apycalypse

[apycalypse]

Me, waiting for my windows update

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all those layers of silence upon silence - donna tartt

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the most fun a girl can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, making connections, contemplating

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Art, not content.

Masterpieces, not noise.

Beauty, not buzz.

Vision, not trends.

Wonders, not fillers.

Stories, not snippets.

Symphonies , not jingles.

Magic, not marketing.

Awe, not engagement.

Poetry, not posts.

Elegance, not excess.

Marvels, not monotony.

Artistry, not analytics.

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When I found out about the allegations against Neil Gaiman what really sent me on an emotional spiral was his fuckin' response:

"eh, one was consensual and the other clearly has memory issues."

I didn't worship the guy but FUCK DUDE REALLY?!

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actually i don't give a fuck when a man is liberal or supports trans rights or plays gay characters or tells biden to step down.

actually i don't give a fuck how many charities they own or donate to. that's the bare minimum. i'm not going to congratulate a basic white man for his performative liberalism ESPECIALLY when he's married to a woman 10+ years younger than him. it's not even about the woman 90% of the time either. i don't care about them or their money or their situation. it's about the principle of a man with money and power choosing someone younger than him to prey on while simultaneously broadcasting an image of safety to the public eye and y'all eat it up every single time.

these left-leaning white men are using performative activism to get public support so they can continue having careers and being predators. they are disgusting and they are just the same as right wing men, except the public takes them at face value and believes the illusion of safety they project. do you know how many men have been loudly and vocally supportive of racial equality and gay rights and trans rights and anti-capitalist, only to be outed as abusive pigs? people keep falling for this shit and it's exhausting. celebrities aren't people. they're too far detached from anything that actually matters in life, so every decision they make regarding politics is based off the aesthetic, not the moral compunction. russel brand, chris evans, morgan freeman, david tennant, michael sheen, neil gaiman, louis ck, etc. no one in the public eye is trustworthy. no one in the public eye is 'safe.' there is nothing you can do except step the fuck out of the limelight and help people on the ground. instead of doing that, celebrities elect to stay in their mansions and make content. no one is an everyman. no one is real. they don't care about us. they are functionally amoral.

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“imagine caring so much about fiction” imagine being so lame that you scoff at the timeless human practice of falling in love with art and stories

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“omg you’re so creative. how do you get your ideas” i hallucinate a single scene in the taco bell drive thru and then spend 13 months trying to write it

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Y’know, I never really got constellations. Like sure, the myths are fun and the night sky is amazing to behold, but like, they don’t actually look like what they’re supposed to be. It just feels like: look up at the sky, see those three stars there? You can draw this weird box around it and it looks like a man! And it doesn’t, it’s just a stupid box or line of stars that don’t look anything like anything. And it isn’t even that the shapes of the constellations themselves are asspulls, it’s how arbitrary they are. There are stars Everywhere in the night sky, why is this star part of dragon or virgo or whatever but not this one? I could just look to the sky, trace some random points and go “hey look it’s the constellation sixtyninus” and it probably would look More like what I said it would look like then the weird ass boxes and sticks that are supposed to be fish and scorpions and waterboys and bears.

Constellations make more sense when you start thinking about them on the timescale of multiple years instead of on a single night stargazing.

The sky changes. This is the number one thing everybody knows about the sky. The sun moves through it, making everything bright and warm. When the sun isn't there, things are dark and cold, but there are stars - untold billions of tiny lights, fading in and out as the sun leaves and returns. There's the moon, moving and changing every night but reliably visible, sometimes even faintly during the day. There are bright stars that move, where the other stars don't.

That is a lot of stuff for the pattern-recognition brain to think about.

It doesn't initially look like the stars move. That is, they move through the night at the same rate the sun does - tracing great circles - but they don't move relative to each other, except for the unusually bright wandering stars that seem to be doing their own thing.

Except over the course of a week, or a month, the stars have moved. Some that used to be visible have set. Some new ones have risen. Why is that?

The moon moves quickly and predictably. The wandering stars move slowly, and some of them are more predictable than others. On rare occasions a star will fall, but these events are unpredictable. The "fixed stars" don't move, except that which stars you can see change during the course of the year.

What does it mean, that different stars dominate the night sky at different times of year? Why does one star's heliacal rising herald the coming of rains? Why does a red star shine before the cold sets in?

It's very important to know when the cold is coming. Maybe it's a good idea to pay attention to some of those stars.

What's the easiest way to keep track of which stars are which? Some are brighter than others, a handful are reddish - but ultimately one star is much like any other, a shimmering pinprick of light. How do you keep track of which stars herald the cold, the rains, the harvest?

You find patterns.

At the height of summer, in the pre-dawn hours, we begin to see a cluster of seven stars that sits behind a large V-shaped pattern that centers on a single red star. If we envision the V as horns and the red star as a blazing eye, we find the Bull of Heaven. If we follow the bull's gaze as the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder, we see another figure slowly emerging from below the horizon. We find the rough shape of a man, one arm raised high over his head, three stars shining at his waist. Perhaps we imagine this man to be a hunter. Perhaps he is hunting the bull, turned back in furious challenge. Perhaps he is hunting the clustered stars on its shoulder. Perhaps we envision the seven stars as sisters, running from the hunter as they arc across the night sky. Perhaps we notice that, where our grandmothers described seven stars, we can see only six. Perhaps we wonder where the seventh sister went.

As the year turns on, the seven stars disappear. The bull fades in the light of sunset. The hunter gets closer to the sun. And far behind him, on the opposite side of the sky, another red star rises as the hunter falls, the heart of a hook-shaped silhouette flanked by two grasping claws. Perhaps we envision this ominous shape as a scorpion, chasing the Hunter from the skies. It sits high in the sky as the warm spring rains turn to burning, arid nights; perhaps we feel justified in imagining it as a dangerous desert creature.

In the north sits a star that does not move, and circling it as its guardian, two rectangular arrangements with long, trailing tails, one large and one small. It is good to know how to find your way, and these patterns can steer you north on moonless nights. Perhaps you see the trailing stars as hunters in pursuit of enormous prey. Perhaps it appears to you as a celestial plough, slowly churning the skies, never touching the earth. You note the resemblance between the large and the small pattern and wonder if they are mother and child. You wonder about a lot of things when you're alone in the dark.

But are you alone? When you look up, it is difficult to feel that way. The stars are the same ones your ancestors walked under, and you think of them and their stories as you trace the patterns they once guided your eyes through. Perhaps you imagine them, gone but not forgotten, warming themself at a stellar campfire in the high, infinite halls of your gods.

And because of them, you know when the rains will come.

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the bond between a girl and her room is stronger than the gravitational force of the earth

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if achilles can wrap himself up in a blanket and ignore his problems then i should be allowed to as well

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Just a timelapse.

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Forever Young

When the pleasures outweighed the issues. When we would look forward to our dreams, not back on them. When we knew we had it all.

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Any of you ever seen this painting?

It's "Andromache" by Rochegrosse and it shows the moment where Andromache is violently torn away from her child Astyanax at the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus is watching the scene from the top of the stairs, waiting for the child to throw it from the ramparts of Troy.

I've seen the original a couple years ago in Rouen, France and let me tell you, I'm not much of an art enthusiast but this painting, this scene and this imaging is haunting my mind to this day. Few paintings have ever left me speechless and this is one of them

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Hey, no idea if you've covered this, bit I've recently wondered if Achilles being raised as a girl was a weird mythos explanation of him either being transmasc or perhaps a woman that was rewritten as a man in history? I don't know if this has any actual basis in fact and I don't think it changes much about that myth, but thought it was an interesting possibility?

It's a fun theory, but I think it's kinda like…… zooming really far into a super crunchy jpeg that's been photocopied twice to see if you can read what's written on a sign four blocks behind the focal point, you know? We're looking for information at a granularity well below the expected data loss we've already been through. To get to "the historical Achilles was perhaps not a cis man" we need to get through a LOT of layers of historical and mythological fuzziness, like the basic unlikeliness of there having been a single historical Achilles at all. While someone with something like that name likely lived, and probably participated in one of the historical Trojan Wars, as soon as he became a folkloric figure, people could assign his name and archetype whatever feats or stories they felt fit, like how he went from being badass but eminently stabbable to being 99% indestructible in the post-Iliad folklore.

Also, "our extremely badass hero spent some time passing as a woman, or at least very much not presenting as a man" is something of a staple trope in a lot of indo-european mythology, like Thor's wedding incident, or in the Mahabharata the year Arjuna spent as "Brihannala", described as either a eunuch or a person of a third gender depending on who you ask. Apollodorus's Bibliotheca also says Dionysus was raised as a girl to misdirect Hera's wrath.

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This is a god sent website

Hey Red what was the website you used for finding Falst's hair color? People on the Discord are curious.

this thing

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Message from an Overly Sarcastic Productions video that I feel Tumblr and fandoms at large should fucking internalize