It all looks better when it's framed.

Maria/27/Germany and England. I sometimes draw stuff. Theme under construction. If you're here because of Sims stuff, go look for the link.

[ouroborosmotifs]

how am i supposed to relax when there are things

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[downtroddendeity]

Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:

Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.

Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.

Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.

Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.

Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.

When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.

Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.

[grates]

petition for things to stop

[firefox-official]

hey man what’s wrong with you

the usual

[graham-cracker-guillotine]

stolen off instagram but i laughed so hard when i saw this

[spiderprincess]

So glad I get to celebrate this most sacred of holidays with leftover vegan Caesar salad that's been in the fridge for two days.

[prettiestpear]

[carlyraejepsans]

et tu, mblr?

[ludvigj]

near-life experience

[mossworm]

spiders are incapable of wrongdoing

[tonyzaret]

How To Go From a Simple Prompt - To An Epic Monster Illustration!

This is not mindless prompting - you actually have to do the creative direction. So, here's how it works. First, I start with a simple prompt:

Your prompt is then sent to Google's new 'search engine,' and you're given a selection of monsters to look at...

And finally, the hard part - using my creative direction skills to choose one that looks the most scary:

You can then use technology like PhoterShop (sp? still getting up to speed on next steps) to put it in new scenes, locations etc... it's not going to be perfect but it's a lot easier than 40 years ago you when would have to buy a magazine to look at a picture like this!

[oldenglishtextposts]

god cursing serpents. fuck those guys (junius 11 pg 41)

[cottonsoftdyke]

life is so beautiful because there is bugs . and there is even big bugs and small bugs . and some of them are even green (my favourite colour) . yes i would recommend taking notes at this time

[kalimaxxing]

the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

[kalimaxxing]

not again

[spiderprincess]

Cross stitch based on the magnet poetry on our fridge.

milk es an fruit

at has water

[modismod]

Americans don’t wear cowboy hats all the time? What’s the point then?

[forthegothicheroine]

-Bram Stoker

[mens-rights-activia]

Men love the idea of a stay at home wife until you actually do it then suddenly it’s all “how did you get inside my house” and “we’re not married. I’m calling the cops” 🙄