Dawn // Twilight

風の谷のナウシカ (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), 1984

天空の城ラピュタ (Castle in the Sky), 1986

となりのトトロ (My Neighbor Totoro), 1988

千と千尋の神隠し (Spirited Away), 2001

ハウルの動く城 (Howl's Moving Castle), 2004

崖の上のポニョ (Ponyo), 2008

風立ちぬ (The Wind Rises), 2013

君たちはどう生きるか (The Boy and the Heron), 2023

My one true love //cries

a little huafanghua sketch from a while ago

lesbian bed death - goth girls are easy

Postcards

Le Jardin '21

This laminated post card offers a glimpse across the river. A little more than a decade after the war, the eastern bank is already fully renovated. The hillsides are lush with gardens and residences, someone's parked a small beige airship by the fountain. This postcard will sell for a pretty penny.

Grand Couron '37

This postcard depicts an ill-advised residential area overlooking the Jamrock Quarter. 13-story buildings line the hillside like sarcophagi, an ominous fog already rising from behind. These are the last boom years -- in '39 the project fails catastrophically, leaving behind an opiate and hepatitis B infested slum.

Martinaise '98

A faded picture postcard from the end of the last century shows Martinaise as was before the Revolution. It's the height of summer, Rue de Saint-Ghislaine is teeming with parasol-wielding bourgeoisie and Wild Pines flags buttress the walkway. Nothing is written on the back.

Couron '33

This one has 'HELL' written on its back. It could not be further from the truth. It's the boom years, and Couron, the nicest district in Revachol West, is enjoying a sun drenched day. Tall and handsome buildings rise from the riverside: steel, iron and yellow limestone, with cloud shadows sliding on the facades.

Boogie Street '46

This crumpled up postcard depicts an open air market in Boogie Street ~5 years ago. A vendor smiles as dead roosters line his stalls -- hung by their feet from canopy. Red blood flows onto the muddy street, blurry shadows of people pass

Mysterious Lotus Casebook 莲花楼 | Episode 2

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

@lurkinglurkerwholurks look it’s Cherryh of the Cuckoo’s Egg!

so of course i made a zine inspired by disco elysium

view on my website

I realise a lot of girl’s Gay Awakenings was kiera knightly or kristen stewart which is cool phenomena tbh but I’m rlly interested in other Gay Awakenings like for example mine was morena baccarin in firefly and also gemma artenton in st trinians. CALLING ALL GAYS (boys and nb babes included)!! reblog with ur non kiera/k-stew Gay Awakening!!!

shout out to fellow writers who don't have a rigid posting schedule on ao3. shout out to the writers who write between boring meetings on their day job. shout out to the writers who wake up a little early to write a few lines for their chapters. shout out to the writers who post every day. shout out to the writers who are learning how to draw to illustrate their own fics. shout out to the writers who didn't update their wip in 6months.

keep going you are loved ❤️❤️❤️

Neah Bay, WA

梅长苏 doodle

i know that a lot of people already know this, and that this may come across as condescending to those who do, but it has become increasingly clear to me that many people, particularly younger people, don't understand this but—

purity culture is more then just thinking sex is bad and evil and gross

purity culture is the belief that you can be corrupted, that there is an level of purity that can be tarnished by thinking or doing something deemed sinful or icky and that once you lose that purity, you are lesser then those who have not been "tainted". it's the belief that seeing, thinking, or doing something inherently nonharmful to others will fundamental change you in a negative way

purity culture is watching gory horror movies and being told that you are disgusting for finding it interesting to watch

purity culture is being told that violence in books, movies, games, etcetera will make you violent

purity culture is being told that wanting to hurt someone makes you bad, darkens your heart, whatever, even if they hurt you first, even if you have no plans to ever act on that desire

purity culture is being told to forgive your abuser, rapist, or even just people who have slighted and hurt you or else you will never fully heal, or that it makes you in someway bad too, or even just as bad as them

purity culture is being told that hating someone is equally to killing them, or wanting to kill them

purity culture is when people have intrusive thoughts that scare and harm them that make you uncomfortable, possibly even triggered, and telling them that they secretly want to do, have, etcetera, those things or else they wouldn't be thinking about it

purity culture is being told not to curse because it makes your mouth filthy, makes your heart filthy, makes you mean and bad and unpleasant

purity culture is being told that jealousy, anger, rage, disgust, and other stigmatized emotions are "bad" or "unhealthy" emotions

purity culture is refusing to let youths or even teenagers read or watch potential upsetting books, shows, movies, games, comics, etcetera out of fear they will act them out, become violent, possessed, unruly, etcetera

purity culture is being told that writing, drawing, or just in general making something dark and uncomfortable makes you gross and evil

purity culture is telling you that you have to portray bad things as bad or else people won't under that it's still bad, that it will normalize this bad thing, that people can be corrupted by it because they can't think for themselves whether this bad thing you portrayed as good is not actually good

purity culture is thinking bad things done for good reasons is just as bad as bad things done for bad reasons, like a mother stealing baby formula to keep her child alive versus someone stealing your pet because they wanted it are equally wrong

purity culture is being told that drinking, smoking, being addicted to drugs, unemployed, homeless, makes you lesser and filthy and corrupts you

purity culture is believing that someone wanting to do something bad, but choosing not to do it because they know it's bad, still makes them bad because they still want to do it

purity culture is thinking people getting tattoos, dying their hair, piercing, wearing make up, getting cosmetic surgeries secretly hate themselves and are disrespecting themselves

purity culture is so much more then just sex. it expands so much further then just christian/religious people and communities

purity culture is doing something bad, and when you try to seek atonement or correct the mistake, that it is unforgivable and will alway be a blight on you, even if others can "learn to look past it"

if you think that someone thinking or do something that does not cause any inherent harm makes them lesser, makes them bad, makes them gross, corrupts them or can lead them to corrupting others, you are pushing purity culture

this is coming from a women raised in an extremely sex negative christian household who spent years hating herself and her body due to sex based purity culture being pushed onto her from the age of six due to early puberty by the way, so don't try to gate keep purity culture on this post as only a religious and or sexual thing

Guzhuang Appreciation Month: favorite aesthetics

A.I. photos are flooding social media and contributing to an Internet where we can't believe what we see. Spotting A.I. 📷s is an important media literacy skill.

None of us have time to research every image we see. We just need people to notice BEFORE THEY LIKE OR SHARE that an image might be fake. If unsure, check it or don't share.

I've started drawing some comics explaining the basic of AI spot-checking and media literacy in the age of disinformation. Follow along here or on my Twitter.

tags by op

‘But I don’t wanna rp with real ppl its so embarrassing 😳’

Me: