solanaceae artium

i do some stuff, i like some things, i love my cat

[holly-warbs]

Frog studies from life, sitting by my grandma’s pond.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Cnetizens: Why the thousand-year-old stone statues at the Northern Song Mausoleums aren’t covered with glass enclosures.

The director of the Cultural Relics Bureau replies: "They’ve stood here largely intact for over a millennium. Why add extra barriers?"

Visitors worry wind, rain and sunlight in the farmland will wear them down. The director explains:

Glass covers speed up decay—it’s like locking the statues in a sauna. Trapped heat and moisture create sharp temperature shifts. Salt crystals inside the stone expand and crack the carvings far faster than open-air exposure.

These statues blend naturally with the farmland landscape. Glass barriers would destroy the sense of scale and historical atmosphere.

When first built, the mausoleum complex was a restricted royal compound ringed by walls, palaces and pine trees—no farmland at all. After the Song fell, protection systems collapsed. Wars and weather destroyed buildings. Local residents gradually dismantled the abandoned structures, reusing timber and bricks in nearby villages.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, villagers turned the empty grounds into farmland, leaving stone figures scattered amid crops.

Few people damaged the statues for three reasons: each weighs several tons and is impossible to move; folk belief held that anyone who damaged the guardian statues would be cursed with misfortune; every later dynasty passed laws punishing those who vandalized former imperial mausoleums.

Once an exclusive imperial burial ground, now ordinary farmland—this shift tells the story of history. Glass covers would only be unnecessary. As an old Chinese poem puts it: 旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家

The swallows that were wont to grace the halls of Wang and Xie, Now seek the humble roofs of common men.

(cr 大鹅呀eyaeyaeya，陈帆fotochen，摄色📸，腾腾兔兔🐰)

[sybaritick]

my mini 4x4in baking dish has saved me so many times when accidentally making too much batter/filling/etc. now i don't need to waste any OR risk overfilling a loaf pan or pie crust, i just put any that doesn't fit in the mini baking dish. i totally recommend this approach. you can even bake extra pumpkin pie filling this way. (currently it is baking extra lemon pound cake.)

[mybeingthere]

Diné Weaver Venancio Aragón

"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”

Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."

https://hyperallergic.com/dine-weaver-venancio-aragon.../...

[apod]

2026 August 2

A Fire Rainbow over West Virginia Image Credit & Copyright: Christa Harbig

Explanation: What’s happening to this cloud? Ice crystals in a distant cirrus cloud are acting like little floating prisms. Known informally as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc appears parallel to the horizon. For a circumhorizontal arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds present below – in this case cirrus fibratus. The numerous, flat, hexagonal ice-crystals that compose the cirrus cloud must be aligned horizontally to properly refract sunlight in a collectively similar manner. Therefore, circumhorizontal arcs are somewhat unusual to see. The featured fire rainbow was photographed in 2021 near North Fork Mountain in West Virginia, USA.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260802.html

[sockdreams]

Happy Birthday to Us!

Greetings, Dreamers! Tomorrow we celebrate Sock Dreams' 26th birthday, and we couldn't be more excited for the occasion! You are hereby cordially invited to our birthday party sale, because more than anything, we'd like to celebrate you! It's increasingly difficult for small businesses to stay afloat, but our customer base not only makes it possible, but you make it fun and rewarding, as well!

As a special thanks, we wanted to make you some birthday treats! We dipped into our Crafty Bundle supplies to make you this sock birthday cake and sock balloons! We even made sock birthday candles, as we went a bit wild with the power of making things out of socks.

And as a party favor, we've rolled out a new Birthday Sticker design for the occasion! Like the rest of our logo stickers, you can get one for free when you add it to any order of a non-sticker item!

But most of all, we'd like to give you our sincere thanks for your support over all these years. We love fulfilling your sock dreams, and hearing your feedback and stories. Our entire business model hinges on listening to customer feedback, so don't be a stranger! Genuine humans read every email you send us, so please let us know what we're doing right, what we could be doing better, and any sock dreams we can help to come true!

Much love, and many more years of socks, the Sock Dreams crew

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

~ Florence Harrison, table of contents illustrations for Christina Rossetti: Poems (1910)

via internet archive

[archatlas]

Really Big Coin Skrekkøgle

This is our Really Big Coin. It is big because it makes other things look small when photographed next to it. Actually, it is a 20:1 replica of the EUR 50-cent, you see it being milled out here. We needed to do quite a bit of sanding, lacquering and smudging to obtain the desired look and some climbing to get into required shooting position (you need to get up real high to take good pictures). The result is a short series of photographs, attempting to visually scale down real-sized objects.

Images and text via

[aberrantkenosis]

what the fuck

[articreated]

In 2017 I started learning how to dye raw fleeces. This was my first ever dye pot on a blue faced Leicester x wensleydale fleece.

[articreated]

I ended up spinning a thick and thin lock spun yarn going from one color gradient to the next. It was a very long six months to spin up the entire fleece. It took me a few tries to find the correct pattern to fit the yarn and how I wanted it to look as a finished project.

[articreated]

It took me three months to finish knitting the shawl.

Pattern: whitebark pine by Sylvia McFadden stillness of trees ebook

Yarn: hand dyed blue faced Leicester x wensleydale fleece hand spun

[omgthatdress]

I am absolutely ENRAPTURED by this hat that Martha Reeves is wearing on her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony! It's so beautiful! It's so fantastic! I love it!

[fairycosmos]

my dead wife. the ad free internet

[fairycosmos]

watching dreamily recorded footage of a web forum from 2003

[fatmasc]

Sometimes ur fat bc u were born that way. Ur parents are fat, ur cousins are fat, u always have been fat.

And sometimes, you become fat. Something happened (puberty, change in diet, change in ability, anything) and someone who was once skinny is now fat. This doesnt make you a failure. It just means ur fat now. Its okay. You didnt do something wrong.

No matter how you are fat, its okay to be fat

[meadow-of-daisies-and-lavender]

That anything also includes trauma and stressors.

[javascript-official]

Oh you see the world in black and white? Fuck you get dithered

[mangled-by-disuse]

engraving tool arrived!

[mangled-by-disuse]

oh no it's just as fun as I thought it would be

[mangled-by-disuse]

also I think I'm surprisingly good at freehanding lettering with this, which is NOT what I expected

(testing out a decoration theme I was thinking of for the gong)

[toroidalearthtruther]

there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between microwave oven manufacturers and the producers of microwave meals over whether the customer should know the wattage of their microwave or if such details should be abstracted away from them

[toroidalearthtruther]

the microwave rice demands 800 watts of power for 2 minutes, but all the microwave can offer me three settings: one low, one high, and one somewhere in the middle. I turn it to the one in the middle as I happen to know 800W is the average power of most microwaves. the light comes on and the bag of rice starts slowly turning, but rather than hearing the usual rumble of the microwave, I instead start hearing short snippets of conversation - words snatched from the ether. the lights flicker and a chill runs up my spine. the voices remind me of those "spirit boxes" ghost hunters use. I double check the setting on the microwave. "ah," I say, remembering that I had set it to medium,

[thejewellerybox]

Ring set with a mouse design amulet

New Kingdom, c. 1479–1425 B.C.

Gold, glazed steatite (soapstone). Inscribed with the cartouche of Thutmose III.

In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum.

[hana-yanagi]

FIRST EVER WPBL HOME RUN!!

denae benites smashes one over center for the first ever home run in WPBL history ⚾💨🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹