oh no it's ash

20 | Tumblr? i hardly know er!!!!!!!

[beanytuesday]

what the hell did I just read

[beanytuesday]

What do you guys think of my new OCs (original characters)?

[monster1994]

Lately ive been finding myself relating to the dying pig

[monster1994]

[jayrockin]

Calling things "leftwing" and "rightwing" is terribly satisfying when I'm talking about fictional alien bird politics

[queersatanic]

Tweet

[yimra-deactivated20250209]

What the fuck

[screampotato]

This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?

[xradiorental-deactivated2025072]

omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:

iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.

[grootficguy]

it must feel good as hell when you’re a horse and you take a big bite out of an apple like ttshoke

[rubensmuse]

your command over onomatopoeia is unmatched bestie

[moat-of-dust]

Word snatched and added to conlang

[markadoo]

child: why do they sell board games in bookstores

loving parent: because there's a manual in every board game

child: oh

child: why don't they sell cars in bookstores

loving parent: because when you're buying a board game, what you're really buying is the rules, and those are in the manual. a car manual with no car can't drive you, but if you have the manual to a board game you could play it without the pieces. there are people who can play a game of chess just by saying where they're moving the pieces and imagining the board, but it's very hard so they give you a board and pieces to help you.

loving parent: That's why you never see Mousetrap in bookstores. Because you can't play it with just the manual.

child: whats Mousetrap

moral: kids these days don't know about Mousetrap

[hbmmaster]

the "language is a social construct, therefore linguistic misinformation is impossible. any claim about language is true if enough people say it is" misconception is of course annoying when applied to stuff like grammar because it's wrong in a nuanced way that's important to explain correctly to avoid spreading even worse ideas about language. but with etymology it's like. no that's not even the part of language that's a social construct, you're making a claim about history. this is something that you really shouldn't think you can just make up

[hbmmaster]

language changes over time but a popular tumblr post claiming that a figure of speech from the bible is actually the short version of its own comeback isn't language changing

[hbmmaster]

btw one of the main tells for false etymology posts online is that they often are presented as something the poster "realized", as opposed to "learned". as though historical facts about how language has evolved are things that you can figure out on your own by thinking about words hard enough

[fallout-lou-begas]

"goo night everybody" is what a cute little slimegirl in a nightcap would say as she tucks herself into bed and falls asleep

[drchucktingle]

[yesterdaysprint]

Harrisburg Telegraph, Pennsylvania, March 29, 1881

[egberts]

the world's smallest carnivore is called the "least weasel" 😭😭 i'm dying but like if it's the smallest carnivore then it sure is the least amount of weasel you can have 😭😭😭

[sator-the-wanderer]

Look at him: this is absolutely the least amount of weasel you can have

[daughterofsarenrae]

To really put it in perspective

[flootzavut]

Immediately I love him

[backstagegondolin]

Wikipedia says that "the Ancient Macedonians believed that to see a least weasel was a good omen"

and I agree! I saw the small beast and now I am happier than before. omen fulfilled

[sighinastorm]

stinky

[sansevierias]

[play-now-my-lord]

ME: hold up. you see that? train's been through here FRIEND: how can you tell ME: tracks. they're not fresh, maybe 60, 80 years old FRIEND: no chance it'll come back, then ME: don't be so sure. That's well within their lifespan... and they're highly territorial

[4denthusiast]

Imagine if each day was infinitely long, but if you ever fell asleep you'd wake up the following morning so you only ever get to experience a finite portion of the day.

[4denthusiast]

Nobody is quite sure whether extreme sleep deprivation causes hallucinations or whether 70 o'clock is just like that.

[4denthusiast]

An unprecedented expedition is planned, using a careful mix of stimulants and antipsychotics to maintain lucidity further into the depths of the night than ever before. The brave insomniac reports back: it's dark.

[4denthusiast]

It is necessary to either turn off machines before going to bed, or set them to turn off automatically. If you don't, they'll continue running long into the night, until either their fuel runs out or they break, no matter how much fuel they have. The power grid, after gradually ramping down to meet decreasing demand over the course of each evening, shuts off entirely at 30:00 each night. Any applications which need to run longer than this, such as security cameras, must have their own energy storage.

One might wonder then how it is that each morning, food is not all completely rotten, iron isn't completely rusted, and the air, deprived of sunlight for an infinite length of time, is not frozen solid. The answer is that naturally, all these things go to sleep too. Refrigeration may be one way to preserve food, but an even more effective way is to store it somewhere so terribly comfy that it falls asleep before the day is done. Even the celestial bodies fall asleep each night, so the planets proceed only a finite distance along their orbits, and the stars don't run out of hydrogen.

In order to somewhat maintain security without requiring that guards remain awake longer than any possible burglar, doors may be constructed to be very heavy sleepers, difficult to rouse and move once they have fallen asleep.

For certain rare and expensive high-performance computing applications, a nuclear reactor may be used to power a data centre for tens of thousands of hours per night. However, the reactor must follow a particular sort of design to account for the fact that the radionuclides themselves eventually fall asleep. Spontaneous fission of the fuel ceases to occur, and only induced fission is possible, so the reactor must be kept perfectly on the edge of criticality to maintain the neutron flux, all while completely unsupervised because all the technicians are asleep. The following morning, the spent fuel then requires even more careful handling because all of the accumulated daughter nuclides wake up at once, giving an enormous pulse of heat.

[ampervadasz]

[bumblebeerror]

THE CASUALNESS OF THAT COLLIE SLIPPING RIGHT OUT OF THEIR COLLAR. That dude is a Willing Participant of this walk and by god everyone else is going to follow the RULES.

[roach-works]

im a fan of the moment where the husky is like 'wait you're not authorized to do that' and the collie is like 'THE FUCK IM NOT'

[spacelazarwolf]

unstoppable force (border collie) vs immovable object (husky)

[timandtonigasleakwedding]

I've tried almost every combination of numbers that Dracula would think of!