Relatable saiki thing #42.0: Eating lunch wherever there isn't people ie the restroom, the stairs, not the classroom or the cafeteria, etc
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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
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tumblr walk of shame (frantically reblogging 908 different posts to cover personal posts where you uncomfortably overshared about your mental state)
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REPLICA PLAYLIST
MUSIC UNDER CUT
I have been receiving requests for any songs that inspired Replica, so here, have my personal playlist. Sorry it’s not Spotify/Soundcloud but they don’t have some of these songs available so uh… guess you’re stuck with YouTube vids. For fun I'll include my personal titles for them (which might give a few hints of what to expect in the future/end).
Replica Main Theme - “Die for You” by Grabbitz
Like Father Like Son Like Brother (Omega and Shelldon) - "As Above So Below" by Alistair Lindsay
Mikey's Theme / The 1st Vision - "Suzume no Tojimari" by Nanoka Hara
Military (Mad) Dogs / Central Park Colony - "Imperium" by Madeon
Shanghai - "Icarus" by Madeon
Boom Goes the Donnie-mite (Mikey/Donnie vs the Sweeper) - "The Red Zone" by Mitsuoto Suzuki
The Day the Sky Bled Red - "7 Seconds Till the End" by Nobuo Uematsu
Going Out Like a Boss (Raph and Leo) - "Agape" by Nicholas Britell
Remembering the Right Way (Mikey and Leo) - "The Souls of Many" - by Alistair Lindsay
Mystic Hands / The 2nd Vision - "Am I Dreaming" by Metro Boomin x A$AP
Book 2 Trailer - "Sea Dragon" by Covet
7 Years Later - "Iron" by Woodkid
Leo's Theme / Attack on the Labor Camp - "Ego Death" by Polyphia
Omega's Theme - "Touch" by Daft Punk
Flat Lines (Omega Alone) - "Die Toteninsel Emptiness" by 1000 Eyes
Spear - "Monsters" by Tommee Profitt
Final Protocol - "The Kraken" by Katie Dey
Rise / Epilogue - "Close in the Distance" by Masayoshi Soken & Tom Mills
I will admit, it's a little embarrassing since you can easily see the patterns of what I've been listening to for the past year or two. I swear I listen to more than just videogame OSTs, these songs just jive well with the story and I often find lyrics distracting when brainstorming scenes. Regardless, the music I listen to is such an important part of my creative process and some of these songs really defined the scenes I now have locked in my head. So I figured it was only fair to give them the credit they're due.
I will continue to add to this playlist, and will note in comic updates when one of these songs is applicable!
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(Bonus:)
Operation “Distract Chuuya from the mission that went terribly wrong” was a success!
(Lyrics from Wrecking Ball by Mother Mother)
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