SalamandarCreations

Fun. Of a widely varied and magical nature.

[gracefullikeagazelle]

this is how i search my own blog

[kosmogrl]

oooh I get it it’s always gonna be because of the environment I grew up in

[aceofpans]

it’s because of the curse

[bambicoded]

[atrusovaartist]

Today I want to show you a very special painting.This place is part of my childhood and some of my happiest memories. I painted it after a trip to Russia in 2017. It feels like a lifetime ago. My oldest son had just turned one, and my husband and I traveled to visit my parents.My parents have a big off-road vehicle, and they love exploring places where ordinary cars simply can’t go-deep forests, marshes, hidden lakes, and quiet rivers. They took us on many adventures, and this was one of those places. We spent the day fishing there and even caught a few large northern pike.This landscape is near the village of Kholuy in the Ivanovo region of Russia.Although I painted it years ago, it isn’t for sale. It is the only painting that was permanently damaged during the catastrophic flood that hit my gallery in 2021, After days of heavy rain in Belgium and Germany, a dam had to be opened overnight to prevent an even greater disaster. Nobody had time to prepare. During the night, the water rushed into the building. The flood reached almost 2.5 meters (over 8 feet) high, nearly touching the ceiling. My paintings floated in muddy water for many hours.Afterward, I washed and disinfected every painting by hand. Many survived surprisingly well, although several wooden stretcher bars warped as they dried. This painting was less fortunate. It must have fallen in just the wrong way, and part of the thick acrylic paint layer detached from the canvas. It now has a small but visible scar, and I still don’t know the best way to restore it.So it hangs in my home instead.People often ask whether it’s okay to touch my textured paintings. I always say yes you can gently touch them with your fingers or even wipe them with a damp cloth if needed. After seeing paintings survive a flood, floating in dirty water for hours, it’s hard for me to imagine that even thousands of curious fingers could do more damage than that one night did.

Sometimes a painting carries not only the memory of the place it depicts, but also the memory of everything it has survived.

acrylic, linen 100 * 120 cm “balance” 2019

[carbon-ate]

[transjester64]

Adding this from the comments...

[divorcedwife]

studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be

[lavenderprose]

"Vegas is sad because Ilya didn't actually want to be doing that :( He was trying to create distance between them :("

And what if I told you that Ilya engineered that hookup specifically because he wanted to dom Shane that night and he knew that if he got Shane in that hotel room that Shane would submit to him so beautifully and what if I told you that actually that's what they both wanted so fucking bad and what if I told you that the only reason the Penthouse hookup is bad is because Shane DID NOT COMMUNICATE what he wanted. Which was kisses. That's all he wanted. Not softer sex not Ilya being "gentle" not the denial of an aspect of his sexuality. Which is submitting sexually.

Vegas is sad because they aren't communicating well and they have feelings for each other and Ilya is refusing to recieve even the most basic aftercare (Chatting. Ilya enjoys to chat with Shane after sex, we've seen it before) and he's too in his own head about other things that he's failing to provide Shane's preferred aftercare (kisses) and neither of them even knows that that's a fixable problem at this point. THAT is the saddness of the scene. Not the kinky sex. They absolutely should have been having their kinky sex they just needed to be doing it more safely. But they're 24 and Ilya is about to reenter the Slavic Torment Nexus and Shane thinks he deserves to be sad forever until he wins a Stanley Cup. So.

[comingatthecottage]

in fact, what if i were to say that the reason it is so devastating is specifically because making the power dynamic so explicit makes them both want and care for each other even more than they already did, and that in fact the vegas sex scene is deeply deeply intimate and connected and a profound demonstration of how compatible they really are

and it's precisely because both of them like it so much that the aftermath hurts so badly

[crossnecklace]

can we talk about how ilya always has his eyes open during intimate moments….. when he’s kissing shane, when he’s putting it in, when shane’s going down on him, the tuna melt scene he can barely stop himself from shutting them but they’re always OPEN. even when shane’s eyes are closed he wants to watch he doesn’t want to miss a single expression a single twitch a single reaction he wants to watchjhhhhhh

[mihai-florescu]

Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.

[penandinkprincess]

in my heart ilya does get off to the dynamic of the "bad boy seduced the golden boy of hockey" thing, which does make it especially funny after they're married because like

ilya, spent the day helping david and yuna reorganize their home office and put new shelves in, dropped by with lunch for shane at a shoot because he KNEW he wasn't going to like anything on offer, just ordered anya new little snow boots for her little baby paws because she doesn't like the velcro on her existing set and his sweet baby princess deserves what she wants forever, refilled shane's water bottle for him with ice water before beginning tonight's seduction because shane likes both cuddles and cold water afterwards so this way he can have both: i am a devious and sexy evil seducer who has TEMPTED YOU into my devious and sexy evil clutches >:)

[bethanydelleman]

Not to be cliche, but Jane Austen's novels are a lot about how great power & wealth should come with great responsibility, and how most of the wealthy and powerful fail at that. She's asking questions like, "Is that insanely wealthy person polite, charitable, and considerate in a way that befits his station in life?" and she's finding most of them wanting.

[bethanydelleman]

Darcy being rude at a party matters because he's so wealthy. Emma insulting Miss Bates is so horrible because she's so wealthy. Those in power were supposed to set a higher standard and be an example of morality and correct conduct to those of the lower classes. While we might not totally agree with this concept today, that is why their behaviour matters so much to Jane Austen. And it's valid because a person who is careless with that much wealth and power can cause a lot of damage. What if everyone in Highbury decided it was now acceptable to shun Miss Bates? It would be diasterious for her. Darcy could easily ruin a woman's marriage prospects. It mattered.

[bethanydelleman]

This is why I get so annoyed when people are all, "Of course Darcy was rude! All these women are throwing themselves at him all the time. He's tired of it. His life is so sad!" because that's the price of being an heir to a massive fortune. The poor poor little baby is in the top 1% of the 1% just because he was born male into the right family. As a balance for this insane luck, he's expected to be benevolent, charitable, and polite. It's a pretty small ask, and he's not doing it. (Though he is great at the charity part, which Elizabeth discovers when she visits Pemberley). "But he never knows if someone actually loves him for him!" Then he can give his entire fortune to me. Problem solved. Sorry, if he wants to be filthy rich he has freaking obligations.

[ilostmygh0st]

[transgenderer]

every spelunker should go in with a cyanide tooth capsule so if they get stuck they can take the gentle way out instead of being tortured by the earth for 72 hours and then dying anyway

[transgenderer]

@kropotkindersurprise said:

it should be an explosive device, so they widen that part of the cave at the same time and no other spelunkers will get stuck there

beautiful vision. i love the idea of a minecraft-style world where if you explode underground it just clears a radius

[thekalpar]

My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.

The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.

This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.

[nonasuch]

I have a whole box of these little tins I bought ages ago that turned out to be too big to fit in a mystery egg and too small for anything else useful.

Today I thought I’d finally figured out what to do with them, but I’m going to have to get a lot faster at making these if I want this to be a practical solution.

[nonasuch]

update: have not gotten faster, but on the bright side they look really cool.

[nonasuch]

Still iterating. The first one I glued the dividers directly to the metal sides of the tin, and then discovered that paint really doesn’t like to stick to said metal. Now I’m making a cardstock liner that can get painted before I put the dividers in.

These still take like 2 hours each to make, and I doubt I’ll get them down to even an hour. The laser-cut wood ones are infinitely faster and less fiddly. I know this.

But also. It is so satisfying to make custom compartments that are exactly the right size for bits and pieces I’ve never known what to do with. I’ve had that celluloid fu dog for years — it was originally a single screwback earring — and I finally got to use it!

[nonasuch]

Current order of operations:

1. Decide on layout. I traced a tin onto some scrap cardstock so I can see how the bits fit into the available space.

2. Cut a strip of paper just over a quarter inch wide. Paint it black.

3. Glue paper strip inside perimeter of tin, being mindful of the corners. Trim to fit.

4. Trace the tin onto a piece of thin cardboard. Cut out slightly within the lines, so it can fit inside the tin.

5. Glue together some little stacks of scrap cardboard to go under the cardboard from step 4, to make the tin a little shallower. This is optional but I’m glad I did it.

6. Glue the cardboard risers into the bottom of the tin, then glue the cardboard from step 4 to the risers. Your tin should now be only slightly deeper than the coffee stir sticks you are using as dividers, if that is what you are also using.

7. Run a thin line of glue around the bottom perimeter of the tin. This will hide any gaps between the cardboard and the sides of the tin.

8. Paint the bottom of the tin black.

9. Start gluing in your dividers! I started with the biggest compartment. Put the trinket in place, hold the coffee stirrer next to it, mark with a pencil, cut with scissors, check the fit, trim it a little if needed, glue into place. This is a ‘measure never, cut as many times as your heart tells you’ kind of project.

10. Once your dividers are in, run a thin line of glue along the bottom edges and the corners, to hide gaps and make sure everything is secured in place. I used a fine-tip glue bottle filled with slightly watered-down tacky glue for this.

11. Paint the dividers black.

12. Glue in your trinkets. You did it!

[nonasuch]

Still deciding what to do with these. Not letting that slow me down.

[renthony]

As a nonbinary intersex person, I feel like I'm always trying to balance on the knife's edge between "I believe that anyone should get whatever hormones and surgery they want, no questions asked, with no shitty barriers" and "...but some of y'all are really edging into truscum/transmedicalist territory, I really need people to stop equating the term 'transition' with 'HRT, surgery, and nothing else,' and I am begging other trans people to do way more work in deconstructing their binary view of gender, because if one more trans person says something exorsexist and/or intersexist to me about my body, I AM going to fucking snap. Stop gendering my body and trying to dictate what transition should mean for anyone who isn't your own damn self."

[renthony]

I really wish it was easier to say, "hey, transmedicalists have put a shitty amount of pressure on me and several of my other nonbinary friends to transition in a way that doesn't suit us, and the emphasis a lot of trans spaces put on HRT and surgery can be super uncomfortable as an intersex person who has had doctors try to tell me I should get hormone treatments to 'fix' my body."

But people get touchy and reactive about that conversation, because of how many bigots are doing the "omg trans people are FORCING their DIRTY HORMONES on our CHILDREN!" narrative.

I never want to accidentally contribute to that moral panic. But at the same time, as a nonbinary intersex person, some trans people really fucking do pull the "oh my god you have to get HRT and surgery in order to be VALID and REAL like ME!" shit.

And it's hard to navigate sometimes, y'know?

[renthony]

These thoughts are on my mind today because I'm reading an anthology of trans-focused comics. A significant number of them are "how I got my surgery/HRT and started feeling like a Real Trans Person" narratives.

The authors haven't done anything shitty in telling their stories. These stories are important to share. But it's hard not to notice that I've yet to see a story like mine, where the journey of self-love comes through learning that body parts have no gender, that my body does not determine my identity, and that I don't have to alter it in order to fit binarist, truscum, intersexist ideas of what I should look like. My body can just exist without intervention. I don't need to do anything to it unless I want to, and the fact that I don't want to does not make me any less trans, nonbinary, or intersex.

It just gets kind of exhausting and alienating to see endless "trans empowerment is through SURGERY and HORMONES!!!!" stories, without much variation.

I wasn't born in the wrong body. I don't feel trapped in my body. My body is already nonbinary, because I am nonbinary.

[ilyapasta]

Yuna Hollander during one of the' Metros-Centaurs playoffs series games during TLG, standing outside of the house in the driveway with an unlit cigarette in her hand, unable to stomach the cocktail of emotions related to what's happening on her TV screen. David comes outside and lights it for her.