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.

"Did the artist realise" yes, the artist realised. There is no point in history where artists did not realise how suggestive their work was. Grug the Artistically Inclined Cave Person is 100% aware that that stone hammer looks remarkably like a dick. In fact, Grug the Artistically Inclined Cave Person is a bit disappointed that it didn't come out looking more like a dick.

we were lied to

[mc is reading a devildom textbook that is on human world history]

mc: .......

satan: ... you look troubled

mc: yeah cause it's all wrong

satan: what do you mean?

mc: well, first of all it says the earth is flat

“the worst he could say is no!” crowley one second before learning his crush is now the ceo of amazon

yeah i support women’s right

but more importantly i support women’s WRONGS

Life is short. Drink another coffee. Read another book. Listen to your favourite song again. Hug your mom. Laugh. Cry. Dance in the rain. Push your friend off a cliff because of a milkshake.

Prompt 162

“So,” Danny drawled from where he was sitting, legs kicking slightly. Really, what a fun reincarnation. A world with heroes and villains where he didn’t have to do shit in and could just vibe with Ellie. 

“So,” Tim responded from where he was typing on his computer, mostly in civilian clothes save for his gauntlets and boots. The Red Robin outfit was haphazardly dropped across the couch and his pole leaning against the end. 

“Technically there’s proper procedures for clones…” Danny motioned to both himself and Ellie from where they sat on the counter, snacking on a plateful of scones. From Alfred, he was certain. 

“Technically, yes… but do we want to actually do that?” 

All three of them smiled, something almost feral in the motion. Of course not. They all had the same memories after all, and Bruce had just returned from the past, from exactly where and when Tim had said he was. Despite no one believing him, hence why they were in his boathouse, and not in the apartment or manor. 

“Think we can pull it off?” Ellie took a sip of tea, mischief swirling in her eyes. 

“Of course we can.” Both Danny and Tim spoke at once, one pulling up a new doc and the other pulling the whiteboard out from under a curtain. 

Natural history museums hold innumerable misidentified specimens on their shelves. These specimens make their way into databases like GBIF, and muddy data that is used in global-scale analyses and other research drawing on such records. Careful verification of all specimens in a collection holding tens to hundreds of thousands of specimens would be a Herculean task that could take a dozen experts a decade. So, we often rely on spot checks.

Whilst searching our constrictor collection to see if we have any albino snakes (we don’t seem to), I came across this snake that had been identified as a Boa constrictor. It is in fact Malayopython reticulatus, a reticulated python. A quick new label and an update in our database, and I was able to move it over to the right shelf. Now it won’t muddy the waters further, and is able to be referred to by anyone interested in examining a retic.

How many more such cases are haunting our shelves of over 14 million objects? And that’s just the Natural History Museum of Denmark; there are billions of objects in similar collections globally. This is quite literally an astronomically huge problem.

I WAS TRYING TO ASK HOW WOULD HIS EXOSKELETON UNDER HIS 'EXOSKELETON' LOOK BUT I PHRASED IT TERRIBLY AND MY PFP ISNT MAKING IT ANY BETTER

the demonic possessions of loudon

the bloody life of england’s fastest surgeon

my favorite anecdote about the franklin expedition ever. brother we are going the wrong way!!!!

I'm gonna say it again: OFMD is not niche. It was a major sleeper hit when it came out, big enough for Max to take a Season 2. It has major talent behind it (yeah, sorry, Taika Waititi is a name, he has a lot of clout, and he put his weight behind this). It has been critically acclaimed for two seasons.

Post-merger, Max tried to bury Season 2. (Zaslav likely couldn't actually cancel it because of contracts, but that's just my assumption. We know that Zaslav is homophobic and racist, and we can see that in what has happened across WB since he took over. Dude is a Major Villain, and not solely because of this.) They cut the budget and episode length. Cast members had to be let go, filming locations rearranged. They released it on a ridiculous schedule that allowed for no longevity or word of mouth to develop. The network was trying to kill it.

They failed to kill it. Damn thing got rave reviews and big numbers, despite little promotion AND a writers' and actors' strike (in which a lot of the cast and crew visibly and audibly participated). Publications were shouting that it was a flagship show for Max. Publications do not say this because one of their writers likes a show; they say this because the numbers look right to them.

This is not a niche show that a few people liked and that fizzled out. It is one of the more prominent queer shows out there, and it is also one of the more prominent comedies on streaming. Max tried to kill it and it has failed to stay dead.

This doesn't mean that some other streamer will definitely pick it up, but stop with the narrative of "get over it" or "there are other shows." Your fave is next, my friend, because if this one has to fight tooth and nail to maybe possibly get a third season...?

Someone posted this somewhere else but im sharing it here because im sobbing

ON WIKIPEDIA THE EXAMPLE CHILD OF QUEERBAITING IS BBC JOHNLOCK IM IN TEARS 😭

the Met Museum's weirdly fetishizing description of that one gorgeous blue velvet Victorian cape squats in my mind without paying rent

this is the cape:

Pretty! Made by Emile Pingat! Very Gothic! love it.

this is part of the description:

 The rich color of the royal blue velvet is evocative of the original wearer who at that point in time would have been seen as a precious jewel who required continual attention and assistance. That perceived helplessness is also reflected in the cape's lack of armholes, which would limit easy mobility.

...I. what.

I suspect it's blue because she liked blue and commissioned it that way (or selected that one ready-made for the color). and, my guy, there is clearly a big front opening through which one can reach for things. would you say that about a men's cape without armholes? they definitely existed, and plenty of women's capes DID have them. how does this No Armholes For Female Helplessness theory play out in view of those facts?

I also suspect this person wrote that part of the description one-handed

every time queer discourse surges on this site everyone is so quick to jump to “it was actually the evil lesbians who divided us” because y’all heard the term “political lesbian” and never bothered to figure out what that meant