Prince Pondincherry @princepondincherry - Tumblr Blog

the fact that "bargaining" is a stage of grief. + the fact that when I'm in extreme pain all I can do is lie on the floor and say "please please please" = we are such social animals. we really really really just have a brain that is wired for "surely there must be a way I can interact with someone else that will fix this" even under the most extreme of circumstances, where any rational thought will see a total absence of guys, such as when one is alone in the woods dying of exposure. humans have such a big hole inside us that's for "Someone Else" like a social placeholder such that we keep engineering stuff like religion in a million different ways in a million different places and times. we gotta have

1. social

2. narrative

and if none is provided to us we will make our own out of dirt and sticks

I love humans and I also find us kind of heartbreaking honestly

positivelyqueer

”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

jaseroque

Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.

jaseroque

I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.

All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.

lesblackwidow

reminder to visit museums, even if you feel out of place. you feel out of place because there is an established concept of inaccessibility of "high culture" to the masses, purposefully developed to distinguish between social classes.

take up space, read the plaques, get the audioguides. you are just as entitled and right in being there. visit museums, boycott museums, be expressive about your opinions about museums.

a lot of museums are free, or discounted for youth and students. take advantage of that. check your local art museum. check your local history museum. museums are there for you, they are there to educate the public, not to distinguish between class. it isn't a private collection, it's a public exhibit.

GO TO MUSEUMS!!!!!!!

dvudushnydiaries

Don't shy away from chatting with staff and curators either!!! Please!!! They love it when people come to them with questions or a desire to learn further!! Get involved, see if they take volunteers, as local museums often struggle to receive the funding to be staffed properly, and public assistance helps greatly. Museums, as institutions, are flawed, but many, many folks involved with them do want to make them better, and the way they get better is by diverse bodies, voices, and people engaging with them!! PLEASE go be a nerd.

and-her-saints

Jesus, the Prisoner (art by me)

and-her-saints

do not piss me off.

creekfiend

I'm so perpetually charmed by the material conditions that result in "spooky" human experiences around here and the fact that they all HAVE explanations that are more interesting than "a spooky supernatural poor person did it" and people IGNORE those explanations just to be like, Goosebumps about it makes me so mad. its COOL to learn why sound travels weirdly in the hollers! its fun to learn about how specific landscapes produce specific experiences! I almost feel like the usamerican tendency to be like "there has to be an Outside Explanation" when presented with location-specific phenomena is a result of our flattening of places/the land into one monolithic concept of "outdoors" in our heads. naw. outdoors is different in different locations. there are location specific experiences that people will have or not have based on the material conditions of the location. because places are different.

creekfiend

you're not supposed to wander around appalachia at night bc you'll fall off a sheer drop that you couldn't see coming. this is also a major risk during the day. you really have to watch out for the sheer drops that you don't see coming due to the undergrowth. I suspect 100% of spooky missing persons cases in appalachia have the spooky explanation of "sheer drop disguised by undergrowth"

really cannot overstate how many utterly invisible ravines we got here and also how big the woods are. they can't find people because the woods? are big

creekfiend

in seriousness you can learn about the isolated Appalachian communities that were up here until quite recently by checking out the foxfire books. it is true that there were many isolated communities that remained pretty separate from mainstream American life for a longish time but most of the last ones were my grandpa's generation. and they were regular? can't overstate how regular they were. just rural and isolated with their own culture. do check out the foxfire museum if you want to learn more about them and their lives! those books are based on real interviews conducted by local high schoolers and college students of the old folks in their communities and they are very interesting windows into day to day rural life up in the mountains in the early to mid 20th century.

creekfiend

I absolutely 100% do not mean this in a like derogatory city slickers way; I myself grew up mostly in a city and I think that it is morally neutral to not have experience with The Outdoors. having said that, I have noticed that a lot of people who do not have regular interactions with "landscape that can kill you" do seem to have an internalized idea that "landscape that can kill you" is something that only happens to other people, or not very often, or only under extreme circumstances. which I think often leads them to assume that there must be something else out here that can kill you. but I fear I must inform the people who wanna believe scary Appalachian woods monsters are real that it's Landscape. inclusive of the beasts that dwell there such as the cougars and bears. its Landscape! (GRASPING EVERYONE ON THE SPOOKY APPALACHIAN TRAIL SUBREDDITS) IT'S LANDSCAPE THAT KILLS YOU! ITS ALWAYS LANDSCAPE! Old Man Hidden Ravine and his best friend Exposure!

creatingblackcharacters

#Make Racists Scared Again 2026

creatingblackcharacters

Share if you want people to know they should be scared to be racist around you 👊🏾

creatingblackcharacters

"making them afraid will make them more racist" that's wild to me, because we live in a whole culture of social consequences for antiracism anyway. It is literally safer to be a racist than it is to speak up against it, socially.

Idk about you, but "I'm afraid no one will want to be my friend if I'm a white supremacist" seems like a pretty logical thought process to have, and I wish THAT were the normal and not "I'm afraid my friends will hate me if I tell them they made racist jokes".

shithowdy

i've decided i'm going to learn more about yellow-headed blackbirds than anyone else. this is a strange and almost juvenile-sounding goal but no one seems particularly interested in studying them. if you try to search for information on them or certain behaviors you get the generic field mark and blurb guides, a few paywalled academic articles, and... posts by me, funnily enough. i just made a separate blog for my bird photography, but expect another at some point specifically focused on my documenting the colony of these birds that i now visit weekly.

i'm not a spiritual person, nor do i believe in the prophetic power of dreams, but i do think they serve as important windows into our fears and motivations and i think it says something that the only time i have actively photographed a bird in my dreams it was indeed a yellow-headed blackbird.

shithowdy

look at my blackbirds boy

shithowdy

the more i read about these birds the more insane i feel. i think the isolation of this tiny marsh might actually be doing some galapagos shit to the blackbirds there because everything from their vocalizations to their nesting habits completely eschews known data.

did you know that they are capable of imitation? don't worry! apparently no one else does either, but i have personally overheard them doing terrible approximations of not only red-winged blackbird songs, but also rooster crowing, ring-necked pheasant squawking, and what i now believe to be an eastern meadowlark song (which i have captured on video, something about which no one gave a fuck!!)

they are supposed to be drawn to marshes with deep water, over which multiple females will weave nests in single male controlled territories of typically 1k to 6ksqft. the waters of this marsh are wading depth, and the males control micro-territories of what cannot be more than 500sqft each-- territories that they share neutrally with marsh wrens.

this marsh is the last surviving 50 acre oasis of wetland in what used to be hundreds of miles of it, now turned into farmland. yellow headed blackbirds have been migrating across this continent for over 100,000 years according to fossil records. how does one compromise with their instincts telling them to travel a specific, ancestral route that looks and feels nothing like what their genetic memory tells them? they adapt, or they disappear, and a bird like this could never accept silence. i don't think.

headspace-hotel

I don't know how or why, but sometimes a species reaches out to you to be its caretaker and you just gotta answer the call.

princess-slay-ya

My most popular post has received a lot of arguments lately, so I figured I’d respond to the most common points people bring up.

Sources:

Carrie Fisher on her costumes

what supermodels wear in hell

on Padme’s wardrobe

to get a general gist of Queen Jamillia’s and Oola’s screen time, here are the scripts for Attack of the Clones (Jamillia is in 359 word scene) and Return of the Jedi (Oola is in scenes that add up to 275 words)

Star Wars Bechedel Test results here

kangals

if you’re ever at a vet hospital and can hear dogs/cats howling and screeching and making terrible noises from the back, please be aware that 99% of the time it is NOT because:

they are dying

they are in terrible pain

they are being tortured

It almost always IS because:

someone is taking their temperature

someone is placing an IV catheter

they’re mad about being in a kennel

craftycrab

other likely reasons why animals are screaming in vet clinics!

they saw another animal

no one is looking at them right now

they are happy to see this particular staff member

they’re a pug getting a nail trim

they’re a shiba inu getting literally anything done

they’re a husky

sixlegnag

The Shiba inu may not even be getting anything done

quasi-normalcy

Mel Brooks on taking studio notes:

taaroko

Telepathy Thoughts

Are there examples of telepathy being more complex than overhearing people thinking in complete sentences in the same voice as their speaking voice? What about being bombarded by mental images or sensory input or emotions or raw unsymbolized thinking? And what about people thinking in languages the telepath doesn't know? Would a telepath know the answer to whether colors look the same to everyone (who isn't colorblind)? Are there any telepaths who are constantly mind-blown by how differently people's minds work?

I would think that someone with a particularly abstract type of thinking would be the ideal person to combat telepathic surveillance without needing a lot of training, and maybe you could weaponize things like having an irritating song stuck in your head.

The telepathy examples I know of are Charles Xavier (movies only, and not all of them), Edward Cullen (but I never read Midnight Sun), and Buffy in that one episode where she gets temporarily infected with demonic telepathy, so it's entirely possible I just have a super poor sampling. Legilimancy in Harry Potter might be a little more nuanced, since it at least seems to include visuals as well as words, and Snape mocks Harry for reducing such a complex idea to "mind-reading." Legion is very creative and trippy with the insides of minds and there's at least one wild telepath vs. telepath battle per season. It's probably the example that does the most with the concept but I'd love to know about others.

stealthetrees

I think Rocky named Grace ‘Dumbass’ or ‘Idiot’ or something and then just never changed it. Then when they get to Erid he’s so used to calling his alien friend ‘Shithead Moron’ that when he introduces him to a large crowd they’re all like ‘woah man what the fuck’ and ‘that’s not nice!’ and ‘you can’t say that bro that’s too mean’ and Rocky has to awkwardly explain to Grace why they’re upset. Grace, who is now very familiar with Rocky’s standard vocabulary, laughs until he is crying on the floor and can’t breath, which makes all the other Eridians panic while Rocky stands there yelling at Grace that it’s not that funny asshole.

lost-carcosa

Albino raccoon

therobotmonster

Quick, spot the main character!

ayellowbirds

it’s so weird how much of a raccoon’s… raccoonness? is tied up in its pattern. This looks like a completely different animal, some sort of weird marsupial.

hollowedskin

@elodieunderglass for your collection

elodieunderglass

Thank you so much! The comment from @ayellowbirds is genuinely part of the reason I adore and collect colour morphs. Without pattern and colour, you’re faced with the surprise of the animal, like experiencing it for the first time.

(Our brains are so good at categorising experiences, that normally, as soon as we experience something, it’s absorbed, and no longer surprising; how delightful to find that we can be surprised by animals again!)

But it also helps you to pick out what’s REALLY inherent to the animal, what pieces of gesture and motion (obscured by colour, pattern or our own familiarity) are actually integral to the understanding of the true Beast….

The albino reminds us to draw raccoons far-footed, and as if they are wearing puffy fur coats that taper comically down each limb.

programmerhumour

Funny how that works

ferrousferrule

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

brunhiddensmusings

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

mugwomps

That’s it exactly. GMO is great ciant corporations can go straight to hell

personalgremlin

this makes me want to cry

euryalus-deactivated20220430

This is true, they painted everywhere, and most of the example of outdoors rock art is found in other continents aside from Europe. Some examples:

The Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, in Guangxi, southern China.

The Helan Kou Valley carvings, north of China.

Kakadu National Park, Australia.

Saimaluu Tash, Kyrgyzstan.

Gobustan, Azerbaijan.

Horseshoe Canyon (Utah)

paradiseismade

Whatever they once said to their authors, they scream their message of no message across the millennia to us now.

The quote is from “What the caves are trying to tell us” by Sam Kriss. It’s a gorgeously written article and I highly recommend reading it.

headspace-hotel

y'all might have heard of this but there's a youtuber called KVN AUST who has a series of videos about "youtube's recycle bin", basically videos that have zero or very few views because they were uploaded without titles and instead have the file name given by the devices they were shot on.

I HIGHLY recommend the whole series but also you can use his library of "leads" to explore the Youtube Recycle Bin yourself and I've done that a lot and it's SO fun

The internet is so vast, much more expansive than algorithms will ever show you. This really reminds me of wandering around randomly on Google Earth. It's possible to experience so much of the world it's kind of mind boggling.

I've been keeping a collection of my favorite youtube recycle bin finds.

I think this is my favorite thing I've found on there.

headspace-hotel

theres apparently more kinds of music than you can possibly imagine. its like. completely randomized sample of human artistic expression.

also there's at least more kinds of sports than I thought existed.

and also everywhere people are dancing. and they're usually not very good at it but that's okay

at the club in some eastern european country judging by the cyrillic text

guy in some kind of cosplay with a gas mask dancing

dance show, looks like students, cyrillic text again. pink panther theme? then party rockers in the house tonight?

guy plays drums on buckets and trashcans (interesting)

guy rapping but you cant hardly hear him because of wind blowing over the microphone. im amazed by the video quality being so good and the audio quality being so bad

brief ambience in a bar

dancing (pretty good)

on stage monologue in language i don't understand

more dancing

no idea what this is

furries dancing on the roof of a building to a furry related song

unfamiliar kind of music. I've never seen instruments like these before. there are poles you beat against the ground and pipes that you slap with a flat implement. it sounds really cool though.

disco music with a guy with a really bad wig

low quality video at a rave or something

driving terrifyingly thru snow somewhere in eastern europe i think

riding in a boat along a canal with dilapidated buildings with graffiti right up to the waters edge very interesting

truck sports somewhere in like, saudi arabia or nearby

Fish market. they are VERY fresh you can tell by the fact they're still flopping

riding a four wheeler in some kind of savanna like environment in the darkness

boat on a lush waterway nice ambience

Some kind of technology being demonstrated. would be really interested to learn what is being shown here

guys inside of a mine?

view out the window of a train near a gigantic city

unfamiliar sport where you hit eachother with sticks balancing on a beam

Guy walks under a bridge appears to be singing to himself the word "homeless"

early morning city ambience really vibey

another peaceful city ambience out a window

night time video out of the window in a city

oceanside city ambience

people in knight armor hitting each other with sticks

anyways that is most of my curated list

headspace-hotel

more of my curated list

Pole dance routine by a dude dressed as a gladiator

Thunderstorm ambience in a city.

Beatboxing battle

Possibly a hotel or something? Backrooms vibes, empty and eerie.

Breakdancing, multiple boys show off their dancing. the breakdancing vids were some of the favorite stuff I found

pocket full of scam by "clowns against corruption"

A video of driving down a road in the darkness that was somehow captivating to view as a kind of short horror film because of the drawn out and distorted audio.

I don't think this pipe should be doing that.

Really cool dance routine called "Symbiosis"

A mascot bee at what looks like a child's birthday party dances to a song that seems...slightly inappropriate for a child's birthday party. definitely on e of my top 5 finds

Snow over apartments. IMMACULATE vibe.

Dance contest between Spider-Men

Unfamiliar music, not sure what he's saying but i love the enrgy

Captivating video of a machine that makes those plastic cartons blueberries come in. the SOUNDS it is so satsfying

POV of a person barely maintaining control of a bike as she rides it down a brick street, making noises of fear and apprehension

immaculate Backrooms vibe. I would love to find more like this.

Another breakdancing competition. My brother and i fascinatedly watched all nine minutes of this. One of my top finds

A beautiful cow investigates a shrine. love the energy of this video

Guy dressed as an egg or possibly the kool aid man silently flailing

A short film about a printer that tries to seduce a guy. Surprisingly well done

Indian rave

Chinese dance contest. Some similarities to breakdancing but not sure exactly what it is, seems like an eclectic mix.

I have no idea what kind of place this is. Maybe a casino? Looks almost like a pro wrestling outfit but he's playing a trumpet

military/police training? paintball? No idea what's going on here but I've found a number of vids like this

I am WILDLY impressed at how many bricks this person can balance on their head

I have this one saved as "no party like an Eastern European party." I have a lot of drunk people in my collection but these gotta be some of the drunkest

Booed at the slam poetry

this is only some of it i desperately need to categorize these

headspace-hotel

it is really striking to me how the version of the world I am shown on algorithm based social media is so different. i am a white USAmerican so algorithms show me other white USAmericans...assuming i only want to see people like myself...

But exploring the internet randomly, using these "leads" to find random videos, it is much more representative of the real world. You can see city streets, buildings, music and dances from everywhere, hear many different languages being spoken, and see all kinds of unfamiliar things that the algorithms would not have shown you.

I realize it is important to see them, to go against the propaganda that warps our minds.

If you are in USA TV and media will never ever show you the real everyday life of people in most countries of the world. but the internet in theory could have the power to unite everyone

It is also really striking how vast and unexplored the internet is. Did you know everything uploaded to Youtube was used to train AI models? All these fragments of real life and real art, languishing in obscurity, shoveled into the slop machine to make slop.

I mostly used "MVI [any four random digits]" as my lead when searching. It gives a lot of older (10+ years old) videos. It is a video camera of some kind.

There are so many dances in the world. So many! So many ways to dance. All over the world, everyone loves to dance, sing, and play music.

I need to categorize and sort my list so I can start categorizing all the dances I find. I try to save the video every time I find a new dance.

headspace-hotel

watching the cow video again, I don't think it is a shrine I think it is maybe a shop that sells little statues and fancy bowls? it seems to be part of a row of shops

most of the location vids are great if you ahve a random place in a story you want to have vivid description

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