These have to be the most expressive cells I have ever seen in my life.

5th one is major surprised Pikachu vibes, even the shape of the cell kinds fits

a couple years ago the eric carle museum of picture book art had an exhibit on diane & leo dillon who are responsible for so many iconic illustrations. i went back twice just to see the collection again. this is a sliver of their work— it’s hard to find high res images.

@perkeleen-lavellan

I recognize Sabriel and Parable of the Sower, but I don't know the other covers. Does anyone know what books they're from?

This is what I could put together with Google image search. Note that some of these are internal illustrations.

Row 1: Sabriel by Garth Nix; Aida by Leontyne Price

Row 2: Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch by Nancy Willard; A Fair Wind for Troy by Doris Gates

Row 3: Juniper by Monica Furlong; poster for an event at Parsons School for Design

Row 4: Spectrum Issue 21: "Spirit of the Reef"; Aida by Leontyne Price again

Row 5: The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese: And Other Tales of the Far North by Howard Norman; the cover illustration of The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon (possibly entitled "Grasshopper Woman")

As you can see, most of these I sourced at: https://leo-and-diane-dillon.blogspot.com

Re: the popular questions

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.

SUPPORT BELOW 50% OF THE THRESHOLD IN THESE COUNTRIES:

Bulgaria - 35% Croatia - 45% Cyprus - 12% (!!!!) Czechia - 47% Greece - 27% Italy - 41% Latvia - 43% Luxembourg - 20% Malta - 11% (!!!!) Romania - 48% Slovakia - 47% Slovenia - 38%

SEVEN countries out of 27 have met the threshold so far. Deadline is 31st July, 2025.

This should absolutely be the law <3

Respectfully, Ireland is the best country on the planet

from the same thread:

I once wore green cargo pants with a black hoodie in Belfast in the mid 2000s and two separate people yelled "alright there Kim Possible?"

Okay, listen, I'll concede that there are some things that probably do warrant being banned from Argo. But if the head nurse disappears into the major dope bazaar to buy an odd green potion guaranteed to cause pon farr, and doesn't seem to cause any notable incidents, I don't see why that's the government's problem. Is the potion illegal? It's your fucking dope bazaar! Don't blame the customer! And if the doctor ends up getting arrested for inciting whores to riot then that sounds like you've got some serious issues affecting your sex workers. If they're rioting, maybe look into what exactly he united them around. Enact laws to give them some safety and healthcare, don't blame a hero of class solidarity for helping them self-advocate.

And if the first officer was drugged and hauled into an alley and sexually assaulted that's a. That's a fucking crime. Or at least I hope it's a crime, but seeing Argo's response to these incidents, I'm honestly not sure. You're gonna exile the VICTIM? Really? This is real 'deal with school bullying by expelling the target' behaviour.

Honestly the ban from Argo is probably a good thing. I certainly wouldn't want to go back.

#to be fair the communication officer did make some... questionable alterations to Argo's comms system.#so there's that

Oh the communications officer, navigator, and the helmsman got what they deserved. I mean that's basic security and safety right there. You can't go around bringing random exotic plants onto random planets, that's how you introduce diseases. We have customs for this kind of shit. I'm reserving judgement on the captain since we're not told what specifically it was about his six-person interspecies orgy that got the shore police chasing him, maybe they did do something serious, but I'm just sayin', not "every one" had to be banned from argo. Typical planet, blaming its clearly endemic problems on foreigners.

Ships with height differences. Reblog if you agree

Don’t forget age difference

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

Story below the cut to avoid a paywall.

Thread on alternative views of iconic landmarks you (probably) haven’t seen before 🧵

1. Mount Fuji from a plane window.

2. Arc de Triomphe, Paris

3. Aerial view of Kaaba, Mecca

4. A view of the Taj Mahal that you do not usually see, highlighting the stark contrast between opulence and poverty divided by a single wall.

5. Top down view of the Statue of Liberty

6. The backside of Tutankhamun's burial mask

7. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica seen through Rome's most famous keyhole.

8. The worn steps of the Tower of Pisa

9. Photographer Alexander Ladanivskyy, in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, captured an extraordinary drone shot of the Great Pyramid of Giza from an unusual perspective.

10. The Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall of China meets the ocean.

for images 11 - 25, please see the source, here

iron man 2 tony i fucking love you

he thought he was dying so he gave away stark industries and iron man, the two things in the world that mattered the most to him, to the two people who mattered the most to him except he pretended one was a celebration and the other was an accident and the only person he felt like he could be vulnerable with for a moment was the woman he believed was just enough of a professional stranger to not pry

and even though he had his whole life to do it, this is the year he revives stark expo and races a car on live television and throws a ridiculous birthday party for himself and eats a box of donuts inside a donut because well it's now or never and god forbid people find out that tony stark is actually a vulnerable mess who never figured out how to deal with grief god forbid tony stark not go out with a bang!

and you know what else?? arms

Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!

All this discourse over who does "painting with light"

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

And it's BEAUTIFUL

The guy in the sleeping bag wiggling around

I’m weeping

The two people in the front wearing one shirt.

Are we really not going to talk about the guy in the back who is attached to another guy’s back while spinning?

WHAT ABOUT THE GUY THAT FALLS OUT OF THE WINDOW

WHY IS IT BACK

no you guys don’t understand, not only is this the first harlem shake out there… these guys aren’t normal military. This is “Telemarkbataljonen”. They’re pretty much the Norwegian equivalent of the fucking black ops. My brother knows a guy in this battalion, and when asked what they do there, he looked my brother dead in the eye and said “That is strictly confidential”. These guys are hard as shit, which makes this even more hilarious

hey does everyone remember the fucking harlem shake. this was goddamn inescapable in 2013

"you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel" girl i am living that balsamic life, that's the mommy down there at the bottom.

#are you havinf a stroke or am i i can NOT understand this

Balsamic vinegar is made by aging a reduced grape syrup in barrels with "mother", which is a kind of bacterial slime that develops naturally in the vinegar over time. True balsamic vinegar goes through a very particular process of aging it in a series of smaller and smaller barrels, transferring it from one barrel to the next either every year, or every few years, depending on the process, and then adding fresh syrup to the largest barrel and continuing the process. The slimy film that forms on the insides of the barrels is the mother, and due to the increased concentrations over the years, the mother in the smallest barrel is most potent, and is sometimes partially removed and used to seed new batches of vinegar, so production can be expanded. Scraping the mother from the bottom of the barrel is how you multiply the goodness, the sweetness, and the quality of your balsamic.

If you've ever bought a bottle of apple cider vinegar and thought "what's that cloudy stuff at the bottom?", that's the mommy <3

This is also a part of what makes a high quality balsamic, well, high quality. And part of what makes it expensive. Good quality balsamic is all about age, both the age of the batch itself, and the age of the mother that seeds it. Balsamic has to be at least 12 years old, but you can age it much longer, and many places do. As for the mother, that requires literal lifetimes. Some of the oldest balsamic producing families in Modena have mothers that have been kept alive for centuries, passed down through the generations to seed new batches year after year after year, hundreds of years over. The bacterial cultures develop unique and incredible flavors in this time, and you can really taste it in the end product. It's the kind of flavor and quality only age can offer.

we have entered laika's autism zone. u will learn food and cooking facts, whether you want to or not.

as a former escape room host i highly recommend doing an escape room as a first date. its a great way to learn how ppl react under pressure and how well they collaborate with you right off the bat. also more than once ive seen people enter an escape room as a couple and exit broken up LOL its a fantastic litmus test

sorry to broadcast ur tags but this is also a valuable part of the litmus test! it seems like you learned a lot about how this person makes you feel in their social group. they didn't go out of their way to include you, and neither did their friends. therefore you can come to a pretty good conclusion about how you might feel being part of their life outside of an escape room; someone who doesnt include you or your feelings in a game is likely going to do the same in other situations