The Path of the King

Android bodies as a vehicle for erotic body horror is well and good, but I think android bodies as a vehicle for erotic comedy is an underexplored genre. Picture a story about a robot with realistic cyborg genitals misreading their pressure gauge and overfilling their synthetic spooge reservoir, then later they're getting a handjob from their partner and the resulting pressure differential blows their penile coupling and sends their entire dick shooting off like a bottle rocket, out the window and into the apartment across the street. The rest of the narrative concerns their increasingly slapstick efforts to locate and recover their errant member (which is, of course, still transmitting full sensory data via wireless connection – this is porn, after all).

it should be a point and click adventure accompanied by the silliest cartoon sound effects possible filled with interactable visual gags like an nsfw version of a humongous entertainment game.

Refilling the player character's spooge reservoir is the tutorial puzzle. It's actually possible to solve it "correctly" and avoid the overpressure issue, albeit only by using information the player cannot legitimately possess at that point in the game; if you actually do so, the plot's inciting incident is avoided, followed shortly by a non-standard game over in which the player character and their partner are randomly crushed by a deorbiting satellite which lands on their apartment.

(The apartment is also destroyed by a falling satellite in the intended plot sequence, but nobody dies because you're out chasing after your dick when it hits.)

I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl

it's a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what's intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles's reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he's wearing. It reminds my of Goya's portraits, how they were so 'realistic' that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?

the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it's serving for no reason. I. I love it. It's an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he's just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of " we will all laugh at guilded butterflies", draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.

This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10

This is a painting of a monarch whose individual personality and even bodily presence are a mere footnote within the legacy of bloodshed that built the throne he occupies. This is the only way it's possible to depict him. It's a photograph of his soul

And I think all of that is entirely deliberate!

I think Jonathan Yeo meant this portrait to be absolutely all of those things, he just can't be very vocal about the paintings true meaning. Yet.

I've done this on another post, but let's compare that portrait up there to some other portraits Yeo's done.

Here's actor and activist Idris Elba, whom colleagues have described as warm and friendly, open-hearted, with an emotional intelligence that makes him capable of being very honest and vulnerable with the character he's playing:

Here's Jony Ive - who founded Apple with Steve Jobs and was chief design officer responsible for some of the more popular artistic choices, who recently left the company because the culture had gotten so toxic and shitty. He now works more in private design, so he has more artistic freedom and he can be less in the public eye:

Yeo's even previously painted British heads of state. Here's the phenomenal Baroness Doreen Lawrence of the labour party, a Jamaican immigrant who turned the tragic murder of her son into a lifelong campaign of quietly and steadily dismantling systemic racism:

To me, all these portraits are deeply personal, conveying the sitter's character with empathy and quiet dignity.

Elba is leaning forward in an intimate friendly gesture. He makes eye contact with the viewer but his face is turned slightly to the side, inviting but not confrontational, his brows slightly drawn together thoughtfully. His hands are natural and relaxed. He's shirtless - not to be a beefcake thirst trap (okay maybe just a tiny little bit), but to convey how emotionally naked he's willing to be.

Ives is literally putting a lens between himself and the viewer - we have to look closer to see his face, but when we do we see his eyes crinkled with a hint of good humor. The perspectives are all distorted, but the main thing we see is the hands that have physically built so much of the technology we use. And even outside the phone screen he's still enased by a circular frame within a frame, indicating yet another layer of separation between the subject and the viewer.

Lawrence is radiant, proudly upright and implacable as a mountain, her head held high and her hands folded before her with a self-contained air of calm determination. And even though the background is a chaotic sea of looming shapes and quick brush strokes, her eyes keep us grounded, even pinned in place. We're the viewer, but she is studying us.

And then, on the other end of the personality spectrum, here's noted asshole Damien Hirst, who frequently makes the news for being racist and sexist and just generally a really slimy piece of shit. His most famous works are the animal carcasses suspended in resin-

-yeah, that. That guy. He's made all the money in the goddamn world three times over for pieces like that, and he still seems like he's on a personal mission to make everyone around him as miserable as possible.

Here's Yeo's portrait of him, seated on a leather throne, dick bulge at eye level, contained in one of his own tanks:

Here's the droopy and melancholic portrait of the famously pompous and insufferable John Cooper Clarke, self-described "original punk poet", who was recently booed off stage for making super transphobic remarks, and whose most famous quote is "I read Kerouac at 12 and decided I could do better":

And, most notably for the argument I'm making here, here's D-Day veteran Sgt Geoffrey Pattinson, and see if you can spot the extremely subtle use of color theory here:

My conclusion: Jonathan Yeo paints very good portraits, and sometimes his subjects are very bad people.

And I think he brings absolutely all of his artistic talent to the Charles portrait.

@chromegnomes is absolutely right; it is the only possible way to depict him. It is a photograph of his soul.

And that's precisely why it's so ugly and uncomfortable to look at.

People have said that Charles has a "complicated legacy", which is what people say when someone has an objectively horrible legacy that they are still personally benefiting from. But the people who still tolerate his extravagant gilded existence to "honor historical tradition" will find absolutely nothing to like in this portrait. All the gold and brass and pomp of his uniform, all the military accolades for his colonial warmongering, all the fabulous ostentatious wealth he was born into and has spent every second of his life surrounded by - which would have been rendered with glittering precision and care in a traditional royal portrait - they're all dingy and washed out and already fading. The medals aren't even clearly marked enough to really know what they are; it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The butterfly that was included as a nod to his honestly extensive conservation work (because let's give the little bit of credit where credit is actually due) stands out as the one bright point of beauty and authenticity - but it's dwarfed by the only other visible object, the sword, and it's being swallowed up by that lurid, putrid background that seems to seep out of Charles' uniform. The dark tips of its wings are the most high-contrast part of the painting except for Charles' black hollow eyes that stare into nothing. And, most significantly in my opinion, the butterfly isn't actually touching him, or connected to him in any way. It just exists alongside him, but it doesn't need him.

His face is painted in such a way to detail absolutely every wrinkle without ever being able to completely cover up the blood red background, and below the sunken shark-like eyes, the artist has included that vapidly pleasant plastered-on smile with nothing behind it that is practically the royal uniform by now. I think the angle is also deliberately chosen to be unsettling: many portraits are traditionally done either head-on, 3/4 profile, or full profile. Charles is none of these - his head is tilted juuust a few degrees off kilter. It's not quite right. And he's looking off to the side very slightly; his thousand-yard-stare is kind of drifting over the viewers shoulder. He can't look us in the eye.

And there is no way, there is absolutely no possible way that an artist who is smart enough and skilled enough to imbue all his other portraits with so much meaning and symbolism and indicators of the subject's character - there's no way that's not intentional.

But... Yeo lives in London. He's still working on other royal and aristocratic portraits. He still has to live in that society, and he still has to get paid.

So of course he has to toe the line, at least until Charles dies, and say that the vivid blood-soaked red is to symbolize the """vibrancy""" of this terminally ill octogenarian, to bring a """modern contemporary feel""" to this 19th century colonizer.

Yeo knows exactly what he's doing.

Here's an excerpt about it from Smithsonian magazine:

Listen, I work in memory care and end-of-life care, and we only say someone "seems to be smiling approvingly" to comfort the family when someone is so far gone they clearly don't know where they are anymore. His ex-wife Camilla, who probably has more good reasons to hate him than any other single human being alive, looked at this haunting vision of hell and was like YES PERFECT.

This is all completely intentional. We are all picking up on exactly the message the artist was trying to convey. Yeo is trying to tell us, loud and clear, that something is not right here. It is absolutely an omen.

Op is right; it is insulting him. And it is supposed to make us look at this pathetic villain, who is currently toddling through the final days of his unfairly long and lavishly useless life, and think "these are our rulers?"

So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.

And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?

The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.

Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.

That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!

idk what this game is but i need to do unspeakable things to him

i want to suck and fuck the new streamerbait mascot horror raccoon

This is So Real

i am losing my fucking mind

ok, sorry, my heartrate spiked, im normal now. you clocked that he was sexy for being the cute & vaguely sinister mascot for a streamerbait horror game, wrote an in character line for him & then also made it petplay. i don't think i'll ever recover

Does anyone have the fucking tiktok video of the overly enthusiastic rich bearded guy showing off his new hiking shoes in his Mansion and the Woods, but then another dude duets with it to make it look like he's escaping from being held prisoner please please

edit THANKS @smellslikebot

The best resolution to a missing persons case ever was that developmentally disabled person who walked off in 1986 saying he "wanted to be a cowboy in Texas", starting a twenty-one year search for him on the assumption he died somewhere in the desert or was murdered, only for everyone to discover that he had spent those decades working as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas. Missing persons investigators rarely consider that maybe they achieved their dreams

He told them where he was going

That's my friend Sebastian!

He does biological research including open source instrumentation and antibiotic free selective markers!

And who's the guy he's sitting on

In an odd inversion, my cis grandfather was marked as female on his DEATH certificate.

afad

I’m male whenever I’m on Brazilian soil because when I applied for a visa, the lady didn’t believe I was a cis woman and put male on my documents even after I complained twice, so I’m also amab (Assigned Male At BrazilianBorder)

my bestie is a cis woman and is amad (assigned male at drivingliscense)

While this is funny this really should highlight to people how deep transphobia runs. It diesn’t matter if you’re cis or trans, strangers in the world will just DECIDE based on apparent visual indicators that simply arent accurate. Cis women are not excempt from harrassment and being accused of being “secretly a man”. All arguments about single-sex spaces crumble when perceptiona of what women SHOULD look like simply arent accurate at all.

And even for simple admin errors, it highlighrs further how much these systems do not care about you. They won’t change your gender on your papers regardless of if you are or aren’t trans. It’s a simple mis-click that could result in you being accused of something like fraud and no one is going to listen to you or take your complaints seriously to fix it before that happens.

Tranaphobia is not exclusive to trans people, its a far wider issue and its time transphobes (and TERFs especially) picked up on that reality and realised what theyre actually doing to themselves.

I think it’s less a concious transphobe moves and more just govt and healthcare ppl being overworked and making mistakes.

Probs some of both.

I think a lot of times it’s not conscious transphobia, but the fact that people can be so thoroughly fucked over by that mistake is indicative of how systemic transphobia is.

dana akdjfjckfjfm

On a scale of this to Barnyard Dick Tits Song how are you handling your cartoon being canceled?

the

I was originally just gonna reblog because of the top tart of the post, but the clip is legitimately funnier than any stand up I've even heard, i actively cannot breathe i can't let anybody notice me laughing, lest they ask what I'm laughing about

I feel like this tweet from @prozdvoices belongs on Tumblr as well lol

I'm obsessed

Android bodies as a vehicle for erotic body horror is well and good, but I think android bodies as a vehicle for erotic comedy is an underexplored genre. Picture a story about a robot with realistic cyborg genitals misreading their pressure gauge and overfilling their synthetic spooge reservoir, then later they're getting a handjob from their partner and the resulting pressure differential blows their penile coupling and sends their entire dick shooting off like a bottle rocket, out the window and into the apartment across the street. The rest of the narrative concerns their increasingly slapstick efforts to locate and recover their errant member (which is, of course, still transmitting full sensory data via wireless connection – this is porn, after all).

madoka rewatch