[what-even-is-thiss]

So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“King Arthur couldn’t have fought the Roman Empire”

Try telling that to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“You can’t just add in new characters”

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.

[what-even-is-thiss]

God, I sure hope so.

[charlesoberonn]

It can be counted as arthurian legend now if you're not a coward.

[clownboybebop]

if you’re ever in the position to choose between giving up and accepting defeat, and actually trying to fight the ancient unkillable god that is about to peel apart reality like a string cheese, remember this: scientifically speaking, you might as well give it a shot!

1.there were trees at the beginning of the world! there were trees so long ago that they predate bacteria that causes wood to decay. when a tree fell, it would lie there in stasis and there wasn’t any way of breaking down wood xylem on a molecular level in that way.

2. it seems obvious to say, but wood eating bacteria are literally incapable of comprehending what they’re breaking down. It’s just not information conciously available to a microorganism. they don’t know what they’re deconstructing, where it came from, bacteria have no way to even fathom the existence of a tree as a concept.

3. Regardless of the facts above, the world we live in today is a world where wood inevitably decomposes

it is worth fighting the unkillable god no matter how pointless it seems. it is worth taking the risk even though youre trying to accomplish something impossible. the reality in which you live was also once reality in which trees didn’t rot. You live in a reality that allows for existence before the possibility of destruction. you live in a reality where uncomprehending microbes break down matter that is so far beyond the scope of their comprehension that it feels comical to specify something so obvious. you live in a reality that occasionally allows unshakeable physical truths to be altered with no warning.

It is worth fighting the unkillable god because trees are so old they predate the source of their destruction, and it still did not spare them. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because bacteria rots unthinkingly, because there is room in our cosmos for destruction without comprehension on the part of the destroyer. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because now and then reality retracts the promise of immortality without fanfare, and when that happens there is no mercy for the ancient. the unmaking is not softer for the desecrators ignorance. for all things, existence is endless until the exact point where it ends.

so you might as well try to kill the unkillable god. it doesn’t seem likely, but at the beginning of the world, trees didn’t rot. so you never know! you never know

[kyraneko]

fight the unkillable god, because you may be mistaken about its unkillability.

fight the unkillable god, because you may be the first bacterium to take a successful bite.

fight the unkillable god, so as to set foot onto the path which leads to the god being killable.

the bacteria that couldn't eat the tree and the bacteria that could eat the tree had the same general understanding of the tree.

might as well take a bite.

[eddieintheocean]

Introductions to academic papers will be like "everyone knows that the sea is cold (citation), as well as salty (5 different citations). Things live in there (citation) and the environment is important to that (2 citations)"

[disorganisedautodidact]

these tags gave me thesis writing flashbacks

[saltedweather]

the thing about writing history. Is that you get used to this. And sometimes, some of us get too comfortable and so we're writing shit like

"Murder is bad. In the time period discussed, people sometimes committed murders (2 citations). And most people agreed that murder was bad, but it was widely known that murders still happened."

And your advisor goes, "Did most people agree, though? Was it widely known?"

And you go (sigh.). Okay. And do twelve hours of going back through your readings. And rewrite.

"Murder is bad (4 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations)."

And you look at your draft. And you go. But. But we all — I mean, the archival sources from the time are in fact QUITE CLEAR about how widely known it was! Like–! I've read hundreds of letters and a third of them mention murder! I've talked to so many historians of this time and place and we ALL talk about the murder thing!

And you look at the twelve goddamned hours of searching you did. And you write several increadingly desperate emails to colleagues. And after another few days, you come to the agonizing realization that, in fact, there are no citations of published work establishing that people knew murders occurred despite them being bad and against the law. And then you spend another week looking up those archival sources. And you rewrite again.

"Murder is bad (6 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations). While no conclusive study has been done, from communications in this time, we can say that at least a significant number of people knew that murders still occurred (18 citations)."

[bucketofdeltav]

I currently have exactly this problem.

"Everyone knows that [reaction A] works like this and [reaction B] works like that". Very common way to start a paper or thesis in this field. Everybody knows this, we can carry on with the more interesting stuff about [reaction C].

Huh. These 73 citations all cite each other in a ouroboros and the only original source in the lot is a popular science book which is indeed worth citing, but it's a memoir, which I have read repeatedly, and the author of the memoir just threw this out there as another example of "things everyone just knew in those days".

...I am now doing a PhD on "Hang on just one second, we have no concrete evidence for how [reaction A] or [reaction B] work and even whether they're different at all."

[daburdboi]

I love seeing my sources cite each other so much. It really makes me feel more like a researcher and like part of a community when I'm reading a paper and I see this person read that too, and also found it worth citing and sharing. This is the stuff that makes me love teaching people about MLA and APA.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Going back to the history for a second: my external examiner for my PhD was determined, for some ungodly reason, for me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians had the concepts of shame, politeness, and “saving face” after embarrassment. But she didn’t want secondary sources, she wanted primary ones.

So I sat there thinking ‘you want me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians knew what shame was, that very human emotion, using their own words in a culture for which we have very few examples of personal/private correspondence or notations that don’t suffer from strict formalities that are present in 98% of non literary texts? Okay then’ and went through hundreds of fragments over weeks to find this:

P.Bologna 1094 3, 5-10

sS m-H n pA xpS n pr-aA a.w.s. Dd n sS pA-wHm r-nty in.tw n=k sS pn n Dd Hna Dd r-nty m ir s iwty HAty=f iw bn n=f sbAy(t) ir sDr.tw iw.tw Hr mtr=k wrS.tw iw.tw Hr sbA=k iw bw sDm=k mtr nb iw i-ir=k pAy=k sxr pA kry Hr sDm mdt in.tw=f Hr kS tw.tw Hr irt sbAyt n mAi tw.tw Hr q-H ssmt Hrw-r=k bw rx.tw qi=k m-Xnw tA-tmm ix rx=k sw

Mahu, Scribe of the Armoury of Pharaoh l.p.h. speaks to the Scribe Pewehem. This letter is brought to you to the following effect: Do not be a senseless man who has no education. One spends the whole night teaching you and passes the whole day instructing you, without your listening to any teaching, but you act after your own fashion. The ape understands words, and it is brought to you from Kush. Lions are trained and Horses tamed: but as for you, one does not discern the like of you within all mankind. Take note of this.

(Caminos, 1954: 13, cf [Redacted], 2016: 59)

I think I sufficiently provided an example of someone (Scribe Mahu) enacting shame and impoliteness onto his student (Scribe Pewehem). 'Prove these humans had the concept of shame' was a wild task that required a wild citation.

Caminos, R., 1954. Late Egyptian Miscellanies. London: OUP. Redacted, C., 2016. My Doctoral Thesis That I Won't Post Publicly But You Can Ask For It. Unpublished.

[1five1two]

[blancamzlooksat]

Dusk Paradise by Varsam Kurnia

[houseofenid]

5 YEARS OF FASHION EDITORIALS BY HOUSE OF ENID 

Full fashion show: HERE  Instagram: @houseofenid

[owlet]

hate to repost but the bde that is sheerly radiating out of this picture is just too much

[cloudine]

What is it that I want?  open letter to my aspirations

Coming to terms with the end of a wonderful year of experiential learning has its costs. Assuming that time passes, that we are passengers of a journey curated by our own direction and external circumstances, that there are crucibles of our own making and of external pressures, that we may or may not measure up to the dreams and projections we began with... the validity of our path is, sure, affected by external flows and currents, but essentially we must carve our own graves and be content of the decisions made by our own free will. 

What do we aspire to be/become/do/affect/create/change? 

Where do we conform?

Where do we push?

How to get there?

It is so easy to freeze like a deer in the middle of the road, to be unsure of what you have accomplished so far, what it is you can do, to undermine the experiences lived when the road seems to steep into an unsurpassable mystery.

Take time, re centre, refocus. 

[cloudine]

creative profesional in action!

[weirdlandtv]

French illustrator, Cécile Dormeau.

[ladydumb]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Paula Bonet (@paulabonet) on Aug 15, 2019 at 3:49am PDT

[cloudine]

m'he donat el gust de fer el que vull quan he volgut porque sí, porque vull.

Because I never needed you

it was always a matter of choice

and the roads that would take me far

but always back close to the home, the home that I built thinking of 

me and my universes, known unknown

this home which creaks and unfolds as I reinhabit its halls,

retornando a mi misma, de polvo del camino y con la huella del sol

dentro de la piel, dentro de las paredes del ser

solitaria cascara de mi corazon, con sus dormitorios de maderas nobles

memorias huecas que me miran con ojos secos y lapidas sin marcar

[alfaiatenicois]

[artist-varo]

Cosmic Energy, Remedios Varo

[nobrashfestivity]

Charles Howard Hinton, illustrations from The Fourth Dimension, 1904

Archive.org

[rubenista]

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man With a Book (detail), 1540

[judithbuttplug]

One of my clubbing friends told me the other week that my nerdy attire makes me look like I’m a porn college student, jokingly obviously and we laughed about it, but all of you know how extra I am with deconstructing simple actions, so it got me thinking about how I can edit the way I can be perceived. I’m kinda insecure about a lot of things when it comes to my appearance as a result of being bullied and outcast in many levels through pretty much all of my teen years, obviously that has had a giant impact on how I have built my identity around arguably “nerdy” things. Becoming an adult has introduced me to other facets of my identity which I later developed more and more as I grew. And a lot of identities people seem to put on me from first impressions are false because the whole thing about being a nerd is you obsess about fandoms and fairly underground things. And most people in my adult life don’t really engage with those things so much, it’s a niche. This applies to how my body performs visually through fashion, as I do tend to dress in very “childish” ways for someone in their 20′s.

I’m not really insecure about the way I dress or how I come across to people, I find it to be a sort of badge of honour I give to someone for them to know me deeply and understand more about who I really am rather than making an assumption based on my appearance. However, I like to experiment with the many facets my body has to offer when subjected to different context, whether by posing, lighting, fashion etc. A lot of my selfies for me have become a study about this body I inhabit because I find it kind of weird that I never get to experience who I am physically while others do. It’s a way of very literal self-discovery, but it’s a self-discovery we share with people through the internet for multiple purposes in current culture. I literally don’t know who I am to others, I don’t know what it’s like to experience me, because perception will dictate what I become in a person’s mind, the way I “put myself out there” can only go so far.

I can’t help but wonder whether this is what Cyndi Sherman was trying to tell us with her self-portraiture, exposing this ability we all possess of becoming different identities simply through capturing a split second of an acted identity on film. Selfie culture itself allows us to perpetuate these identities coherently, giving us complete power to edit our image and chose how we want it to be perceived through performing certain identity nuances in photography.

I’m not saying any of this is a bad thing or a good thing. I’m simply trying to understand it.

[cloudine]

“who am I if not simply a carcass for you to witness? how should I piece the fragments of light that pierce the skin and bounce of what is deep inside? am I but smoke and mirrors am I nothing but everything except some sometimes.”  -C

[cloudine]

Applying to ABA ART LAB

For as long as four months I have been dwelling on the influx of self-doubt, a sense of unpreparedness and impostor syndrome that crippled my ability to finalise my portfolio, to send a perfectly written cover letter and a frankly overqualified application to a role that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to apply to.

Aba Art Lab is a gallery and as the name suggests, an art room where artists create site-specific work in response to stimuli. At first glance, looking at their role of illustration intern seemed like an easily attainable internship that would fill the quota of work placement weeks that I required, and would allow me to spend time in Spain near my Catalonian family while learning the language. It doesn’t get more ideal than that. However overqualified I felt, however good the perks, I could not muster a portfolio that satisfied me, as it felt dishonest to who I am as a practitioner. True, all the work is mine, but did it really tell a story I wanted to describe to my practice? The answer is probably not.

 Change is good, and growth is impossible without change, but like growing pains, it is a process that can cause quite a lot of discomfort and confusion. It paralysed me as I processed the changes that had already happened, and frankly, being able to travel for a month and a half and not *actually* making any decisions about my future was a blessing. 

Working for the DDW was the best thing that happened to me in October, it was a thrilling experience that allowed me to meet designers, students and really inspirational makers. Looking at industry on all levels was insightful and decidedly developed my understanding of what possibilities lied in it other than illustration as a pure form. 

It was also uncomfortable because I felt that the more I learned the more I distanced myself from the way I understood art and design, and decidedly it was changing my relationship with it. I could no longer apply as an illustrator to ABA, but was I a good enough designer to be accepted through that application? 

Onomatopee really defined much of how I currently feel about the places I want to work with/for, but I will outline more specifically why here.