#arts and humanities

[expiationist]

just a little stem vs humanities student story, since that seems so be a controversial topic in the academic world:

as a language and business double major, i absolutely think stem majors are another breed. hear me out. my best friend of 10 years is a biochem major, and she has always taken the hardest calc/physics/chem classes. she would get As on bio tests like it was first grade math. her knowledge eludes me. i have to try exponentially harder than her in every class we had together, and we barely even had the same classes! she took regular calc freshman year, got an A pretty easily. i took business calc, got an A because i was so close to an A and my professor saw how much effort i had put in and felt bad. i have always thought stem was much harder than anything i was pursuing.

until i heard her pov.

she is also pursuing a spanish minor, and has been taking spanish classes since 8th grade (we took our first spanish class together). i took spanish in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade, then stopped taking it through classes and started self studying japanese my junior year of highschool. she continued to pursue spanish and has taken in every year and every semester since 8th grade. shes studying abroad next semester, and we thought it would be a good idea for me to pick up spanish so she would have an opportunity to teach me and talk in spanish together. however, i picked it up pretty fast after not taking it for four years.

i noticed she felt ~some type of way~ about it, which prompted a conversation between the two of us.

to spare the mundane details, she thought it was insane that i caught up to where she was within weeks, after not having taken a class higher than high school spanish 2. i told her i thought it was insane that she got an A in every calc, physics, bio, and chem class, which i was never able to get a single A in (until business calc in college). she has a 4.0, taking what i thought were WAY harder classes than what i was taking. hell, i couldn’t even get an A in astronomy. astronomy.

she then talked about how i had rarely EVER gotten less than a 93 on essays, even if i had written them the night before, while she has to spend weeks on essays to get a good grade on them.

the moral of this story, is that everyone has their own talents. science comes natural to her. languages and humanities come natural to me. i find her talents way harder. she finds my talents way harder because humanities tend to be subjective, and business requires a certain personality and being good with people, which she doesn’t see those qualities in herself.

personally, i think anyone who pushes the “stem is objectively harder” agenda is probably just insecure in their own abilities to do arts/humanities/business. a real mature student can see that everyone has their own talents and a field that is suited to them! there is no need to invalidate peoples academic pursuits. college should be about finding what YOU love and want to pursue, not invalidating everyone and making them feel dumber because they chose a different path from you.

do what you love, and study hard if you love it! just because someone studies humanities subjects doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of succeeding in stem. and just because you study stem doesn’t make you smarter than someone who doesn’t choose to pursue that.

HOWEVER. from my pov, stem is like actually shit from Mars that i will never be able to wrap my head around, so to be humble ill admit i could NEVER study stem subjects beyond general education requirements. kudos to you guys! but that doesnt apply to every a&h kid out there!

#study blog #studyblr #studyinspo #stem aesthetic #stemeducation #stem academia #arts and humanities #art #art student #humanities #academia aesthetic #chaotic academia #university #langblr #japanese langblr #japanese #japanese language #langblog

[msaprildaniels]

There are few things I find more unsettling than STEM-educated people who seem reasonable, sound, and sober until you ask them about the arts and humanities, at which point they become red-faced, spittle-flecked hives of fury and resentment. It's something I don't understand, that anger.

#stem #arts and humanities #they should be friends

[positively--speculative]

You know what? I'm making my own separate post about this.

It's a little laughable that if you make any sort of criticism here about people in STEM, you will get a slew of crybabies in your notes talking about "not all STEM people" or whatever. Shit, I even saw someone suggest we're still "jealous" of them because we were bad at math in high school. I think many people, including myself, who are more into the humanities will reveal that we actually made several friends who were good at math and/or science and are incredibly grateful to the educators who understood our struggles in those subjects and worked to be as helpful as possible in order for us to pass those classes so we could continue on in our education and strive in the subjects we enjoyed and are good at. The notion that we are resentful of people who excelled in subjects we weren't as good at is funny and likely says more about them than anyone else. If people don't like you, it's probably not because you're better at math than them. It's because you act like an asshole lol.

STEM majors are praised in just about every corner of our society constantly, and you know what? We should celebrate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We need people to be good at those things to continue to make advances as humans. I am very grateful to the people who have used those things for good. But the more people I run into who strive mostly in STEM, the more I realize that many have bought into the idea that subjects like literary analysis and criticism do not provide any sort of life skills and are therefore not valuable. I've run into many "smart" people who can absolutely read but just don't. They don't think they need to. They know everything they need to know after all. They refuse to expose themselves to stories that are complex and that showcase the lives of people who are different than them and living very different experiences. They refuse to explore further and learn about authors and what may have shaped their decisions to write their stories the way they do. They refuse to see how this is actually a very useful skill to use outside of literary analysis. Like, sorry, but this is a consistent pattern in many of our experiences with STEM fanatics. That's why people write about it here. But it's clear, if you are into STEM and are offended by this, that you just aren't used to just a handful of people not lining up to kiss your ass just because you are "good at math" lmao.

And, like, so many STEM fanatics get so upset and defensive when those of us into the humanities put our skills to good use and create posts and criticisms that closely examine a piece of fiction and discuss the ways it reflects the society it was created in or could have helped shape the society it existed in and possibly still shape the world we live in, they get so mad and defensive. "It's just a movie! It's just a book!" And no one is actually stopping them from enjoying whatever thing it is on its surface, but they get mad and annoyed at us doing it for some reason.

On a final note (at least for now), our skills are obviously valuable if our oppressors are currently banning books. What it suggests is that they don't want more people like us. We're valuable to society, but we're not the kind of valuable they want. We ask too many questions. STEM, on the other hand, while often used for good is also very easily weaponized. So, if you are a sensitive STEM fanatic, maybe you'll understand why we wished more of you chose to get your heads out of your asses and read a book that isn't purely technical for once.

If you are into STEM and the behavior above does not describe you, CONGRATULATIONS! It wasn't about you and you can keep scrolling!

#STEM #humanities #arts and humanities #science #mathematics #engineering #criticism #technology #if it's not about you don't make it about you

[ochipi]

I find it very comforting that the hashtag “Art” is almost 24/7 trending on tumblr.

#art #trending #tumblr trends #hashtag #comfort #arts and humanities

[jovialcloudqueenisnotonfire]

contrary to popular belief, the dichotomy of college majors is not STEM vs Arts, it’s Business vs Everyone Else

#and by business i mean them and related majors #university #college #stem major #arts and humanities #business major slander

[bisousmwah]

American Academy in Rome

Credit: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

#architecture #rome #ancient history #research #arts and humanities

[slacktivist]

Cut your divisions. Slice your faculties. Now bleed out.

#scholarly academia #academia #university #tertiary education #education #climate crisis #education sector #phd life #postgraduate #post capitalism #cambridge university #york university #university of waikato #AUT #university of auckland #ANU #arts and culture #arts and humanities #colonialism #standardization #homogeneity #scholarly publishing #digital inequities

[sabertoothwalrus]

I wanted to revisit sock princess

#adventure time #ice king #sock princess #simon petrikov #finn the human #jake the dog #marceline the vampire queen #princess bubblegum #my art #comic

[skorpionegrass]

finally finished my mlp human designs ^^ i hope i can draw more of them in the future

#i have sm of this human equestria au planned out... but when will i draw it idk #enjoy this for now ^^ #my art #mlp #my little pony #friendship is magic #mlp fanart #twilight sparkle #rarity #applejack #fluttershy #pinkie pie #rainbow dash

[troythecatfish]

#threads #threads app #threads account #threads an instagram app #celebrity news #robin williams #zelda williams #ai #ai generated #aiartisnotart #ai is a plague #ai issues #ai is not art #ai is scary #ai is dangerous #ai is theft #ai is stupid #support human artists #disturbing #terrifying #unsettling #actors strike #sag afra strike #workers #workers rights #workers strike #support unions #voice actors #actors #actor

[jamjoob]

I would've done anything for another fancy dinner episode

#adventure time #finn the human #jake the dog #marceline #simon petrikov #princess bubblegum #huntress wizard #bmo #my art

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

#shut up e #long post #Saturday thoughts #this has been in my drafts for a week haha #also this is the heart of why AI art feels so wrong #forget the discussion of copyright and theft etc - even if models were only trained on public domain they would still feel very wrong #because they’re not art. art is the labor of creation #even commercial art and art commissioned by the popes and kings of history: there is humanity in the labor of it #unrelated: I did not know living in the Bronx was now something to brag about. How the fuck do y’all New Yorkers afford this city???

[msaprildaniels]

A guy who has never taken the time to learn to value anything but the material: "Hey, what's the material value of this numinous beauty? What concrete benefit do I get from being better able to self-reflect on my precious existence in the midst of an ambiguous void? Do I really need to pay that nickle of tax dollars it would cost to train people to study this stuff? Come on, chop-chop, I need an answer right now, and it's gotta be comprehensible to me without requiring me to study that which I seek to understand, and you also gotta make it flatter my preconceptions while gently easing me out of my prior biases. Wipe my ass, too."

That same guy, elsewhere in the conversation: "Look I know I started by saying your whole field is a fraud but you're getting really angry and I don't appreciate that."

#arts and humanities

[st4rlex]

i had an epiphany

#fionna and cake #fionna and cake spoilers #marshall lee #fionna cambell #fionna the human #adventure time #art #lex art #artists on tumblr

[softausterity]

like okay if we're talking about this anatomically the ear holes on a human skull and a cat are actually in the same spot it's a difference in the shape of the cranium. you can see what's happening if you look at hairless cats

ears is big. so you can put the cat ears wherever you want if you start them at the same point as where the human ears would go.

just like. pull the sideburns back a little and it's fine. it's fine.

it's the best way to catify your blorbos with visible human ears. but that's just my........ purrsonal opinion..............

#excuse the drawing quality on literally everything that isn't the human skulls #.....i don't have a tag for this. #art tag

[indeedgoodman]

#art #humanity #kindness #people being people #society #human beings #faith in humanity #india #cleaning #life hacks #tips #how to #love #life #hope #feeling #emotions #existence #reality #real life