#lauraine stuff

[thewitcheswaag]

I love picking up hobbies that help with understanding history 🖋️

[thewitcheswaag]

Personal journal all the way~

This little one from Paperblanks (cover is a page from the infamous Gutenberg Bible) is one where I write about a very specific topic in my life, namely my experiences in the realms politics and activism. It suits the small format, as it doesn't get filled up too quickly, and I can easily return to previous entries that are in line with what I happen to be writing that day.

I've had other journals as well, but I think the fact that I stopped writing in them is also an easy way to track my mental state. I had what I assume to be an early stage of burnout, and we're still not completely out of the woods with that one, but as soon as I took more time to myself, more writing appeared.

To me, it's a natural consequence of engaging with your creativity. If I spend more time writing, I get a stronger urge to write in general. Regardless of topic, really, although I centre my own thoughts and interests the most. It helps me make sense of everything, and to further explore what I've previously learnt.

For writers, I'll always recommend keeping some sort of journal, irrespective of what sort of things you write about. I have a journal specifically dedicated to writing lying around somewhere, which I might get back into someday. Flipping through that journal tracks my growth as a writer, and I'm happy it exists as a result.

Also, as a bit of an aside, I had a palaeography (the study of handwriting) (Google says 'the study of ancient writing systems [...] and manuscripts') teacher who said she knew the handwriting of all of her friends, because she prompted them to send her letters, since she kept sending them letters as well. It's a lost art in many ways, and it would be a shame if it ended up completely lost.

[thewitcheswaag]

A New University Semester Has Begun

The posts might slow down on occasion, because the third year of my art history BA has arrived. I've been keeping it relatively steady with two Da Vinci Code Analysis posts per day, and one Reasoning With Vampires reblog for the fun of it, but you might see a slight change in output for a little while.

I'm trying to dedicate a single day of the week to producing most of my posts for the rest of that week, because that means I can just schedule them out and I'll avoid having to sacrifice study time. And since one of my courses for the coming six weeks is French (take that, Brown!), I need as much time as possible.

On the bright side, I've finally figured out how to format my image posts a little better (because I took a better look at how Dana did it), and thus what will end up weighed on my Witches' Waag will be of better quality. ♥️

[thewitcheswaag]

The Growth Demon

Yes, I picked this GIF because I didn't want something actually frightening on here. 😶‍🌫️

I just spent some time on Substack effectively examining how I feel about social media and its algorithms. To be clear: I do love Tumblr. It's like a light in the darkness (although I think we all agree that the bot problem needs some more work). I can literally do whatever I want here, in the exact format I want, with little to no pressure.

If I look at how I feel while drafting posts or how I feel about what I've published, I can honestly say Tumblr is the only platform where I feel completely confident in my niche. I post image edits while I complain about Dan Brown's poor writing, and what more could I honestly ask for?

I'm supposed to be a fiction writer

It's what I've always wanted to do, and still do in the background. It's also the only work I produce that I don't ever publish for some reason, because I guess I'm too self-critical to do so still. The situation got so bad that I routinely forget how to get back into the Wattpad account I made, and I might just have to delegate my future fiction endeavours to Tumblr and Substack as a result. (Apparently 'delegate' is only used for people, but I think my Tumblr is kind of me personified, so it half works.)

I try to focus on authenticity, in that I refuse to attempt methods that explicitly market myself. It's not like I completely refrain from doing so, because that whole period where I didn't even want to use hashtags on my main Instagram page was a little silly, but I don't want to do any engagement bait or posts that are designed to get picked up by the algorithm (I did post politics on Threads, but that was out of genuine interest).

My little Substack rant below for those interested. I figured the cross-posting thing is probably the only aspect of having multiple platforms that I engage with that I find funny. Otherwise, it's more or less an exercise in reeling from just how different they all are from one another while offering the same user-unfriendly experience (with the app formerly known as Twitter being the worst among them by a long shot).

Except of course for Tumblr, which I find to be the only one that captures the more user-oriented nature of the early internet. This is officially the only platform I've not considered giving up on even once after I started it (and yes, for Twitter, that happened within a day, because I made my account yesterday).

Why I Stopped Caring About Growth

After lots of time spent on social media and getting owned by the algorithm.

[thewitcheswaag]

Apparently, some people on Tumblr have started copying popular posts from old blogs word for word, passing them off as their own.

I'm just going to sit here with my never-ending 'Reasoning With Vampires' repost-spree. Did you know people still find those and like them, leading them to a lovely old blog that someone worked very hard on fifteen years ago?

I'd rather have that than personal attention for my posts. Dana was incredibly important in my formation as a reader and writer, and she's done some amazing work on this site. I'm literally here because of her.

Noteworthy that some people have been Tumblr users for so long that they know and remember the posts you're stealing. It tanks your reputation for no reason, as the blog you use that gets associated with this practice is forever tainted with it.

[thewitcheswaag]

Reading What I Hate

I got spooked by a few copies of The Da Vinci Code in a store a couple of days ago, because they reminded me of the Garfield video by Super Eyepatch Wolf (link below for those interested).

It also reminded me of how I felt about Twilight back in the day, although in so many ways I consider that to be much more innocent to my sensibilities in the grand scheme of things.

Some of you might recall how we used to consider Stephenie Meyer arrogant, but I've honestly changed my mind on that. I see her behaviour as a defence mechanism against the very real, very strong hatred against her. In a way, we're all responsible for preventing her from suing E.L. James for copyright infringement, and we have to live with unleashing a much worse series on the world without any sort of professional pushback against it.

Hilariously enough, I'm pretty sure Fifty Shades of Grey will just further fade into the background, whereas Twilight has already experienced its own little renaissance. As I wrote in a previous post, I don't think Twilight ever pretended to be anything more than it was, although the author has certainly had a peculiar upbringing which she couldn't help but pour all over her characters.

🏵️ Dan Brown's writing is poopy.

It's poopy in a different way than Meyer's, or even James's. James doesn't really have anything interesting going for her besides perhaps how she popularised the subject matter. As much as I personally don't like to read smut, I'm pretty sure even I can come up with much better written examples of it from relatively unknown authors.

James was offensive precisely because she got so popular for doing so very little with a genre (in fact, from what I've always been told, she represents BDSM about as well as Brown represents albinism, which is to say has not a smidgen of a clue how any of it works in the real world). Meyer was just in the right place at the right time, when stories like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games (two polar opposites, you might say) were filling the new Young Adult gap in the market.

Dan Brown insults us by being an intense grandstander. In a sense, I'd liken him to someone like John Boyne, who wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. When confronted with how poorly he represents the suffering of Jewish people in the camps during World War II (I mean, was he writing a mini extermination camp that somehow keeps small children alive AND allows them to sit near a fence which isn't at all guarded, or what?), he decided to double down.

Brown preempts any sort of historical, art historical, theological, and literary criticism by simply stating that 'All descriptions ... are accurate', when they clearly aren't. I was not going into this without any negative bias against him, but he managed to worsen it with a single sentence before the story even starts.

It's quite a feat.

🖌️ The consequences of Brown's literary trolling.

One of my classmates (from a different seminar group) unironically thought that Dan Brown's description of Da Vinci's Last Supper was accurate, and that it contained a secret depiction of Mary Magdalene.

Brown, in reality, couldn't even accurately explain why M.M. was falsely identified with a lady of the night. It was a mistake that Pope Gregory the Great made by mixing her up with another woman in the New Testament. It's literally not as big of a deal as Brown's making it out to be. Historians have long since accepted how and why it happened, and amended it while also referring back to the tradition of how M.M. was seen for a long time.

In another part of reality, M.M. is also the subject of a very famous iconographic bit of imagery, Noli me tangere, 'Touch me not'. In the Bible, she's the first one to see Christ after he rose from the dead, and she mistakes him for a gardener. When she does recognise him, Jesus tells her not to touch him, for he has not yet ascended.

Naturally, this leaves a lot to artistic imagination when considering this moment from M.M.'s perspective. How can she not have recognised Christ when he was 1) the Messiah, but 2) someone she'd known very closely. This leads me to a neat bit of iconographical explanation:

This is Noli me tangere by Lambert Sustris, painted between 1548 and 1560. Mary Magdalene can be recognised not only because we might recognise Christ from his red garment – and thus we can figure out what scene this is – but also because her attribute is at her hand, namely the alabaster vase that contains an ointment. (It doesn't have to be a vase; it's often a box, actually. It's the alabaster that gives it away.)

Iconography is something that, as I said, Dan Brown often invents out of whole cloth. If Da Vinci had painted Mary Magdalene in the guise of Saint John (ironically the author of the gospel we get the Noli me tangere scene from), you'd have expected some identifiable attributes there. In the painting by Sustris, she's dressed rather like an Italian woman between 1548-1560 (I love studying 16th century clothing).

Christ here is holding a gardening tool, which is how the artist imagined M.M. might have mixed him up with a gardener. It does not matter that the clothing and the environment don't match the Biblical scenery – people deliberately put elements they recognised in Biblical scenes, because it made them feel closer to the stories that were shown.

The Noli me tangere scene gets progressively more hilarious as time goes on, because the Christ looking like a gardener depiction for this specific moment in the Bible gets elaborated upon by different artists. You see, artists actually learn from each other and further develop something over time, so iconography is a very logical form of analysis in art history.

Same scene by our girl Lavinia Fontana in 1581. You still see the alabaster box Mary Magdalene is holding, and you see both her and several other figures with haloes. Christ's halo (which often has a cross in it if the halo is solid) is not properly visible because of his hat. And indeed, here he looks like he went on a gardening spree right after his Resurrection.

We can use the exact same methods to properly analyse the iconography in Da Vinci's Last Supper, which I'll likely do at some point in the future, but that scene is more than half a book away from me as of right now, so I'll leave you with a scary Garfield video instead.

[thewitcheswaag]

I like to reblog old Twilight posts from the Tumblr that started my love for editing, Reasoning With Vampires, which was active primarily between 2010-2012. Remembering that I read this while on the bus to school or waiting in the cafeteria probably makes me very old.

If anyone's wondering whether I actually hate Twilight, the best answer to give is yes and no. I used to hate read it, though, but that's a story for another time.

🙂‍↕️ Yes, because of the imprinting on severely underage children – Meyer's a mormon, so she was raised with rather misogynistic and archaic views – and the incredibly unhealthy boundaries that exist not only between Bella and Edward, but also between Bella and Jacob, and to a lesser extent between Bella and Alice.

It's a bit melancholic when I consider the author may not even know what healthy boundaries in relationships and regular friendships look like.

⛔️ And no, because I don't think Twilight ever pretended to be anything other than what it actually is, which is a simple YA (low) (urban) fantasy story with a very celibate and sort of safe romance (it feels safe for the author and the reader, but is still toxic and not a healthy relationship model at all).

The way it's written is pretty piss poor, but simultaneously really easy to read. I can't quite explain how that works, but Stephenie Meyer has an undeniable talent for pulling readers into her story, although the plot is rather, well, nonexistent in places.

I'll never forget her interview with Oprah, where she quite literally stated that her mother was the one who thought New Moon needed some action at the end. Screen Junkies actually sort of mentioned this by accident in their Honest Trailers series, because they called the Volturi 'these random last-minute villains'. They were. They were supposed to be introduced in Eclipse originally.

I'm more grateful than anything else that holding up Twilight's clear examples of bad writing made me a much better author, and developed me into the person I am today in a lot of ways.

This is also why I love reblogging Dana's old posts, though she may never see it. I kinda hope she does someday, because I loved her style so much that I took inspiration from it for my The Da Vinci Code criticism.

Be sure to give her blog a little scroll – if you're like me, you can get stuck there for literal hours – and enjoy the literal picking apart of two-and-a-half books in The Twilight Saga (she never finished Eclipse).

Whereas I get to be lazy and take pictures of pages, Dana had to rip her copies apart and manually scan them. A lot has changed in fifteen years, and I think that retracing my writing journey to Reasoning With Vampires really highlights that.

[thewitcheswaag]

Can't believe I've never used Tumblr before

I have arrived to enjoy the cosy vibes.

After reading on social media that Tumblr was not only back, but actually really good (someone literally said it was like old social media sites, which I loved), I decided to show up for a change. I never really used this site before, but I'm loving the layout a lot!

I did have a favourite blog though, which was run by an amazing woman called Dana, who literally pulled apart books in the Twilight Saga to scan its pages and comment on them. I'm pretty sure I learnt a lot of writing from her through this analysis, and I'm a hundred percent sure I discovered my nitpick-y nature for editing stories from this blog.

As for the name of this blog, 'The Witches' Waag': I took it from the Dutch (and also German) word for a weighing house, which was used to determine if a woman was a witch. I love history, and this was the most major bit of blatant misogyny in the Western historical context as far as I've seen, and I happen to have two postcards that depict this practice from the 17th century.

I'm a huge nerd for the 16th century, as well as for fantasy, so that will probably be what a lot of my posting will be dedicated to.

For now, I'll be focussing a lot on picking apart certain (bad) stories in the style of RWV. Hopefully I'll see you then. ♥️