[gravitcat]

a thing for mermay i guess

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

[searea]

[petricorah]

I love "i would kill for you" ship dynamics but what about "i would stop killing" ship dynamic??

I would lay down my sword for you. I would change my nature and go against everything i've known. I would resist the easy way out of solving my problems. I would give up the adrenaline of battle to stay by your side and make tea instead. I'm not sure I know who I am without a weapon in my hand because I've had to fight for so long but for you I'm willing to try and figure this out.

It must be hard. To put down your weapon that's protected you for so long. It's allowed you to stay alive it's kept you from getting hurt--physically and mentally. Because you've never had to worry about a real relationship if you think you'll be dead at the next battle. And you feel naked without it and it feels like you're ripping off an extension of yourself. Are you even whole without it? Are you worthy of being loved if you can't prove it by risking your life? And yet they've found someone who's asking them for something much harder than dying in battle on their behalf. They've found someone who wants them to live. And that's much more terrifying.

[silhouette-cosplay]

My finished trapunto quilted gambeson for Vax! It was so cool to take techniques I learned on my Galadriel gambeson and dial them up further for this design!

As Vax is associated with ravens, I designed various wing and feather motifs wrapping around the body, a stylised raven skull in the back, and then added his “threads of fate” in hand stitched gold embroidery ribbon.

[not100bees]

Despite the fact that every single story about a wish is called "There Is No Way To Perfectly Word Your Wish Without There Being Some Sort Of Side Effect Or Unintended Consequence" I do feel like if I was in the position to get a wish granted I could perfectly word it as such there would be no side effects or unintended consequences.

[havingapoemwithyou]

How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

[throwusaboner]

murderbot and arts first meeting is literally so funny. like imagine you meet a biblically accurate angel and instead of being all 'be not afraid' it says actually you SHOULD be afraid. and then when you are in fact afraid it goes oh shit oh fuck. not THAT afraid, sorry. wanna watch tv? and then you watch tv with it and it keeps telling you to pause it when its favourite characters are in danger so it can calm down. and then it asks to do surgery on your bones. Asshole Research Transport character of all time

[larkscape]

op your tags are so important

[quietwingsinthesky]

like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.

[quietwingsinthesky]

“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.

“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.

[random-brushstrokes]

Kōno Michisei - Self-Portrait (1917)

Kohno Michisei, seen here at twenty-two, presents himself in a pose modeled on Western Renaissance master Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) self-portrait produced in 1500. Between 1914 and 1924 a remarkable quantity of high-quality portraiture was produced by Japanese artists who blended Western and East Asian painting traditions. While some of these painters had first-hand knowledge of Western painting, most, like Michisei, culled their images from books and magazines. The young artist was raised in an environment filled with powerful iconic images. His father was a portrait photographer, an artist in both Japanese and Western modes, and an active member of the Russian Orthodox Church. These influences are readily apparent in this self-portrait. Michisei's perceptive understanding of classic Western images was based on constant perusal of his father's extensive library; a portrait's potential for psychological and spiritual impact was impressed on him through exposure to religious icons used in the Orthodox liturgy. (source)

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[your-cosmic-creature]

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

[matineaux-deactivated20260222]

kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc

[hi-im-ryn]

[rann-poisoncage]

jumping in the murray x king gus ship! ( I know my king gus is shit, he should be way more buff. I didn't have enough time to properly design him between work, ToT will do better next time...

[theforgettingroom]

Yup. This is what we want.

[sumikatt]

Kerry Guinan

Artists, 2019

Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Dominican Republic.

Images: Photograph of 3 canvases from the series in the solo exhibition 'Our Celestial Sphere' at Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019.

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick Institute of Technology, and Fingal County Council. Images: Pallas Projects/Studios & Kerry Guinan.

(Original caption from artist’s website)

Series of six blank canvases (70x70cm) signed by the factory workers that made them in Daler Rowney, Free Industrial Zone, La Romana, the Do

And after contacting the Irish Museum of Modern Art and being referred to a curator (!), they provided me with the caption information that was used when displaying the work for the Staying With The Trouble exhibition in 2025 (thank you so much IMMA staff!!)

Artists is a series of blank, square canvases, each signed by a staff member in the manufacturing facility that produced the canvases in the La Romana Free Trade Zone, the Dominican Republic. The manufacturer, Daler Rowney, is a popular supplier of art materials in Ireland. The artist coordinated the project remotely by contacting the facility manager. The signatories volunteered to take part in the project upon invitation. They are Johan Rivera, Carlos Roa, Aneury Rondon, and Orlando Saldivar.

Anyways, I’d spent about the last 6 hours of my life trying to find out this information after some discussion on artist supply chains came up on the dashboard. Hope you enjoy the work as much as I do.

[fluffyxi]

Gimli: "It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no dwarf women, and that dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground!"

.

I premiered my lady dwarf OC Dirka today at my local renaissance festival and I felt so beautiful even with a beard. This has been a dream costume of mine for a long time and I'm so pleased with how it came out!

[nickyandmikey]

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

[nickyandmikey]

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW

[irrelevantlyvalid]

op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light

[chokolattejedi]

Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

[executeness]

I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

God I’m not okay about it

[ramshacklefey]

Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.

[jbbartram-illu]

I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3

[eregyrn-falls]

Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

Been thinking a lot about why VeggieTales is so unironically good when so much Christian media just completely sucks and what makes VT different, and honestly I think it boils down to the fact that VT is focused SO much less on evangelizing or spreading fear. There aren't any VeggieTales episodes telling kids to go convert their friends or they'll go to hell– I don't think they ever mention or imply hell at all. (Note that I stopped watching around, like, the early 2010s, when the og creator left and the specials started to suck.) The general idea of the morality tales isn't "sin is bad because it makes God hate you and send you to hell," it's "sin is bad because it hurts yourself or others and that makes God sad because he loves you and wants you to be happy." It's "spread God's love" not to convert everyone and make them go to Church, but because it's just the right thing to do to be nice to people. I think the only special that maybe got close to being evangelical was Easter Carol with the "if the church wasn't here this place would suck," but to be completely fair it was a Christmas Carol adaptation and you have to pull a Bad Future outta somewhere, and that ep was also very focused on focusing on the actual message of Easter and how it should inspire you to be kind instead of prideful.

I think what makes VeggieTales better than so much other Christian media is that it's so much more focused on the love than rules or threats. It was made by people who just wanted to make something within their belief system and entertain children, and not in order to force people into their ideals. And also they wanted to have the talking Veggies sing about grammar and hairbrushes and joke about the IRS and we all sat there, six years old, going "yes sir Mr Tomato whatever you say Mr Tomato"