the other day one of my students asked me if i was 'into musicals'. anyway here's a crop of a wip i've had sitting open in photoshop for a year and a half.
i don't do bad sauce passes

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wallacepolsom
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

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Kiana Khansmith

@theartofmadeline

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi

tannertan36
AnasAbdin

titsay
Cosmic Funnies
trying on a metaphor
Misplaced Lens Cap

roma★
will byers stan first human second

oozey mess
ojovivo
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@eleancrvances
the other day one of my students asked me if i was 'into musicals'. anyway here's a crop of a wip i've had sitting open in photoshop for a year and a half.
I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).
Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.
He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.
Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.
All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!
So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.
Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:
Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.
Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.
Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.
Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.
Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.
When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.
Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.
Ferry line the other day featured a tantrum child and it got me thinking about the sort of classic caricature of the whiny "are we theeeeere yet?" and it's variants - and about how little control kids have, generally, over where they are or where they go. How long they stay, how they get there. Slim to none? Maybe intervals of time when they have freedom of movement and choice of activity within a predefined scope. But for the most part you're told where you'll be - not necessarily even with warning - and then you have to go. Non stop, day in and day out. At which point, yeah, maybe it is the final straw if you're told you'll be in that traveling limbo longer than expected. Or just longer than you can stand.
It was interesting thinking about this, because I never conceptualized it that way as a child. I didn't think I was under an unreasonable pressure of having my location controlled by others, because it didn't ever really occur to me to see the shape of that pattern as something that Could be different.
I did get lost, though. Or - by my memory I only got lost once, when I was 5, and it was very scary. My mom remembers... many more incidents. But in those cases I knew where I was, and I'd got there on purpose, and I came back on my own time. Most of them, I didn't even know anyone thought I was lost. I'd just gone somewhere. And not told anyone.
At least a couple times I knew very strongly that I needed to be somewhere and not have anyone know where. I needed to get away from being seen, being known, being circumscribed. I needed no one to be able to come get me. Those times were mostly when I was older, when I'd started to go more places on my own power - city bus to school and so on - and when that sense of being pinned in place closed in I knew the shape of what I was escaping. But when I was younger it was just something I Did. I didn't know it as a need or as a reaction to anything in particular. It was just something that was important to me to sometimes do.
And I think it's an interesting window into misbehavior in kids. Problem behavior, things parents tear their hair about, things kids at some point just.... grow out of, apparently. How much is the backlash of a stress applied elsewhere? Some constraint, which they don't have the perspective to understand as unbearable or even unreasonable, which is pressurized and transmuted into some reaction through some other pressure-release valve. I mean, that's not at all a new analysis, that kids 'act out' in response to pressure. But I guess I don't often see it applied all the way back to "normal" levels of kids whining and yelling and getting into trouble, in response to the "normal" levels of constraint kids are under.
Which is so much, actually, once you're looking for it. But strangely I think a lot of people go through this double-forgetting, while they simultaneously gain more agency in their own lives and more perspective about the world and about agency as a concept. They don't complete the analysis of the situation they used to be in, with the new tools. They don't track the shape of the behaviors they grew out of, and what they felt like from the inside versus what they were named by adults, and how and when exactly those feelings and those behaviors slipped away.
And then they grow up into adults who put kids through the exact same thing.
#When I did reading tutoring there was one kid who begged to go to the water fountain at least twice every session #And then the bathroom too because that was a lot of water #People kept acting like a was being a pushover for letting him but it's not like I didn't know what he was doing #It was the only type of break he knew how to ask for. And the only way to get up and move even a little - long walk down the hall - #After a whole day of class and another hour of reading tutoring. #I could have been strict about once a day only or do it at the start or yadda yadda. But what would that gain? #It wouldn't help his focus or his learning or his wellbeing or his trust in me. It would gain *maybe* 10 minutes more time in the session. #What the hell is that worth? #But it was so strange to the adults around that I let him. Just because it was boundary pushing behavior just because it was asking for #a shred more freedom than had been allotted.
aadam jacobs's archive
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 01.01 | "In Throes of Increasing Wonder…"
THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 01.01 | "Detroit"
Gentle reader, even as you comfort yourself that reason must prevail, you find yourself awaking, ever more often, from a nightmare of a distant house that twitches in its sleep.
Gizem Akdag
it really does mean a lot to me that iwtv 101 is what is probably the most perfectly encapsulated gothic story ever put on tv and will remain as such for the next 10 thousand years. my beautiful friends jane eyre mina harker unnamed narrator from rebecca meet your new forever supreme ldpdl
This comic is genuinely how I remember which is which.
i think he's handling things really well.
The leads in Rope (1948) according to the MPAA Analysis Chart
Gifs from the second National Theatre Liaisons trailer.
Amadeus, 1984, dir. Miloš Forman
I might have said, “Where is it?” for it did not seem in the room—nor in the house—nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air—nor from under the earth—nor from overhead. I had heard it—where, or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being—a known, loved, well-remembered voice—that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.
“I am coming!” I cried. “Wait for me! Oh, I will come!”
Jane Eyre (1943) dir. Robert Stevenson
Assad Zaman as Armand Interview with the Vampire — 3.01
Lestat de Lioncourt & Daniel Molloy THE VAMPIRE LESTAT (2026–) 3.01 "Detroit"
God I fucking love being a monk at the Monastery of Lindisfarne on this fine morning of June 8th, 793. I love looking at all the gold and silver objects and alive monks that live here.