Birdie Told Me

I don’t even know what to say here anymore. Just call me Birdie - Replies and follows from Toanunnery

[beggars-opera]

Witch 1: When shall we three meet again?

Witch 2: When the hurdy-gurdy's done

Witch 3: *absolutely shredding*

[codes-and-stuffs]

i do think we should normalise being like. platonically enamoured with someone. perhaps i love and admire you dearly and there's nothing romantic about it

[valtsv]

"why do you keep calling things you find beautiful, inexplicable, and unsettling angels" i'm just doing what british wartime radar technicians did first

[valtsv]

it was birds btw

[valtsv]

↑ angel

[payloadofgeckos]

another timed painting, this one of @sikalyxx 's Trevor, thanks so much for letting me steal him

[molabuddy]

really specific trope i like that i feel like can only be explained in a diagram

[classicslesbianopinions]

it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

[perrenlore]

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

[iamalivenow]

yeah bro it's a character study. the 2 thousand words of blowjob is vital to the study of the character

[birdie-told-me]

Revenge on @infiniteseahorse

[ranrandraws]

sphinx that i am probably not going to finish/ work on further than this

[muscariii]

More artfight stuff!

1. Philomina for Pippin Draws

2. Nadia for @falmerbrook

3. Kolvar for Nawonamo

4. Lia for Invidia

I have some more stuff in progress (got some sketches done) but I'm taking a short break so that I don't burn myself out!

I managed to make more drawings than last year so I'm already happy about that!!

[cowboyhatesithere]

the uncontrollable urge to know how people describe me to others

[aukkenopsia]

birdfolks

[heyfruitcake]

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

[ignitelimelight]

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

[kintsugi-my-soul]

Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it

Here’s one in English.

[helenmask]

I thiiinkkkk I'm done

[helenvaughans]

[lowpawly]

people foolishly dismiss desserts and treats as having no nutritional value when they actually are necessary for refilling your sanity stat. to prove my point please observe the emotional stability of the next person you meet who doesnt let themselves ever eat any form of dessert

[necrophilologist]

joining the bandwagon with one for the romanists:

it's january 49 BC and civil war is in the air.

spin the wheel: this person is trying to kill you

spin it again: this person tries to protect you

do you survive the civil war?

i die Badly

i die but not without a fight

i come out of it injured, but alive

piece of cake. we're crushing that motherfucker

INVIDIA SACRAE CAESAR NE TANGERE FAMAE NAM SIQUID LATIIS FAS EST PROMITTERE MUS

Remaining time: 1 day 22 hours