@smappybubbles / smappybubbles.tumblr.com
I am aware I have died on this hill before but people who really strenuously argue that fanfic isn't "real writing" drive me insane. what do you meeeaaaaannn. besides the fact that any attempt to define "real art" vs "fake art" is inherently reactionary, it just doesn't make any sense. it's Writing. people Write it. what the fuck are you talking about.
reminder that coming up with some fake little dudes and creating intricate storylines in your head is a completely free and fun way to pass the time and the government can't stop you
[Image description: three art pieces by Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. All three pieces are wall hangings, made of bead weaving, with long fringe. The first two also incorporate metal jingles. All have very vibrant and clashing colors. They have text woven into the beads, in all capital letters. The colors and patterns mean that reading the text may cause eye strain.
The first piece says βAmerican history is longer, larger, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. JBβ.
The second piece says βI am Alive, You are Alive, They are Alive, We are Living! I am Alive, You are Alive, They are Alive, We are Living!β
The third piece says βEye of the storm; like a hurricane.β End ID. /]
Aprilβs Illustration from My D&D Pirate Pin-up Calendar
Featuring our adorable satyr blood cleric. Heβs the shortest non-kobold on the crew (5β0) and also the oldest member, having recently celebrated his 1,000 birthday.
please? please? please?
I love when modern horror movies do this.
I was watching The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Let's play a game. If a coroner approached me with this symbol, what would I tell him?
Two big flags: That's a woven textile, and those are Roman letters. Most surviving Roman spells were written on stone or metal stele. Roman characters on papyrus practically screams North Africa, 1st-4th century AD.
Given, there is no textile on earth that could survive the stomach acid like this, so I'm assuming something supernatural is happening.
So north Africa, 1-4th century AD. That specific type of circle is clearly remineacent of Solomoic magic. The thing is. Solomonic seals were usually produced in an Egyptian milieu. Authentic North african magical characters usually have little loops on the end, because they're trying to imitate the ankh. Or they look noticably Greek.
Whats interesting to me, is that the symbol inside the circle is more Greek-Pythagorean than Egyptian. It's got that square capped with triangles. That's a neoplatonist sacred geometry thing.
Also, I have the movie paused, but I would bet money those numerals on the edges are supposed to correspond to bible verses. I would bet money one of them is supposed to be EX 22:18.
Which, if that's true, would mean that this isn't 1-4th century, but more like a post-golden-dawn reprint from the 1850s.
Official prediction: This bitch is supposed to be an 1850s American frontier witch. The prop designers get extra points if they want me to think she was part of the Salem witch trials, or some other sensational event like that.
I made it like 4 seconds before they gave me more sigils.
Apologies for the photo of my TV, but these are not authentic Greek characteres (meaning non-linguistic magical symbols.) That character in the very center with the floating strokes is clearly supposed to be evocative of a Hebrew letter Hey. (Potentially an Enochian letter Gon.) Even ancient Greco-Judaic magical practices never mixed alphabets like this. So this is 1000% a post 1800, post-Golden Dawn working.
This type of 8-pronged symbol doesn't appear in Judaic-derived magic. That's a modified reconstruction vegvesir. I still bet money they want this chick to be a Salem Witch Trials Victim, but afaik that symbology wasn't published until those mfers published the Huld Manuscript in 1860. Two centuries too late.
That 8-pronged symbol looks more like some of the planetary pentacles from The Key Of Solomon (the greater one, not he lesser), rather than anything Icelandic.
Oh that's a good point! I forgot about the planetary seals! Though, it would be pretty tough for a Salem Witch to get their hands on a manuscript of the GKoS. Most of the copies at that period were still in Hebrew lol.
Like, it could maybe be modified from this guy in the (probably) 16th century Hebrew manuscript.
The author of the spell in the movie could clearly read liturgical Latin. If they're modifying Hebrew language occult texts in 1692, they're probably a 2nd generation Cabbalist/Hebraist. In which case what are their Catholic asses doing in Massachusetts lol.
Honestly Autopsy of Jane Doe veers between horror and comedy by how much they need to give us "clues" she's a Witch from around the time of Salem and how little they actually KNOW about what people thought Meant Witchcraft at the tome of Salem. Hint: it was not Occult Symbols. They didn't need that shit. It was mostly Spectral Evidence they relied on, with a little physical finding of "Witches Marks" and racism towards Tituba's "foreign" "magic rituals."
And also a lot of it is explained by rivalries of various families and between Salem Town and Salem Villages/Farms. So there's the social factor too.
None of which. You know. Leave PHYSICAL EVIDENCE on anyone's bodies. So it's MAKIN' SHIT UP TIME!
Like. The only semi-decent clue was lichen under her nails that is from the part of Massachusetts Salem is in. Everything else was bullshit and therefore funny.
So I've seen conflicting stories about the colour black in history.
Some say it's very expensive and hard to maintain, so that's why rich merchants wore black. Evidence in portraits.
Some say that for dyes it's on the cheaper side actually.
Some say the expensive black doesn't come from dye but rather the colour of the animal, so black fabric comes from black fibre which comes from black sheep. How exactly would black sheep be more expensive than regular white sheep?
Which one is right? I know this is probably influenced by which century it's set in, like maybe some eras have an easier time getting black dye
I found a well-sourced blog post about this, luckily, because I'm a 19th-century focused researcher and I've heard conflicting things about black in earlier periods. It seems to be that high-quality black-dyed fabric was difficult to obtain in the west from the Middle Ages potentially through the 18th century because it required massive amounts of dye to get the color very deep ("true black"). Lesser black shades were quite common, though, so black, period, doesn't seem to be more expensive than any other color. Possibly the intensively dyed, deep blacks might have been? But not black in general.
Rich merchants did wear black- but so did other people. They just usually didn't have portraits.
The black sheep thing I've never heard before. And anyway, that could only apply to wool- not cotton, linen, silk, leather, etc.
Oh I have info about the black sheep thing!
Have you heard of merino wool? It's a very reputed type of wool, the one that made Spain's wool industry famous up until the Industrial Revolution.
Merino sheep are originally black. Like these ones my parents have (recently sheared in those pictures):
They look brown-ish because the sun and the dust make it so that the outer part gets lighter coloured, the inner part or the wool in babies (lambs?) is actually of a quite dark and uniform black that turns more brown as they get older (again, the sun). If you notice, the skin in the head and legs is very dark black.
Those white sheep are also merino sheep but: that is the mutation.
Other than being very well adapted to the weather and space in Spain, they produce wool of good quality (about 2 kilos of wool per sheep), so the white sheep were chosen over the centuries because well, you can dye white wool easily. In recent years, some shepherds are trying to get back the original black merino sheep and they often work with artisans like these (where you can see what black wool looks like): https://dehesalana.com/
Now, I agree that the wool itself is more dark brown than black, but I guess with certain shearing (either shearing sooner than needed, or separating fibers?) or with certain dyes or chemicals, it can easily be dark black or dark colours.
When reading about local history (Extremadura, Spain) in the end of the 18th Century, many villages had "industry" (not a real factory per se, but many people making a living of this) of "paΓ±os pardos", that is "dark wool fabric" (paΓ±o is a type of work for the wool, where you spin it and weave it, and then felt it; pardo means dark brown). This is because, these sheep were frequent and the easiest way to dress.
Also, in Catholic countries, mourning for years was a very frequent thing (an aunt of my father spent over 10 years of her youth wearing mourning clothes, that is black, because different family members died), so obtaining black colours to dye all of your belongings was probably frequent and not that expensive.
But, in short, if the wool you have comes from black sheep, half of your clothing will be dark, if not black.
And to end, a nod to the Spanish speakers in the room. The idiom "no confundir churras con merinas" is in reference to two different type of sheep that are very common in Spain but not the same, it's used when something looks a certain way but don't be fool, it's actually a different thing.
So cool! That actually points to black/dark wool being MORE common in some times and places, then
Llamas, alpacas, and other animals used for fiber also produce black wool/hair
Most dyes i know of for black shade into brown. So I think it would be common to have black, it would just be hard to get a true, deep black rather than a murky dark shade
society really lost the war when dressing nice / slutty = βgayβ βmetrosexualβ βis he π π»β. we had decades of men wearing crop tops and short shorts without blinking an eye and now itβs ye ole pilgrim standards and talk of scandal if they show their knees
they were FASHIONISTAS!!! and we SHAMED them!!!
the fact that men used to be able to dress like that and no one said a thing but chris pine stepped outside in this and thereβs dozens of articles about him & his reaction to the criticism?
stand UP kings. bring back the thighs and the tummies!!!!!!
3 seconds into dungeon meshi and theyβre already living my dream. i love eating things I ought not in unfamiliar ecosystems
one time in undergrad we went to this big farm & greenhouse where they were cultivating rare & endangered plants and during the tour the botanist let us all taste a leaf off of a particular plant & I was like oh some of these are edible!
so we got to the next plant and when he took questions I asked if it was also edible and he said βI mean. Itβs not poisonous, but Iβm sure it wonβt taste good.β I asked if I could try it anyway and it seemed like he was just perplexed enough to indulge me so he gave me one leaf. It was terrible.
At the next plant he offered me a leaf before I asked and he wanted to know what it tasted like
For the rest of the tour he gave me a leaf from each non-poisonous plant and I told him how they all tasted (mostly like nothing at all but some unspeakably terrible) and thatβs how I ate several dozen rare & endangered leaves.
So anyway. Iβm a fan of this blonde guy already. I think weβd be friends
like, does it suck that a lot of girls* are socialized to learn to do household chores for an imagined future husband who learned to do none of that and may use his ignorance as an excuse to do as little home labor as possible, even possibly exaggerating it in service of that goal? obviously yes.
AND it's also doing a lot of boys* a huge disservice--not just because cleaning is an essential skill for any adult in today's more egalitarian society, but because cleaning and decorating and buying clothes and All Of It is a form of self-care, and it's a way of putting your identity into your environment. to grow up under the impression that you should have no interest in these skills, that they're just extra labor to avoid, and that if you did you would do them badly anyway--it sucks. if you can't even begin to imagine how to make a home nice for yourself or dress yourself like an adult, how do you even start to want those things? there's an element of learned helplessness to it, and it is in fact hard to catch up later in life.
(but it IS POSSIBLE!!!)
*this is the Gender Asterisk, which denotes I am aware people of many different genders are socialized many different ways, speaking as an afab person who sympathizes heavily with the Boy Problems I am describing here
Rapists, and killers, too? Really? (Those on death-row?) The drug/prostitution problems are just a portion of USA criminals.
yes, all criminals. the moment you say βexcept X criminalβ is the moment that people will try to convict their opponents as having committed X crime.
itβs the same thing as whatβs going on right now with people equating drag to some sort of child exploitation. βbut the children!!β they wail, and people listen because oh, if drag is harming children, then drag MUST be BAD, so we HAVE TO BAN DRAG.
do you understand what iβm saying? you canβt take away the rights of any category of criminal, because suddenly that category will be overflowing with people who totally 100% definitely committed that horrible crime.
Just to look at this from one step further back, let's accept the premise. Let's imagine that there is a type of crime that is 1) horrible evil irredeemable universally-agreed-upon bad, and 2) could somehow be prosecuted with 100% accuracy and 0% bias. Yes, even then, those criminals deserve a right to vote.
Do you they're going to like vote themselves out of jail? Vote to make murder legal? What exactly are you afraid of.
Realistically they'll just... vote just like anyone else. They'll help elect city councilmembers they think will better their hometowns, and presidents they think will best serve the country. They might even vote in their own interests! To reform prisons, fund rehabilitation programs, and outlaw predatory practices by telecoms. Are you saying you don't want any of those things?
And even if there were one of those super-duper-unambiguously-evil totally misanthropic death-row convicts, who's scheduled to be execute the very next day and just wants to sow chaos and watch the outside world burn however they can... what's the worst they could do, vote republican?
Taking people's rights away isn't bad because it might happen to someone you like, it's because taking people's rights away is bad.
the main difference between rapists in prison and rapists in, say, the supreme court, is enough money to get away with it. while im not super pleased about rapists setting government policy directly, brutally dehumanizing and removing all political volition from anyone we convict of rape (which only *somewhat* overlaps the population of rapists) is still absurdly bad.
Klub Outside Artbook. Byakuya sketch.
not to be controversial but respect trans women or die by my sword
and my bow
And my axe
