vanillivilovesreus

As you know, you can make writers lives easier by doing unnecessary exposition scenes in real life, thereby making them realistic.

Thank you for making this post on the hip social media site that we frequent at this point in our lives. I'm reblogging it both because it's funny and because I consider us friends

Yes, in the early 21st century we often consider people we only interact with over social media as friends, even if we have never met them in real life. And that's why I have not only reblogged this post, but also liked it (by clicking a button with my mouse).

i just watched the omen (1976) and while i really enjoyed it, i couldn’t stop myself from laughing at JUST how much neil and terry stole from it when writing good omens 😭😭

When we wrote the book the film The Omen was popular currency, much like Jaws or Star Wars, and people knew we were (among other things) parodying it. These days people have forgotten. It’s as if Spaceballs had gone on to have a longer media life than Star Wars.

Doing more than one? Choose whichever you found the most helpful. ❤️

pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it's like, "oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism" and that was very very brave of them

#here is a man so heartless he has literally cut his own heart out of his chest #but he's still not as evil as the fucking east india trading company

Actually the portrait of Charles is red to represent enthusiasm, energy, determination, passion, strength, leadership, and love. It doesn't matter that it looks like he's walking through fountains of blood spilled by the British empire! Some of you people need to learn color theory

i was WAITING for this post

tumblr coming across the painting:

That post I made over new years had people at my THROAT for saying I only buy real leather. Sorry I really do think that wearing textured plastic that will fall apart in under 5 years and go on to irreparably poison the environment is the worse option here.

if you look into the mushroom leather or apple leather or cactus leather or any other plant-based alternatives, they're all still about 50-75% polyurethane. They'll still fall apart fast and then they wont decompose except into microplastics. They're just not sustainable. I thrift pretty much all my leather garments and some of them are 30 years old and still hold up like they're new. Like there's no contest.

i cant get over the king charles portrait. they made that thing to age in his place. that painting hangs in the house of a too-friendly family you find in the post apocalyptic wasteland who inexplicably has a ready supply of fresh meat. if mario jumped into that painting he wouldn't find a charming platformer he would be flayed and hanged like a medieval criminal by an unseeable force in a droning red void. that painting is a color blindness test for people who work in IT but believe in the divine right of kings. that painting is going to weep the sequel to blood. after he dies charles is gonna crawl outta that thing like sadako.

this painting is what ultrakill speedrunners see when they close their eyes. if you showed this to the romans who flogged jesus theyd think this painting is excessive. this painting is the blood cavern from space funeral. it's the color out of space.

jegus tapdancing christ it is actually that bad

Hi fun fact, colors do have meaning and there is a legit thing called color theory. Red does has more positive connotations than negative. Red is associated with more love, lust, passion than blood and death just like the chart shows you but If you want, here’s a link for you to check it out yourself. Also, check out “The Designer’s Dictionary of Color” by Sean Adams. Have fun learning something

Xoxo

-Designer

much better :)

Around the world today, the penumbra of the rising of the first sun of May is lined with onlookers and wellwishers, eyes on the eastern horizon to catch the first glimpse of a new season.

Because in our hearts, this is how summer returns to the northern hemisphere; this sun a baton passed in the annual relay as the south prepares for what winter may bring.

Among our number, where the hilltops flatten enough for people to trust their feet in the gloom, for over a century now morris dancers have set out in the fading dark to dance in the dawn, for the same reason we do anything: because it's what we do. That's all tradition is, after all.

And every year, alongside the bells, a passage from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather rings in my mind.

And so, every year, follow the sound of bells and sticks, the chorus of voices singing Hal And Tow, and you'll find a bunch of knackered weirdos in the middle of nowhere in daft hats and a chill breeze, but proud of what they've done.

After all, we just made the sun rise.

I am one of today's lucky 10,000.

I did not know until this moment that Morris Dancing existed as an irl phenomenon. I thought Pratchett made it up for his books. I was wrong. Apparently Englishmen will really get out of bed in the pitch black, stalk through the night in a costume with bells on, and dance to herald the dawn on the first of May.

Pratchett did not make this up. He didn't have to.

Dear OP, thank you for dancing in the dawn.

Oh it gets weirder! There are different schools of Morris dancer. They have fun.

The Cotswold Morris dancer is usually an old white British man, extremely serious and would be the perfect uncle if you yearned for an uncle. They wear bowler hats with flowers, white clothes and bells on their legs. They do a symmetrical polite dance with a hanky. They are VERY spry, like alarmingly spry and athletic. There is usually an accordion. In addition to the hanky thing, they also carry small rounded sticks like spoon handles, which they gently tap against each other in a pattern (this is called rapping.) Their presence usually evokes the vibe of cricket grounds, mown grass and a speech from the mayor: the genteel English folk tradition whose pagan roots are endorsed enthusiastically by the history-minded vicar. I think the best thing about everything Cotswold dancers are is that they are doing something in public that is likely supposed to be incredibly embarrassing and they are completely immune to that. Because of the purity of their confidence and focus and the courage of their convictions, nobody can object to them or interfere with them or even mock them. If a straight old man wants to wear a flowery hat and strap ribbons and bells to his legs and high-kick in the middle of town, then that’s what men do, fuck off. The cringe factor is utterly dead in these men. The second best thing is that their mathematical focus and hypnotic autistic rizz DO make you think that they are doing something Significant and Important here. Clearly they ARE underpinning the seasons because why else this confident wizard behavior?

The Border Morris dancers are the goth ones, usually wearing some mixture of black, stompy boots, a decorated top hat and a “tatted coat” of colorful dark rags. They used to paint their faces black to disguise themselves, but as this began to collide unpleasantly with blackface and anti-Blackness, the progressive ones now use alternative makeup. Today they might do a black painted eye mask or other gothy looks. Women are more common in this tradition. Their dances often involve rushing at each other in mock battle and thwacking each other in ferocious patterns with sticks. There is whooping and howling and a sense of chaos and usually a Hobby Horse; they are going for a mad max witchy vibe. Clearly these rituals also do something.

You also get fusion ones…

And outliers like the extremely sexy topless young men with knives, who randomly broke out at the wassail this year and did a sexy knife dance with each other before shouting HUP and sprinting off into the dusk. I don’t know if anyone knew who they were, but they were great at it. I’m sure it did the apples a lot of good, and I’d like to study the effect further, please come back and try it again with a control group etc. Secretly hoping OP is one of those

I am on several criteria not a sexy topless young man with knives I'm afraid.

Most Maydays I've been a white-clad panama-hat-wearing hanky-waving Cotswold dancer, this year for a change I was in my Border black rags. And no face paint today - ours takes best part of an hour to do and you can bet that hour was for sleeping. (Especially as for the first time since 2019, it was a work day, and we didn't fancy either scrubbing it off before work or showing up in face paint.)

Interestingly the Cotswold kit evokes cricket vibes because that's pretty much what it is: the sides who the dances were collected from danced in their cricket whites.

A fair few sides these days dance Cotswold in the summer and Border in the winter - Border (and Molly, which is debatably morris, some Molly dancers insist it's not) was danced in the winter by out-of-season farm labourers to busk (and threaten, hence the disguise element) for money, while Cotswold was done at summer fairs and the like, and how warm the respective kits are still reflects that.

(Here speaks someone who's worn a black rag jacket and top hat in a heatwave and cricket whites in the snow and recommends neither.)

As for Pagan roots - if anyone tells you they know where morris started, either they're selling you a book or they've bought one. For one, what's called morris these days bears little resemblance to the dance that carried Will Kempe from London to Norwich around the time he fell out with Shakespeare's acting company. But as far back as we have record of it, it's been tied to the Christian calendar specifically (and not even the fun holidays we nicked off the Celts, even dancing on Mayday is a relatively modern addition that didn't get into the calendar till 1923). That's not to say it's divorced from Paganism in the modern day, as many particularly Border dancers are practising Pagans and I've been at dance outs on Beltane and Imbolc which were primarily religious gatherings.

Ooh also, on gender, the 2023 morris census (that's a thing) shows the tradition to be majority-female now:

Cotswold morris is now 40% female, 59% male and 1% non-binary, not so far from Border's 55/44/1 split.

(A note on the census though is that this is data collected per side, not per dancer, so dancers in multiple sides, colloquially known as tarts, will be counted multiple times and be statistically overrepresented.)

@elodieunderglass @baddywronglegs So you're saying that Border Morris is

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

As someone who spent over a decade catering luxury events, let me add some back of house info:

Tiktok has surpassed tumblr LMAO

ok tik tok you win this round

Der arme Björnd konnte sich doch nicht auch noch mit dem Nationalsozialismus beschäftigen 😢😢😢 in seiner Zeit als äh ... Geschichtslehrer (X)

"Bin ich weniger wert als andere Menschen, habe ich keine Menschenwürde, bin ich kein Mensch-"

Der Artikel ist so gut

Naziparolen zu verbieten hindert uns an der kollektiven Selbstfindung? Demzufolge ist faschistisches, menschenverachtendes Gedankengut dem Deutschen inhärent, Bernd? Ich dachte du wärst hier der große Patriot, aber anscheinend hast du keine besonders hohe Meinung von deinen Landsleuten.

LMAO oh mein Gott

Was ich nicht dafür geben würde, das auf Video zu sehen

Das wird mit jedem Absatz besser, mein Gott haben sie den zerfleddert

based

(Natürlich wird Heulboje Bernd in Berufung gehen. Trag deine gerechte Strafe wie ein Mann, du Weichei.)

We must beat the Americans

The difference between int and wis

Je suis désolé. Je ne parle pas anglais.

Canadians be like "Buddy" (derogatory)