森の散歩道…なんとなく🩵の紫陽花

@theartofmadeline

#extradirty

pixel skylines
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hello vonnie
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
AnasAbdin

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Sweet Seals For You, Always
cherry valley forever

Origami Around
Claire Keane
almost home
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Keni
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
$LAYYYTER
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@sleepygoats
森の散歩道…なんとなく🩵の紫陽花
🌷🌱⛅💐 springmix 🌼🍃🌸💐
Swarovski can continue to fuck off.
In 2021, Swarovski (the company that makes the very sparkly crystals you see in certain jewelry, on figure-skaters' twinkliest outfits, on red carpet dresses), decided they didn't want the grubby fingers of small-time jewelers, clothing designers and costumers and crafters on their shiny beads and rhinestones anymore. They decided to limit their sales to "luxury" and couture creators, not girls who sell stuff on Etsy. The tenor of their press release on the subject was snide and insulting. Resellers (like your favorite bead shop) would no longer be allowed to carry their product; the average Jane on the street would not be able to purchase them. You could only get them if you had an authorized business agreement that bound you to very strict brand behavior. And those of us who still had good stock of the crystals would no longer be "permitted" to use the brand's name in our listings for sale.
Every bead shop and craft supply place and many, many small clothing makers--wedding shops, prom and dancing dress suppliers, the sort of salt of the Earth mom and pop time machines of shops that are the backbone of the field--scrambled to find something that could replace them. The last of the stock dwindled quickly, all of us grabbing what we could get while there was any chance of it, and then it was gone and we no longer had any access.
I was Big Pissed about it at the time. It was just so goddamn stuck-up, when wholesalers and indie jewelers had made them so much money, when some people I knew--when *I!*--had been brand-loyal for decades. But with no recourse, everyone pivoted fairly quickly, most of us to Preciosa Crystals. Those are Czech, quite sparkly, and considerably less expensive than Swarovski. The faceting method they use is different, but not worse; any differences are hardly noticeable when you're seeing them as a hundred pinpoints of light.
Well, out of nowhere, Swarovski just dropped this: https://www.harmanbeads.com/swarovski-brand-policy-update
"Effective June 1, 2026, Swarovski updated the distribution and brand usage policies introduced in 2021. Businesses may now purchase Swarovski Crystals without signing a Brand Control Agreement, and Authorized Distribution Partners may once again sell Swarovski Crystals to resellers, including bead stores and online retailers. Businesses may also use the Swarovski brand name when following Swarovski’s Proper Use Guidelines. Designers, manufacturers, artists, brands, retailers, and resellers are now eligible to purchase Swarovski Crystals through authorized distribution channels."
They want us back. A lot of the companies who could have kept a brand relationship with them also have swapped to Preciosa, over the last half-decade, in solidarity with indie creators and out of a sour awareness that it could be them, next. And it doesn't hurt that Preciosa was able to expand their line quite a bit now that everyone who wanted sparkle had no choice but to go to them.
And I'm not seeing nearly anyone who intends to return. The feeling is, "Y'all told us to fuck off! Off we fucked! And now, that's what you can do, too!" I'm seeing a lot of "How many of us did you stab in the back?" comments from the people whose money they're hoping to attract.
And personally I'm sitting over here all rubby hands, mean snickering, because they really thought they were going to be able to outclimb the people who actually provided all their profits, and now here they are, hat in hand.
abstract and modern art haters are sooo snobby like klein literally Created an entirely new pigment and then painted a canvas in a way where the brush strokes wouldn't be visible. the insinuation that people with no skill could reproduce that is so annoying because unless you are skilled at color mixing and painting you definitely couldn’t lmao
i hope it's okay to add this because i think it hits the nail directly on the head
Honestly, it's like picking up a book and saying "I know all these words, I can type, I could have written this" like there's no middle step between the technical ability and the finished work.
It's saying "I could write this exact book" while holding a copy of the book in your hand. Like yeah shit you could, it's substantially easier to copy words that are already there than to create something from nothing.
I had an "I could do that!" Moment once, and it honestly changed the direction of my life.
I had dropped out of college for the second time, was profoundly depressed, and not sure what I was going to do with my life. My mom took me to an exhibition of the Denver Botanical Gardens' Botanical Illustration program.
It was a color-pencil-on-acrylic drawing of a Witches Broom plant, and I remember suddenly realizing that wait. I know how to do that. I know how to make those marks, how to layer those colors. I could do this.
I could make something good enough to hang in a gallery.
-And that changed things for me. Yeah, actually, I wasn't a total failure, I COULD do that and in fact I think I will. I signed up for the program, got my accreditation as a scientific illustrator, and my fucking dignity back. I even got to take classes from the woman who drew that Witches Broom.
All this is to say: Actually, go in to galleries and see if there is something you think you could do.
Then go do it.
You might find out that the threshold to getting your work shown/published is entirely within your skill level, or (like me) it's something you will get to learn so much more about, or you will wander into a completely different art form but literally whatever happens your life will be richer for it.
Imagine how kickass if the lady in the original post decided to do what Klein actually said did, and we all got a brand new pigment and painting technique out of it. You think you can do that? Good! Go do it! It'll kick ass!!
Like yeah, we all know that there's a lot of people who are all talk, but I am here to encourage you all who ever looked at something and thought '...I actually think I can do this?' to GO FUCKING DO IT IT WILL BE SO FUCKING COOL!!!
Tag! You're It! - My 2nd year film :D
Just a dandy boy 🌻
TW: slavery and the slave trade
The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.
The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.
Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)
It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!
It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.
In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.
And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.
For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).
As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.
The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.
The contrast between that and white institutions like the British Museum is really stark. Do you treat the slave trade with the gravity it deserves, which is to say that you mention it at every opportunity and do not shy away from saying, "The slave trade is why this museum, this city, this country, this continent, why all of it is the way it is"? Or do you move one statue to a new location, put a little sign up about how one man's wife's family owned slaves a long time ago, and say "That's enough, we've dealt with the slavery issue now"?
agott + her myrphon
I love you, vintage gay Pikachu. You’ll find the boy for you, I promise.
I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up
Agreed. As many kinds of humans, our centers of variance are inevitably well within each other's ranges of variance. The differences are far, far smaller than the commonalities.
I get where a lot of it comes from - humans need to categorize because the world is Too Big to itemize it all.
But we have a lamentable tendency to then use those categories as morally qualitative when they are at best circumstantially quantitative.
*Deep sigh*
Guys, I heard children outside in the backyard of my school, and i’m on the fifth floor, but right above the playground, so I threw a paper airplane with a little message on it to them, and then they got excited so I threw another one, and then I threw another, and then another, and then they started making requests like “tell us a story” and I wrote a little thing about me throwing airplanes out the window or “draw us a picture of yourself” and i drew a picture that didn’t look too great but they thought it was fun and they’d expectantly wait and I’d throw another and they’d be screaming and chasing it and trying to figure out who i am and stuff and after twenty minutes, and, like, forty airplanes i sent one that said “do you wanna see me” and they were excited and started chanting so i threw one that said “countdown” and they counted down from ten and then i actually poked my head out the window because they still hadn’t seen me yet and i had a handful of, like, twenty paper airplanes with me and i threw them all one at a time as they tried to catch them like a giant ticket blaster at chuckie cheese, and the look of pure delight and joy on those kids’ faces was worth all that time and paper.
This is still my biggest accomplishment and the greatest moment of my life.
桜と水仙
title of this is just ‘lesbian sex’
lot of terfs have been reblogging this so I may as well publicly state that the woman on the right is modeled with permission after my transfemme friend. if you relate to it as strongly as many of you claim in the tags I urge you to reflect upon that with empathy and compassion about the depth of experiences you truly do share with trans women.
otherwise fuck off I guess. my art is not fuel for your hatred.
honk shoo
[ID from Alt: Digital art of a sleeping white-haired horse with a pink and blue quilt and a brown teddy bear. The background is periwinkle blue. End ID]
One of my favourite photos from my trip to Warsaw in 2006
you have to love trans women more than you hate transmisogyny, you have to love jews more than you hate antisemitism, you have to love Black people more than you hate white supremacy, you have to love Indigenous people more than you hate colonialism, you have to love the disabled and mentally ill more than you hate ableism, you have to love. you have to love.
i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!
i love you smog tests for cars i love you clean air regulations i love you HEPA filters i love you dam removal i love you planting native gardens i love you monarch butterflies (up 64% in 2026!) i love you working for decades to bring the condors back from zero to 300+ in the wild i love you inventing little machines to pick up the plastic fishing nets and other trash in the sea i love you occupational health and safety regulations i love you environmental protection agencies i love you unions i love you social aid programs i love you food not bombs i love you sea shepherds i love you most countries stopping industrial whaling and more humpback whales now than ever before i love you saving the forests i love you little libraries i love you take what you need cupboards/fridges i love you secular food pantries i love you public bathrooms i love you all-ages playgrounds i love you museums i love you aquariums + zoos i love you restoring peregrine falcons to nyc i love you letting beavers fix the river i love you releasing wolves into the wild i love you bison recovery efforts i love you landback i love you reducing light pollution i love you freeway sound baffle walls i love you advertising bans i love you public outreach and education i love you maria montessori i love you queer clinics i love you people working really hard and succeeding at fixing the world and making it safer for all living beings!