A miscellany

Art, musings on books and poetry, some worldbuilding thoughts. All takes are works in progress. He/him, 29.

[cardo-de-comer]

comm for @themyscrian thank you very much once again!!

[berensreverie]

Another oil painting :D

[apatheticfluorescence]

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

[headspace-hotel]

Shakespeare is like this

[insufferablepirate]

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

[sea-slug-daily]

Carronella pellucida

Image source: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/102498933

[dummy-dot-exe]

She's just hanging out. by Raichiyo33@Raichiyo33

[ichimakesart]

The Alluring Stranger

~☆◇Prints◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Commissions◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Kofi◇☆~▪︎~☆◇For inquiries: [email protected]◇☆~

[ootori0704]

1656

[jareckiworld]

Henryk Płóciennik (1933-2020) — Comet II [zincograph on cardboard, 1974]

[saltshroud]

coming down from the Gobrin

[mynodon]

Genuinely mind-blowing how much being good at dancing makes someone more attractive. People are out there devoting their lives to insane amounts of exercise, bland monotonous diets, and convoluting skincare regimes to make themselves hotter, rather than just learning to bust a move.

[ydolem-art]

Inktober day 11 "Rest"

[miamaimania]

“The Impossible III” by Maria Martins, 1946

[andmaybegayer]

Most of London has been pretty quiet which, when it's not, highlights just how much we should be able to throw rocks at people who have a stupid loud car.

[andmaybegayer]

the impact of the congestion zone is fucking crazy though, like, I was initially annoyed at how long the pedestrian lights took to change and how few crosswalks there are but after a few hours I realized that there are genuinely so few cars that most of the time even major streets simply do not have that much traffic. Once the light for cars turns green the street is usually clear enough to walk after like 30 seconds. We need to start charging people Kč 500 to drive into the city immediately.

[mynodon]

Extremely funny to read this as someone who grew up in London and never uses the crossings. You can just cross anywhere! It's great.

[venustapolis]

A Southern Landscape with Ruins of an Antique Temple (Ferdinand Knab, 1834 - 1902)

[eschocat]

Whenever I read about language evolution I can’t get over how instinctually wrong it feels that language get phonemically simpler as time goes on. How Old English had more phonemes than we have now, and even contemporarily phonemes are converging and merging. Language just feels so complex that I am not sure how they could’ve began complex and simplified over time. It feels as if language should have began very simple, and complexity later emerged. Seems counter to Wittgenstein too. The builder’s game of four words is described as “primitive.” Our first games as children are simple, like tag or hide and seek. We only learn chess later.

[blogofex]

Languages also gain phonemes over time. English has several phonemes right now that Old English lacked. Most of the Romance languages have more phonemes than Latin did.

[o-craven-canto]

All languages must be able to convey the same information, so what complexity is lost in one set of features is gained in another. Romance languages lost the Latin case system, and began to convey the same syntactic relations by using word order, which in Latin would have had little grammatical meaning. When English shed almost all its inflection system, its duties were picked up by modifying particles and word combinations.

There is a typological spectrum of languages arranged to how much they use juxtaposition of words (analytic) vs. inflection of words (synthetic) to conveey information, and over time they may change between types. Common combination of words get fused together into inflectional affixes, and then as they keep eroding they are replaced by new auxiliary words. Ancient Egyptian might have gone through the whole cycle over 3000 years.

[tanadrin]

And language probably did get more complex as it emerged over time but the absolute latest that happened was around 50,000 years ago (probably much earlier; “behavioral modernity” may be an artificial archeological horizon that doesn’t map to anything real about human evolution), which is far, far beyond the reach of the comparative method to reconstruct earlier stages of attested languages. So we only can reconstruct details about languages well after humans reach their approximate modern cognitive sophistication, which is not really something that has changed appreciably in the last 10,000 years (because that’s far too short a horizon for significant evolutionary change to occur on).

[monstermonger]

Friend in an alleyway | my wife sent me this photo the other day and said "you HAVE to draw this." and I agreed completely <:

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

art by Curtis Lanaghan