Just You Wait

My goal is to publish a book, but there's a million things I haven't done. In the meantime, this blog is where you can find posts that involve musical theatre, creative writing, disability activism, and my life in general (particularly as an autistic person who tells very few people in real life.) She/her pronouns. DFTBA. 

[pooh-and-friends]

RARE PICTURES OF EEYORE SMILING

[regularlesbian]

not to be reformist but i just realized requiring employers to treat a commute as time on the job would probably make american cities profoundly more habitable

[spinningorigins]

I am having trouble understanding. Can you, or someone else who knows more about this please provide further explanation?

[rage-city]

if employers were paying for commute time (as is standard in several countries), spending less time commuting would be incentivized. cities would be more compact and take less time to traverse than across urban sprawl. i also interpreted it to mean that cities would also have more diverse transportation infrastructure, instead of the heavily-trafficked slog of the freeway. efficient public transport, walkability, etc.

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[wilwheaton]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[y0rkminster]

There was a murder case in Ireland where the killer and the victim had had burner phones (they were in a secret relationship). Both Nokia, the old school ones.

The killer dumped them in a deep, very muddy pond that often froze over, had a ton of plants, fish, and algae, and the mud was very runny/could theoretically get into cracks easily.

Anyway those phones were down there ages. I can’t remember exactly how long, I’d guess a year or so. Police finally recovered them. They consulted data retrieval experts.

I kid you not, when they learned they were Nokias, they recommended just letting them dry out then trying to power them on.

Sure enough, those babies flashed right up. Like nothing had happened.

Truly indestructible.

[torillatavataan]

Above is true, by the way. I’m pretty sure they refer to the murder of Elaine O'Hara. The phones were found in a reservoir and had been there for little over a year.

[lizclimo]

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

:D

this is some quality tiny animal humour :D

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

I pay more taxes than The Manchurian Cantaloupe!

[thebibliosphere]

Tfw you’re a disabled, self-employed creator who has spent the last 6 years living hand to mouth and you still pay more in taxes than the Evil Cheeto.

[lady--divine]

“Heart Fall Soup Channel: His taxes” had me dying XD

[cluegrrl]

[anxietyproblem]

[steampunktendencies]

A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish Courtesy Philip Mould

[beyoursledgehammer]

PAINT RESTORATION OF MESMERIZING

[eliciaforever-deactivated201906]

I saw this on Twitter. He’s using acetone, but a cellulose ether has been added to make it into a gel (probably Klucel—this entire gel mixture is sometimes just called Klucel by restorers, but Klucel is specifically the stuff that makes the gel). 

Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.

It looks scary, but acetone has no effect on oils, and jelly acetone is even less interactive with the surface of the paint or canvas.

[ooh-sluggie]

Will someone PLEASE clean the mona lisa

[dracofidus-deactivated20200523]

For those who are wondering, they cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa made by one of Da Vinchi’s students, and here’s a side by side comparison:

CLEAN THE FUCKING MONA LISA.

[elliotputyourbootsbackon]

A couple problems with cleaning the Mona Lisa:

The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.

A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Painting is a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze - a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil - is applied to the surface.  Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).

The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish. 

In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it. 

The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.

Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps.  Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.

The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques.  The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration. 

Don’t believe me, check it out:

This is how most people think The Last Supper looks

But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.

The actual Last Supper looks like this:

The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.

This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere.  Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.

They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)

Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished.  It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.

Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.

Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them - one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) - but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.

(also, I’m not a conservator but I’ll be applying to a conservation grad program sometime next year, so sorry if any of my info is at all inaccurate) 

[tabby-dragon]

I found this really interesting, thanks for sharing.

[gwendolynlerman]

Writing systems in the world

A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication. There are about 4,000 languages that make use of an established writing system.

All writing systems require:

at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script;

at least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understood and shared by a community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and relations to one another;

at least one language (generally spoken) whose constructions are represented and can be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;

some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).

Generally, threre are three major types of writing systems: alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. There are a number of subdivisions of each type, and there are different classifications of writing systems in different sources.

Alphabets use a standard set of letters representing the consonants and vowels of a spoken language. The correspondence is almost never one-to-one. Usually several different letters represent one phoneme and/or several phonemes are represented by the same letter. Alternately, a sequence of two or more letters can represent a single phoneme. Abjads differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and in abugidas or alphasyllabaries each character represents a consonant-vowel pairing.

Syllabaries consist of symbols that represent syllables (which are considered to be a basic building block of the words).

Logographies use characters corresponding to words, morphemes or other semantic units.

Alphabets typically use a set of less than 100 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have several hundred, and logographies can have thousands of symbols.

Segmental systems

A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language.

Alphabets

Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters that represent consonants and vowels. The word “alphabet” is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.

Alphabets currently in use include Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian (Mkhedruli), Greek, Korean (hangŭl), Latin/Roman, N’Ko, and Tifinagh.

Abjads

The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds, although vocalization is used in specific contexts, such as in religious books and children’s books. The term “abjad” takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet’s consonants ‘alif, bā’, jīm, and dāl.

Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana are the only abjads currently in use, but Samaritan and Syriac are used to a limited extent.

Abugidas

An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. The graphic similarity of most abugidas comes from the fact that they are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some contexts.

Abugidas that are currently in use include Bengali, Burmese/Myanmar, Cree (Nêhiyaw), Dehong Dai (Tai Le), Devanāgarī, Fraser, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Gujarāti, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Inuktitut, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Naskapi (Innu Aimun), Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan. 

The ones used to a limited extent are Balinese, Batak, Bilang-bilang, Blackfoot (Siksika), Buhid, Carrier (Dulkw’ahke), Chakma, Cham, Dhurwa, Ditema, Gondi, Grantha, Hanifi, Hanuno’o, Hmong, Javanese, Jenticha, Kaithi, Kerinci, Khoiki, Kirat Rai, Kulitan, Lampung, Lanna, Lepcha (Róng-Ríng), Limbu/Kirati, Lontara, Lota Ende, Manipuri (Meetei Mayek), Mon, Mwangwego, New Tai Lue, Ranjana, Rejang, Sasak, Satera Jontal, Saurashtra, Shan, Sharda, Siddham, Sorang Sompeng, Soyombo, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tikamuli, Tolong Siki, Tigalari, and Varang Kshiti.

Syllabic systems

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words.

Syllabaries currently in use include Cherokee (Tsalagi), Hiragana (Japanese), Katakana (Japanese), and Yi (Nosu).

Logographic systems

The symbols used in logographic systems often represent both sound and meaning. These scripts can also be called semanto-phonetic, logophonetic, morphoprhonemic, or logosyllabic.

They may include the following types of symbol:

Pictograms and logograms

Pictograms or pictographs resemble the things they represent. Logograms are symbols that represent parts of words or whole words.

Ideograms

Ideograms or ideographs are symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas.

Compound characters

Compound characters include a semantic element, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation.

The semanto-phonetic writing systems currently in use are Chinese (Zhōngwén) and Japanese (Nihongo), while Naxi is used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes.

Directionality

Scripts are also graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left.

The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right and right-to-left.

The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influence.

[feminismandmedia]

[image description: a tweet by user @indigenousAI saying

"fun fact: as a DV survivor i cannot register to vote because doing so makes my address public. anyone who is fleeing or hiding from an abuser is automatically disenfranchised from the political process and this is a feature, not a bug"]

[taehyungsgrowl]

I don’t know of the original poster might not be aware

but!

if you’ve been a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, you can enroll into the address confidentiality program (free of cost!) and be registered to vote as an absentee voter and your name and address will not be made available for the public

it is super easy to get enrolled - the application takes like 5 minutes, but it has to be with someone who is certified to do it (most likely an advocate! try going to a family justice center in your area or calling the Attorney Generals office in your area!!!!)

ALSO : 

you don’t need to have any police reports or have a protection order to qualify!!! you just have to sign stating that you’ve been a victim of one of the aforementioned crimes.

[orgy-of-nerdiness]

Links to the info for every state in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_confidentiality_program

Address confidentiality program - Wikipedia

[nonbinary-hawke-deactivated2021]

Idk how to explain to people that the US isn't declining into fascism, it's been a fascist state since the moment it started with genocide and slavery.

[nonbinary-hawke-deactivated2021]

People on this post keep insisting that it's not fascism because of lack of authoritarianism and not realizing that that's the fucking point.

There was a lack of authoritarianism for most people, most notably white people.

But what about the Native people who were forced into reservations that they weren't allowed to leave without permission? Who weren't allowed to speak their languages or sing their songs or dance their dances?

What about the black people who were forced into slavery and then into segregation? Who were separated from their families and weren't allowed to read or write?

What about the brown immigrants who were paid next to nothing for backbreaking work building a country that they weren't considered a part of? Who were forced to live in controlled housing where their every movement was monitored in case they tried to leave?

The US is and has always been a fascist state. Some people just have the privilege to ignore it.

[thewizardknownasfinehair]

Not to be /that guy/ but let's not forget about Chinese immigrants who built the railways and truly industrialized our nation, only to have the Chinese exclusion act passed

[mamapluto]

Don't forget immigration laws being passed specifically to keep out Jewish refugees.

[hornraven]

I can feel…the serotonin and dopamine dropping…i need to make…Crafts

i must make…

b e a d l i z a r d

[radioactivedelorean]

B…

B e a d l i z a r d

[msillzie]

I have seen these things for years but never knew how to make them so I must thank op for this new knowledge

[calysto1395]

op has given me the best gift possible

ive been making them for four days

[smugsackofstraw]

Am… am I back in the 90’s?

[cheeseoneveryfudgingthing]

Bead animals were my JAM in the 90’s!! And you don’t have to limit your creativity to lizards, either! With a few adjustments, you can make anything!

AND with a little practice, you can even make them 3D shaped (especially with the smaller beads and wire, though you can make them with the bigger beads and string, to an extent) 

[elodieunderglass]

These connect powerfully to some locked-down memories

[thoodleoo]

felt inspired to make this after reading some of the comments on my post about liking history

[isuggestjuicyass]

I think it’s really important for those who study history, both academically and recreationally, to make spaces for historical discussion as hostile to white supremacy and bigotry as possible. Make the space uninhabitable for them and hopefully we can clear the name of some of these really interesting fields of study.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[astrodidact]

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

"don't speak ill of the dead" don't be a piece of shit before you die.

[anemonequeen-moved]

once again, dont speak ill of the dead is for your uncle who had an alcohol problem, not the politician who upheld the oppression of millions of people