good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience

29, she/they, into books and these days reading a lot of webnovels too

[rongzhi]

Translation request by @unbridled. English added by me :)

[blinkinink]

[les8ean]

:3

[dailynarnia]

is jake gyllenhaal gay??

why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this

[helloitsbees]

happy pride month to this post specifically

[bobdylanyaoi]

“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.

[magnhild]

it's midnight on the 1st of june aest

[qin-shi-huang-di]

blocked blocked blocked blocked!

none of you possesses the mandate of heaven!

[king-sejong-the-great]

Blocks. . . as in BRONZE blocks!?

As in BLOCKS of moveable type!?

Brilliant! Such a technology would allow books to be reproduced en masse, without the need for laboriously reproducing books by hand! This would greatly increase the number of copies of books that we could create, as well as greatly reduce the incidence of copying errors!

OH! And if my new alphabetic syllabary takes off, then instead of hundreds of blocks for different ideograms, a case of printing blocks could include dozens of copies of each letter, thus allowing for more rapid deployment and a much more efficient storage of the printing blocks!

This could lead to a literacy revolution! We could mass produce texts for the common people! Everyone, not just the elite scholars, could study the works of the great Confucianist masters, thus increasing loyalty, filial piety, and virtuous behavior!

Brilliant!

[qin-shi-huang-di]

DELETE YOUR BLOG

[king-sejong-the-great]

Of course! Anything for the illustrious First Emperor of the Middle Kingdoms!

[king-sejong-the-great]

Update: I have consulted the court historians, and they have told me that it is not possible for me to delete official government records, and that my request to do so will be added to the sillok.

[qin-shi-huang-di]

ABDICATE!!!!

[qin-shi-huang-di]

FIRST KILL ALL THE COURT HISTORIANS AND THEN FUCKING ABDICATE

[homunculus-argument]

Randomly remembered seeing this random old black and white photo from like the 50s, pretty sure it was from Sweden. A picture from a morgue, of a tall blond man in some kind of an uniform approaching another man standing beside an opened coffin, clutching something to his chest while looking at the approaching man with a look of wary insult on his face. The caption explained that this was an incident of a police officer stopping a man from putting a bottle of beer in his father's coffin (his own father, not the cop's father) because for some reason doing that was against Sweden's burial laws.

I don't remember the details but I recall how the guy had the looks of a rough life written all over him, ragged clothes in contrast to the police officer's pristine uniform - though obscured by motion blur as he was rapidly approaching with hateful intent - and the much finer burial clothes of the deceased. A small, skinny man with black hair, holding onto the bottle that's about to be confiscated like it's something precious to him.

I felt like something wasn't adding up and went to the comments to see if there was additional context that was missing from all this, and there was: The son and the father were Romani, and at least at the time it was still very much a tradition in Swedish Romani culture to bury the dead with little gifts - not necessarily extravagant or expensive, but things that the lost loved one would have liked.

This wasn't about a mourning son being stopped from playfully paying his respects in a way that someone else thought indignified. This was about a man being prohibited from performing his own peoples' funeral rites.

[vvlpecvlae]

Had to go find the photo, it's indeed Swedish. Taken by Åke Borglund and photo of the year 1958, apparently.

Source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021016531349/arets-bild-1958-tagen-i-stillhetens-kapell-tid-uppstandelsens-kapell-i

[homunculus-argument]

Holy fuck you found it.

I misremembered, it wasn't a morgue, those are empty church pews.

[vvlpecvlae]

After finding and posting the photo above, I did some more research and found out where it was originally published. Long story short, I now own a 1958 issue of Se, which was a Swedish magazine for photojournalism, inspired by Life and other similar publications.

The photo comes from an article on a Swedish Romani funeral in Karlstad (a city 300 km west of Stockholm). The text is pretty exoticising and othering, I won't bother translating the whole thing. But I will relay the most interesting information.

First of all, the deceased man is Josef Dimetri (1903-1958), who was a Romani chief. From what I can tell from the Swedish censuses, he left behind a wife and six children, ages 18-31.

Which means that the photo is a bit deceptive on its own - the chapel is still empty there, but the article states it was taken shortly before the rest of the guests arrived. Because there were plenty of guests - and there are more photos of them!

The article doesn't explain why the police was there, but it says they had to step in and break off some fighting and arguments that broke out between guests, which is more likely what they were there for (rather than just inspecting bottles). They can also be seen talking to spectators in the last photo, so staving off curious or hostile people might also have been a reason.

And most important, perhaps: While the policeman did try to stop him from leaving the bottle, the son shook him off and protested that "he needs it, he needs it", and "the tactful policeman" (as the article calls him) did not insist further. So it seems Josef Dimetri was in fact laid to rest with his bottle of beer.

[chamomile-teabag]

WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me

[graceebooks]

the bitch wife should be one of the most revered and respected archetypes in our culture and yet she is constantly mocked and derided smh

[tinycrescent]

kira kira ✦✧

[dreadwedge]

data scientist talking to themself in the mirror to psych themself up before a presentation in 2010:

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Wang and Lai (2014)

[gemstone-gynoid]

[brucebocchi]

[20th-centuryghost]

sorry this was going to be a tags addition because I only get to use my coated pantone swatchbook like 6 times a year when i have a new enamel pin to design, but...

METALLIC GOLD PANTIES ????

[purlturtle]

[mayfay]

[starlight-shadowbanned]

[anka-dm]

My illustrations the most based poem about tigers by Nael, age 6

Every time I read it I feel space inside my chest expand in very *emotion* way.

[jothehat]

May your 25th of May be glorious! Here's to Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg.

[dimity-lawn]

Friendly reminder for tomorrow!

[iirulancorrino]

Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez

[oneawkwardcookie]

[image description: screenshot of the poem Mexican American Disambiguation, from José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal

Mexican American Disambiguation

after Idris Goodwin

my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago which means i am a Mexican American with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos. my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexicans still living in México. those Mexicans call themselves mexicanos. white folks at parties call them pobrecitos. American colleges call them international students & diverse. my mom was white in México & my dad was mestizo & after they crossed the border they became diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic. but my parents call themselves mexicanos, who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos living in México, those mexicanos might call my family gringos, which is the word my family calls white folks & white folks call my parents interracial. colleges say put them on a brochure. my parents say que significa esa palabra, i point out that all the men in my family marry lighter-skinned women. that’s the Chicano in me. which means it’s the fancy college degrees in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me is diverse even when i eat American foods like hamburgers, which, to clarify, are American when a white person eats them & diverse when my family eats them. so much of America can be understood like this. my parents were undocumented when they came to this country & by undocumented, i mean sin papeles, & by sin papeles, i mean royally fucked, which should not be confused with the American Dream though the two are cousins. colleges are not looking for undocumented diversity. my dad became a citizen which should not be confused with keys to the house. we were safe from deportation, which should not be confused with walking the plank, though they’re cousins. i call that sociology, but that’s just the Chicano in me, who should not be confused with the diversity in me or the mexicano in me who is constantly fighting with the upwardly mobile in me who is good friends with the Mexican American in me, who the colleges love, but only on brochures, who the government calls NON-WHITE, HISPANIC or WHITE, HISPANIC, who my parents call mijo even when i don’t come home so much.

/end ID]

[sapphireh3arts]

i know folks are gonna call me a pedo for this one, but i grew up seeing my mom and grandma naked. they had health issues and at times needed care and help showering. and i truly think more kids need to be shown the nonsexual reality of naked women at a young age. there is nothing sexual about my grandmothers breasts, they were simply body parts. more women die of heart attacks because people are too afraid of breasts to do real chest compressions, because they are scared to touch their breasts. the sexualization of our bodies literally kills us. i need people to be more normal about naked bodies and i'm 100% serious.