Your finger on the pulse of my Soul

Sometimes I post art rarely that I've drawn. There will be beautiful, inspiring things, cute things, and all in between. I like Pokemon, BEES, pretty pictures, food, and being a giant nerd. I don't talk here much about my life. Remember: you're stuck in here with me, not the other way around :D

[lacetulle]

Custom Monica Ivena

[heartnosekid]

oleander hawkmoth (daphnis nerii) | stonedaffection on ig

[aq2003]

(vaguely inspired by a scene in this fic)

[ynnu-64]

Saxon for the PM!!!1!!11!1!1

THIS IS BASED ON " Veil" by _K0TTERI_ on Twitter!!!

[anthonyhurd]

Some recent digital pieces. I offer all of these up as prints on my shop at store.anthonyhurd.com

[ltwilliammowett]

Scrimshawed whale bone pie crimper in shape of a Unicorn, made by a sailor for a beloved person ashore or aboard, mid 19th century

Constructed from two sections of whale ivory with a baleen spacer. Well-formed head with inset baleen eyes and applied baleen ears and horn. Fluted wheel with a star-shaped hub supported by the unicorn's front legs. Elegantly formed rear legs and looping tail. c. 20cm long

[todaysbird]

the sri lanka blue magpie is a corvid species found exclusively in sri lanka. they are colorful for a corvid species, with bright blue markings along with red feet, beaks, and eye rings. they are mainly carnivorous, feeding on lizards and small mammals and large insects, and are talented hunters despite not being particularly strong in flight - they mainly prey on other animals by hopping through the trees. males and females are not distinguishable by appearance.

[todaysbird]

the unicolor jay is a member of the corvid family native to central america. named for its fairly solid blue color, the unicolor jay is an outlier among other jays, who typically have some kind of patterning or defining marking. little research has been done on unicolor jays specifically, but based on research of other jays, they are likely intelligent birds with varied diets and aggressive mannerisms towards other species.

[divineandmajesticinone]

WONDER BAR (1934) | dir. Lloyd Bacon

“The other [scene that stands out above the rest] involved a handsome man, asking a dancing couple if he could cut in. The female partner, expecting his attention, agrees, only to see him dance with her male partner. Jolson then flaps his wrist and says, “Boys will be boys. Woo!”. This scene almost caused the Production Code to reject the film, and was featured in the opening scenes of the documentary film The Celluloid Closet (1996).”

[secondlina]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[zegalba]

Daniel Arsham & Hajime Sorayama Sculpture: Holding Hands (2019)

[its-tenrose]

doctor who + tumblr textposts (4)

[poorquentyn]

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

[sophiamcdougall]

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.  […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.  Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

[vulgarweed]

Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.

[its-a-beautful-day]

Been thinking about how it feels, being the wild child

the struggle of not feeling human, when emotions get too strong,

when hands feel like paws and teeth become fangs, shoulders and hunches raised in anger and low growls of fear,

somehow this body language is easier, is more natural than my own

[foone]

Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.

Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.

Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.

Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.

Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.

Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.

[mangamaga]

art nouveau fireplace from 1908 in Catalonia

[penny-anna]

One Good Reason: Team Two