ephebe's journal

A. B. / 22 / eastern european aesthete

[absencesrepetees]

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses), and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography (via la-femme-terrible)

[wovi]

*

the ladies’ home journal, sept 1948

[frmarino]

Alekos Fassianos. Youth with Laurels and a Kite. 1996

[morphic-mythos]

The Greek for “divine possession” is enthusiasmos—enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be “engodded,” to be divinely inspired.

—Stephen Fry, Mythos

[chapellsroan]

DROP DEAD dir. Petra Collins

[rneliflua]

not to be pretentious, but a lot of stuff you guys complain is being ruined by capitalism/the algorithm/whatever can be solved by consuming something else than the most basic mainstream stuff that's thrown in your lap. "songs nowadays are getting shorter to fit entire tiktoks and it's ruining music" have you tried listening to something else than Spotify's Top 100 my dude? "fanfiction-to-publishing pipeline is churning out mediocre books and it's ruining literature" have you tried reading something outside the NYT bestseller list my dude? This is not a post about how algorithm based industries give visibility to the lowest common denominator art at the expense of actually creative and meaningful art that struggles to make itself known, which is a valid discussion for another time, this is about people actively not giving this kind of art their visibility because they won't get out of their way to discover stuff outside the mainstream radar and prefer to be passively fed what to consume while bitching that is not up to their tastes.

[newloverofbeauty]

Bruce Weber: Sir Ian McKellan and friend

[carbomcoco]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[carbomcoco]

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

[rozzed]

why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? it won't hurt him....

[historicalbookimages]

🗿 Monographie des plantes fossiles du grès bigarré de la chaine des Vosges /. Leipzig: G. Engelmann, 1844.. Original source Image description: Historical illustration showing four fossilized leaves of ancient conifer plants labeled as “Albertia” from the Vosges sandstone. The fossils are embedded in irregular stone slabs with distinct detailed leaf venation. Two leaves (A. Braunie) are positioned on the top left and bottom left, exhibiting broad, elongated leaflets. Two others (B. Speciosa) are on the top right and bottom right, showing slightly narrower and more separated leaflets. The lithograph is from an 1844 monograph focused on fossil plants, capturing the structure and texture of these ancient conifer specimens in brown tones against a white background.

[ezidxan]

Traces, The People of Peacock (2006)

Êzîdîs of the village Alagyaz in Armenia recount the tragedies that had forced them into exile (¼)

[redlipstickresurrected]

Ankita Sikdar aka Urochithi (Indian, based Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India) - The Eye. Kolkata, India. Silver Jewelry from Baka Jewelry Captured and edited by Srinjan Biswas

[momoboyds]

here are some free books

reading is fun and knowledge is power

[theancientwayoflife]

~ Kylix. Place of origin: Greece Date: 5th century B.C.

[metamorphesque]

genocide, tathev simonyan

[sovietpostcards]

"Having orbited the Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Humans, let us preserve and increase the beauty, not destroy it!"

― Yuri Gagarin

[tridentandtales]

Etruscan duck askos

325 - 275 BCE

British Museum 1865,0103.20