ramblingkat

[ramblingkat]

I am one of those people on the counter.

[ramblingkat]

I want to try so many little hobbies. Candle making, soap making, basket weaving, wood carving, book binding, baking, weaving, I want to try them all.

[ramblingkat]

“History will write that you were the bravest of them all. But it was he who roared with the rage of a dying dragon with only your battle cry to carry his fall. And it is he, and not you, who will be forgotten by lions and men. For all stars must burn and the greatest things must end.”

— history will be mistaken once again; with fire in his smile and fierce to his last breath, he threw his head back and laughed in the face of certain death | p.d

[ramblingkat]

“They call you freedom, and it’s a lie. But Lucifer still falls for freedom, every goddamn time.”

— History repeats itself, or so they say; and freedom is never your name | p.d

[ramblingkat]

a lot of the time when anglophones ask about other languages we're like "what words do you have in your mother tongue that don't have a direct translation in english" because we're uh. looking to acquire more vocab, i guess.

i want to know what words you learnt in english that don't have an equivalent in your mother/other tongue now!

[ramblingkat]

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.

[ramblingkat]

btw if you're on this site it is your duty to reblog any post that has been prophecied to reach 10k notes. let's all annoy op

[ramblingkat]

Does the new curse mean it will reach 15k?

Scrolling tumblr; the experience:

Moot

Moot

Soul shattering text post

Moot has new blorbo

Moots blorbo

Moots blorbo

Moots blorbo

Most depressing political news ever

Moots blorbo

Moots blorbo

Ooo art

Moots blorbo

[ramblingkat]

a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

[ramblingkat]

He looks like he wants to ask one of the others if they are seeing this, but afraid to really look away.

Today's Seal Is: Making Contact With An Unknown Beast

[ramblingkat]

LOOK HOW MANY FLYERS HAVE BEEN STUck on tHIS LAMPOST?? germans are crazy

[ramblingkat]

I want to know how many are on the same fic.

I really love ao3

[ramblingkat]

This game sucks.

New writing game:

Write.

[ramblingkat]

"tumblr humor is only funny to tumblr users" NOT true. those bitches on pinterest love us.

[ramblingkat]

One of the most enjoyable things about being on tumblr is reading a post about an epic fandom fight for a fandom you know absolutely nothing about and there are all these people doing insane things and having insane fights and just losing their minds and it is clearly a huge deal for a subset of people and all that drama and you have NO idea what is going on and who any of the characters or actors or celebs or fandom people even are.

Did you know that Blurg fought with Blarg and Blerg said Bloop and it’s the worst thing that ever happened and here is 50 people screaming at each other in comments

And you read this and go “I understand every word individually but put together they might as well be in Martian.” And then continue reading because it’s the best kind of messy fight - one you have no connection to. It’s like this era’s trashy “who is the father/you were cheating with who/this is your secret dog” talk shows from the 1990s which were fun for the same reason. Yes please, throw the metaphorical chair!

[ramblingkat]

happy sex email day everybody!