biblical angels but their true form looks like the patterns in 90s arcade carpets

That’s just microbiology innit?

Obsessed with this answer.

I’m sorry but it’s fucking delusional to act as if prioritizing the actual material consequences of an election over making an abstract ideological “point” comes from a position of passive, moderate liberalism. I literally don’t have a guarantee to basic bodily autonomy as an American woman anymore because people didn’t take the threat of Trump presidency seriously enough in 2016. I don’t think democrats are undeserving of criticism either but if you don’t think there’s a significant difference between the parties at this point I have to assume you are not actually informed about the issues and institutions you’re discussing

saw some debate over the english title translation of dungeon meshi and I am here to offer you this alternative

I know I don't shut up about this but frankly not enough people are angry about the 5-day/40 hour workweek (and I am AWARE a lot of people work even more than that). I feel like a lot more people should be absolutely furious that we only really have two days a week and some occasional hours in the evening to socialise, run errands, do chores, or relax.

It's no wonder so many people are profoundly lonely and disconnected from their communities when maintaining a social life in what little free time we have is incredibly difficult. If you have kids, a second job, a very long commute, or other responsibilities, it's nearly impossible.

We literally aren't meant to live like this and I'll never stop being shocked how many people just take it as the natural state of things and don't want to throw a brick through a billionaire's window every time they think of it.

things you will see on a road trip across america

-so much desert that you will get scared 

-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve. 

-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.

-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?

-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go. 

-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone. 

-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio. 

-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look. 

-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here. 

-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.

-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry. 

-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending. 

-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not. 

-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip. 

-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.

-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water. 

-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.

-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip. 

-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn? 

-a small stream in some small woods and the light will come down perfectly and the water will be beautiful and the grass will be beautiful and there will be flowers maybe or the leaves of the trees are starting to turn gold and there are birds chirping and it will be so perfect you will want to stand there and stay forever and live in this little magical painting off the side of the highway and be some kind of highway druid. but instead, you’ll get bored after a while, and get back in the car. 

All I want is for someone to go on a road trip like this with me. We could do all this and then go to House on the Rock and if they weren’t sick of me by then I’d marry them. I can’t drive, though :(

I’ll go with you!! I fucking love road trips and American Gods is my favorite book. I’ve always wanted to go to House on the Rock.

All of this is true, but you left out:

- the mountains rising up in the distance that look so close but it takes you five hours to reach them.

- the small town you will inevitably drive through because there was supposed to be a gas station at this exit but it’s not. there. and the old men stand or sit on their porches and stare at you and your obviously not-local car as you use the empty parking lot across the road from them to turn around.

- the fact that some states go on forever. forever. forever. didn’t you pass mile marker 31 three hours ago? how are you only just now to mile marker 32? how is this possible?

- when you reach the ocean, no matter which side of the country you are on, it is always sunset. always. this is inevitable.

Buachaille Etive Mor by Kyle Bonallo (ig: @kylebonallo)

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?"

one of the worst irl debuffs is "something in the kitchen smells weird but you cant find it". you have to just do the rituals and hope for the best (taking out the trash, boiling water down the sink, look for lost potatoes etc)

truly the best line in a show filled with best lines and the way toby schmitz delivered it is a work of art

POLDARK Season 1, Episode 6

this sequence could easily be a scene from the show and I'd be none the wiser

the fact that walls get dusty is ridiculous. you're vertical. act like it.

the song stagger lee is a better tarentino movie than any film made by quentin tarentino

Wayne’s World (1992) // Dir. Penelope Spheeris