[ostolero]

[persephoneme]

i hateeee the framing of any type of media engagement that relies on juxtaposing fun, enjoyable, 'low' art (usually [m/m] fanfiction, romance novels, genre fiction, &c.) with difficult, fufilling 'high' art (usually classics, arthouse films, &c) as like. 'fast food vs. vegetables', 'entertainment' vs 'personal (moral?) development' not the least because these aren't remotely discrete categories but also because its annoyingggg

[persephoneme]

people used to love to do this in fandom with femslash specifically and i hated it then also. do you have any idea how demeaning it is to have to hear people framing the act of reading stories about people like you as eating vegetables. as atonement for the sin of wanting to read about men fucking. come on now

[communistkenobi]

everyone rightfully complains about how the r word is back in vogue now but I think the people talking about how using ChatGPT makes you a small brained lazy degenerate are getting off way too easy

[communistkenobi]

“hey don’t use eugenics language to describe a thing you don’t like”

“wow I can’t believe you’re defending the thing I don’t like”

[annabelle--cane]

as someone who has formally studied the history of art and literature, my favorite things to study are always the "common" arts. vernacular design; material culture; and the pamphlets, ceramics, prints, and clothing forms we have zillions of extant examples of because they sold like hot cakes and workshops could only barely churn them out fast enough to meet demand. some sectors of art history scholarship are quite set on excluding "crafts" from "the arts," when, from my view, crafts are obviously a subsection of the arts, not a whole different category, and modes of "crafts" routinely get promoted to "arts" when heavyweight scholars take interest in them. it's like, mate, if you're calling yourself a serious art historian and you genuinely think that these eighteenth century tentacle porn prints are of zero intellectual or artistic value then that is your limitation as a scholar, not an inherent deficiency of the works. popular arts are exactly as worthy of respect and considered study as fine arts.

this is why it bugs me to no end to see people dismiss current popular art out of hand as completely unworthwhile in the name of fostering greater appreciation for the arts. hobby art, folk art, crafts, pop art, etc., they are all still very much art and it is valuable to treat them as such. to discount, for example, booktok romantasy novels as obviously bad and "not that deep" and label them as completely devoid of substance is, to me, a fundamentally incurious position to take. if I may say something a little bit meaner, it also strikes me as an excuse to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to learn anything new or subjectively unpleasant; it's a thought terminating cliche. and before anyone says anything, no, taking a work or genre or medium seriously does not automatically mean viewing it as Good or sacrosanct, I have ideological and aesthetic issues with much of the art canon, it means taking it seriously. dismissing huge swathes of the arts as unworthy of intellectual consideration is not a pro-art or pro-intellectual argument.

[annabelle--cane]

"these eighteenth century What Now" okay I have some bad news: I misremembered the date of this work, it's early nineteenth century, not eighteenth century. second, I have some good news: here is the image I had in mind. I really cannot stress enough that if you open that wikipedia link then you will see a sexually explicit woodblock print of a woman engaging carnally with a pair of octopodes, so you have been warned. art historian beware etc etc.

[elierlick]

In 1967, a trans woman named Vicky shared her life with an interviewer. The UCLA Film and Television Archive preserved the full short film, Queens at Heart, in 2009.

[v-lagopus]

Queens at Heart - Wikipedia

"In the 21st century, it has been variously described as a trans exploitation film, a short documentary film, and an 'exploitation documentary short'. However, critics have also noted it provides a candid look at the life of some transgender women in the time before the Stonewall riots. J. Hoberman for The New York Times called it 'at once an exploitation film and an educational one, with a tone variously prurient, dismissive, and nonjudgemental'. Sarah Fonseca for them. called it 'a red-blooded American exploitation film that tries to pass itself off as an expert documentary' and criticized the interviewer but also said the four women's participation 'has enormous value for those interested in queer and trans life before Stonewall.'"

And here's the full fi;m if you want:

[ot3]

the nasty trick is that making friends is pretty easy but managing to keep in touch with everyone is next to impossible

[theartofangirling]

everyone say thank you to that one anne hathaway twelfth night promo image for all it's done for fandom

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[grapnel]

An example of why one should use the Oxford comma.

[necromancelena]

If you went to a bar and the bartender was a mousegirl you could ask for a drink and she would balance it on her head and say "for you, it's on the mouse"

[megapope-deactivated20220531]

the crazy thing about this is that it took one single word to turn it horny. coulda been a normal cute post. coulda taken the high road & conjured a delightful image of a mouse scampering down the bar with a beer ten times its size balanced on its head. but you had to say "mousegirl" and not "mouse." don't pretend this isn't what's going on either i know the score i know what's up. i'm familiar with this sort of semantic trick. you want to fuck down on an anime girl with certain characteristics of a rodent and everyone's gotta know.

[basileater]

>10 hours ago

>deactivated

[agave]

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: t t a a a t at a a g c a a a aac t a a a " , t' t " t ca tg at t tat t t g t t t . ca a a ct t. ca ta t g a & c a gt ag a cag t a t a t t t aac t a. t a t a "g" a t "." 't t t 't at' gg t t c at' . ' aa t t t atc tc. at t c a a g t cta caacttc a t a ' gtta . >ag >actat #ga g cat t t t t t

Closest match: Codakia orbicularis genome assembly, chromosome: 11 Common name: Tiger Lucine

(image source)

[adampvrrish]

zutara is part of what i call the Trifecta of Bullshit, consisting of three very popular heterosexual ships that have no basis in canon and involve a morally gray male character that's heavily desired by the general fanbase and a female character that is easy to project onto and in fanfiction, is unlike their canon self, because it's the idealized fantasy version of the reader. the ships are dramione, reylo, and zutara.

[deadpowol]

[belladonnabedlam]

Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…

What is your AO3 user ID?

I’m an OG user 5 digits or less

Six figures baby!

I’m in the millions…

Remaining time: 5 days 4 hours

I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!

[antikate]

I went to a clothes shop with my daughter yesterday and we were talking about how the clothes were nice but how it was the kind of shop that made us both feel like a horse. You know it’s like, here I am, a horse at a human clothing shop, putting on clothes that look ridiculous on a horse, and it’s obviously my fault for being a horse and not a human

Of course that sweater looks weird on me, I’m a horse, not a human! I can barely get my hooves through the sleeves, and it bunches up over my withers and doesn’t reach my fetlocks, and there’s no accounting for my hindquarters. Or my forequarters either

So then we started talking about horse shops and classifying clothes as for humans or for horses, and now I’m afraid the idea of the horse shop is permanently cemented in my vocabulary, and someone is going to ask me about clothes and I’ll be like “oh I can’t shop there it isn’t for horses” and it will be weird

[asthedeathoflight]

Murderbot would hate this but I think theres a case to be made that part of the reason ART and Murderbot click so well is because ART is, to some degree, also a bot-human construct.

Like obviously PHYSICALLY it's just a bot. But it is a bot who has been raised to believe on some level that it is human - at the very least, that it has more in common with humans than it does with other bots. There's an angle here about ART who is kind of like a bird who has been raised by and imprinted on humans, who believes itself to be human, who doesn't recognize itself in other birds, who doesn't understand why the other humans don't see it as an equal. It's in a shitty bind, because humans wont see it as one of them but it can't live as a bot. So it's living in the kind of subtle insidious misery which is why animal husbandry experts pretty universally agree that having animals imprint on humans is bad for them. (This is the problem with the siloing of academic disciplines. A zoologist could have told the MI department not to /purposefully make the superai imprint on humans/)

And so, for our hyper-intelligent and socially deprived metaphorical African Grey, what a fucking miracle that while out on its own it stumbled into a /human-bird hybrid./ Murderbot is quite possibly the only person ART has ever been able to be completely itself around, the only person who can really understand the totality of what ART is in all its messy contradiction. That's why their relationship is so life-altering for both of them, because they're both people who feel adrift and isolated outside of the realms of both humans and bots, and they can understand one another both in their humanity and their inhumanity.

[thepleasuregoblin]

Because Catholicism and by extension Christianity are so big and normal I don't think a lot of people consider how strange the Vatican is just conceptually. Like yeah in the capital of a long-dead empire there's an opulent temple district that acts as it's own sovereign nation, still speaking the dead language of that empire for their rituals, ruled by a prophet-king chosen by a secret conclave of the high priesthood. Yeah his followers eat a lot of fish in the spring.

[milfsisyphus]

grug hate two factor authentication. first grug have to remember password. then grug have to point out which cave painting has birds. now they want grug to hunt and gather new thing called numbers. grug won’t do it grug miss the bird paintings grug was getting pretty good at birds.

[inkdot-deactivated20200219]

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

[hungrylikethewolfie]

This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash.  This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.

[skeletree-blog]

I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.

[theopinionatedartist]

Super important

[deafinatlyme]

Tldr: The reason clothes never “looked right on you” is because models and celebrities always had their clothes tailored to fit them perfectly.

[plucky-passerine]

I love this post but it always frustrated me just a little because I can’t even afford to buy new clothes let alone get the clothes I have tailored. But then I remembered that a lot of things are easier to do than you think they will be, so here’s some resources on how to alter your own clothes!

[cats-eye-galaxy]

Please read this, it’s an opportunity to learn about yourself, possibly a new skill and why it isn’t you, it’s the industry.