Very Serious Art

I am curious about the world, and I make stuff, these days mostly made of wood and/or made of storytelling.

[opulentjoy]

[detaisin-etc]

John Martin’s Last Judgement, 1853

Full Description

[redlipstickresurrected]

Francesca Dalla Benetta (Italian, b. 1977, Florence, Italy, based Mexico City, Mexico) - 2019-2020, Sculptures: Bronze on Bronze (info with each pic)

[transgenderer]

"society that allows polyamory, but only in certain very specific arrangements" is so underrated as a spec fic concept. the only examples i can think of are troll romance and sedoretus. theres something i find deeply satisfying about it

[transgenderer]

@topoillogical said:

I really like troll romance as a system. Homestuck is also perfect for 15 year olds. Young enough to find 13 year olds relateable. Old enough to understand complex plots. Horny. Able to ship in a gloriously 4x complex system

I love the homestuck quadrants. We should do that more. I should write smth similar...

the homestuck quadrants are funny because like. obv intense homestuck fans want to replicate it but black romance is really weird and unnatural to humans! i feel like no one expereinces like. legit black romance. with someone they actually know. i guess i shouldnt underestimate human diversity. ive been feeling very universal love lately so i dont know if could really hate anyone i know well. mostly i can just find people boring and annoying. which is not a good basis for black romance! maybe i could spin a math rivalry into a black romance, i definitely experience rivalry as an emotion....but black romance isnt JUST rivalry, i feel like there should be real enmity

[kit-is-god]

black romance is just hating someone and wanting to fuck them at the same time its not that hard

[detaisin-etc]

Ooh! Another example of that concept is in the people of O in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. TVTropes seems to sum it up pretty well: “O, whose society is divided into the immutable moieties called "Morning" and "Evening." A marriage on O consists of a Morning man and woman and an Evening man and woman, arranged so that each person has both a husband and wife of the opposite moiety, both of whom they're expected to be sexually involved with, and one additional spouse of the opposite gender (but the same moiety) with whom they're forbidden to be sexually involved.” It shows up in three short stories, and I’ve only read one of them, but I get the impression this system is always described in half-detail, with some things specific enough to be engaging but big parts left vague.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Charlie Baird (Scottish, b. 1955, Nairn, Scotland) - Bike Ride, 2021, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

[70sscifiart]

Alfred Kelsner

[redlipstickresurrected]

Carolynda Macdonald (Scottish, b. 1957, Hannover, Germany, based Carnoustie, Scotland) - 1: The Valley of Lost Souls 2: Herald, 2019  3: Traces and Hidden Places, 2019  4: Fighting Spirit, Paintings: Oil on Linen

[gameraboy1]

“New York: magic city” Esquire, December 1949 Photograph by Robert Bagby

[70sscifiart]

Robert McCall

[lawfulgoodness]

Since we’re doing “tips for those new to Tumblr,” can I please express how much I love it when somebody goes through my archive, or starts scrolling through a tag giving likes to a post from 4 years ago, or resharing something I haven’t thought about in 9 years?  I love it.

Absolutely love it.

I love to see people liking things I’ve liked, exploring my interests, getting to know me.  When I see 8 “hearts” in my activity feed from the same person on a series of posts from 2013, I immediately just want to be friends and go get a coffee and ask them what their favorite alignment is, or what comic book character they love, or their favorite movie.

Please feel free to do that.  I know it’s discouraged on some social media platforms, but here on Tumblr we love it.

[headspace-hotel]

"Asteroid," poem assembled from quotations from Wikipedia articles

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

Be the medieval peasant your experiences would kill

I’m normally pretty lukewarm toward cars and motor vehicles more generally, but there’s something about an 18-wheeler sweeping past a few feet to your side on a mixed vehicle/pedestrian bridge that fills the ape brain with terror, arousal, and pure gawking disbelief

[detaisin-etc]

Double-decker buses. Less scary for sure, but there’s nothing like having a machine shaped like a small social housing block, with the mannerisms of a gigantic metal cow, sidle right up to you on a busy city street.

[livaniana]

[iamjapanese]

Stars fell on Livaniana

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[theemperorsfeather]

Ok so the most amazing reblog I've seen of this says:

There's a globe-spanning layer of mesopelagic fish that is so dense it distorts SONAR. For decades we had no idea what created the Deep Scattering Layer or why it moved. We still know almost nothing about it.

It contains 65% of all fish biomass.

Marine Ecology has Dark Fish.

And:

FYSA: 65% is a low-end estimate. Dark Fish may comprise 95% of all fish biomass, but we just don't know: https://phys.org/news/2014-03-ninety-five-cent-world-fish-mesopelagic.html

[shrimp-bird]

Bristlemouth dominance: How do we know? - Twilight Zone

Bristlemouths are reported to be the most numerous vertebrate, with numbers estimated in the quadrillions. How scientists arrive at that es

Apparently 40% to 50% of that hidden biomass is mostly likely these guys, bristlemouths, and they are thought to be the most abundant vertebrates on Earth, numbering in the quadrillions. The mesopelagic zone makes up 20% of the oceans so while the estimates are based on limited sampling, so far bristlemouths have been there wherever scientists go looking.

[transgenderer]

there's a great deal of overlap between the design of orthodox churches and ottoman-style mosques, for understandable reasons, not to get on a weird #notallchurches soapbox, just a dome fan

okay yeah. whats with the lack of domes in north/west europe then. domes are one of the basic shapes. the closes thing is the florence cathedral which isnt even a real dome, its all weird and angular

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

It does look kind of like a vampire squid, though, and that’s at least moderately based

[detaisin-etc]

The following is based on some half-remembered architectural history classes (so anyone with more knowledge than me please jump in!), but I believe giant round domes were basically an extinct technology in most of medieval Western Europe. Medieval European intellectuals were *painfully* aware that the Roman Empire had been much richer, more high-tech and generally cooler than they were, and so they based much of their grand architecture on Roman aesthetics and Roman technology. This is most noticeable in the early medieval style called “romanesque”, which does indeed have domes and barrel arches. However, the Roman method for building domes was to build a vast wooden cast of the entire building, then cover it in concrete. This required: a) pretty advanced concrete technology, b) tons and tons wood, cut into complex scaffolding, which doesn’t even end up in the finished building! c) loads of labourers. Medieval cultures lacked all of those things, so their romanesque domes and vaults just weren’t very big or impressive. European stonemasons gradually solved this problem with the invention of the rib vault: basically a thin stone ribcage which gets built first, and can stand up by itself while you lay the rest of the vault or arch on top of it. This uses much less wood scaffolding, and much less labour. Sure, it takes longer –sometimes centuries– but medieval Christians didn’t have a lot going on except for farming, warring, and worshipping God, so they were game for it. The rib vault became the backbone (ha ha) of ecclesiastical architecture, and the signature look of what became the Gothic style. As Western Europe developed its own distinct aesthetics separate from Rome, the “tree canopy/freaky batwing membrane” look of gothic cathedrals became the fashion, instead of domes. Meanwhile the Byzantine & Persian traditions of building brick domes seems to’ve carried on uninterrupted in Eastern Europe & West Asia.

[catadromously]

your tag “sometimes a historian is someone who etches marks on the wall to catalogue your growth” made me clutch my chest and sit down. yes. i’m literally going into a public history grad program next year and you just casually summed up the entire field and why i love it. thank you

here is a gravestone from ancient Athens, a young girl with her favorite pets.

here is a food-sharing scene from the Maya site Calakmul. when they remodeled the building, the people there packed this mural with mud to preserve it.

here is a child’s footprint stamped into clay in Mesopotamia more than 2000 years ago. many of these have been found, and some are inscribed with the children’s names. 

we don’t want to forget each other. that’s history.

[thunderstruck9]

Alice Boyd (British, 1823-1897), The Thames from Cheyne Walk, probably a view from Belle Vue House, 1875. Oil on canvas, 77 x 61 cm.

[jacobvanloon]

The Rip XIII Watercolor on paper, 8.5 x 10.75" 2021