its thinking about jingsu hours up in here

lyb | svsss | orv |tlt

[yingui]

i have to believe he's never coming back

[asmalltooth]

Sandworms this, Bene Gesserit that, something I really love about the Dune books is they look you dead in the eye and tell you how fucked up parents and children are.

A huge part of the Dune novel is about subtle workings of violence and resentment in the family. The way Jessica views Paul as her creature and posession and recoils in horror from the parts of him she can't control. The way Paul sees her as a source of both his strength and his deepest fears: She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy. And in all this they still love each other. It's not the lack of love. It's the idea that birth and nurturing are inherently violent for both sides.

Just like with Duke Leto and his father. Just like with Jessica and Alia. And we see the same thing mirrored in the Harkonnens. The Baron abusing Feyd-Rautha while raising him and preparing him as his successor?? Fully aware the boy's rise to power will be his own death. The Baron himself as the book's main villain is a giant grotesque baby. Parenthood as existential horror.

The theme continues with Messiah where the birth of Leto II and Ghanima erases their parents. In Children of Dune Paul offers himself as sacrifice to the son he tried to kill and Chani nearly returns from the dead by possessing her daughter. Leto II and Ghanima are eldritch horrors trapped in child bodies. But even they come off as less cruel than Jessica in her final abandonment of both Paul and Alia. Leto II returns in God Emperor to claim humanity as his children, becoming both a god and a tyrant. Meanwhile his whole dead family lives inside his head and has to be kept from overpowering him at all times.

There is so much weird horror surrounding parents and children in the Dune books.

And I love that a lot of that found its way into Villeneuve's Jessica. That's who she is, that's why Rebecca Ferguson's performance is a horror performance even though it might not always serve the character. It captures that part of the books beautifully.

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

nothing physically incestuous ever happens between leto and ghanima but nevertheless incest is written all over their relationship. for one thing they're husband and wife, obviously, but it's more than that. it's the way they casually discuss, though quickly reject, the idea of continuing the atreides line through themselves, with each other (ghanima telling her brother, "i won't bear your children"), and the way leto refers to her tenderly as "ghani." even long after her death he does this. stuff that makes you raise your eyebrow a little.

but most of all for me it's that exchange that leto has with farad'n at the end of children of dune. he emphatically, even triumphantly reveals that there will be no betrothal between farad'n and ghanima as farad'n had been expecting there to be, because "[his] sister will marry [him]." and then, even while telling farad'n that he (farad'n) will father the continuing atreides dynasty, he makes an explicit point to knock farad'n down a peg: "note this, cousin harq al-ada. this is the way it will always be with [ghanima and i]. we'll stand thus when we are married. back to back, each looking outward from the other to protect the one thing we have always been." / "remember that, cousin, when you're face to face with my ghanima. remember that when you whisper of love and soft things, when you are most tempted by the habits of my peace and my contentment. your back will remain exposed." oh and also he is described to smile "mockingly" at farad'n in between those two sentences. idk. he shows such a... possessiveness, for lack of a better word, toward ghanima during this scene. it comes across as him wanting to set clear boundaries with farad'n regarding ghanima, a la "you will be her paramour and father her children because i no longer can, but i am her husband and i am her brother and i am the other half of the single whole that she is part of." like i do not think we are at all intended to read leto and ghanima's relationship as purely brother/sister

[ddorothywei]

[gobwinning]

egregious violation of the hippocratic oath

[hinamie]

nothing wrong with them :)

[hypokeimena]

it actually makes me feel fully out of touch with consensus when people say an author is anti-war "because he said war is hell!"

please. please. do you know a single thing about Recorded Human History. "war is hell" is so, so frequently THE pro-war take, and the entire reason soldiers and officers receive social esteem for fighting. the honorable duty of undergoing The Trials Of War on behalf of your polity &/or beliefs is one of the fundamental cornerstones of masculinity in SO, SO many human cultures. what is anyone EVEN SAYING!!!

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

in a modern context, one could even argue that the emphasis placed on the traumatic nature of waging war, of participating in war, is part of how the participants morally absolve themselves from their participation. There is a common idea in liberalism (but not only in liberalism) that the trauma of killing one person, or ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, et cetera, is its own punishment, regardless of whether the persons killed were soldiers or civilians, whether it could even be considered right or wrong, whether it was necessary or unnecessary to kill them. Under this logic, renumeration or reconstruction for the victims is considered functionally irrelevant because of the exonerating suffering of the soldier.

In “Israel” they call this kind of narrative in media “Shooting and crying.”

This kind of apologia is/was often applied to the US military’s actions in every historical conflict, up to the present day. I have also seen American police officers use this kind of apologia when they are criticized for discrimination, murder, and various other crimes. They say “Oh, you civilians couldn’t possibly understand how hard it is to be a cop. It’s so difficult and traumatic.”

I think this idea of “exonerating trauma” is both dangerous and widespread. I’m sure there are many other examples of this type of rhetoric.

[maureen2musings]

Mount Rainier National Park

shifa.photos

[appaumey]

[keepthedelta]

I know this is off topic and feel free to ignore it, but why don’t you like rf Kuang?

I precisely don’t enjoy her books and need more people who doesn’t like them lol

well first and foremost, i don't think she's actually a very good writer. some of her individual moments or sentences are really great, but her books are so badly paced (you get a sudden flurry of action where everything happens really quickly but then it drags on for chapters as the protagonist has lots of emotions™️) and many of her characters are either very shallow and only there for plot purposes or lowkey self inserts of kuang herself.

and tbh i think the self insert thing extends to the worlds she builds as well as the characters. babel is set in the 1830s but it has the political understandings of the 21st century and the life that kuang herself has lived. yellowface is absolutely consumed with kuang's own perception of her work and her critics. athena (the dead asian writer whose work the protagonist passes off as her own) reads so much like an rf kuang self insert (and the protagonist spends so much time talking or thinking about how beautiful and successful she was) that it actually undercuts the message about racism that kuang is trying to force feed you because it just reads as envy (and a not very successful maybe cyncial attempt at low level lesbianism).

speaking of racism... babel starts with an interesting premise and ideas of racism and colonialism to explore, but quickly becomes a Colonialism 101 lecture which is extremely boring for anyone with more than a basic understanding of it. it's also a very 21st century understanding of racism and colonialism, i suspect because kuang either doesn't like to explore beyond the boundaries of her own life experiences, or is unable to (due to being a bad researcher or bad writer idk). i think you also see that in yellowface, where the nuances of racism come up (the protagonist, june, correctly points out that athena wrote about koreans, a racial group to which she does not belong, and was praised for it) but kuang just refuses to actually explore it.

for a writer explicitly interested in the different flavours of societal oppression, kuang is either uninterested or unable to express the nuances and intersections of varying axes of oppression. in babel, the white female character betrays the characters of colour, and while the ways white women upheld (and continue to uphold) white supremacy whilst advocating for female liberation or limit their feminist ideals to white women is a genuine topic of conversation/topic to explore (as is the way men of colour are subject to racial oppression but often ignore or actively participate in the oppression of women, especially women of colour), kuang just doesn't. letty is such a two dimensional character, and the narrative doesn't even seem to hate her because she's racist, but because she's a woman. i've only read babel and yellowface but i've seen other people say that she's similarly misogynistic (and blind to her own misogyny) in the poppy wars.

her writing is very shallow in the sense that it doesn't really explore the topics that it claims to, and her worldbuilding is similarly shallow. because when you actually think about it, babel doesn't make sense. the idea that the act of translation becomes a form of magic is a really really interesting concept, and much of the book's plot is centred around the idea that translating from european languages into english is no longer very powerful and the more "exotic" languages such as mandarin or arabic are the future of translation (this guides the characters's studies, and is a reason why the main character robin is born at all). this is actually an interesting idea, language as a resource to be plundered the way natural resources are, but it doesn't make sense that only the english/europeans are doing it. if you can create magic by translating european languages to english (languages with the same linguistic heritage) then why wouldn't you be able to create magic by translating between say cantonese and mandarin? or mandarin and hokkien? or korean and japanese? any of the asian languages? why wouldn't those countries have an equal ability with translation magic? kuang just superimposes real world colonialism on her fantasy world, despite it not really making sense.

in general, i find her writing INCREDIBLY frustrating because i really like the concepts but her execution is so shallow and uninteresting. translation magic? incredible idea, nonsensical execution. realising that you were born and raised for a racist imperial purpose and you're not even your awful father's first attempt? so much potential, but not explored nearly enough. working your whole life for a singular purpose but deciding that actually it's morally wrong and the only way to stop it is to destroy the system? fascinating proposition, executed with all the grace of a drowning elephant (i've also seen someone on here point out that for a book that is subtitled the necessity of violence and is about tearing down oxford due to it's colonial entanglements, it is very ironic that kuang herself went to oxford and completed her studies, and seemingly had a wonderful time there). a vicious exposé of the hypocrisies of the publishing world and it's performative diversity? incredible concept, but in print is actually just kuang sneering at both her readers and her critics. a horrible, self-serving, jealous protagonist? great idea, doesn't ever lean into it far enough.

and the editing! i think this might be the thing that irritates me the most because everything i've every read from kuang feels SO unedited. kuang's work is so obsessed with her own cleverness, and her own research, and it's all very annoying. she doesn't trust the reader to understand the subtleties or nuances of characters and the worldbuilding, and constantly reminds them how they should feel or think about something (e.g. she has a character defend slavery as a concept and then adds in a footnote to tell the reader that this is wrong) or to defend her writing decisions (at one point a character eats oysters and she puts in a footnote to say that back in 1830 they were considered poor food but she had a great experience eating oysters at a ball at oxford so she wanted to include it). it all comes back to her life and her experiences in a very literal way that is perpetually exhausting. so much of yellowface feels like she's addressing her own critics (and not in a particularly sophisticated way) and it makes for boring reading. she is convinced of her own brilliance, and all of her books read as though no one has ever tried to limit her or redirect her.

her books lack depth, and focus, and they feel very self centred. you are always reading about r.f. kuang, no matter whose name is on the page. it's so frustrating because i think she has incredibly creative ideas. i genuinely want to read a book about a grad student going to the underworld because that's a reasonable thing to do in academia rather than have your research interrupted in such a way but i just know that i'm not going to enjoy her execution because the idea is about as deep as she'll have written it

[grynwood]

Remember to hydrate your necro 💧

[durinbedo]

[fenkko]

razor discovers shrimp fried rice

[redlipstickresurrected]

Andrea Ferrero (Peruvian, b. 1991, Lima, Peru, based Mexico City, Mexico) - A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos (Sometimes I sleep with my eyes open), 2025, Sculptures: Powder-Coated Steel, Cast Aluminum

[lordsfromelsewhere]

Hey! I love the way you paint and I was wondering if you have some resources on where you picked up your use of colour and texture? I'm not looking to imitate your style I just like to learn how people do things and understand digital art as a medium better, I'm also just very entranced by the way you use colour!

Thank you so much!! That’s so lovely to hear <3 Forgive how long this reply will be, I absolutely live for this shit. And all art is an amalgam of things we steal from other artists; steal away :)

Colour: My use of colour is very much inspired by artists like Yanjun Cheng and Marco Bucci, especially this video about making colours vibrate. Also Emilyena and this video, which largely influenced how I incorporate blue, yellow, and red into skin tones, although I seldom use blending modes.

I start by blocking in with a desaturated mid-dark tone and then build up with more saturated colours. Due to colour relativity, you can get a harmonious and vibrant effect, even using random colours, if they are relatively desaturated. My favourite palette is to block in shadows with red and highlights with blue, but I’ll always make the shadows and highlights opposite temperatures.

For visual interest and texture, I like to add the opposite temperature to an area of colour, usually with hatching. Similar to watercolours, I’ll “overshoot” the colour I want, for example a more saturated blue, and use brush opacity to layer it over orange, resulting in what is actually a desaturated red that appears as blue.

I like a lot of hue variation. For cohesion, I always make sure to spread a colour throughout an entire piece, changing the value and saturation to suit whether it’s in light or shadow, again because of relativity. Towards the end of my workflow I’m more decisive about where the most colourful areas will be, but at the beginning I’ll use a large airbrush to add a lot of variation and build on that.

All that matters is that your values make sense. When you squint at your work, you should be able to make sense of the forms because hue is secondary. Adding purples, greens, pinks to skin aren’t realistic, but when you squint they merge into a normal skin tone because of the ‘vibrating colour’ idea. By making all your colours closer to grey, dark orange can appear green and dark pink can look purple.

Texture: Aaron Griffin is a big texture inspiration for me. His free brushes make up 95% of my artwork. I don’t like to swap brushes too much while I’m working so most of it is done with Sampled Brush 5 8 and Sampled Brush 7 1, the latter of which has colour jitter. I use it to block in my colours to get an immediate jump on texture and hue variation.

I never use blending tools, only the colour picker and brush opacity to manually blend. When you build up colours in translucent layers, you don’t really have to blend. Sometimes I’ll use hatching to soften a transition or to add more colour. I use the default Clip Studio Paint Design pencil for this.

I find it easiest to work on one layer so I can jump around a lot. I use the largest brush possible then make it smaller and smaller as I do the fine details. Therefore, focal points will have the most contrast of small brush strokes, and the other areas will have larger, unblended brush strokes.

Sometimes when I’m adding colours I use a scribbly motion (back and forth, not in circles), then go in the other direction like cross hatching, colour picking all the while, to “blend” it out.

Loose, “messy” brushwork is my favourite and what I’m working on getting better at. Confidence and shape design as well. Inspiration is Aleksander Rostov, Daniel Gerhartz, John Singer Sargent, and J. C. Leyendecker.

Tutorials: Almost everything I’ve ever learnt about painting comes from videos by Marco Bucci and Sinix Design. From the former, check out the 10 Minutes to Better Painting and the Quick Essentials series; from the latter, check out the Paintover Pals playlist and the Anatomy Quick Tips series. Watching their processes really influenced my art.

Hope this helped :) I will rant forever about this topic and my inbox is always open <3

[escapismsworld]

An original osteological preparation by Ryan Matthew Cohn, who is known for reviving the 19th-century tradition of developing medical education tools, created for a show at Museum of Arts and Design in 2014. It now resides in the collection of Tim K.

[shanqiuuuu]

夜深忽梦少年事

Happy Chinese New Year