Trying to become good at a Single Hobby

Sometimes I draw. Sometimes I knit. Sometimes I paint. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I play games. And yet. I'm not good at ANY OF THEM

[somehowmags]

and for that matter why have i seen posts on here trying to rehabilitate the reputation of fucking 4chan. like i say this as a person of color tumblr is racist yes but it is not "incited multiple white supremacist mass shootings" levels of racist. it is not "started gamergate" levels of misogynist. what are we doing here. if you found community and support in 4chan good for you but everyone else has the right to feel uncomfortable that you found community among nazis and racists

[bladeofardour]

big papa Dynamo and his kids in trouble

[onlytiktoks]

[piedude]

[homunculus-argument]

One thing the french language hit bullseye on is their word for frog. Grenouille. Splendid one, rolls off the tongue. Like yeah that's what it shoud be called. C'est une fucking grenouille right there.

[homunculus-argument]

One thing the french language hit bullseye on is their word for frog. Grenouille. Splendid one, rolls off the tongue. Like yeah that's what it shoud be called. C'est une fucking grenouille right there.

[hardhatsandbeecaves]

AP + RE + GR

[cute-animals-only]

[rubykgrant]

Ninth picture for @creatingblackcharacters Melanin Beam Challenge; Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind! She's a protagonist who doesn't have a lot of "bells and whistles", she almost "majestic" in a natural and effortless way, while being a very determined leader with a true goal of peace. I tried really REALLY hard to-

1- not let this redesign be "ambiguous", clearly depicting her as Black (with a very dark skin-tone, her hair done in thick cornrows that are pulled back into a ponytail puff, golden brown eyes, visible upper and lower lip, and a broad nose that has a defined angle)

2- vaguely mimic that watercolor style (I'm doing ALL of these edits in MS Paint with a mouse. there are layers now, which is wonderful, and 3D Paint has more resolution and brushes for details, but it is still tedious to work slowly for the end result I want. I finally copy-paste several times into Microsoft Word to use the few art edits available, including certain blurring/grainy filters. that's it. I made those fake "water drip" spots individually until they looked halfway decent)

[ry3gret]

@hehimejoshi, my take on Gravett! Sorry it took me so long, I had a hard time nailing her (happens whenever I have a clear image of something). hope you find her delightfully ghoulish.

[ind1estar]

melanin beam always makes me wish black hcs were more widely accepted and celebrated. imagine how much more colorful fandom could be.

[wrenhavenriver]

the cat was sleeping cutely so i took a picture and went to show it to my mom and she burst out laughing and pulled out her phone and showed me a near identical one she'd taken a few minutes before

[wrenhavenriver]

self-proclaimed free thinkers when the cat is doing a snooze:

[autogynophelia]

TW: slavery and the slave trade

The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.

The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.

Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)

It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!

It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.

In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.

And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.

For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).

As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.

The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.

The contrast between that and white institutions like the British Museum is really stark. Do you treat the slave trade with the gravity it deserves, which is to say that you mention it at every opportunity and do not shy away from saying, "The slave trade is why this museum, this city, this country, this continent, why all of it is the way it is"? Or do you move one statue to a new location, put a little sign up about how one man's wife's family owned slaves a long time ago, and say "That's enough, we've dealt with the slavery issue now"?

[jchorsky]

"You've been noticed..."

IT'S DONNEEEEE YAY !!! im very proud of this one especially the background and colours . the intention was that she's possessing ava & thus in her shadow, but i don't think it really came across properly,,, i think the next thing i make will show her face more .

[hotvampireadjacent]

[1five1two]

Leopard Figurine. Mesopotamia. c. 3300-2900 BC.

[eternalgirlscout]

so called "free thinkers" when hi 1 quastion

[dasloddl]

op disabled reblogs but I think the point still stands

[the-quasar-hero]

A concerning amount of y’all seem to think that being racist is a morally neutral position, instead of a prejudice that you are supposed to work on dismantling such as sexism, homophobia, and so on. I’d suggest watching kindergarten level cartoons to learn about treating others like human beings but some of y’all already do that and it’s not doing the trick.

[the-quasar-hero]

I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a broken record. A lot of y’all talk about misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc but don’t wanna summon the same vim when racism is brought up. Using the excuse that this is a predominantly white space is the same line of thinking as “boys will be boys” when men do something sexist. A group of ppl being of a certain demographic that doesn’t experience a form of bigotry doesn’t excuse their perpetuating of it. If you think a guy should check his peers when they’re being misogynistic, then you should check your white peers when they’re similarly being racist. And similarly if you are disgusted when a guy tries to shrug off misogyny and say it’s not a big deal, and do the same exact thing when it comes to racism think for TWO SECONDS how that makes you look!

[the-quasar-hero]

To neatly summarize, if you consider yourself a progressive person and combat bigotry where it appears but stop short when racism rears its head, it’s not a good look. If your compassion evaporates on the axis of racial discrimination, it will call into question your judgment on other bigotries as they’re tangled in a messy web of oppression. I’m not expecting you to be Malcom X up in here, but for the love of everything on this earth stop acting like it’s not a big deal.