hey do people know about this painting??? because it hangs in the art gallery in my city and it makes me a little insane every time i see it
anyway it’s called the victory of faith (1891) and it’s by saint george hare
**actually, i’m editing this to add a closeup of their faces too:
How can you be part of this?
In the middle of lunch one day, everyone minding their own business in the cafeteria, a Senior guy dressed in a banana costume came in screaming. He was in clear DISTRESS. Flailing his arms and running in zig zags. He kept screaming things like “help me!” and “he’s going to get me!” && we were all SO confused until all of a sudden a damn gorilla shows up (guy in suit, of course). He beats on his chest and lets out a huge roar, the banana lets out a shriek, and then it’s ON. These two ran through our tiny cafeteria, the gorilla roaring and the banana frantically singing “I will survive.” At one point the banana saw someone with a banana peel on their table (clearly they had ate a banana for lunch) and he took the peel from them and screamed “BROOOOTTHHHERRR!” before returning to singing “I will survive” in a much more determined tone.
It ended when our school principal took the gorilla down (yeah, tackled him to the ground, if you knew our principal you’d understand… we were a school of like 300 people TOTAL and he was like all of our best friend. Dude was cool) and yelled, “This is a banana safezone young man!”
The following day, there were ‘banana safezone’ posters everywhere and we had a school assembly where our guidance counselor talked about banana rights.
I’ve never looked at a banana the same.
Marcille's line delivery kills me
Groundbreaking! Poetic cinema.
The wild thing about being obsessed with your own DnD campaign is that there's absolutely NO fandom content for it except the stuff that you make
Like, what do you mean only six other people in the entire world have heard of Dave the Ice Elemental whose job is Freezer at the Fantasy Starbucks?
I’ve been on tumblr for almost 13 years and I refuse to know what homestuck is about
The thing that amazes me is that I've been on tumblr for ages and dashboard osmosis has conveyed absolutely nothing to me about Homestuck whatsoever.
There are whole episodes of Supernatural that I've seen in their entirety through gifsets. I don't even know what sort of a thing Homestuck is or where I would find it. I know less about what happens in Homestuck, which presumably actually exists, than what happens in Goncharov, which doesn't.
I spend hours every day on tumblr. I don't know how this is possible.
Cannonball
The squealed “pleaaaase” sounded straight out of Invader Zim
nobody wants your birds, brennan
Murderbot I love u
Original post by @lavenderlemniscate
"We can come back here every year. You in your world and me in mine. Midsummer's Day. Midday." "And I'll be there. I'll be there every year. My whole life." "And if we do meet someone we like, we must be kind to them. We won't compare them. When we come here, just for an hour, we can be together." "Every year. I promise."
His Dark Materials (2019-2022), 3x08 - "The Botanic Garden"
100% Disagree
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.
Bluntly: Standards.
Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.
But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.
All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap.
Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.
(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)
I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:
Care.
See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.
The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.
(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)
Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.
But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.
The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.
[Image description: screen shot of a social media post from Brendan Frasier Crane (@bf_crane): "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is the most American of songs, because it's set up like a cautionary tale about pride leading to a fall but it turns out the fiddler actually is the best and his vanity is justified. 9:23 PM. 05 Jul 23. 137K Views. Description ends.]
Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it's made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible -- not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.
BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel's song:
Fire on the Mountain, run, Boy, run. Devil's in the House of the Rising Sun. Chicken's in the bread pan, pickin' out dough. Granny, Will Your Dog Bite? No, child, no.
Fire on the mountain (some eye contact):
House of the Rising Sun (some eye contact):
Chicken in the bread tray (pan):
Granny, will your dog bite?
I love how it's assumed in this thread you've heard this song, but I'm just gonna drop it. It's not only worth a listen, but look, there he is, fiddling away. There is no second fiddle. He done play the devil too.
Evil villain voice: With the collapse of Boeing now inevitable, Trains shall soon return to their right place as the preferred method of long distance travel in the United States once more
