring new faculty for the next academic year) is extremely negligent and cruel. This doesn't affect me personally, but it sucks and I hate it.

I wrote a short review of Ngozi Ukazu's new graphic novel Bunt that I posted on Goodreads and then took down five minutes later. Here it is:

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But who is it going to benefit if I say any of this in public, you know? The potential benefits just don't outweigh the potential backlash.

ETA: If it seems as though I'm taking the negative portrayals of these characters personally, that's because I am. I feel like these characters are my students. As someone who teaches classes about Japan, I definitely have autism spectrum students who wear furry ears to class and transgender students who ask for make-up quizzes because their "family thing" is an anime convention and international students who don't speak 100% "proper" English. So what if they come off as weird. They're just kids. Let them be.

This is a mini-review that I wrote for WWAC but will not post, at least not in its current form:

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So I sympathize with Rui, whose every word is stolen from her by the men who conspire to confine her to a page of pulped paper. If she can’t speak in the language of the cultural elite, she’ll find another way of expressing herself, and the vast and mysterious array of life she produces is infinitely more vibrant than her husband’s formulaic literary fiction. Her husband has the privilege of publishing award-winning books made of dead wood, but she is the roots and the leaves and the flowers and the wind.

...I wrote this last night, and then this morning I got an email telling me that my application to the Philadelphia writer’s workshop was waitlisted. This is frustrating, obviously, to have the door closed in my face again. But then again, there’s a lot of space outside the house, and a lot more room to grow.

Why reblog machine-generated art?
https://ms-demeanor.tumblr.com/post/734136970463313920/why-reblog-machine-generated-art

I don’t think that all AI art is ugly. I don’t think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that ‘having soul’ is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don’t think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don’t think that’s a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

This is an interesting and well-written perspective on AI art. I disagree with the first half of the excerpted paragraph, as I think 100% of AI art looks overly processed and dumb as fuck, but the main problem with AI art is definitely capitalism, by which I mean the main problem with AI art has less to do with AI and more to do with human artists not being paid, compensated, or otherwise able to make a living. Also:

Not everyone wants to make good art that’s creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren’t passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their YouTube video.

This is a perfect way to put it, because:

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I personally don't like AI art, but it feels reductive to say it's all bad all the time. I wish the corporate resources potentially saved by using AI art for disposable graphics were used to support human artists engaged in more meaningful projects, but that feels like a different conversation.

This post contains more yelling about the practical everyday business of being a writer.

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I'm still thinking about how much I hate this movie, sorry.

There's a recurring joke about how the main "human" character, a grown Gen X woman, is married to an Anglo man who is trying to learn Spanish for her sake but is very bad it at.

I just want to say that joke sucks.

It's such an amazing experience to learn languages! Even as an adult! Sometimes it's hard, and sometimes you make mistakes, but that's okay! Being able to speak different languages is magical, and everyone who wants to learn should try! Studying a language isn't "cultural appropriation," and there is literally not a single non-American human being on this earth who is going to judge you for speaking a language other than English. Please study Spanish! Or Arabic, or Chinese, or whatever you like! Do it for your friends, do it for your partner, or just do it for yourself! It's super fun to study a language you didn't grow up speaking, and it will make your world so much larger and more interesting.

I guess what I mean is that, in its bubbly affirmation that "women can do anything," Barbie never asks whether maybe there are some things that no human being of any gender should do. Like, Barbie is very excited to show women on the Supreme Court - Black women, no less! - but it never asks whether or not there should even be a Supreme Court in the first place.

Speaking of which, I guess that's my fringe belief: I believe that, for one week every year, U.S. citizens with the proper license should be able to hunt Supreme Court justices for sport. Any democracy worth its salt operates according to a system of checks and balances, and it's important to keep the ecosystem healthy. (Joke!!!! obviously)

Anyway, I apologize for misspeaking about the demographics of Los Angeles as represented in the Barbie movie. There is actually a third person of Latin American descent! Shortly after Barbie travels from Barbieland to "the real world," she becomes aware of the male gaze through the comments made by a group of construction workers, and one of them is Latino. I always love seeing a white woman threatened by the perceived hostility of a brown man. Diversity win!!

Comic-Con Cruise Experience to Set Sail in 2025
https://nerdist.com/article/san-diego-comic-con-international-will-have-fan-cruise-experience-in-feburary-2025-comic-con-the-cruise/

Comic-Con: The Cruise will give fans a chance to meet actors, creators, and more during special events and other activities. Typical cruise activities like trivia sessions and tastings will be available as well as theme night parties and tabletop gaming.

NOPE. Nope nope nope. No thank you!!

A part of me thinks this sounds fun, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the concept of a fan convention that you can't leave. And also, it's not impossible that the whole thing could vanish into the ocean.

Yesterday, Elon Musk rolled out a new policy for Twitter. There are now "daily reading limits" for different tiers of accounts. This policy was implemented without much thought. For example, opening a tweet thread counts as "reading" all of the comments on all of the tweets in the thread, meaning that it's possible to the exceed your daily limit with just one tweet. Given the giant protests in France and Israel, and well as the recent Supreme Count decisions and mass shootings in the United States, this isn't as unlikely as you might think.

Because Twitter had to send out so many error messages to users, it has essentially staged a DDS attack on itself, causing several service outages yesterday afternoon.

Based on reporting by NPR and the Washington Post, a probable cause for what's going on is: (a) Musk fired roughly half the staff at Twitter, and the team is suffering from a severe labor shortage, and (b) Twitter has lost so much money during the past year that they can no longer afford to pay their server costs.

This is obviously frustrating, but Twitter has been in severe decline since last November. Everyone threatened to move to Mastodon, but all of the accounts I've seen there are lonely and sad and have no engagement. Instagram is becoming more hostile with each passing week as it tries to mimic the endless scroll of videos on TikTok, and many creatives have abandoned the platform entirely over the past few months. TikTok continues to be the death of culture.

Meanwhile, Reddit is even more of a trashfire than usual, with the "Reddit blackout" protest against API changes going on for almost a month now. Half of the boards are dark, and the other half are unmoderated. As a result, a lot of Reddit users have migrated to Tumblr (which means that I now have all sorts of people jumping onto my posts to try to explain Legend of Zelda to me). All the while, Tumblr continues to roll out site updates that make its user interface even more difficult to navigate.

The internet continues to burn. What a great time to be an emerging creative. 🙃

In before "but how could that artist possibly know????????"

Like have we just decided to forget that super fun Wojak meme that was all over the internet during 2020 when the internet collectively came to the conclusion that the pandemic was created by Jews who wanted to cash in on all that sweet sweet geld from the vaccine, which of course they were using to make "white" people infertile while spreading pestilence and poverty in Black and brown communities.

(Serious content warning for the image under the cut btw.)

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But Ganondorf isn't Jewish! But the artist wasn't being malicious! Okay, but I don't care?

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To quote: "Ganondorf is a dark-skinned desert man with a big nose and evil, mystical powers, and those are also old, stereotypical traits given to both Jewish and Middle Eastern men." If you're a professional artist drawing an illustration of a character with real-world ethnic facial features, know your shit and don't be gross.