Find beauty - find yourself.

[velvetcloak]

Brooch by Marcus & Co., 1900. The Newark Museum of Art.

[dependell]

I am always thinking about every line of dialogue in the first 50 seconds of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.

[shining-supernova]

HELLO?

[biggerchallenge]

Darkplace is a key example of how in order to truly master making art that is "deliberately bad" you need to have a thorough understanding of what the medium considers the rules for "good form" so that you can than break every single rule.

[newtypezaku]

[ghostisredacted]

just saw someone say "a fandom is small, so like only 1-3 fics posted per day" . you wouldnt survive a day in the place where im from

[funeral]

In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening . . . In the process of digitalization, . . . information acquires an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea—that is, a re-representation. When reality takes the form of information, the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization gives everything the form of information, reality is flattened.

Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration

[sandersstudies]

We were doing an activity where the kids got to make a playbill for a musical about themselves and all the other kids were like “character list: mommy, daddy, me, my brother, my best friend” “scenes: I get a puppy, first day of school, my baby sister is born”

But one little girl was like “oh, it’s a musical about ME you say” and the character list was all the other girls in the class cast as her body parts, and a story about how her body works.

“Kaylee is nice so she will be the heart. Lily is my kidneys. Sapphire is the lungs.”

She surreptitiously showed me that the girl who kept taking the crayons she was using was cast specifically as “left buttcheek” and I had to pretend like that wasn’t the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

[nostalgia-is-a-bitch-ah]

Some of you never realized most disabled people have to pay to be able to walk or move around. Like big money payments. The kind that makes people become poor or homeless.

[unioncarbidesuperfan66]

library classification labels

[urgetocreate]

Nikita Chan (Chinese/American), Keeper of the Secret Garden, 2026, Color pencil on paper

[the-vanilla-extraction]

okay let's make another cake 🎂🎂

butter

sugar

eggs

flour

milk

baking powder

vanilla extract

Remaining time: 1 day 19 hours

[dashcon-two]

please, dear audience, fill this out. for science

[beroebluejeans]

There is a quality of books (or movies or shows) that I can best describe as “stickiness,” which is separate from being good or even enjoyable: a sticky book is one I just keep thinking about. Sometimes it’s because a book is very good (e.g. The Locked Tomb), and sometimes it’s because a book is very bad (e.g. ACOTAR), but there are also very good and very bad books that are slippery, such that when I’m done reading them they slip from my thoughts like water from a hydrophobic surface.

[kholran]

It’s finally happened.

After almost a decade on this site, I found another Tumblr user in the wild. I stopped to tie my shoe with rainbow laces this morning outside the silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg, and I heard it.

“I like your shoelaces.”

Oh. Oh no.

I responded the only way I could. “Thanks.” And then I reluctantly added, “I stole them from the president…and if that makes sense to you, I’m very sorry.”

The poor man, in full Colonial dress, stared at me for a long moment. And then burst into laughter. And said, “I haven’t thought about that in YEARS and this has never happened to me before.”

Yeah. Me neither. Not until today.

Tumblr rite of passage. Achievement unlocked.

[beggars-opera]

@victoriansecret I found your friend!!!

[beggars-opera]

[velvetnightgallery]

Art Nouveau green book covers

[wirenettle]

I see your bloodymary and i raise you: The Hail Mary Diaries

[crowthekiller]

grace sees SecUnit and is like “omg hiiiii :D its so crazy to see another human here!! how did you even get up here??? how’s earth doing? how’s-“ meanwhile rocky is staring in unadulterated fucking HORROR as he hears this Thing, vaguely shaped like a human, but also so incredibly Wrong in every way, even more Wrong than most humans. it has a semi-carapace?? and it’s made of completely different materials??? and it’s missing most of what grace calls “vital organs” and has replaced them with what looks like lab equipment??

SecUnit speaks and rocky drags grace and himself away with much horror, screaming incoherently about the sheer Wrongness of it all

[specialagentartemis]

And then Murderbot sees an alien spider monster creature trying to drag this squishy human scientist away and has a predictably bad reaction to that!

Murderbot and Rocky both screaming WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING while Grace has to pull out every skill from every conflict resolution seminar he's been required to take

[disc80s]

[anineillustration]

some tea things

[consulships]

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

[literaryreference]

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

[tricky-pockets]

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.